For a good cause, I swear

Jeremiah felt the magic flood through him, threatening to overwhelm his body until it found a conduit through the other witches present. His breath hitched hard as he lifted his arms above his head, wincing at the pain of his old scars acting up. His fist unclenched with the lock of hair he had acquired from Broen's father, casting it into the flames. Everything was going perfectly.

Until it wasn't.

The flames began to blacken yet somehow glow brighter as they closed in on Jeremiah. The magic, which had until now diffused itself through all present, suddenly flooded back into him with the force of a crashing wave. His tattoos began to glow with the same angry violet that the flames had moments before, with cracks forming and spreading across his skin.

Jeremiah was panicked. He didn't know what had gone wrong, but it had and it was going to be bad. Very very bad. "Move away!" he shouted at the others, repeating his command as he curled himself into a ball at the center of the circle.

Jeremiah squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block out the sound of popping as he began to fall apart at the seams. Too much magic for a human body to handle. The force of him coming apart put out the flames of the ritual circle with a wind far too cold for the time of year, even at night.

What was left was a pair of skulls, one human and one beast, fused together with a constant flow of violet magic set behind the eye sockets.

The reactions were a mixture of paralyzed horror and the scampering, sudden burst of true panic that happened so infrequently. Those who didn't run found themselves stuck stock still, staring at the circle of scorched Earth and the faintly glowing skull that had been a person moments before.

It must've felt like hours but surely couldn't have been when the soil at the ritual's center began to swell. It shuddered, and then did so again. And once again, falling into a rhythm not unlike a heartbeat.

Vines, brown and dry with death began to creep up from this mound of soil like a shallow grave. Fur and bones of things long dead cracked through the topsoil. Weaving together with the plant matter into something like a man and yet wholly unlike it. Curled up like an unborn child, the discarded skull taking the place of a head.

The lump of fur and vines moved slightly at the sound of Wednesday and Shiro calling out to it. An arm swung as it tried to right itself, a massive clawed hand catching in the dirt and lifting the body up slightly.

"Wh-"

The voice that resonated from the fused creature skull was almost Jeremiah's. But it was both too loud and seemingly far away, echoing from somewhere you couldn't quite see.

The skull turned, the intense violet glow behind the eye sockets narrowing to pin pricks of light as they focused on Shiro beside them. "What's happening."