A Hat Full of Sky is important (not only because Tiffany starts calling Mistress Weatherwax “Granny”, and they dance together through a swarm of bees, and Granny asks her whether she’s ready to be a witch by noonlight, which is a word Tiffany decided that should exist when she was 9, or because she decides when she’s old she’ll wear midnight and she’ll wear green now, or because she notices that Granny gets tired easily, and she checks her breathing when she sleeps, but) because everything that’s coded as monstrous, actually, just… isn’t.

There’s a lady with two noses and four hands and four legs and she has a steadier grip in her left right hand but better eyesight in her right-hand eyes. There’s an invisible presence that slams the cutlery drawer… when you don’t let it put the knives in their right place. There’s an immortal hivemind that possesses and consumes entities because it doesn’t have a body or a mind; it only has fear. But it isn’t evil.

“Welcome,” said Tiffany.

Welcome? said the hiver in Tiffany’s own voice.

“Yes. You are welcome in this place. You are safe here.”

No! We are never safe!

“You are safe here,” Tiffany repeated.

Please! said the hiver. Shelter us!

“(…) You hid in other creatures. (…) What are you hiding from?”

Everything, said the hiver.

What the hiver wants is the third wish; make this not have happened. But Tiffany doesn’t kill the hiver (which has killed before), and she doesn’t exorcise/purify/otherwise cleanse it. She gives it a voice; you’re not a hive, you’re you. You’re not anxiety and fear, you’re what feels them. She doesn’t make the hiver end, she just eases the way. “You’ll spend the rest of your life learning what’s already in your bones”, says Granny. That you’re alive. That you can walk the desert. That you are you.

(via ironhammer)