On the False Magic and the Amber Light Nobody Told Her Was Already Hers
Acrylic on canvas. 16 × 20. Original activist work by Kristi, High Priestess of Agape Covens.
Her face is white, not pale. It is skeletal, the skin drawn close to the bone as if whatever once animated her has been slowly consumed from the inside out. She is still standing. She is still pointing.
The hand gestures toward the grey and black stone figure beside her. It is grim, shadowed, and permanent. While her body stays slightly turned away from it. She is not facing it but in its proximity. And she is making sure the girls behind her know exactly where to look.
The girls are watching her, not the statue. They wear black witch hats. Their forms are grey, drained of warmth, and reaching toward something they can feel but have not yet found. They are learning and she is the lesson.
Above them all, the sky is blurred and amber-grim. The sun bleeds through without cutting through. And in the distance, barely there against the heavy air, vultures circle in a patient, knowing arc.
They are not songbirds.
The false magic does not arrive as a threat. It arrives as a promise.
Look at her eyes, if you can bear to. They are not the same. One has been looking at the wrong thing for so long that it has begun to spiral and unwind slowly into a disillusion that has no clean edges, or a single moment of betrayal. Just the long nauseating dissolution of a world built on a foundation that was never solid.
The other eye strains. It is still trying. The effort is visible in the tension of it. The part of her that knows, and has known for longer than she has been willing to say out loud. Pressing against the fog of everything she was told to believe.
Two eyes. Two stories. One face holding both, still standing, and pointing. Still wearing around her neck a necklace of small bones as if she dressed herself in it one morning and simply forgot to take it off.
The ground beneath her feet is amber-brown and warm. The sky behind the grimness holds gold. The stone of the monument itself catches amber light in its shadows. The warmth present in every surface the enchantment has not fully claimed. A filtering through, persistent, and refusing to be extinguished entirely.
She is standing on it but cannot see it. Everything she was taught to look at is in front of her, and what is in front of her is grey.
The buzzards are not waiting for the body. They are waiting for the recognition.
This painting was made in 2026, inside the Great Transition, by a hand that has been watching this particular scene play out across decades. The woman with the divided eyes. The girls in the witch hats learning the wrong school of magic. The grey monument casting its shadow across amber ground that nobody pointed anyone toward.
It is activist work. It is lore. The kind of image that does something to you before the words arrive to tell you what.
The original painting ships with a full story. A complete accounting of every symbol, every color, the meaning of the style itself, and what it means to hold this painting on your wall during the years the buzzards already knew were coming. The story is written for the one who brings the painting home. It belongs with the canvas, not on this page.
But if you are still thinking about her eyes, the one that spirals and the one that strains, then you already know something this painting has to say to you.
The story you are reading now travels with every original.
When you bring this painting into your home, you bring the witness with it. The breaking of the enchantment, held in pigment and canvas. For the wall of every woman who is learning to look at her own hands and see what was always there.
Original acrylic on canvas. 16 × 20. One of a kind. Available now.
The crossroads are here. The torches are lit. Let’s walk.
Purchase the original painting at The Agape Collective of Arcane Arts – Our Enchanted Merchant Guild
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Kristi
High Priestess of Agape Covens
Founder, The Crossroads Movement
