Rowena sighed and cleared her desk. It was the third time that day that she had managed to unsuccessfully read her astrological charts. “ How on earth am I meant to know when to harvest the mandrake if I don’t know the position of Mercury?” she muttered to herself as she leant back in her old rickety chair and called for Felix to make her a cup of herbal tea. 

“You don’t need to know the position of Mercury, you can harvest the Mandrake at the same time you harvest the mugwort, and thats now!” Felix said as he set a mug down on the three legged table. 

“Humph, shows how much you know” Rowena was beginning to regret not educating Felix in the art of the planets. She had found Felix as a baby outside the foot of the cave, wrapped in a flimsy shawl. Many of the local women left their unwanted children outside her cave, some believed she kept them and looked after them, others believed she ate them. Rowena usually took them to neighbouring villages and searched for the people with the clearest auras to look after the child. Yet when she found Felix something about his fiery red hair and startling green eyes told her that he would be of great use to her in the future, she wasn’t the maternal type but there was something about Felix that she couldn’t resist so she picked him up and took him into her cave and looked after him ever since.

Felix, now at late adolescence and early adulthood, had developed a great skill for clairvoyance, he became particularly outstanding at the art of mind reading, although he could never read Rowena’s mind which was such a great vortex of complex numbers and theories he would never be able to decipher it. Although sometimes, in certain important circumstances, Rowena would let him into a simpler part of her mind so that they could have a telepathic conference that they didn’t want anyone else to hear. They were a eccentric pair, both living like hermits dedicating all their time to studying the occult. Their cave was packed with tarot cards and various items to help communicate with the spirits. 

Before Rowena found Felix, her only company were the spirits that would come to visit her from time to time. She would laugh with them, play cards with them and even let a spirit that she trusted enter her body for a brief period. Occasionally she would lay the table for three if she was having a particularly distinguished guest round, which Felix found absolutely ludicrous since spirits did not eat the food of the living. What pained Rowena the most is that all her friends were, or would become, spirits when she would carry on in the land of the living, she dreaded they day that Felix would start to age and wither away so she was concocting a formula of eternal life but she was not sure if it would actually work.