Chapter 47: Chapter 40: Ritual

  

 

  The girl had been disheartened by her previous attempt to contact Rose, at least at first. All the time and effort she put into her ritual had failed to bring the exact results she had desired, with it instead fizzling into what seemed more like a flashy version of the scrying often talked about in older texts on divination. Indeed, with some of her past experiments she took to scrying like a fish to water. But all that effort was not worth the pay-off she had gained; she wanted Rose back in her world, she didn’t want to peek in on her changing like some voyeur.

    But after examining the intention of the spell, she came to the realization that the results were actually quite impressive. She had previous successes in her research, but those had been for spells related to minor things. The spells were for the usual day to day woes and obstacles in life, ones for luck and success in academics. There had definitely been upticks in both matters after her attempts to try these spells, but something as abstract as “increased luck” was hard to actually quantify and there was one thing she loved, it was the ability to take results and apply hard numbers to them. She was, after all, a student of science at heart.

    She had found much more satisfying results delving into the field of parapsychology and looking at the more recent research done. Over the past while Rose had gone missing she had worked hard at practicing these simple tests in the free time she had between research. It was the usual thing, thinking hard at a random number generator trying to sway its output.

 

    Minor stuff. Anything to increase the amount of willpower she had, the amount of force her mind could exert on the outside world. She thought back to a show she had watched that touched on this. All basic magic really was at its heart was one's ability to exert your will, consciously or subconsciously, on the world and reality. Reality may put up a hell of a fight, but even modern physics was beginning to show that those observing reality have the ability to influence by the mere act of watching it.

    As she was reflecting on her past research, she looked up from where she knelt in a park outside the city of Reading. It wasn’t ideal, as she would much prefer performing this ritual at the site of the previous one, the site where Rose had disappeared. It wasn’t ideal, but it was a location that had a certain power of its own. As she had realized earlier, reality tended to put up one hell of a fight when you decided to spit in its face, and she needed all the firepower she could get if she were to pull the tutor she loved back into the world that had so cruelly cast her out.

    In her research, she had noticed trends, lines where people would go missing, where strange events would occur, hauntings were known to happen, and other oddness would pop up. These would be influenced by population centers where humans lived, as weird events needed observers to be observed. To bastardize the old riddle, if Bigfoot knocked over a tree in a forest, and no one was around to hear it, did the event make a sound?

 

   

    But by looking deeper, there was a clear pattern. Lines, as was said. Lines where weirdness would happen, where the unnatural was a bit more natural, and the strange was slightly more commonplace. And there’d be nodes. Places where the lines overlapped and those nodes would be marked by especially noticeable weirdness. In the Old World these would be marked by barrows, mounds covered in Hawthorn, and there would be an unspoken consensus that these places were better left alone. America did not have this. But there were rumors. Towns with increased rates of missing and injured. Towns with abandoned warehouses, ruins, and other places reeking of atmosphere.

    This was one such town. After the end of the major days of rail, outsourcing, and the general flight of industry to cheaper climes, there was plenty of decay, and even the parks often had ruins. It was a hell of a lot easier than sneaking into one of the bigger name sites as well. From what she had gathered those also tended to be filled with what she thought of as entities and what the layman thought of as ghosts. If you kept yourself on the straight and narrow, refusing to admit that the supernatural may be less “super” than thought, you were likely to be safe. Reality is often about perception, after all.

 

    But the girl had long since gone off the deep end into arcane rites. She had cast off the comforting cloak of being an uptight scholar with her feet planted in the world of science. The wholehearted rejection of a world that operated on the rationality she knew, fueled by her obsessive love for Rose, dropped her deep into a reality where knowledge of the things that go “bump” in the night was common. And as such, she lost the protection gained from being a typical student of science. She could perceive the ghosts, as a result they could “perceive” back. And if they can see her, they can hit her, and they can hurt her.

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    So she was stuck finding a happy medium between places that were relatively safe and where reality was especially thin, and a node in the “seams of the world” had she had taken to thinking of it. It seemed to make sense in her mind. Reality was made up of broad sheets of rationality, with weak spots and the edges of this fabric that made up the mundane world. But if someone were to use the right tool, a seam ripper in the form of a spell, it may be possible to pop a few stitches and grab something on the other side of the curtain.

    She thought as she worked, carving a circle in the layer of dirt on the ruin’s floor with a knife. She used a string and a nail to cheat on making the exterior of the circle, but the rest of it was free-hand. The text and intention was to her mind the most important part of the circle anyways. She’d glance at the sketch she had written of it from time to time as she continued to inscribe, and take the occasional swig from a flask. The circle looked complex and dark, as if taken from one of the books of Ritual Magic so secretly popular in the Renaissance. It looked like the kind of circle to summon a demon, like something out of the Key of Solomon.

 

    Rather than a circle to summon a demon, it was a circle to wretch open a small part of the seams in reality to summon Rose. The girl believed in demons; she had done too much reading not to be aware of them. But her research showed they could be fickle and cruel, and prone to turning on their summoner if not controlled right.

 

    Beings such as demons and fairies were like a cheat to the earlier idea that magic was accomplished by will. Rather than exerting your effort directly against reality, you get something already on the edge or separate from the world to do things for you. It simplifies the amount of time and energy needed and can lead to greater effects. The trade off was dangerous, being tied to something otherworldly, bound by things such as contracts and marriage in the case of fae, and eternal damnation in some sort of realm if you were to make a mistake with demons. The thought of it made the girl feel as if one was watching her at that very moment, and she shivered.

    The circle completed, she took a step back and took another swig from the flask. This naturally was another step in ensuring the success of the ritual. It wasn’t anything too overtly bad; an infusion of several herbs in alcohol and mixed with water to help relax her mind and induce the right mental state for this sort of ritual. It was a bit like absinthe, although heavier on the lavender than the wormwood. Nothing overtly psychoactive, nothing on any sort of federal Schedule, as the purpose was just to boost the ritual. The water had been exposed to the moonlight, to absorb its rays, further making the infusion take on a magical air. All the time and energy poured into the potion ideally would increase her success.

    She walked around the exterior of the site, once again repeating the steps from her previous ritual. At each corner she had already placed several colored candles. The previous ritual hadn’t been successful, as mentioned, but it showed her what she desired most which had suggested she was on the right track. She went with colors that, rather than fit into classical attributes people ascribed to them, reminded her of the one she sought to summon, the one she desired most. Lavender, Kelly Green, a tannish Coyote brown, and yellow to represent the brightness the girl always felt when seeing her.

    Finishing, she returned to her spot in front of the circle, where several pre-staged censers, filled with incense of her own blend, sat ready to be lit. Taking a remaining lighted candle, this one white, she lit the contents of the censers and a scent emanated, lavender, coffee and pine filling the air in swirls of smoke that seemed to dance around the kneeling woman as she knelt with her eyes closed.

 

    She remained there, in meditation, eyes closed and her knife clasped in front of her in hands poised as if in prayer. Her mind wandered, searching out along the seams between reality, worming its way in through the stitching and out the other side. She had a guidepost, at the very least, the vision that came to her the last major ritual she had tried.

 

    She had an image, and that gave her a target, a place to seek out and find. She concentrated, fixing in the image in place. A different image from before. It’s not like Rose had been frozen in time after all. Time seemed to work differently on the other side, sometimes speeding up, sometimes slowing to a crawl. What she say this time, however, filled her with an agonizing pain. Rose, in the arms of another woman. Rose, close to her and clearly in love.

    The pain filled her heart, as her eyes shot open. She shouted an incantation and plunged the knife into the earth inside the circle. And the world broke.