Spring had arrived, tingeing the gum trees red with new leaves and casting a purple haze over the jacaranda behind the house. Looking east Harriet could see whitecaps glinting in the sunshine on the distant bay, with the husk of the lighthouse standing as a silent sentinel above the partially inundated town. The veranda was out of the wind and in the sun so it would be warm enough for her morning ritual for the first time since the departure of what passed for winter these days. Dropping her robe, she slid open the door and stepped out, a zephyr ruffling her auburn hair.

The paddock before her stretched down to a wild hedge of wattle, banksia and grevillea. Breathing deeply Harriet stretched, flowed and paused in moves that owed something to Tai Chi, something to yoga and perhaps also to ballet. Eyes closed, she felt the sun warm her and the gentle breeze chase cooler tendrils across her skin. As her body flexed, she deepened her concentration and opened her senses. She felt the slow growth of grass in the paddock, dreaming quietly of lazy growth in the morning sun. Her senses slowly spread, quicker lifeforms swam into her purview: the pink and grey galahs, whickering softly as they nibbled the grass, wary of the sky and its high-circling threats. She felt a pair of sulphur-crested cockatoos jousting playfully in the sky, revelling in their flight and their game. Further out, her goats nibbled contentedly at the sweet new shoots that spring had engendered.

A listener, were there one, would have caught soft moments of a shifting, sliding melody that was both an accompaniment to and a driver of Harriet’s sensual movements. The zephyr toyed with her body hair, stroking sensation from her sensitive armpits and across her mons. Lithe movement accentuated the play of warmth and cool across her skin, playing with her buttocks, softly rounded stomach and breasts so that waves of goosebumps followed, raising the fine body hairs which in turn fed their sensations back into her aroused skin. Her areoles crinkled as her senses roamed wider, blood concentrating towards her nipples. The hedge hid a wombat burrow, deep and dark, she tasted the warmth of the mother-joey bond and moved on to an echidna, long snout raised tasting the scent of a female. Her labia gently swelled, moistening as the teasing of her skin aroused her further and her senses pushed wider.

There ... there, in the thicket beyond the hedge, was something new, something very different. Neither a vegetable mind, growing slow and root-linked to its neighbours, nor a simple animal mind caught up in the immediacy of living, but one sending a tendril of sense back to her that fed into and fed from her, spiralling them both up towards a pinnacle they could not yet see, a tendril that grew thick and strong as it carried their sensations. Harriet moved faster, her skin sensing every touch of sun and air, the slickness of moisture sliding down her vulva to her thighs. And she could feel him sharing her sensations as she felt his, the hardening of his cock, the quivering drop of lubrication at its tip, his tongue’s sensual caress of his lips. He fed back to her the burning pleasure he felt as she pinched her nipples and squeezed her breasts.

Each resonated to the other’s sensations, returning them amplified and augmented by their own, twisting around one another, feeding both their flames until her senses exploded outwards as her body convulsed and moisture flowed down her thighs as she felt his seed burst from his cock and curve to the ground. Wracked by ecstatic convulsions, she collapsed to the wooden decking, gasping and nearly insensate, brimming with the energy of their mutual orgasm.

Slowly, conscious thought returned through the glow of receding pleasure. Never had she felt such a strong link and never before had she linked with man. It was both wonderful and deeply frightening. Males brought complications, distractions and conflict which limited her abilities but this male had taken her energy and fed it back, amplified and this had stretched her senses further than she had ever reached. At their height, she thought she had sensed something out in the bay – a pod of dolphins playing amongst the waves around Julian Rocks? Never before had she cast her senses that far.

Struggling to her feet, her orgasm echoing through her still, she used some of the energy to probe carefully towards the thicket. At the edge of her usual range, she felt him, running towards the crumbling highway that led to the empty town. She tasted the fear the encounter had awakened in him but behind this, she glimpsed his desire. Would that desire pull him back or would the fear keep him running? She also sensed that he was dangerously filled with energy – if he did not soon learn to manage that it would consume him.

Slightly unsteady, she reentered the house and dressed for the day’s tasks: the solar panels, both hot water and electric, needed a wipe down to clean the bird droppings and then there was the vegetable garden. But first the goats need her attention: she could sense the growing tautness of the udders of Calliope and Erato, her two current milkers. She could also feel Apollo’s interest in one of the young females and almost without thought, dampened his interest: mating would be on her schedule.

With goats milked and their precious gift safely stored in the fridge, Harriet climbed on to the roof. That vantage point, as she carefully wiped down the solar collectors, allowed Harriet to survey the land around her. The few houses she could see were slowly descending back to nature. Most buildings had already disappeared under the rapidly growing lantana that blighted the landscape. Only her assiduous destruction of its scouts had kept it from what she considered her lands. Her small herd of goats helped, eating new growth with relish, but they alone were not enough. She did not enjoy blighting a living organism, but lantana was a serious problem and it had to be done.

Away to the south, her nearest neighbour was miles distant – and meetings were infrequent: special occasions still coloured with an undercurrent of fear resulting from the plagues that had nearly scoured all people from the land.

Harriet sensed Joy and her daughter, Samma going about their day, witches like herself, as were a significant minority of the women that Harriet had ever met. Something in one of the plagues had unlocked female brains in ways that she and others were still exploring. Until this morning, she had thought only women were affected that way.

Harriet felt Joy’s acknowledging sad touch, as a finger gently drawn down Harriet’s cheek. What had happened to Joy was an example of the dangers surrounding males. A careful survey revealed no other humans were within her range, so the male had kept on running. With the collectors cleaned, she spent several hours judiciously using her store of power to encourage her food plants to grow and discourage weeds from germinating, stopping every now and then to send her senses across the land around her.

As the sun set behind the hills, Harriet carefully closed and checked the doors and windows of the house. She had fed the goats close to the house, carefully reinforcing their inhibitions towards eating her flower and vegetable garden and giving Apollo guard duty. He would serve as a watch on intruders and was capable of giving any such a very nasty surprise. Even though the batteries were showing a healthy charge, Harriet decided against using light tonight. In an empty landscape, any light at night was a beacon that could draw unwanted attention. That male – or his possible companions – could still be around, beyond her range but not beyond sighting a light in the dark. She prepared a quick meal of salad and goats cheese with flatbread, eating it as the light dwindled.

Lying in bed, Harriet contemplated how she might handle a recurrence of the morning’s contact. It had been so unexpected and the contact had ramped up so quickly that she had been a passenger on the waves of sensation and energy and then so dazed by the experience as to be unable to react quickly. In future, she would be ready to control and hopefully direct the contact. A mentally active male could be a serious threat to her and the other witches she knew. Lying in the darkness, she felt some guilt that she had not passed a warning to Joy; she was concerned that it would tip her into one of her bouts of deep depression. Tomorrow, she would have to speak to her – and then walk north the few kilometres needed to contact Alison, if she was at her house. They would, in turn, spread the warning. She would need to keep in touch with Joy and perhaps visit if her reaction to Harriet’s news was really bad. Samma was still only a girl and did not have the mental resources to help pull her mother from such darkness.