I descended down the cellar, blinked away the mould, frowned my eyebrows at the smoke-like smell. One of my paintings had caught on fire and was smouldering on the ground. They did that sometimes. I bent down to brush the ashes together, let the coloured glass panes filter my sight in blue and green. I had small windows all around the top of my cellar, so it wasn't entirely underground. I liked to see at least some of the many-limbed ferns waving outside. So like I said, I collected all of the embers in a neat little pile, cleaned the soot from underneath my nails. But that's when I realised. My paintings don't spontaneously burst on fire.

Arrow, arrow, arrow. My arms blistered with them. I jumped up, almost screamed all of Tartarus together.

"You need to stop finding these masterworks," Francesca said.

"And you shouldn't be here," I said. Shivers ran over my bones at the thought that she had been in my house this entire morning.

Francesca put her arrow away. She only had one, but they multiplied according to the intensity with which she wanted to address you. They were an illusion of course, one of the most dangerous category of charms we had been taught.

"You have something you never returned," she simply said.

And she had returned a memory to me. At the Academy, every single time I had bought or acquired a painting she thought was exquisitely beautiful, she had burned it. She did it with about every painting she saw hanging around our friends' dormitories. You see, whenever you destroy something with a charm, you consume part of it. It's a major power trip, for a second your mind stretches to the proportions of the brilliance of the object itself. I had let her do that, because what could I have done? She was Francesca, my friend at the Witches Academy. And I knew my restoring charms.

"How did you come into my house?" I asked, slightly exasperated.

"You have windows," she said. Her eyes had killed me with their depth many times before. It wasn't any different four years after we had graduated. She twirled around the leaves of one of my potted plants. It was fake, I hadn't figured out how to keep plants alive yet.

"Come on, I kept waiting and waiting, Lily. I thought, for sure, she would have already let me know by now. Why did you have to hold onto it for so long?" she asked.

I didn't know why I hadn't batted at eye at the painting laying smoking on the ground at first. Maybe I wasn't perfectly awake yet. Back at school, her habit had annoyed me, not because it was that hard to reconjure my artworks. But because it was a styxer, that charm she used. Not particularly wicked, but not clean-cut either. Our Academy wasn't very strict with that. As long as you didn't irrevocably damage property, you were excused of styxing every now and then.

"Well..." I trailed off.

Francesca's black coat with metal DDD badges I had never seen before. Francesca's hand full of golden rings that were all alien to me. Thank something that she was still wearing the necklace. The one with the topaz gemstone I had gifted her as her birthday gift in the summer before we graduated. Only now I noticed the forced open window all the way in the back. The DDD was the logical path after an education at the Academy. She'd easily learned a lot of new tricks in the previous years, that was for sure.

"Well what?"

"Because I didn't know if you would come to get it back."

Her lips broke into a slight smile.

"You give me too much credit."

*****

I had kept our Lie. A concentrated, bubbling, glowering pastiche of all the possible lies we could have thought of. It had started as a fun little project to kill time when we were fourteen, brewing a potion solely with Lies. But it didn't stop that one evening when we were watching frogs jump out of the Academy grounds pond, summer looming as heavy as a full-appled tree on the horizon. When Francesca told me the most extravagant lie she could have told me, and I had believed her. I didn't know why that was, but afterwards I felt like a cloud had started raining on me and had kept her alone dry. I was never good at catching lies.

*****

So Francesca apparently thought I was joking when I questioned her likeness to boomerangs.

"Let's go outside," I offered.

"What, you don't want to show me?"

"Let me restore my painting first."

"Come on, I've gathered so much new stuff," she said. 'Let's add this batch and we'll be ready. My four years plus yours combined? We'll have a Lie the size of a religion!"

Of course she had. She'd left immediately after the Academy to join the DDD program, a training program for mastering the art of styxing. The DDD organisation, the one which funded our Academy. It was by far the cheapest boarding school for Witches around. And the thing is, a witch either learns to control her powers at least somewhat, or suffers the consequences of unkept magic. Most lower income parents had no other choice but send them to the school which writes predetermines your post-school options. Francesca had tried to convince me to join, but I wasn't that interested in styxing as her. So I was left with the jar of our Lie, trying to make something of it in the University world as a DDD reject.

I reshaped the embers into my painting. The canvas depicted a golden box, and someone opening it. Pandora's box, no surprise. Then, I went over to my fake plants. Started watering them.

"Lily?"

I ignored her. The faintest impressions of feathers began pressing in my neck. If I kept on with my watering can, I knew they'd turn into spearpoints.

"What do you want me to say?" I asked and turned around to her.

A thin line bit into her lips, her eyes stared hard. The topaz necklace she was wearing caught the morning light all in greenish blue and I felt sick. She stormed up the stairs, rained fire charms on my artworks lining the cellar walls. She didn't even seem to notice if she liked them enough to destroy or not. 

The fire beckoned closer-by, my limbs froze. But I was a witch, I could restore this. Ever since I was a kid I knew that when something broke, I had only to cast a spell and plead for the pieces to rush together again. Although, this wasn't the Academy. There, someone would immediately join in as soon as they smelled smoke on the hallway. Or add on to the fire if they felt like it. The thing is, at least you wouldn't be the only one affected by the smoke. 

I listened to the flames tickling the canvas into succumbing.

I thought, Francesca is going to kill me when she finds out I haven't added a single lie to the bottle in the four years she's been gone.

The smoke grew thicker, my chest started to shrink.

I thought, that was a lie. That was a damned lie and Francesca is going to find our Lie before I can add this one to it. Because Francesca will understand. She'll hear me out, we'll maybe even start a pilgrimage to find the lies I couldn't collect. Her four years of the DDD training were over, she would have the time, I knew that.

The Troy-like scene wasn't that difficult to overthrow, I'd restored bigger objects for my exams before. So with a flick of my mouth, I spat all over Francesca's borrowed hell.

****

My whole room was in shambles, all shelves and cabinets had been clattered on the ground. A wind-up music box tumbled down, started playing a song.

"Stop it! It's not in here, it's not here!"

Francesca violently smacked the music box closed and fell down on my bed. Her face was blazing, like it always did when she had been on a painting rampage. 

"Then where? You know it's not fair to keep it, it's mine too. I have the vial right here."

Seeing her sitting in the same room with me again still felt uncanny. We had been seven together, didn't know each other. Now we were twenty-one, hadn't known each other for a while. In my mind, there had only been two options, and I had chosen the wrong one. I'd tried the University, and I still hadn't learned how to tell lies apart. My shoulders felt too heavy to keep my arms crossed together.

"I thought you would have stopped with the paintings. And you didn't even look at them, how did you know they were beautiful?"

She threw her hands up in the air. 

"What harm does it do? I destroyed them, I got their power. Come on, Lily, stop avoiding this. Your lies, my lies. Let's get this over with. We can't keep holding on to our little project forever."

Of course, we had figured out a system to store our lies before we added them to the potion. We ran around campus, collected lies we thought we'd overheard, reconvened. When the time was ripe, Francesca delivered her vial, I added mine, and I brew the mix into a proper potion. Well, mostly with Francesca's lies. I really didn't have a clue whenever someone was telling a lie or not. It made no sense.

Francesca lost her patience, threw her vial on the bed. The black liquid was still simmering, wasn't dead yet.

"I don't have any."

"Come on, at the University? You must have found thousands."

"No, listen. University wasn't like the Academy, there was no grey moral code. They don't allow styxing in the slightest. The people around there, they weren't people I could get along with. I tried, but I didn't understand them. I couldn't tell when they were lying, when they weren't, why they acted the way they did. I've always been horrible at it, but this was a minefield... So I dropped out."

She stared at me in disbelief.

"What have you been doing then?"

I ignored her.

"Look at your necklace."

She frowned, cupped it in her hands.

"Open it," I said.

I never told her I had found a way to store all of our lies in a much smaller container, in a different form of matter even. See, what I had realised, is that all of the lies that we had found up until then had one thing in common. They looked really big. They blew up in your face and made you gnaw at your hands for solace. But in reality, nothing hurt as much as the sharp, rock-hard, miniature beginning of your lie. That is what I'd gifted her that day of her last birthday before she left.

A tiny pebble fell out of the topaz gem.

"But... you gave this to me before I left. Is this everything we have ever caught together? This is barely anything. I wish you'd just destroyed all of it instead," she said, her voice flat.

"It's all there. It's all the same, Francesca. I can't tell lies apart, they all feel the same to me. You kill art, you say you do it because destroying is beautiful, but look at you now. You're power-tripped and it's from paintings you've never even properly looked at. How do you know that what you've been saying all the time is true?"

"Doesn't matter if I see them or not, and destroying isn't beautiful," she said. Her eyes perforated my skin. "They're beautiful because I destroy them. I possess them in a way that you can't possess them otherwise."

She held the pebble to the light.

"And anyway, lies and power, they're not the same."

She threw the pebble on the ground.

"You were afraid to try, that's what. You gave up before you even started."

My veins filled with shame. I probably could have tried harder. But that wasn't all of it. Somehow, I knew she wasn't completely right. Collecting lies wasn't the same as lying yourself, but what was destroying art even when you know it can be restored? I didn't know who she had become, and if what she was saying or what I understood from her made any sense. I knew even less about who I was myself. 

I looked at Francesca and at the pebble of our Lie-project from when we were fourteen. Her necklace hung limp on her collarbone. The only thing I did know was that I wouldn't be able to catch any lies as long as we were on our stupid little mission to catch them.

Francesca had been somewhat right. I gave up because I thought understanding lies had to be as easy as she had made it seem. But I wasn't like her. And she wasn't like me.

"I don't know. Maybe we grew out of it, and we didn't realise," I said.

Francesca gave me a deep eyes again. I felt no arrows, they looked a little taken aback. For the last time, I thought they looked a little like all of our past.

"You know, I think I'll try a power trip too," I said.

She smiled, surprised.

"Really? As in, you want to try styxing? You want to destroy something now too?"

"Yes. Could you show me how to destroy our Lie?

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