Smiling and waving goodbye to her friends, Sabrina hurried to her mother's office. Tugging on the door handle, she was annoyed to find it closed, which meant her mother was meeting with someone, so she stood in the hallway, tapping the toe of her boot against the grey stone floor.

Eventually, the door opened and Tante Alice, an older witch with an affinity for music, stepped out. She'd been Sabrina's childhood piano teacher, and her deep-set hazel eyes lit with recognition as they landed on her former pupil.

Sabrina was in no mood for a conversation about why she hadn't continued with the piano...yes, she'd been good at it, but every moment with the instrument had been one away from her metal-working, making her music lessons a necessary sacrifice in the pursuit of mastering her affinity.

Stepping forward, she returned the music teacher's smile, then spoke before the other witch could. "I'd love to visit, Tante Alice, but my mother requested I see her about something. I'm so sorry," she explained before darting inside the Sprechen's office and closing the door firmly behind her.

Marlene was sitting at her ornate desk, the wide legs of which were carved to resemble flames in honor of her affinity for fire, and she looked up in surprise as Sabrina rushed into the room.

"I received your note," Sabrina offered, hoping that explained her admittedly abrupt entrance. "Do you really think you found a place for me to work?"

Marlene nodded and, after putting a few things away, gestured for Sabrina to follow her. As they made their way through the labyrinthine corridors, Sabrina could barely contain herself. A million questions danced on the tip of her tongue, but she kept them to herself, knowing her mother would share information when she was good and ready and not a moment sooner.

Finally, after numerous twists and turns, Marlene pulled an oversized key from her dress pocket and inserted it into a large wooden door that was straight at the bottom and rounded at the top. The door was quite reluctant to open, and Sabrina watched her mother push against it with her shoulder before it eventually swung inward, groaning loudly on its hinges as it did.

For some reason, the fact that the room was reluctant to admit visitors seemed like a good sign to Sabrina.

As she followed her mother inside, she inhaled sharply—one wall of the room was made entirely of windows, the glass squares providing an unobstructed view outside, over the Neckar River, and all the way to the edge of the Schwarzwald.

Even though the windows were in need of a thorough cleaning, Sabrina walked forward and peered out, her eyes sweeping over the wide blue river, taking in the shadows dancing beneath the pine trees forming the border of the forbidden forest.

A hawk glided past, and as Sabrina followed its flight path, she realized she could see all the way to the other end of the castle, which curved gently inwards and was marked by the astronomy tower, the tallest section of the entire structure. Sabrina had spent many a night on the flat observation deck during her schooling, charting the movement of planets and admiring the constellations. She now spent more time with microscopes than telescopes, but perhaps one night she could find the time to revisit the tower and its unparalleled sky-gazing.

Turning from the view, she examined the rest of the room. The high ceiling was supported by rough wooden beams, and shelves were built directly into sections of the walls. A stone counter ran almost the entire length of one wall, fitted with an oversized sink that would be useful.

Three different-sized tables were placed haphazardly throughout the room, and Sabrina envisioned herself rearranging them, able to leave her projects out with plenty of space to spare rather than needing to clean up after herself every time she worked on something, making the limited space available to others.

A thick coat of dust covered almost everything in the room, and she couldn't keep from sneezing when she peeked under a cloth draped over the back of a rather unstable chair.

"It used to be a solarium," came her mother's voice from behind her, and Sabrina managed to pull her attention away from the room long enough to listen. "But most of the older witches didn't feel comfortable up here, given the view over the Schwarzwald. It clearly hasn't been used in a while." Marlene wrinkled her nose and made a face that said she wasn't certain this was such a good idea.

"It's perfect," Sabrina said quickly, hoping she was fast enough to avoid having her mother change her mind. "It just needs a good cleaning. I'll get the Helferin to help me."

Her mother nodded somewhat dubiously, lifting the hem of her dress so it wouldn't drag through the layer of grime on the floor.

"If you think this will be suitable for your needs, then, it's yours."

She pulled the key she'd used earlier to unlock the door from her pocket and handed it to Sabrina, who wrapped her hand around it, savoring the feel of the aged metal against her palm.

"Thank you," she said, and what's more, she meant it. She would have been excited to find herself in a closet she could barely turn around in...to have such a large space with so much light was truly more than she'd dared hope for.

As she followed her mother downstairs to the Essen Hall for dinner, Sabrina felt as if her feet were barely touching the ground.

This was it. Finally, she had her own space, where she could work to her heart's content and not have to worry about others interfering with her process or asking questions she didn't want to stop and answer. She'd have to apply a silencing spell to the door, so she wouldn't be disturbed if someone knocked while she was in the middle of something. She'd also need to add some heavy drapes for the times she didn't want the room full of light, but those could be easily acquired from the seamstresses or possibly the community supply cupboard.

The next day was a day off from her metal-working, so Sabrina recruited four Helferin to join her in the former solarium. While they focused on sweeping, mopping, and wiping away cobwebs, Sabrina busied herself cleaning out all the drawers and cabinets, ensuring there was no trace of a former occupant and familiarizing herself with the best places to put her things.

While she carried her microscopes and boxes of slides to the workspace herself, she did allow the Helferin to transport most of her books, especially the heavier academic textbooks she'd collected that would serve as useful reference manuals for the experiments she planned on running.

Sabrina then turned her attention to the wall of windows; she could have said a spell to clean them or turned the task over to the Helferin, but this was her space and she wanted to know every inch of it, so she cleaned the windows herself, occasionally looking down at the river below and the woods beyond and wondering if anything in the forest could see up into her workroom.

Maedra and Gerta came and helped too, polishing light fixtures, tightening loose knobs, and helping Sabrina hang the heavy crimson drapes she found in the supply cupboard. The drapes had originally hung in the library, but they'd been changed out for something else, and Sabrina was excited to have found them, as she'd always maintained a special fondness for the castle library.

Eventually, with the help of her friends and the Helferin, working every moment she wasn't repairing broken items in the smithy, the space began to come together. Sabrina added rows of glass vials, beakers, and jars, obtained from witches with glassmaking affinities or taken from unwanted stock in the communal supply cupboard.

She filled one whole drawer with bound notebooks and pencils in preparation of documenting her research. A few of Tante Olga's older metalworking tools had been destined for the scrap heap, but Sabrina repaired them, making them good as new and adding them to her growing collection of instruments.

Standing in the center of the room one evening, Sabrina took a slow look around, allowing her chest to fill with pride. The space was unrecognizable compared to what it had been before...now it was clean, organized, and ready to further her learning.

This was her chance, not only to make something of herself, but to prove something to herself...that she could do more with her affinity than anyone else had ever dreamed.

Even though she was tired, there was no more fitting way to christen her workspace than by conducting her first experiment, and she knew exactly what she wanted to do. She'd been reading and thinking about it for weeks at this point, even though her books had only described it in broad theoretical principles. Supposedly no metallurgist had ever successfully performed such an act, but that simply made Sabrina all the more determined.

Sitting down in a high-backed chair, she studied the various metals arranged on the table before her, eventually selecting a piece of iron just the right size to hold in her hand.

Tightening her grip around the metal, she squeezed her eyes shut, concentrating. She took deep breaths in and out through her nose, slowing her heartbeat, feeling the slight tingle zip thru her limbs as she successfully connected with the iron.

Sabrina imagined going deeper into the metal, sinking below the surface and moving inside the iron, focusing on smaller and smaller pieces, bringing them into focus like she did when switching between the eyepieces of her microscope. When she could sink no deeper, she gazed around, noting where the smallest particles joined together to create larger ones, sections snapping into one another like the pieces of the wooden puzzles the Hexen sometimes completed on long winter nights.

It was so brilliantly, amazingly detailed, it almost took her breath away.

After allowing herself a moment to simply observe everything around her, she reviewed what she wanted to accomplish. What she was doing now was nothing new...she regularly went deep inside metal, finding broken, disconnected, or damaged particles and rearranging them, repairing the object from the inside out.

But one thing she'd never done—an act that was supposedly impossible—was undoing every internal connection until the metal changed shapes, becoming something unrecognizable that could no longer be classified as metal.

Looking at the dark grey particles floating around her, Sabrina envisioned herself undoing two of the interlocked pieces, freeing them, creating a space that hadn't been there before. When she'd done this with one pair, she moved on to another, unlocking, undoing, unraveling the internal structure of the iron. As she changed the composition of the metal through a process invisible to the naked eye, she could feel the iron lump shifting in her hand, which pleased her to no end.

Perhaps one day she would be strong enough to observe the metal change as she altered it, but for now, it took all her attention to perform the act, leaving her none to spare for watching her handiwork take place in real time.

She continued to undo the tiny pieces, freeing them from one another until none of the particles were connected anymore. The lump of iron suddenly shifted in her hand, and she opened her eyes just in time to see the entire piece fall apart, collapsing into a pile of what looked like dark grey sand on her palm.

Sabrina stared at the pile in amazement.

She'd done it.

She'd taken something apart so completely, she had changed its entire composition. No one would ever know the storm-grey grains in her hand had once been a fist-sized piece of iron.

Of course, a pile of something that used to be metal was of no use to anyone, although it was incredibly useful to know she could exert such precise control over her affinity. Now she needed to determine if the process also worked the other way: could she take the microscopic pieces and put them back together in such a way no one would ever know the iron had been taken apart?

There was only one way to know.

Closing her eyes again, Sabrina found herself surrounded by a sea of tiny particles. Everywhere she looked, they floated past, glinting in a light she couldn't determine the source of, even within the confines of her own mind...or perhaps because it was within the confines of her own mind.

Imagining herself reaching out, she gingerly grasped a nearby piece, examining the edges for an idea of what it would best connect with. Pulling another piece to herself, she turned the two specks around, lining up the edges until they locked into place, joining them together. She continued doing this, adding one piece at a time to the slowing growing mass, and she could feel sweat trickling down her temples as she worked to recreate the iron lump using only the power of her affinity.

As she added more pieces, she felt the disparate grains start to shift on her palm, drawing towards one another as if they'd been magnetized and were combining of their own accord.

A slow smile spread across her face.

But it wasn't of their own accord...it was because of her.

The iron began to reform inside her cupped hand, extending on one end, bulging at the other, protruding outwards, then upwards, a clear picture of what the piece had looked like before she'd started experimenting filling the blank page in her mind and guiding her as she worked.

At long last, Sabrina let out a deep exhale, swaying a little where she sat as a wave of exhaustion washed over her, before studying the iron in her hand—the solid piece of iron. Bringing it closer to her face, she inspected every inch of the metal's surface but couldn't find any differences from how it had been before she'd taken it apart.

This was incredible! Not only could she undo metal, she could put it back together, too...so well, in fact, no one would ever know she'd reduced it to little more than dust at one point.

"And they said it wasn't possible," she said softly before closing her fist around the metal, squeezing until the sharp edges dug into her callused palm. What did the metallurgists in her books know? Nothing, clearly. Her affinity was beyond them, beyond any of the Hexen, likely beyond any witch anywhere.

As the small cuckoo clock sang out from the wall, Sabrina winced, not having realized how late it was. Hopefully her mother had already gone to be bed, although that didn't necessarily mean she would avoid a lecture, as her mother would happily postpone it until the following morning.

Well, there was nothing she could do about it now, so Sabrina tidied up, locked the door behind her, and made her way home, her mind drifting back to the sensation of changing the iron's shape. It still wasn't creating something from nothing, or creating something that had never existed, but she was closer now than she'd ever been before.

Picture by Denny Muller from Unsplash