Treat or Trick - Huge for the Witch

Chapter 1 - A Desire For Magic

Callum Morgan's eyes glazed over as he stared at the spreadsheet on his monitor, numbers blurring into meaningless patterns. He blinked, refocused, and the data snapped back into order, taxpayer IDs, exemption codes, dependent counts, all neatly confined to their cells. This was his talent: making sense of chaos, turning the messiness of human finances into clean, logical rows and columns. It was a good job. A sensible job. The kind his parents had always hoped he'd find. But as the afternoon light slanted through the office blinds, catching dust motes in golden beams, Callum couldn't help but feel that somewhere, in some other world, numbers danced with purpose and power, that in the right hands, they might even spell magic.
He pressed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and sighed. Three more hours until freedom.
"Morgan, you're still coming to the quarterly review meeting, right?"
Callum looked up to see Diane from Accounting leaning against his cubicle wall, her smile pleasant but impersonal. He returned the same.
"Wouldn't miss it," he said, though they both knew he would rather be anywhere else. "I've got the variance reports ready to go."
"You're a lifesaver," she said, already checking her phone. "Three o'clock, Conference Room B."
He nodded, watching her walk away. Diane was nice enough. They all were. But after three years in this office, his coworkers remained just that, coworkers. People he smiled at in the break room while waiting for the microwave, whose birthdays he acknowledged with a card passed around the department. None of them knew that under his desk, tucked between reference manuals, was a worn paperback copy of "The Wizard's Dilemma," the fifth book in a fantasy series he'd been rereading on his lunch breaks.
His fingers tapped absently on his mouse, drifting toward the small ceramic dragon perched behind his monitor, a hand-painted figurine from his favorite game, positioned so that only he could see it. Callum adjusted its wings slightly, then caught himself and pulled his hand back to the keyboard. Thirty-two years old and still playing with toys. His mother would purse her lips if she could see him now.
The clock on his computer read 2:13 PM. Time moved differently here, stretching like taffy until it seemed the day might never end. He saved his work and stood, gathering papers for the meeting, his movements mechanical. This was the rhythm of his days: wake, commute, calculate, commute, sleep, repeat. A life measured in timesheets and tax codes.
It had been different, briefly, when he'd shared an apartment closer to downtown with Marc. At least then there had been someone to talk to in the evenings, someone who didn't find it strange when Callum spent entire weekends lost in online role-playing games. But then Marc had met Ellie, and suddenly the apartment felt too small for three, even though Ellie didn't officially live there.
"I need my own space," Callum had told them when he announced his move, though what he'd really meant was: I need somewhere I can disappear without anyone noticing.
So, he'd found the house in Alder Ridge, a rental too big for one person but cheap enough because of its distance from the city and its age. The landlord had warned him about the drafts, about the plumbing that sometimes groaned like a living thing, but Callum had fallen for the built-in bookshelves and the bay window that looked out on a yard bordered by birch trees.
That night, after the meeting and the long drive home, Callum stood in his kitchen, heating leftover pasta and listening to the house settle around him. The floors creaked even when he wasn't walking on them, as if someone else was moving through the rooms. The first week, these sounds had kept him awake, but now he found them oddly comforting, proof that even inanimate things had voices if you paid attention.
He carried his bowl to the small desk in the living room where he'd set up his personal computer. Outside, dusk was falling, turning the world soft and blue. The ivy that crept up the north side of the house seemed to have grown another foot since he'd last checked, an impossibility, but there it was, its tendrils now reaching toward his window like curious fingers. It grew faster than any plant he'd ever seen, as if nourished by something more than rain and soil.
Callum switched on his computer, the screen casting his face in pale light. He should probably trim the ivy back before it damaged the siding, but something stopped him. The way it framed his window, creating patterns of shadow and leaf on his walls when the wind blew, it made the room feel less empty, less stark. Made it feel like the beginning of a story.
He opened his email, prepared to shift from one screen to another, work to home. But instead of clicking on his inbox, his fingers hesitated, then moved to open the browser. He typed "unexplained plant growth myths" into the search bar, then immediately felt foolish. It was just ivy. Fast-growing ivy, but still just a plant. This was the problem with living alone; too much time to indulge the strange tangents of his mind.
Still, as he ate his pasta and scrolled through results, folklore about plants that grew on fairy mounds, legends of vines that protected sacred spaces, something eased in his chest. The rigid lines of his workday softened. Here, in this creaky house with its mysterious ivy and shifting shadows, he could almost believe in things beyond spreadsheets and tax codes. Could almost feel that the world he'd always longed for, the one where magic hummed beneath the surface of ordinary things, wasn't just ink on a page or pixels on a screen.
Callum pushed back from his desk and walked to the window, pressing his palm against the cool glass. Outside, the birch trees swayed, their pale trunks ghostly in the gathering dark. For a moment, just a moment, he thought he saw a flicker of green light between them, like a lantern carried by an unseen hand. But then it was gone, and there was only the night, the trees, and his own reflection staring back at him.
He smiled at himself, a small, self-deprecating quirk of his lips. "Still waiting for your Hogwarts letter, Morgan?" he murmured, but there was no real mockery in it. Just the quiet recognition of a heart that had never quite learned to stop believing.
But that night, as he lay in bed with the moon painting silver stripes through his blinds, he couldn't shake the feeling that the house was trying to tell him something, that the ivy reaching for his window, the floors that spoke in the darkness, the strange play of light between the trees, were all pieces of a message he hadn't yet learned to read.
And for the first time since moving to Alder Ridge, Callum fell asleep without checking his phone, without setting his alarm, without making a list of tomorrow's tasks. He fell asleep with the ghost of a smile on his face, dreaming of green light and whispering leaves.