My Rival, My Mirror

There is a particular tension between women that is rarely spoken of without simplification.

We call it rivalry.

We reduce it to jealousy, competition, comparison-- who is more beautiful, more desired, more powerful. But beneath these surface narratives lies something far more intricate, more unsettling.

Recognition.

The rival is not merely the other woman.

She is the one who reflects what we cannot easily accept in ourselves.

The First Glance: Difference

When Lyra first encounters Vina, the energy is unmistakable.

A charge. A disturbance.

Vina is not simply another presence in Noah’s world, she is an intrusion. A force that disrupts Lyra’s sense of coherence, of place, of being singular in her connection.

At this stage, the dynamics appear familiar.

Two women. One man. Desire as the axis of conflict.

But this is only the outer layer.

Because what unsettles Lyra is not only that Vina exists, but how she exists.

The Deeper Current: Recognition

Vina carries something Lyra does not fully understand, yet instinctively feels.

A rawness. A power. A proximity to the forbidden.

As a descendant of the Manananggal, Vina embodies a kind of femininity that has been historically feared, because it is uncontained, visceral, unapologetically other.

Lyra, by contrast, moves within a different register: intellectual, searching, fragmented in a more internal way.

And yet, the boundary between them is not fixed.

Because what Lyra perceives in Vina is not wholly alien.

It is latent.

Unlived.

Or perhaps, unpermitted.

The rival becomes the mirror.

The Erotics of Rivalry

There is an undercurrent in feminine rivalry that is not purely antagonistic.

It is charged with fascination.

To observe the other woman is to study a possibility of self. To feel threatened is also, in some quiet register, to feel drawn.

This does not negate conflict.

It complicates it.

Lyra’s awareness of Vina is not detached. It is embodied. She feels it, in the tightening of breath, in the heightened alertness, in the subtle shifts of her own desire.

Vina’s presence alters the field.

Not only in relation to Noah, but in relation to Lyra’s own understanding of herself as a woman, as a lover, as a being capable of transformation.

Noah as Catalyst, Not Center

It would be easy to position Noah as the center of this dynamics.

But he is not.

He is the catalyst.

The one through whom the energies of Lyra and Vina come into contact, into tension, into entanglement.

But what unfolds between the two women exceeds him.

Their relationship becomes a site of evolution.

A confrontation not over possession, but over identity.

Fragmentation and Becoming

Lyra’s journey, especially after her near-fatal teleportation, is one of fragmentation.

She becomes porous, receptive to multiple timelines, multiple desires, multiple selves.

In this state, her encounter with Vina intensifies.

Because Vina is not fragmented in the same way.

She is integrated, but in a form that is culturally marked as monstrous.

What Lyra experiences as disorientation, Vina embodies as coherence.

And this is both threatening and illuminating.

The mirror does not simply reflect similarity.

It reveals divergence.

What one has become. What the other might yet become.

From Rivalry to Entanglement

As the narrative unfolds, the relationship between Lyra and Vina begins to shift.

Not into harmony, necessarily, but into something more complex.

An entanglement.

They are no longer merely opposing forces.

They begin to influence each other.

Lyra’s depth, her introspection, her capacity for layered feeling-- these begin to touch Vina. To soften, to expand her beyond the inherited script of the “bad witch.”

And Vina’s unapologetic embodiment, her acceptance of her own nature-- these begin to awaken something in Lyra. A permission. A courage.

The mirror becomes reciprocal.

Each sees herself in the other, and is changed.

The Feminine Beyond Opposition

The patriarchal narrative thrives on dividing women.

It simplifies relationships into binaries: rival or ally, pure or dangerous, beloved or rejected.

But the relationship between Lyra and Vina resists this.

They are not easily categorized.

They are, at once, in tension and in resonance.

They challenge each other.

They reveal each other.

They become, in a sense, co-creators of each other’s evolution.

My Rival, My Mirror

To write this relationship is to acknowledge a truth often left unspoken:

That the women who unsettle us most deeply are not always our enemies.

They are our mirrors.

They show us the edges of our own becoming, the parts we have not yet embraced, the powers we have not yet claimed, the truths we have not yet dared to articulate.

Lyra does not become Vina.

Vina does not become Lyra.

But through each other, they become more fully themselves.

The Final Reflection

In the end, the question is not who wins.

There is no victory in the conventional sense.

There is only transformation.

The rival, once feared, becomes indispensable.

The mirror, once resisted, becomes necessary.

And in that recognition, something shifts:

Not the erasure of difference.

But the acceptance of multiplicity within the feminine.

In The Witch of Pontevedra, Lyra and Vina do not resolve into a single truth.

They remain complex, contradictory, evolving.

As we all are.

And perhaps that is the most honest portrayal of all:

That within every woman lives both the one who fears and the one who is feared.

The one who loves and the one who disrupts love.

The one who seeks coherence and the one who embodies chaos.

Rival.

Mirror.

Self.

The Witch Was Never the Villain

Before she was feared, she was named.

And before she was named, she was known.

Not as a monster, not as a corrupter of men or a devourer of children, but as a woman who understood forces others could not.: the rhythms of the body; the healing properties of herbs; the mysteries of blood, birth, desire, and death.

The witch, in her earliest form, was not an aberration.

She was continuity.

Invention of the Witch

The figure of the witch, as we have inherited her, is not ancient truth, it is constructed fear.

Across centuries, particularly in Europe’s violent campaigns against so-called heresy and deviance, the witch became a repository for everything that threatened patriarchal order: female autonomy, sexual agency, knowledge outside institutional control.

The persecutions that culminated in events like the Salem witch trials were not isolated hysteria. They were part of a larger pattern, a systemic effort to discipline bodies, especially women’s bodies, into submission.

To name a woman a witch was to render her dangerous.

And once dangerous, she could be silenced.

Policing of Female Body

What, precisely, made a woman suspect?

Too much knowledge. Too much solitude. Too much desire.

A woman who did not belong to a man-- father, husband, priest-- became unreadable within the logic of patriarchy. And what cannot be controlled must be explained.

Thus, the myth: she consorts with dark forces. She seduces. She corrupts.

The witch became the narrative solution to a cultural anxiety: what to do with a woman who belongs to herself.

Her body, once a source of life and intuition, was rewritten as a site of danger. Her sensuality, once sacred, became suspect.

In this rewriting, we see not merely superstition, but strategy.

Erotics of Fear

There is, within the myth of the witch, a deeply erotic undercurrent.

Why was the witch so often imagined as both repulsive and irresistible? Why the fixation on her body—her touch, her gaze, her supposed ability to enchant?

Because desire itself was feared.

Not male desire-- that was normalized, even sanctioned-- but female desire that did not seek permission. Desire that chose. Desire that refused containment.

The witch, then, becomes a projection.

She embodies the fantasy and the terror of unregulated female sexuality. She is punished not only for what she knows, but for what she awakens.

Rewriting the Witch in The Witch of Pontevedra

In my novella, the witch is not a singular figure.

She is refracted through characters, most explicitly through Vina, but also through Lyra, who, though not the witch in lineage, becomes entangled in her evolution.

Vina, a descendant of the mythic Manananggal, inherits the burden of the “bad witch.” She is feared, misunderstood, defined by narratives imposed upon her long before she could speak for herself.

But as the story unfolds, this label begins to fracture.

What if the “bad witch” is not a truth, but an inheritance?

What if her monstrosity is not innate, but constructed?

Through her entanglement with Lyra and Noah, Vina evolves, not into something less powerful, but into something more conscious, more deliberate, more compassionate.

She does not shed her nature.

She redefines it.

The Witch as Post-Human Figure

To deconstruct the witch is not merely to correct a historical wrong.

It is to open a new way of imagining the human.

The witch, especially as reimagined in speculative fiction, becomes a post-human figure, one who exists at the threshold of categories. Human and other. Self and network. Body and memory.

She is not confined by binaries.

She embodies contradiction.

In this sense, the witch is not a relic of the past, but a figure of the future, a symbol of what it means to exist beyond imposed definitions.

From Fear to Recognition

To write the witch anew is to refuse inherited fear.

It is to look at what has been demonized and ask: what truth was buried here?

What knowledge was silenced?

What forms of power were deemed unacceptable?

In reclaiming the witch, we do not sanitize her.

We allow her complexity.

Her anger. Her desire. Her capacity for harm and for healing.

We move from condemnation to recognition.

The Final Undoing

The patriarchal myth of the witch depends on distance.

On keeping her other, separate, contained.

But what happens when we recognize her within ourselves?

When we see that the qualities once feared: intuition, autonomy, sensual knowledge, emotional depth, which are not aberrations, but aspects of being fully human?

The myth begins to unravel.

And in its place, something more honest emerges: not the witch as villain, but the witch as mirror.

In The Witch of Pontevedra, this undoing is not complete.

It is ongoing.

As all deconstructions are.

But in the act of writing: of giving voice, depth, and agency to those once reduced to myth, we participate in a quiet revolution.

We do not destroy the witch.

We release her.

And in doing so, we release ourselves.

Read more about the Poetics of the Witch on my Substack .

A Field of Power

There are moments in a woman’s life that defy logic.

A man enters a room, nothing extraordinary, perhaps not even conventionally handsome, and yet something in his presence alters the air. He looks at her, and in that glance, something travels: a current, a quiet voltage. It is not merely seen; it is felt. Her body responds before her mind has formed a thought. A shiver, subtle but unmistakable, moves through her.

What is this power?

It is not technique. Not yet. Not even proximity.

It is recognition.

Somewhere beneath the visible, something in him has touched something in her: an alignment of energies, histories, longings. It is as if the body knows before the intellect can interpret. The gaze becomes not an act of looking, but an act of entering.

And yet, there exists the opposite mystery.

There are men who have learned every choreography of desire, who know the rhythms, the gestures, the sequences said to produce pleasure. They approach intimacy with confidence, even mastery. And still, the woman beside them remains unmoved, unresponsive, distant, as if her body was present, but her being had withdrawn.

Why does one glance awaken, while a thousand practiced motions fail?

Because love, real intimacy, is not a performance. It is a field of power.

And like all fields of power, it cannot be simulated.

We often speak of foreplay as though it was a prelude measured in minutes. A sequence of actions designed to prepare the body for what follows. But this is a profound misunderstanding.

Foreplay does not begin in the bedroom.

It begins much earlier.

It begins in the way one is spoken to. days before, weeks before.
In the tone of a message.
In the attentiveness of listening.
In the subtle affirmations that say: I see you. I recognize you. I value your presence.

It begins in trust.

In the slow accumulation of emotional safety.
In the absence of manipulation.
In the quiet consistency that allows two people to lower their defenses, not out of obligation, but out of ease.

By the time two bodies meet, something far more intricate has already been woven.

Or not.

If that weaving has not occurred, if there has been no genuine meeting of minds, no resonance of emotional frequency. then no amount of physical expertise can compensate. The body, especially the female body, is not merely mechanical. It does not respond reliably to stimulus alone. It responds to meaning.

And meaning is relational.

This is where love becomes a site of power struggle.

Not power in the crude sense of dominance or control, but in the subtler negotiation of presence and absence, of giving and withholding, of vulnerability and defense. Who opens first? Who risks more? Who holds back? Who seeks to be seen, and who fears being known?

Desire intensifies in this space of tension.

The gaze that sends a shiver is not empty, it carries intention, curiosity, a certain daring. It says, without words: I am willing to meet you where you are, if you are willing to meet me.

But if one partner remains closed, guarded, distracted, emotionally absent, then the field collapses. The gestures may continue, but they no longer carry current. What remains is movement without connection, contact without encounter.

Intimacy, then, cannot be forced.

It cannot be manufactured through technique or accelerated through urgency. It emerges almost inevitably when two individuals arrive at a shared state of presence. When they are, in some profound sense, synchronized.

Emotionally. Psychologically. Even temporally.

This synchronization is rare, which is why its effects are so powerful.

When it happens, the body responds not as an isolated organism, but as part of a larger, relational system. Sensation deepens. Time alters. What might otherwise be ordinary becomes charged with significance.

And in such moments, pleasure is not merely physical.

It becomes expressive, an unfolding of trust, a release of accumulated tension, a recognition of being met without fragmentation.

This is why some encounters feel transformative, while others feel hollow.

Not because of what was done, but because of what was shared.

The woman who lies unresponsive is not necessarily cold nor indifferent. She may simply be unconvinced, unreached at the level where response begins. Her body waits for something more than touch. It waits for alignment.

And the man whose glance ignites may not even be aware of what he carries. He has, perhaps unknowingly, entered the field fully without pretense, without fragmentation, and in doing so, has invited a corresponding openness.

This is the paradox of love as power struggle:

The more one seeks to control the experience, the less power one actually holds.
The more one is willing to be present, the more the field responds.

In the end, intimacy is not about winning.

It is about meeting.

And when that meeting is real, when it has been prepared not in minutes but in the quiet, accumulating gestures of days, months, even years, then what unfolds between two people is inevitable and powerful: a shared, fleeting, and profoundly human moment of being fully alive-- together.