So Be It

There may or may not have been a list of things either of the two had been expecting atop the cliff. The mystery woman was squarely not on it, and she may or may not have been waiting for them.

She stood – a rather generous choice of verb, considering her hunched posture – in a singular robe of earthen darks, face concealed under a hood, hidden nearly as well as her seemingly enfeebled body. Not what anyone would consider appropriate attire for much of anything, especially not hiking.

Yet there she was. Jessica and Kyle exchanged looks in tandem, as if distrusting their own eyesight, checking their findings with one another. Nevertheless, the woman continued to mill around in the grass. An uneasiness seeped from her very presence, between the concealment of her figure - they hadn't even been convinced it was a she - and the erratic actions.

Innumerable scenarios played out in both their heads; assorted campfire-tier tales of horror, of random undesirables simply waiting along the trail, stories of tragic bad luck ending in an equitable fate. Granted, none had ever opened in such an apparent fashion, with some old crone mucking about in puddles, but that reassured neither her nor him.

Jessica looked over her shoulder and the couple shot glances at one another again. Silent words rolled off her lips, reading, "What's she doing?"

He merely shrugged with a weak shake of the head. She mimicked the gesture, her lips curling into a confident smile. He knew that look, and before he could stop her, she was already drawing in a breath, ready to call out to the potential crazy lady. "Wait," he exclaimed in the most hushed tone possible, hand cupping against the top of her shoulder to hold her back.

Whether it was his voice, his hand, both or neither, the lady on the trail had heard something, and she turned to face them. Not in a sudden, surprised manner, or even a rational one. Rather, her neck crooked itself glacially. It was several seconds before her shrouded eyes even made contact with theirs.

Inhumanly slow, the figure waded through the off-trail marshes and shuffled back onto the road. Both the others found themselves losing ground with subconscious steps backward at her approach. She continued, saying nothing and doing nothing to detract from the unnerving quality she projected.

Within moments, she was squarely in front of the two. Her eyes darted left to right to left, focus divided between Kyle and Jessica.

"Leave this place," she hissed.

She had not spoken a word, and her sudden words caught the hikers off-guard. "W-what," Jessica posed, words stumbling just as her legs almost had, "Why?"

"Leave this place," the woman re-stated, strengthening the emphasis of 'leave'. Her glare floated upward, meeting the girl square in the eyes.

The light bounced off the older woman's face, revealing a visage far from what either of the two had expected. She was by no means decrepid or feeble, and her features reflected that. There was a weathered look to her, a passive toughened expression set rigidly over her scowl, but her skin was smooth beyond the lines; their best guesses placed her around her early-to-mid 40's. Her hair was wavy just like Jessica's, but raven black against the younger girl's dirty blonde. It was only visible in a short length before disappearing into her robe, a stylistic choice made even more mystifying in the face of her...well, face.

Kyle placed a hand on Jess' shoulder, leaning in as his body turned away. "Come on Jess, let's go. We can tr-"

"No," she proclaimed, both to her partner and the woman. "I'm sorry, but who do you think you are? This is a public trail!"

"Begone." Her eyes remained locked, narrowing slightly. "There are powers at work here you cannot hope to comprehend."

Jessica blinked a few times, digesting the unorthodox choice of words while Kyle muttered the words to himself for the same purpose. "Powers...comprehend?"

Having enough, Jessica scoffed in loud frustration. "You know what? No! I've been planning this hike for like two months now. Get out of my way." When no yield came, she stepped to the left, around the obstruction.

The woman simply stepped the same direction in kind. Her figure was improbably immovable, yielding not even an inch as Jessica all-but pressed up against her, passively-aggressively trying to force her way through. The lady raised her arm, revealing a hand equally weathered to her face. A crooked finger ran through a fringey strand of the girl's dirty-blonde hair. "You poor child, you th-"

"Hey!" Kyle stepped forward, and with it stepped in, taking issue to the woman's abrupt gesture. His arm angled to separate the two but he stopped himself just short of any considerable assault upon the woman. "C'mon! What the hell?"

Her other hand extended and he hesitated. "Do not trifle with me, boy."

Again his tongue fumbled over her words. "Trifle? S-Seriously? The hell, lady?"

"I will only repeat this once more," the woman uttered, shifting her serpentine stare toward Kyle, "Leave."

"Who do you think you are?" Jessica yelled, refusing to back down.

"I am someone who's been around long enough know better than you."

"Really?" Kyle's words teetered on incredulous. "We're adu-" He paused, "I mean, I'm a grown man! So, yeah..." He trailed off, flustered, at a loss for words.

"Seriously," Jessica continued, "You can't pull the age card when we're in our twenties and you're, like, fifty."

The woman said nothing, taking inspiration from both their words. Her lips merely curled into a smile. "So that is your rationale? Appearance?" She asked, vaguely gesturing around her and Jessica's faces with her hands.

"What?" Jessica's words were confused, and she blinked, turning her attention back to Kyle.

"Yes!" He yelled, hastily.

"So be it."

Her words did not enter their ears so much as pierce through them. Both his and her hearts skipped a beat. The semblance of dread they'd expected from one version of the old crone - the unknown woman milling about crazily in the grass - rushed back into their stomachs.

Unseen to their oblivious eyes, the woman's shadow contorted and burgeoned against the harsh mid-day sun. It stretched across the trail, reaching out for the two hikers. Within split-seconds of one another, Jessica and then Kyle's hairs stood on-end. An unknown fear, a primal sensation reacting to the otherworldly elements hovering about, coursed through them and they shuffled backward uneasily.

They gasped in tandem as a looming presence buckled itself around both their forms, as if some ghostly puppeteering arm was slithering its way up their spines, assuming control. Jessica and Kyle grunted, backs arching at the peculiar sensation seeping in from their extremities, spreading inward.

The older woman shut her eyes and both their heads throbbed. That same presence pushed itself into their heads and images flashed in their heads. For Jessica, a handful of disjointed childhood memory of her grade schooler self, of 'Jessie' in various states in her old house, in the mirror, in school.

Kyle, however, took an extra moment as vague recollections stacked upon one another. Just as was unknowingly happening to Jessica, he was presented with dozens of mental flickers of himself, circa 5th grade or so. Except in a blink of the mind's eye, every single instance of him was substituted, permutated, into images of his younger sister - at least, he was fairly confident that was his sister - at a comparable age; all in the same places, positions, and poses; him, but not him.

And then without warning, the same spectral hand grasped at their hearts, tugging the metaphorical hand puppets inside-out. Everything went black.

Externally, the figures of Kyle and Jessica could scarcely muster the beginnings of a gasp before they froze utterly. For a brief moment nothing happened, only for their very fabric to begin evaporating in the light breeze. With a sudden thump, their lower halves writhed and warped, movement wriggling about beneath their skin like figures buried under the sand. Gaseous trails of aether, colored particles once tied to their clothes, features and innards, gushed haphazardly into the air before disintegrating. Just like that, the two hikers were systematically being erased; all the while, their distended midsections and legs continued to shift, flail and kick about.

Finally, the ex-form of Jessica freed its prisoner, between the ongoing vaporization and said prisoner clawing her way out. A young girl now stood in the dissipating lower half that once was the young adult, gasping for air and coughing out jets of reddish-pink vapor. The fading trails stole her attention and she followed them with dazed eyes. Her hair brushed against the back of her neck, despite being pinned into a bun not thirty seconds before. Her shirt was now stuffy, and the late-morning heat beat intensely upon it, to say nothing of the pants she was now apparently in or her sandals.

A million and one 'wrong' passive sensations weighed at her consciousness to the point where none particularly stood out, all bubbling to the surface as an amalgamated numbness. Her attention fell to her shirt, now bearing an almost vulgar pink and some embroidered pattern, and she pinched at it with two pairs of inept fingers. At this her expression faulted, some combination of panic and outright incomprehension, before looking back over to the old woman.

Except, she wasn't looking over at the old woman. Jessica's vision panned; she was looking up at her, and the smirk painting itself onto the woman's face seemed to effect itself from this realization. "What, what the hell?!" She yelled, powering through the surprise wobbliness of her voice. "What happened to me?!"

"Why, is it not clear," the woman remarked with an unsettling joviality. "You are now fit to heed my advice."

The other, slightly larger cocoon shed itself sufficiently to reveal a second girl flailing away at the ashesque effigy. Finally in the open air, she alternated between drawing sharp breaths and hacking up the crimson steam that once belonged to Kyle's figure. She let out a few awkward blinks, so overwhelmed by the darkness she just escaped that mild shock had set in. As her vision refocused, the witch from before was still present. Except, in Jessica's place a young girl stood instead.

Gone was her sporty outfit, in its place a rather gaudy hot-pink cap-sleeved shirt, with complementary flip-flops. Between the two articles lay some pre-faded skinny jeans, which were themselves riddled with pre-made holes. Her hair was the same dirty blonde hue, but had gone from a straight, functional bun to a crimped mass held in an unkempt low ponytail. Her face and eyes remained similar, but more compressed, with the addition of the faintest allowable amount of makeup a girl her age would reasonably be permitted. She was clearly Jessica but looked half her age, at most.

The girl in back started to inquire. "...Jess-" She'd intended her tone to rise into an '-ica?!' but instead halted abruptly, cupping her hands over her mouth at the sound of her own voice. At that firm touch, her expression only soured further, gaze turning inward and downward at a sensation within her mouth.

Nevertheless, 'Jess' spun around at the sound of her name, threatening to whip both the others with her ponytail, becoming visibly startled at the sight standing where her boyfriend was. "Wha..." She couldn't parse it. Instead of Kyle, stood another girl right at her eye level.

Her skin was pale, only in part from fighting her way out of the same predicament Jess had. She had been stuck into a long-sleeved striped shirt, its whites and periwinkles vaguely matching her newfound chilly blue eyes. The color of her hair was bright - some shades above Kyle's golden blonde, a steadfast platinum - and braided into two immaculate pigtails. Plain girl's jeans with white-and-pink tennis shoes completed her. Clumsy but deliberate fingers were probing the inside of her mouth, and her eyes only widened confirming the feeling, the old presence, of braces on teeth.

The clothes, her adorable face, that hair; even the fashion, to some extent. They all resonated with memories, but it didn't make sense to see her here.

But her eyes didn't lie...so she'd hoped. "Lacey?!" She called out, to the anachronistic form of Kyle's little sister.

"Wh...what," came the response from 'Lacey', barely amounting to more than a whisper. "No, it's..." ...me, she was unable to finish.

"Kyle?!" The question choked itself out as a whisper, but part of her didn't want the answer.

It never came. The so-called Kyle's eyes drifted down to her trembling hands, then down at her clothes. She looked at the young Jessica, breath only intensifying, then at the ever-content, unshaken witch who was suddenly towering over her.

Finally, her hands touched at her face, steadily sliding downward, and her attention returned to her hands. "Oh my god..." She paused, and everything about her seemed to lock up.

The older woman let out a single chuckle. "It seems your girlfriend there," she said, emphasizing the 'girl', "needs a new name."

"Shut up!" Jess snapped. "What th-"

"Not 'Lacey', but not 'Kyle'," she remarked, indifferent to their plight or her protests. "How about Kacie?"

"Shut up! What is wrong with you?!"

The witch tsk'ed. "Such ungratefulness." A finger rose, pre-empting the angry pint-sized retort Jess was mustering. "This is no place for little girls; leave."

"I'm not a girl," she squeaked, in violation of every sign pointing to the contrary.

"How curious. You mean to convince me that much older than you look, is that it?" A single content chuckle punctuated the ironic delivery. "Adorable. Now return home."

The thought reverberated through both their minds. Jessica and Kyle, going on yet another hike, only to be banished from their old lives and thrust into the roles of Jessie and Kacie. Return home. They couldn't even drive now, let alone legally. Or work; they were kids. Girls. How would they get back to normal? How would they live?

"No!" Jess screamed, loudly enough to snap Kacie from her stupor.

She faulted in expression. "This is your last warning. Leave this place."

"No," Jess and Kacie both managed to yell in tandem.

It was one simple outburst, one peculiar choice of words, that managed to seal Jessica and Kacie née Kyle's fate. The girl in front, the more experienced of the two, proudly, brashly added: "We're not moving until you change us back!"

The woman's expression soured, threatening to melt down before she opened her mind and her mouth. One corner of her lips turned upward in pensiveness. Then, the other. Her expression pressed back together into a victorious smile - a sly face both girls had seen before.

"So be it."

Both girls shuffled backward at the same wretched sensation from before. Their skin, foreign as it may have been to their present selves, nevertheless stood hairs-on-end as the shadowy canopy slithered across the ground unseen. Within seconds it asserted itself, constricting their spirits again.

Jess's gaze darted downward toward her chilled feet. Her pulse picked up substantially, a horrible sickening sinking feeling stacked upon her petite frame, and her arms retreated inward, bending and covering her chest as if she were protecting her heart, a gesture her ex-boy friend unintentionally mimicked. She looked at the witch, wide-eyed and pleading. "Wait! I-"

No warning heralded the spell's true effect. Within the blink of an eye, enormous stone stalagmites erupted forth from nothing, springing out of the ground without so much as disturbing the soil. It was situated entirely from the base of the arcane circles woven around its victims, and yet it did not pierce or pass through its victims at all. Rather, it built itself infinitesimally fast, layering itself around them instantaneously with their figures in mind. A couple of feet above the girls' heads, magical residue sprayed forth mistily from the stalagmites' dull tips - the point at which that particular portion of the spell collapsed on itself - before dissolving into the air. As the explosive roar of the stone turned into echoes and then nothing, the witch relaxed her muscles, shaking her head at their brashness.

The two floated in utter darkness, reeling from both the deafening boom and the abrupt deprivation of sight, completely and perfectly encapsulated within two girl-sized spires of mountain stone. They were unable to see or effectively hear, touch overwhelmed by the rock asserting itself all over their body, and in Jess's case, taste dominated by what had entered her open mouth mid-inquiry. They could not budge even the most minuscule fraction of an inch. It was the most peculiar thing: there was no pressure, no pain; only an absolute snugness bathing their entire forms. Their breath ceased - not for lack of trying or death, but for their internals being rendered into a vacuum by encasement in stone. The slightest throb of their hearts, the sole confirmation they were alive, paradoxically pained them from within their unknown prison.

For seconds and seconds and seconds, they were alone with their thoughts, the lack of oxygen only rearing its head more and more and more. The smouldering sensation swiftly graduated to a sheer burning, recalling unwelcome memories befitting their age of seeing how long they could hold their breath. Except, relief was not one exhale away, and a certain lightheadedness crept in. Their vision started to spin - or at least, the sensation of such was layered upon it even against their blindness. The white noise stuffing the range of their hearing distorted, and even the unavoidable taste of stone upon Jess' tongue seemed to alter itself. Their panic had itself metamorphosed into pure desperation as the two flailed uselessly, pointlessly, .

It came as yet another chill, and then every ounce of their figure was bit into by an immense popping tightness.

All at once, their elementary need for air, the desperate failed gasps their brains kept screaming for, was extinguished. Yet their confusion, the panic, the unadulterated terror, did nothing to subside. Sight and hearing were as useless as they had been seconds ago, but the passive cool of the stone had gone, only for it to feel as if the temperature had simply migrated inward, inside of them somehow. Their nerves commanded useless squirming at the alien choking sensation within, as if their insides were being continuously gripped and held together somehow.

The "scene", if one could call it that, continued for several agonizingly slow seconds before their senses began to resonate again. What began as a faint rumble feeding into their ears quickly started to vibrate them in place, triggering a number of odd, terrifyingly new sensations within them. At an uncanny pace, the pillars that had magically woven itself around the girls unraveled. Like a murder of scattering crows, fist-sized chunks of rock tumbled from the massive pillar, only to deteriorate into mere pebbles before dissolving into aether. From the top downward, their tombs deteriorated bit by bit, crumbling sounds and peculiar vibrations never ceasing in intensity. After another eternity, they finally felt cool, breezy air atop their heads, and then their foreheads.

The sun was poised perfectly to shine in their eyes, overwhelming their dark vision and taking them from blindness to yet more blindness. Only, as they stared directly and intensely into it, two realizations rose to the surface: One, it wasn't nearly as intense as logic dictated; and two, they were unable to shield their eyes, or avert them, or even shut them. As they moved, or rather tried to, strange tingling shot through the general areas of their nerves, but their body otherwise failed to respond whatsoever.

"Quite adequate," the woman returned, her figure largely silhouetted by the harsh sun at her back. "Wouldn't you agree?"

It was surprising on some levels, less so on others, that Jessie and Kacie did not respond. They remained completely motionless. Their fearful expressions did not waver, stuck exactly as they were before the spell had exacted itself upon them. They remained static from one second to the next and beyond.

The only thing that had changed about them was their composition, as the two were now comprised entirely of enchanted, impeccably shaped granite.

Within the statues, their minds were doing flips and fumbling at the prospect of merely understanding their predicament. Regardless of what their eyes may have obliviously been composed of - now, of course, nothing more than widened, granite orbs - their eyesight re-adjusted itself to the afternoon light. Jess's vision was dominated by the smug image of the hag, who she struggled to assault verbally with every single fiber of her being, her victorious visage projected with a slight distortion compared to before.

Kacie, easily the quieter of the two during the scant moments of her living, breathing existence, was in a much more educational position. Her eyesight, unmoving as it may have been, nevertheless found focus on the left side, which was wholly occupied by Jessica. Even against the glaring sun she was so helpless against, paired with the strange desaturation of color fed to her warped field of vision, the image of her would-be girlfriend was very evidently off. Some sort of grey texture was splayed all over her frozen figure.

"Truly a shame," spoke the one who could. "You were given numerous chances to turn back, zero of which you deserved."

Again, inexplicable power began to sway and billow at the girls' numb feet.

"Now, lovers, behold your fate."

With a singular flicking of both her wrists, the statue of Jessica twirled around nearly 180 degrees and the statue of Kacie swiveled slightly to the left, pitching downward slightly, and both met their partner's gaze directly.

The two peered involuntarily into each others' blank eyes. Even despite the fact they had been remolded into girls less than half their apparent age, and even with the evidence presented front-and-center, unblinking and unmoving and unchanging just as each of them was, they would not - could not - believe it, and their brains continued to wail in denial. All the while, the image of their mate - only, turned into an adolescent girl and frozen in fearful stone - burned itself into their psyches.

Jessie's expression teetered around abject fear with the slightest hint of foolhardy confidence that had not completely washed away. Her mouth was frozen agape, in the middle of a sentence she would never finish, with her teeth wholly visible and exquisitely captured in granite, a detail that would surely impress some uninformed onlooker. Her tomboyish features had become even smoother and more girly with the extra hairs' breadth of stone plated on. Gone were the gaudy pinks of her puffy-sleeved shirt and sandals, supplanted by a neutral gray rocky texture. Her skinny jeans were effectively fused to her legs, rough texture smoothed to the point of erasure, legs left with a series of elliptical etchings that were once unambiguously holes in the denim. Her hair was the same dull gray as the rest of her, gone from a messy flowing ponytail to a chaotic mass of rock, all her stray hairs either erased by the magical process or converted into the odd warped stone stalk. To the omniscient observer, she was clearly the same girl as before, but cold and heavy as stone.

Across from her, Kacie's skin was an identical dull grey, wholly the work of the same magic. Her eyes were as wide as her transfixed ex-girlfriend's, but her facial character radiated confusion, with an ounce of curiosity. Her lips had been parted ever so slightly, with the faintest corner of one bracket from her braces visible, but that was rendered moot by the extra ounce of thickness sealing her mouth shut. The granite coating had washed over the rest of her all the same, making the white-and-periwinkle stripes on her shirt trivial, instead a uniform color that perfectly matched the frigid stone spheres she was given for eyes. Her hair had fused together into a lightly textured stone coiffure that was itself twisted into a pair of plaited stone ropes—needless to say, far removed from the platinum blonde she had a mere minute before. Now her braids would never come undone, leading the eye down her neck where they re-attached to her from collar to chest. Plain girl's jeans, the stone wrinkled ridges giving a definite lifelike impression, along with granite tennis shoes completed her.

Whether by coincidence, happenstance, or fate, they had both assumed the same stance. Their legs were ever so slightly bent, as if poised to retreat, and their arms were drawn and folded inward, with the forearms braced vertically to guard their chests in flesh, only to now fortify them in stone. It had been stated before that the couple were truly two-of-a-kind; now, whether by coincidence, happenstance, or fate, they truly were. Sisters in art; Jessie and Kacie were stone, and the stone was Jessie and Kacie.

"But, it appears you managed to be correct..." The magical force stirred once more at their feet, only to whisk off distantly to the side. With another flick of the wrist, the earth began to rumble, and a cacophony of scattering, shattering stone assaulted their hearing, even through the muffled range they now perceived sound at. Within seconds, the ubiquitous stone tumbling and grinding of a rock slide, albeit a small one, came to a rest. With that, a crucial part of the path, the boulders Jessica and Kyle and countless others prior had scrambled up to reach this area, was no more. By the time the faintest seed of panic began to germinate at the magic affecting them in some way, it had already ended.

"...You will not be moving until I change you back."

She stood just aside between the stone sisters. One set of fingers ran down a smooth cheek feeling only the faintest remaining hint of Jessie's warmth, while another traced the contours of Kacie's petrified braid. "Perhaps in time, you will see the reason for my warnings." Her hands shifted, clamped fingers in her right now following along an elongated stone thread that was once a stray unruly hair, and her left with an open palm, sampling Kacie's cheek and enjoying the last remnants of her warmth in kind. With moderate effort, her fingers clamped and twisted, breaking off the reed-like length of petrified hair and sending a shock through Jess' form.

"Fools."

The witch tossed the needle, turned away, and she was done. Done engaging with them as one would with family, arguably ill-mannered hikers, little girls, or even as one would a plant.

There were a million things she could have said. To taunt them, issue a warning in hindsight, revel in her one-sided victory, or anything. But one did not talk to inanimate objects. One did not converse with statues. One did not open half of a dialogue, even if they were captured in sublime detail. And one did not carry on with it, even if the statues had been quite animated girls just moments before.

In one existence, Jessica and Kyle went on a hike and came back early, irritated for the better part of the day, but with an absurd story under their belts.

In another, Jessica and Kyle went on a hike and came back as Jessie and Kacie, fear-stricken, painstakingly returning home only to desperately convince their aged parents of their absurd story, an ambiguous fate awaiting them as they faced the prospect of blossoming into women for the second and first time.

Yet, Jessica and Kyle went on a hike and never came back. Instead they remained, transformed into preteen daughters and then into granite stone. Doomed to stare into one another's eyes and come to terms with their own new existence, emotions swirling unchecked without release. Anger at the hag and her unreasonable magic. Regret at not stopping themselves or their partner and cutting their losses. Profound sadness at the fact that not only would no one find them, no one would even be looking for them. Left to wallow in their own negative auras.

They could only hope with each passing stretch of time that they would be freed. The time of their childlike punishment running its course. Another magical person finding them. An earthquake, somehow, or a reckless vandal smashing them into pieces.

But they could muster no more than useless prayer. An ambiguous fate awaited them, the same as it always had been, but now they had zero say in it.

Only time would tell the true fate of the anonymous stone girls. And so they were.