First theme is fantasy!

This is a really good idea! I'd love to write the first part, but I suppose it's whatever's posted first?

I wasn't totally sure what to do with the prompt and this is kind of weird, but oh well

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fantasy

n. (plural fantasies)

the faculty or activity of imagining things, especially things that are impossible or improbable

ORIGIN: late Middle English: from Old French fantasie, via Latin from Greek phantasia, ‘imagination, appearance,’ later ‘phantom’

—the OED

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“Granny, I just had an idea!” Nine year old Ava bounced up from her work with a bright smile.

“Well now, that’s not an everyday occurrence. Do you reckon we should celebrate?”

“Granny,” Ava said, annoyed. She knew as well as Granny Hardbroom that the larder was too empty for a celebration, and besides, proper witches didn’t celebrate something so mundane. No, proper witches had ideas on a regular basis. That was the real trick—to be clever. The pointy hat was just so people listened.

“Never mind, dear,” Granny Hardbroom says absentmindedly. “Keep cleaning those skulls.” Ava frowned and kept wiping them, vainly trying to remove a large stain. It simply wouldn’t do to have stained skulls—they must look real. The price label was okay—it was on the bottom, and none of the villagers were brave enough to examine any skull more closely, not with their leering grins and empty sockets staring down from the dark corners.

“Granny, I had an idea, but you made me forget it,” Ava said disappointedly.

“Sorry, dear.” Granny Hardbroom pushes her spectacles up higher on her small nose. It’s rather annoying to have a small nose, she muses—her glasses are always falling down, and besides, it isn’t nearly frightening or warty enough to inspire the proper degree of respect.

“But Granny, where do ideas go?”

“It’s a long story,” said Granny Hardbroom.

“Tell it! Please?”

“Oh, all right,” Granny Hardbroom sighs out. Ava hurriedly drops her rag and the skull and goes to sit in front of Granny Hardbroom.

“Well, it depends. Mistress Nettle—you know, the one down the lane whose cat was dyed green by accident when it stepped in her Fake Cauldron Syrup™—says ideas float away on the wind to a far-off land in the clouds. Mistress Lenox—the one who no-one respects because allergic to cats, poor witch—says ideas go down your e-soap-hag-us (that’s the tube down your throat) and gets mixed up with whatever you eat and that’s what gives you bad digestion. But none of those are true.

“No, ideas go to the land of dreams. The land of wishes never fully realized. The land of dust bunnies, and lost hairpins, and everything else that slips people’s minds. It’s a land of potential, of hopes that have never come true. But it’s also a land of fears, and nightmares, and dark thoughts people have but never show. It’s a dangerous place, to be sure.

“But it’s not real, not really. It’s a phantom land.

“Nothing there is tangible. It’s all ideas, all ghosts hovering around waiting to be realized, prophecies waiting to be fulfilled. Waiting, waiting, waiting for something that might never happen.

“The creatures there are terrible. Mutant and forgotten. Angry. They’ll do anything to escape. They come in the darkest hours of night, animals like Night Mares, trotting on stormy hooves to your room. The Monster under your bed is from there, too—waiting for you to succumb, to forget reality for long enough that It can use you. That’s why it’s dangerous to wish.

“For on some nights, the longest of the year, the boundary between fantasy and reality, the line between phantom and real, becomes blurred and thinned. It becomes a veil, thin enough to peep through. Thin enough to break through. That’s when we dream.

“So don’t get too caught up in your dream worlds. Don’t become too reliant on wishes. That’s why magic is dangerous—that’s why being a witch is about scrubbing the floors and Thinking solutions instead of magicking them. Tangibility. It grounds you, permitting occasional magic to touch that weak divide separating us from the shadow world without you providing the link to get through.

“So, Ava: don’t get lost in fantasy. You might never come back.” 

not sure how much I like this :/

Witches’s cats didn’t die. At least, not really. Their mortal bodies would weaken, decay over time, but as long as the witch their soul was tethered to was still alive, the cat would come back again and again, in a different body, but always the same soul. 

The black cat with the green eyes curled up by the fireplace had inhabited this house as long as Elina Hardbroom had been alive. He was hers, and she was his, but they weren’t really separate beings — they were one entity. 

The black cat hadn’t always been a black cat — he’d been a tortoiseshell colored like grave dirt and spilt ink, and he watched Elina as a young girl as she struggled with her spells under the watchful eye of her mother. And once it was dark and her mother couldn’t see young Elina’s frustrated tears, the cat curled up her lap and purred, the flickering candlelight and smell of the herbs tied in bunches to the rafters comforting her and lulling her to sleep. And in the morning, he’d be there to cheer her on as she finally mastered her spells, as she became a proper witch.

And he’d been a long, lithe Siamese with iceberg eyes who appeared as a teenage Elina cried over his old, limp tortoiseshell body, as her mother explained that witches’s cats don’t die, as her mother warned her about the world of fantasy. He was there as her mother slipped away into the next world, as her mother’s cat — a fluffy white one — vanished, too, and didn’t come back this time. 

He’d been a shorthair with amber eyes and a coat as blue-gray as the winter sky, and he watched Elina at the winter festival, as she danced and laughed and fell in love. And he was there to play with little Fern in her cradle, giggling as she grabbed at the cat, her red hair like firelight. And as Fern grew, as she struggled and mastered spells, aided by Elina’s kind eyes and wise words, he was there. As Elina fought a battle with herself, deciding not to tell her daughter the dangers of fantasy, deciding not to tell her the horrors of her world, he was there. And he saw it all as Fern disappeared into the world of fantasy, but tethered to Elina, he was helpless to stop her, helpless to go after her, helpless to do anything but watch as she vanished forever. And he was there for Elina when she cried, like he had been a hundred times before and would be a hundred times more.

And he was a black cat with green eyes as Elina brought Ava home and mentored her — Ava, the cheerful toddler who grew into a cheerful young girl. Ava, the witch girl born to human parents who needed a place to learn magic. Ava, who struggled and mastered the same spells as Elina and Fern did. And as Elina became Granny Hardbroom, as she told Ava the dangers of fantasy, as she swore she would never let Ava get lost in the world of fantasy, as she promised not to fail Ava the way she’d failed her daughter, he was there. The cat saw all.