《Silvana: Queen of the Witches》


 Prologue - Allhallows

    In 1646, during the bleakest days of the English Civil War, as the kingdom was torn asunder in the bitter conflict of the Royalists and the Roundheads, and the countryside reeled from the deprivations of the conflict, one place remained, for a time, curiously pristine. It was a little village called Allhallows in the rural thickets of Cambridgeshire. You needn''t trouble yourself to try to find it on a map, as it is no longer there.


    While the surrounding towns languished and faltered, all sorts of folks, upended by the war, or by poverty, or just nagged by the elusive mystery of their life''s purpose, found their way to the new settlement. People said it was a little paradise where every man was a brother, every woman a sister, and upon the earth on which it stood no lord could claim dominion save one.


    The village founder was a man by the name of Benjamin Croke. Croke had been a cunning man, in particular a wandering dowser by trade. During his searchings he claimed to have had a vision from God, whom he said appeared in the grove just outside of the village and called upon him to establish a place on earth that should be alike heaven, where no one would be deprived their earthly desires, but would find fellowship and harmony among one another.


    At the same time, conducting his great deeds of cruelty not two counties over, was Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General, whose fervent zeal for putting sorcerers, or would-be sorcerers, to the stake was the stuff of legend. Word of Allhallows spread to his ears and Hopkins prepared an expedition that would investigate the nature of such a strange place on suspicion of witchcraft, or at the very least, surely a criminal deviation from the protocols of the church.Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    Before Hopkins had even set on his way for Allhallows he received a letter from Ben Croke, who invited him as a guest to meet in the town, and to see for himself "the greatness of God''s gifts formed of amity with nature and brotherhood among men."


    We know from Hopkins'' records that such a meeting did indeed take place between the two men. Though we do not know what happened, or what they spoke of, we do know what happened afterwords.


    Hopkins ordered all residents of the town to be arrested and burned at the stake for ''high diablerie, the practice of necromancy, and for being in league and communion with Satan himself.''


    At Ben Croke''s brief and severe trial at the hands of the witchfinder''s prosecution, two pieces of evidence were leveled against him, a book of spells called ''The True Grimoire'', and a parchment on which he had drafted a contract to corrupt the innocent and perform blood sacrifice in exchange for earthly favor. The book and Croke himself were burned swiftly after the trial''s guilty verdict, but the parchment of the pact was retained in the court''s records- still bearing the infernal signature of the devils who had ruled over Allhallows.

 Chapter 1 (A) - The Elderwood Wand

    In The Hour of Mercury, on The Day of Astaroth, the Moon a Crescent:


    I barely slept the last night, I was too excited. When the alarm on my phone started bleeting its annoying jingle I bolted up from my bed. My eyelids were heavy. It was still dark out the window, the trees barely visible in deep navy blue haze.


    I clicked on the lamp on my nightstand, hopped up, and struggled into my shirt and jeans. Artie, ever my faithful familiar, rose up and yawned her fanged mouth, stretching straight the center of her fluffy black spine. She slipped off the bed and wandered into the forest of bookshelves which sectioned off my bedroom from the rest of the living room.


    The coffee machine on the work table still glowed red and sizzled as I wrenched the pre-heated pot and poured out the steaming black sludge which smelled subtly of hazelnut. As I mulled the warm mug in my hands, sat back in my arm chair, and gazed out the window into the woods. The trees beside the patio shivered their raspy naked claws, the autumn leaves had started to fall.


    ''This is it! Lo, this is it!'' I chanted in my skull, boldly attempting to sip my coffee and nimbly avoiding a scorched tongue. ''Today''s the day.''


    I looked at my phone and saw the clock read 5:50 AM. Fifteen minutes to sunrise. It was time.


    I grabbed the shears, clutched the necklace that lay above my breast to confirm that the amulet was still there, and walked out to my car. The grey fog hung heavy and ominous over the lake, the trees, and the hill leading out into the neighborhood. The ground was still wet and mucky. It had rained the night before and I could see my breath in the morning air. It was like a sacred moment, out of time.


    I got in the car, buckled my seatbelt, and turned the ignition. The engine winced its pained braying. ''Ugh. Fuck.'' I hoped this didn''t wake the neighbors.


    Moments later I had wound my way across the topsy-turvy hills that dipped and climbed like a roller coaster track which led to our secluded place by the lake.If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    I shot past the mailboxes, and then the vast tunnel of branches, and then past the wide open fields of lollygagging oreo cows. The sky was now a pale blue slathered in splotches of pink and orange clouds, like some epic landscape on a fantasy book cover.


    I took a deep breath. Here is where the challenge would begin. I stopped beneath the long hill near the road leading to Puffer''s Pond and drove up towards the cafe, outside which lay the prize I had staked.


    A lone police car sat idling beside the driveway leading in.


    "Oh, you have got to be kidding me! You have got to be fucking kidding me!" I cursed through my teeth behind the safety of my windshield.


    Without stopping I kept driving through into a sidestreet and circled back around towards my neighborhood.


    Of course there were lots of elder trees, similar to the specimen I sought, hanging like vines across the road with their blade-shaped crimson and bronze withered leaves, but all too ripe and none suitable. My heart leapt, there was only 10 minutes left to sunrise! I kept driving and driving, winding back towards my cabin where I feared my best efforts would crumble into defeat.


    I followed the path home, casting my gaze upon the passenger side''s window in shifts seeking some serendipitous deliverance.


    And after a few minutes, there it was! By a lonesome dirt path leading out into the woods off the side of the road stood a row of young green elder trees, Their skinny branches lined with thin leaves which looked like something out of the Jurassic. The black warts all over the bark were unmistakable.


    I parked the car on the pavement, fearing that if I pulled into the path my tires would be stuck in the mucky soil. I got out, wrenched the shears out of the back seat, and approached the saplings.


    I looked up and down the proud young tree that stood out to me. A sense of deep reluctance came over me when I thought about the young tree itself. With its limb struck off, it might suffer a substantial stunt in its growth through the rest of its life. I tried my best to find the substantial branch which looked both the straightest for my purposes and the most vestigial, for the sapling''s sake.


    Then the golden rays of the sun showered my face through the gaps between the skinny pine trees. It was time.


    I took a deep breath, stood upright with good posture, and held out the shears in my right hand.


    I spoke the orison of the wand, or at least something close enough in the moment. "Lord Frimost, you are wise and powerful, lend to this wand your purity! Lord Frimost, offer to it your wisdom and your power!"


    I held the shears out, positioning the wood perfectly between the blades, and clamped down as hard and swiftly as I could, cutting down through most of the branch. I gingerly struggled with my hands to break loose the last sinew of the bark.


    Then I carefully tossed the long branch across the backseat of my car and drove home.

 Chapter 1 (B) - The Elderwood Wand

    When I strolled back onto my downhill street I passed by the prying and suspicious eyes of my neighbors out on a walk. Could they imagine the gravity of my daybreak mission?


    I parked and dragged the branch inside, closing the door behind me. As I drew the branch onto my work desk that lay in front of the arm chair in the living room, Artie caught sight of the long straight twigs and leaves that dangled from its ends. To my horror she batted at the stick I carried, scraping at the ends of the wood with her talons.


    "Ack! No! Bad Artie! Bad Familiar!" I cried, picking up the little wooly beast by the armpits and gently setting her aside in the hall.


    I laid the arm of elderwood down on the work table. Then I snapped up a disk of quicklite charcoal and sparked it up on the kitchen range''s high burner setting. I returned and placed it inside the brass censer upon which I sprinkled some pinches of aloe wood, frankincense, and mace. The smell of the smoke which belched across the table was sweet and musky, and I doused the branch in its fumes.


    First I clipped the ends of the branch past the length I didn''t want. Then I took the wood working knife and began to shave off piece by piece of the bark. I stripped off the brown pock-marked bark until it was green, and then yellow, and then beige. Then I sanded it smooth.Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    As I performed this tedious task for many minutes unabated, Artie slunk across the shelves behind me, knocking my father''s old books from the seventies about social theory and hominid evolutionary development down to the ground at her determined march.


    I withdrew my sharper engraving knife and carefully drew the seal of Lord Frimost into the wand''s center. The abstract sigil gave the impression of some symbols... a number 4... an R... a Y... A degrees sign... Mars..., but I knew I would probably never glean its secret meaning, save to ask its owner myself.


    I again baptized the finished baton in the incense smoke. The length of it was naturally perforated in the middle, like a Dionysian thyrsus.


    It was done. I held in my hand the wand of evocation, and I had constructed the first major instrument and begun the ritual sequence. It would be only a matter of time before I summoned Frimost himself and made my pact.


    I wrapped the wand in a clean sheet and scooped up Artie into bed. I curled up with my delighted kitty-kat wearing a smile, content that I would soon make contact with the infernal guardians of desire themselves.

 Chapter 2 (A) - Barista Purgatory

    A few hours later the mythic feeling of the morning had been smothered by awaking to my habitual bondage to bourgeois drudgery. I threw on my dark blue blouse and black jeans, dabbed on the bare minimum makeup and drove to work.


    I drove around the same route through the woods that I had fled earlier on in the morning and parked outside the little cafe by the railroad tracks at the end of the road into town.


    I walked in, past the row of untouched elderwood saplings that lined the parking lot, and offered my customary morning wave to Kurt from the kitchen window, who nodded as he flipped a omelet back into the sizzling skillet he tended. I couldn''t tell if he had even noticed me or was head-banging to the black metal piping in through his earbuds.


    I rounded the corner of the cashier''s counter to see Rene fishing a carton of almond milk out of the refrigerator under the table.


    "Hey" she greeted me smiling, "How''s the art project going, Silvana?"


    "Eh, it''s not all bad." I conceded with a smirk. "Finished another big piece this morning."


    "Oh Silvana" she cooed with her hand over your heart "To think- here you were slinging the fair trade sludge, and next thing you know you''ll be filming yourself sleeping for five hours and snorting mountains of cocaine with Lou Reed at Studio 54"


    "Not if I''m shot by a struggling feminist playwright first!" I said.Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    "and then we''ll bury you with a little bottle of your favorite perfume." she added.


    "How chic!"


    Rene burst out laughing, snorting loudly.


    "I''ve got to get you to the fire! Everybody would love you there, you''ve got to come one of these weekends!"


    "What? So I can risk third-degree burns and shake some maracas around to get fucked by some guy named like, I don''t know, Kyle, because he knows guitar."


    "pffft!" She scoffed. "but really, why don''t you come out there? You''d have fun!"


    "I just feel like it''s not my scene. I guess I really should. This week it would just interfere with the project I have going on though." I said.


    "Oh come on, we could absolutely use a real witch at our black sabbath!"


    I rolled my eyes.


    "Hey though, How''d it go with your mom the other night?" Rene prodded.


    I sighed. "Same as usual. We still haven''t heard back."


    "Ah." she said, putting her hand on my shoulder. "Try not to let it get to you. Worst case scenario you can always come live with me and Kurt."


    "Thanks." I said as she shuffled past the counter towards the stockroom.


    Little by little, like the slow drip of seeped java, customers began to trickle in through the late morning. There were the contractors who came each morning for egg sandwiches and black coffee. There was the mom who came chasing a latte for herself and cookies for her three kids. Finally in the corner sat the slovenly graduate student who usually forgot to shower, wore days old clothes, and pored over his physics books each morning with chai tea and a brownie.


    I didn''t hate my barista job in the abstract. Coffee-bitch was a noble and respected calling in a town that festered with insufferably smug and overeducated yuppies. I was thankful that my work allowed me to present as I was and to stave off the student loan repayments, but there was still something about it that felt uncomfortably performative and subservient. Sometimes something about it nagged at my failure to flee this wretched town I have always wanted to leave and just made me feel like I was existentially being skinned alive every day.

 Chapter 2 (B) - Barista Purgatory

    Between the pouring of cups and the breaking of change, my brain had switched onto autopilot sometime in the middle of the recurrent malaise until I saw someone standing in front of me who shook it like a snow globe.


    There, standing next in line, was Grant McDowell, the boy I spent four years wanting to talk to and never found the words.


    "H-hi C-can I want you a coffee..." FUCK.


    I looked to see Rene shoot me a wide-eyed glance.


    "I''ll just get a mocha." Grant said.


    I smiled and nervously chuckled as I fled to the coffee machine and stirred the cocoa and milk together in a large cup.


    "Hey good to see you again!" Rene said to Grant over the counter.


    "Oh hey, Rene right? How''s life been?"


    "Eh, same as always. What are you up to? Are you still in school?"


    "Well, sort of. I''m only back here to see my folks for a bit of the summer. I actually just scored an internship at MIT in the data science labs so I''m starting there in the fall."


    "Nice! So what is that, like, listening in on people''s phones to catch thought crimes?"Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.


    "Yeah, they''ve just got me collecting everybody''s nudes."


    I knocked the mixed drink on the counter.


    "Shit!" I exclaimed, ducking to grab paper towels from the rack on the other side of the counter.


    "Looks like you botched your dexterity roll." Grant quipped smiling, the first thing he''d said to me that I could remember.


    "hah... hah! uhhh... lucky I have a +2 paper towel!" I stammered, starting to frantically wipe up the spill.


    "Heh."


    "Sorry about that!" Rene said.


    "Yeah, I''m in a bit of a rush. I can just take any coffee you''ve got." He said.


    "Sure!" said Rene pouring a cardboard cup full of the Peruvian blend. "Here it is! On the house!"


    "Thanks! Nice to see you again."


    "Oh, hey, we do a bonfire gathering on Saturdays out in Sunderland! You''re welcome to come sometime if you want!" Rene said as he began to leave.


    "Yeah! Sounds cool! Maybe I''ll drop in one of these weekends!" he called back as he walked out the door.


    Rene''s friendly smile grit into a grimace of pity as she looked down on me soaking up the spilled mocha that had leaked onto the floor. "Yikes."


    "I know! I''m sorry!" I said.


    "No, I just mean, I feel bad. You deserve some good luck, you know?"


    I sighed.


    "Still, now you''ve got an incentive to come to the thing this weekend! Maybe Grant will show up!"


    It''s very hard as an adult to really explain why certain people on the periphery of your life can still come to hold so much power over you. Grant and I had never really had a conversation, and if we did I was always the girl next to the girl he was talking to. Grant was smooth, lithe, and rich. The most genuinely charming boy in town. The kind of person I''d wanted to have in my life back then. The kind of person I''d wanted to recognize those same things in me.


    But there I was, a 23 year old loser fumbling over asking the order of a man who didn''t even remember me.


    As I soaked my shame up from the counter, reliving the seemingly neverending worst four years of my life, I grit my teeth and wished for the moment when I was home and fixed on my materials. Back to my workings that held actual promise.

 Chapter 3 - The Witch House

    In The Hour of the Moon, on The Night of Astaroth, the Moon a Crescent:


    In defeat I slumped back to my witch¡¯s cottage in the woods and fumbled with the keys until I found the right one to open the front door. From the window, Artie¡¯s little muppet face poked out to greet me. Her outstretched furry head was transfixed on the fidgeting of my fingers. I opened the door to an outpouring of my familiar¡¯s accolades of affectionate rubbing and meowing and set upon the task of leaving out her dinner, which she graciously devoured.


    With the cat fed I hit the Mr. Coffee machine again and collapsed into the armchair I had arranged facing my workbench. There was an incredible silence that held over the cottage. I loved the way that whenever I would move around the cabin that the wood beneath me would creek and the way that specks of dust would float across the sunlight that flooded in through the screen windows. It was like debris floating on the ocean floor. The cabin was my sanctuary in the woods, from all the assholes in town and all over the world that wanted to hurt me, but it was also my cage.


    I hated living out here as a kid. It was very isolating out here with no friends at any reasonable distance without a car ride and nothing faster than dial-up until I was well towards college. Now it was the only reminder of more innocent times, and I felt like, no matter what happened, a part of me would always dwell within these walls. The old books that populated the wall like the leaves of great trees was all that I felt was left of my dad.


    I poured myself a hot mug of joe and scanned the length of my workbench as I blew the stream from the rim. I smiled with pride as I marveled at the conjuring wand I had made for myself that morning. I inspected the deep carvings that I had cut to render the seal of Lord Frimost and smiled in private satisfaction at my own craft.


    Arranged beside the wand were many of the other tools and instruments I had already consecrated the previous week: There was the fine parchment I had bought from the art store. There was the lancet, a little plastic-handled diabetic¡¯s prick I had painted with the proper symbols along the plastic handle.Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    Next to that sat the inkwell, again painted on its label with the proper figures as the Verum prescribes, and the ink itself, purified by reciting the proper prayer in which rested a red feather quill pen. Finally there was the aspergillius, the concoction resting in a wide brass bowl onto which I had painted the proscribed magic words and seeped a salve of mint, rosemary, and marjoram, all purified again by the indicated incantations.


    Of course all of these things had been properly fumigated by the essential mixture of burnt aloe wood, frankincense, and mace, shipped from India through the vast infernal trade networks of global capitalist imperialism at exorbitant price, all gathered and assembled at the prescribed day of Wednesday, at the prescribed hour of Dawn. In spite of myself and all my inadequacies, I took pride that it was all coming together, just like the old book said.


    I¡¯d hardly had time to dote on the fruits of my labor when my phone started to ring.


    ¡°Hello?¡± I answered.


    ¡°Hi Honey! How was work?¡± Mom asked.


    It was unusual for her to be calling me and not the other way around.


    ¡°Um¡­ It was fine¡­¡± I lied. ¡°You know, just another weekday at the coffee shop. How was school?¡±


    ¡°¡­It was fine. My students are a pretty good bunch this semester so¡­¡±


    ¡°Ah¡­¡±


    ¡°So¡­¡± She began.


    There was a long pause on my mom¡¯s end.


    ¡°I called the bank today to see if they had made a decision about refinancing the mortgage yet.¡± She said.


    I swallowed a lump down my throat ¡°¡­and?¡±


    ¡°They still haven¡¯t gotten around to the case but¡­ I think you should start packing stuff to come live out here with me.¡±


    I sighed and held silent with the phone.


    ¡°Honey?¡±


    ¡°I just want to wait until we know¡­¡± I said, starting to cry. ¡°I just feel like¡­ I feel like whatever¡¯s left of dad is still here. I just miss him so much.¡±


    ¡°Oh honey¡­¡±


    ¡°Just give it a few more days¡­¡± I whimpered. ¡°I just want to believe something will come through¡­¡±


    My mom didn¡¯t speak for a little while. ¡°Okay. I love you honey, get some rest.¡±


    ¡°I love you too, mom.¡±


    I hung up and started to cry in my chair. Artie crawled into my lap, kneading at my knees to comfort me, and soon we fell asleep together.

 Chapter 4 - Study-Hall of the Abyss

    On the Night of Astaroth, The Moon a Crescent:


    And I sat there again. That little classroom each morning of freshman year where I''d sit through study hall in the back. That room where the walls of the adjacent buildings obscure the sunlight and I spent the start of each day in shadow. That room where my innocence was taken from me, drop by drop.


    Each and every day I was to be humiliated. Shay would call me a "freak" and Ashley would call me a "retard" and Jake would demean my body. I was to be the carcass for those vultures who''d widdle me down every day with snide remarks and insults. They would take delight in reminding me of my place, of my inferiority in the food-chain of prison life, while the chains of the institution bound me, confining my body and spirit and depriving me of sleep.


    I tried so hard. I fought so hard not to hate.


    Because in myself and my own suffering I came to see the suffering of others. I came to see the suffering of all people of all time, the exploiter and the exploited. I came to see the suffering of all things.


    Ashley, Shay, Jake, they were nothing. They were just pawns reenacting a cosmic drama- a squalid reality of dim fiends- a never ending mandala of eating, fucking, and killing.


    It was I who stood proud. It was I who was broken on that wheel of karmic suffering and said "No". "The chain ends at me!", "I will shoulder this burden! I will carry this recognition inside of me! I will not pass on my misery to others!" I am Persephone in the netherworld! I am Sophia incarnate to liberate all sentience from the scourge of the Ialdabaoth! I am the Bodhisattva in hell!This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author''s work.


    I let the weight of the chains sink me. I let the abyss submerge me in that first period study hall five days a week. I was the one who said "No!" And for millions of years I languished there, a ghost of the deep, the hag-fish feasting upon my pallid corpse.


    I was a demon condemned to my torment, a thing borne of pressure, and isolation, and yearning, and sorrow. A thing that inspired fear merely by being myself against all adversity. For I still carried within myself that absolute spark of faith. That little flicker within myself that I knew who I was, and I chose right, and I chose love for all things.


    And as I hung there, sinking ever deeper down that bottomless trench, I saw a light. Another flicker floated down from the locker hall, through the pitch black study hall of infinite sorrow, and reached out his hand.


    It was Grant. All aglow, a kindred angler in the darkness who wrenched me up from my anguish.


    Because he was like me! It was only us! His sharp mind! His righteous voice! His gentleness! Only we had the swords sharp enough to cut our way through the underbrush and storm the bastions of that profaned temple! To make of that place a paradise of kindred spirits and co-creation and take to the stars!


    As we floated there, bathed in each other''s iridescent brilliance, he pinched the old key that I wore as a necklace and looked at it, and then his gaze met my eyes.


    "I did see you. I always saw you." he said. "But I was afraid."


    Tears welled in my eyes as he drew me closer.


    I ran my finger up across his chest and held his cheek with the tips of my fingers, and I lunged up and kissed him and tasted the embrace of his lips upon mine. Our light exploded like suns.

 Chapter 5 - The Ritual Knife

    In The Hour of Jupiter, on The Day of Silcharde, the Moon a Crescent:


    At the ringing of my phone¡¯s alarm my tear watery eyes pried opened. I still sat in the arm chair looking out on the trees in the dim early morning through the screen window, Artie prancing around with on the work table in front of me.


    I began to cry when I recalled what I had just felt, and the memories it welled up. It was very painful now to have to think back to such a time in my life, but the saddest part was where things had all gone since then. No, of course, Grant would never see me the way I saw him, but what hurt more was the reality of how I had changed. I hadn¡¯t stayed selfless. I had hurt people, and I regretted the time and energy I had spent during those formative years trying to be true to myself. There is no reward for being yourself. It doesn¡¯t get better.


    As the powder blue sky began to bring pale illumination to the forest outside my window I dabbed the tears from my cheeks and quickly jotted down the jist of the dream in my journal. I guessed that just seeing Grant again the other day must have been what evoked these forlorn aspirations. When I finished I walked to the kitchen and again laid out Artie¡¯s bowl of kibble to distract her while I began the morning¡¯s working.


    Today would be one of the most simple and ephemeral parts of the preparation cycle. I cleared off the finished materials from the work bench and withdrew the ritual knife. It was nothing fancy, just a small dagger with a straight symmetrical edge, only just sharp enough to break skin with a great deal of applied pressure.


    The dagger was, of course, never intended to draw blood or make sacrifices or anything of the sort. The lancet already did that job much more efficiently, and with much less risk of unintended injury. The dagger represented the tool that the witch should use for the demarcation of sacred space, for the drawing of the circle of practice, and for the projection of her will upon the spiritual forces with which I was to interact.


    As I sat beginning to paint the symbols in red along the edges of the blade, I took pleasure in how far my knowledge had come from my teenage fascination with the Goetia and conjuring of spirits. I had finally become clear on the details that had for so long eluded me thanks to my recent study of the Grimorium Verum, the most complete of the goetia spell books to survive to the present. The Verum filled the gaps that had been missing from the more well-known but later collected compendiums: The Lesser Key of Solomon, The Pseudomonarchia Demonia, and The Red Dragon.Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author''s preferred platform and support their work!


    The Verum laid out the process of summoning the demons in a much more down to earth philosophy than the older manuals. There were no excessive prostrations of keeping the stygian forces at bay. The evil spirits, all laid out in an orderly feudal hierarchy, were not to be driven in bondage, but befriended, brought into mutual cooperation with the witch to accomplish each other¡¯s goals.


    The circle and triangle inscribed upon the floor of the place of practice, for example, which in the more well known grimoires is described as a barrier to protect oneself from any infernal suspects, is in the Verum a parlour of communion between the witch and their guest. The long screeds of prayers to Jehova and Jesus in the later grimoires, sparse in the text of the Verum, were likely just camouflage used to give cover to the conjurer whose manual of operations ended up in the wrong hands.


    In any case, it was the Verum alone which detailed the tools and the proper procedures the other Goetic compendiums merely implied: The astrological schedule of the components, the construction of the tools, the primary importance of the parchment and sealing.


    As I held the knife above the incense smoke, I took pride in every new step in understanding I had taken. With some free time and some careful reading I had uncovered the procedure that lay only between the lines of the arcane tomes and the skeletal mandibles of a long extinct oral tradition. Maybe my failed attempt at a degree in Classics wasn¡¯t completely useless after all!


    As I set the consecrated knife along with the other tools I sunk deep into my arm-chair and let out a deep sigh. I would be lying if I said I didn¡¯t have doubts, if I said it didn¡¯t feel completely infantile and stupid to invest my hopes in material outcomes for something that sounds like make believe, but things were totally out of my hands anyways. There was something therapeutic about putting my hopes in something this weird and elaborate, something that at least exhausted my sense of anxiety.


    There was some anecdote from a Zizek lecture that always stuck with me when I tried to reassure myself I wasn¡¯t completely pathological. In a certain part of Europe there is some superstition that horseshoes hung over barns bring good luck, or drive off evil spirits, or something. Anyway, a man visiting that part of the country visits his professor¡¯s barn and looks over the entrance to see a horseshoe. The man says to his professor ¡°Surely you¡¯re too rational to believe in such a superstition!¡± and the professor responds ¡°Of course, but I am told that it works even if you don¡¯t believe in it!¡±


    After spending all those years holed up in university trying to understand magic and ritual through anecdotes and deconstruction, maybe I had been missing something I¡¯d find in the actual doing. When the inevitable would come to pass, at the very least I could take solace in trying everything and the kitchen sink.

 Chapter 6 - Yithogh the Feckless

    In The Hour of The Moon, on The Day of Silcharde, the Moon a Crescent:


    Thursday was the day of the week that I would go to visit Annie. I got in my car and drove into Amherst, passing through the busy comings and goings of all the folks daring around pleasant street and wound around the suburban backstreets in the south part of town out towards Hampshire College where her house was.


    I knocked on the door to see the friendly face of Mrs. Wells open the door. "Hey Kathy, is Annie around?"


    She smiled. ¡°Upstairs, as always.¡± she said, letting me in to take off my shoes and scamper up the carpeted steps.


    I walked in to the upstairs den to see Annie hunched over on the couch, clad in her usual uniform of a dark hoodie sweatshirt and pajama pants, her teeth grit and her eyes transfixed on the television screen which rumbled in the wails and slicing of her sawblade against the gargantuan carapace of some cosmic monstrosity.


    "Hey Annie" I greeted her.


    She did even glance at me. She stayed glued to the screen growling "come on come on come on come on"


    I watched as she continued to hack and slash blindly, winnowing down the eldritch abomination¡¯s HP bar drop by drop, but with one poorly-timed tap of the dodge button, Yithogh the Feckless bore down and speared her avatar through the abdomen with his long skeletal tentacle-fingers. He lifted her up thirty feet into the air and bit into her, peeling Annie''s character into his gullet with his several rows of fanged teeth like kebab meat off a skewer.


    The words ¡®All is Lost¡¯ bled red across the screen with an ominous groan.


    "Fuuuuuuuuuuck!!!" Annie hissed.


    "Hey, you''ve still made it pretty far since last week." I said.


    "I''ve been stuck on Yithogh for the last two days! I suck so hard!" She whined, slumping over on the couch.


    "Come on, let''s go for a walk. You know how those games are. You take a break and get some fresh air and next thing you know you¡¯re wiping the floor with the antediluvians and racing around the crimson ziggurats of Kutha.¡±


    "Uuuugh. I just need to git good."


    "Well come on, let''s git you good" I said pointing her towards the door.


    Annie and I had been friends for years now. We¡¯d met when our parents had charged me as her babysitter, only four years her senior. Even then, a ten year old Annie was always more mature and better company than my fourteen year old peers, and I¡¯d had ample time to corrupt her to my wicked ways. Of course, her high school years having flown by, now she was also adrift with me in this pseudo-adulthood limbo.


    Together we walked down her driveway and the empty neighborhood street and made our way to the old cemetery at the end of her road. It was on private land, and the locals knew us from when we were kids, so nobody used to bother us there and it was a nice quiet place to just hang out and watch the birds that darted between the branches.


    It was also one of the few places where Annie really felt at ease. There was something peaceful about the old stones and the overgrown grass that made life seem less stressful, that gave perspective that things should not be so fast paced the way the world around us always screamed at us to heed.


    A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.Annie collapsed onto the ground and lay in the lane between two weathered 19th century headstones.


    "So up to anything besides Darkborne this week?"


    "Not really" Annie said. "Mostly trying not to collapse into the usual weepy puddle of anxiety, and Darkborne is about the only thing keeping me from doing that right now."


    "Life can be like that some times." I commiserated. "Have you thought a little more about school?"


    "Nah. I know I go back and forth about that but just the idea freaks me out."


    "Why? You''d be perfect for it! University was the first time I actually felt like I could spread my wings and be a real person."


    "And how''d that work out for you? You''re underemployed and in six digits of debt."


    I sighed and looked to my feet. "That''s different. I''m a lot dumber than you are and life just got in my way. I know if you were sure about what you were doing that you''d crush it and have a great time!"


    "I doubt it." Annie sighed. "I still have the dreams sometimes."


    "I''m sorry..." I said. "You know I''m here if you ever need someone to listen."


    Annie forced a chuckle. "That''s the problem, everybody listening to me all the time." She muttered.


    "Anyway, how''s your week going?" She asked me.


    "Pretty shit. Ran into somebody from high school the other day." I sighed. "I mean, other than that it''s been okay. Everything is stressful. Everything is falling apart. The bottom could fall out at any moment, but that''s how it''s been for the last year. At least for the last few weeks I''ve had a project to distract me."


    "I''m sorry." She said. "I wish you didn''t have to feel that bad about stuff. You didn''t deserve what happened with your dad."


    "Yeah." I said, tears coming to my eyes, "I just try not to think about the past, but every other day it feels like I''ll just run into something and the wounds are open and gushing out again."


    "Hey, what''s that thing hanging from your neck?" she asked, pointing to my newly fashioned amulet that hung from my neck.


    "Oh, this?" I said, taking it off and putting it in her palm to inspect. "I made it, the design is from an old magical book I found."


    "What kind of stone is it?"


    "Heliotrope. Bloodstone." I said.


    Annie looked at it for a long time. "What''s the symbol on it?"


    "It''s the sigil of a spirit. His name is Scirlin.¡±


    Annie kept looking at it for a while. "And the paint it¡¯s... it''s your blood... right?"


    "...Yeah."


    "Huh." she said. "When I look at it I feel like... I feel like it''s got something of sunset in it."


    "What does that mean?"


    "I dunno. It''s cool, but its got something going on. Like holding amber up to the sun."


    "Can I have it back?" I asked.


    "Sure." she said, putting it back in my hand.


    "Hey, let''s head back in, order a pizza, and we''ll be at The Grand Mausoleum of Moro by midnight. I''ll steal the controller if I have to!"

 Chapter 7 (A) - The Sigil

    In The Hour of Venus, on The Day of Bechaud, the Moon a Crescent:


    On Friday I woke up groggy, and even moreso when I remembered what my task for the day was. I wrenched myself out of bed, Artie leading me to the kitchen, and I laid out her tuna and kibble. As she munched the meal I couldn''t get over how funny it was that I get to live with a hyper-predatory muppet. Like a fluffy xenomorph. I watched her eat while I sipped my morning mug of coffee and doodled the sigil from my notes that I was to charge that evening.


    Artie was one of a pair of black kittens I had adopted after my dad died a few years ago, along with her brother, Apollo, who lived with my mom out east. Apollo is a big dopey dog-cat who meows and trudges around gracelessly. He''s nice to everybody.


    Artie, however, was my own best friend. She just loved spending time with me in particular and would snuggle with me all day, but besides that she was an absolute little beast. She was a huntress, a tracker and a slayer of mice. Outside of her sweet affections, a primordial bloodlust surged within the fluffy little muppet.


    I stopped watching my cat chow down and brought my attention back to the journal. Sigils are a particularly simple and effective form of magick. The key is to take a conscious desire, a will to do something, externalize it, and then and to lodge it back into the subconscious mind through external stimulus. That way you trick yourself into receiving your own will as something not of your own.


    Sigils are easily made by taking a voiced desire, spoken affirmatively rather than tentatively, e.g. "I got the promotion" "I am lucky" "I made a million dollars.", removing the vowels, which are shown to be ultimately superfluous to our mind''s ability to decipher speech from writing, and then rearranging the letters into a single image that your mind could grasp.


    The process is to couple that hidden message with what the anthropologist Stanislaw Bronislowski, in his ethnographic study of religion and magic in Melanesian societies, called "The Coefficient of Weirdness." Malinowski observed that the magical spells and incantations of the sorcerers of the various tribes he visited were not only strange and alien to him, but designed to be strange and otherworldly to the sensibilities of the practitioners themselves, which Malinowski identified as a defining characteristic of magick in virtually every culture context in which it emerges.Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    Through sigilization, the cut-up consonants of your desire are thereby rearranged into something that seems weird, or strange, or out of the ordinary. Something that shocks your own mind and forces it to process it as something new and impressive.


    I usually would try to space out the process over a week, often hiding notes to construct future sigils, like a squirrel forgetting where its nuts are buried over the winter and accidentally seeding several trees.


    I had a bad habit of forming sigils that were a little too complicated, so I would often try to take an extra step and ''narrativize'' them in my head. I selected one from my magickal notebook that I had made a few weeks ago. I had forgotten what the sigil itself literally meant, but I knew it was the one I had started when I decided to begin the ritual cycle.


    I''d gotten the inspiration for the basic shape of this one from one of the diagrams in the Goetia- a symbol that looked like an interlocking sequence of triangles and wedges that reminded me of cuneiform or the Tibetan script- and through it I tried to tease out the vague impression of meaning or imagery- lovers in ecstatic coitus, their orgasm opens the doors of the moon, through the devil''s key. No, it didn''t make much sense, but it overwhelmed me with a sense of the mystic and made the relatively complicated image a little easier to compress into a single thought.


    Of course for any sigil to work it needs to be charged. It requires some moment of heightened or sustained concentration upon it. You can charge a sigil lots of ways- concentrating upon it in meditation, putting it somewhere in plain view every day, burning it, jerking off to it.


    But I was desperate. This had to work. I was throwing the kitchen sink approach at my problems. I wanted to go all in and do this the classic old-fashioned way.

 Chapter 7 (B) - The Sigil

    I looked down to check the messages on my phone. I had spent the last week texting on and off with a guy from tinder, Mark. We''d tossed some playful banter back and forth and he was quick to want to set something up.


    From his pictures and description Mark seemed kind of bland, but we arranged to meet tonight at my favorite restaurant, so I figured I''d at least get a good dinner out of it. Who knows, maybe he''d be a catch, it was worth a shot at least to try to kill two birds with one stone.


    I arrived driving on the highway of route I-91 towards Northampton a few minutes after we''d arranged to meet. Just fashionably late.


    I had suggested we grab dinner at my favorite place to eat out with my family when I was little which actually made for a nice spot. Joe''s Cafe- a small, smoky Italian restaurant, with an American name, covered in brilliant warm murals of rural northern Mexico painted in the ''50s. Common folklore would hold that it was Antonio''s on pleasant street in Amherst that had the best pizza in the valley, but anyone who believed that was a rube.


    I found Mark already sitting at a booth with an aimless grin on his face. He greeted me as I plopped myself down in the red leather booth.


    "Hey! How''s the week been." he asked.


    I took a long sigh. "Agony. And yours?"


    He laughed. "It''s been a good week on my end. The exchange rate is up so I''m doing pretty well this week!"


    "Ah." I said. Did he say that to impress me?


    Mark was a few inches taller than me, with light brown hair and wore a red polo. I''d been hoping he was a little more magnetic in person than in his pictures, but erring towards the optimistic about such things was almost always the wrong guess.


    "Your makeup looks nice." He said.


    "Oh. Thanks." I said.


    The waitress came to our table. "Heeey! Nice to see you again!" she greeted me. "What are you guys having."


    I smiled. "Well, you know me, I''ll just have a glass of the cheapest red and the usual."A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    The waitress looked to Mark who continued to nervously scan the menu "I''ll have... uhhh... I''ll have... I guess I''ll just have the spaghetti bolognese." he stammered.


    The waitress smiled and took our menus, leaving me to fend for myself, adrift in a choppy sea of awkwardness.


    After a few moments of staring and deafening quiet I decided I needed to try to move things forward. I had a routine for trying to talk to boys. Politics was a dead end. Work was always tedius at best, corrosive at worst. Ideally, if I had my drothers, I''d try to talk about science or history or philosophy, but I was seldom out with a conversationalist who could keep up with my academic fetishes. Failing those, there was always one topic, the great human universal pleasure and the sport of kings, to fall back on.


    After the waitress returned to leave us our drinks, I broke the silence. "So have you seen any good movies lately, or...?"


    "Oh yeah, well I''ve been rewatching a lot of the superhero movies before they do the big team up next month."


    ''oh god, abort, abort.'' "So have you seen any bad movies lately?" I asked, dousing the fear of inanity with a swig of the wine.


    "Uhhh, well like..." he took a few moments to dredge something up. "There was this awful zombie movie on streaming I ended up putting on the other weekend called Hell of the Living Dead. It was really old, but it had a photoshopped cover that made it look new and I had no idea it was made in like 1997 or something. That was pretty shitty."


    "Oh yeah, ! I''ve seen that one! It''s one of those Italian ripoff movies from the ''70s and 80''s. That one''s great because, like, for some reason, the zombie outbreak is in Papua New Guinea and they just splice in all this stock footage from nature documentaries and like, B-roll from Cannibal Holocaust or something.


    There are a bunch of those like, fake rip-off movies. Like the same guy who made Hell of the Living Dead also made like, two fake sequels to Jaws, and basically like a dozen ripoffs of Rambo which were basically just 90% shots of buff shirtless dudes running around a jungle, and a movie called Terminator 2, which is actually a shitty ripoff of Aliens and has nothing to do with The Terminator.


    Of course the director, Bruno Mattei, he also made this movie I really love called Rats: Night of Terror. It''s strangely kind of original, because like, It''s about this biker gang that''s roaming the post-apocalyptic wasteland, and they end up finding this empty bunker full of food and supplies, only they find out too late that it''s been infested by swarms of mutant super-intelligent rats. Basically the whole movie was a ploy to just shower half-naked Italian actresses in buckets of really cute looking rats, but it''s also got this hilarious pretentious and barely coherent heavy-handed moral message, something about the dangers of trifling in God''s domain, etc.


    Those movies are really funny, because, like, despite being sleazy and stupid as shit, they have the best soundtracks. They used Goblin, who are the prog rock band who did all the Suspiria-"


    I was embarassingly interrupted as the waitress returned with our food.


    "Ahh, thank you! Can I get another glass of wine?" I asked. She smiled and nodded as she returned to her rounds through the rows of tables.

 Chapter 7 (C) - The Sigil

    I dug up a slice of my personal pizza and glanced back to Mark, who wore a nervous smile on his face.


    "So.... " Mark asked. "...You''re like, ... a film student?"


    "Oh, no. Well, I mean, I was a student. I dropped out. Now I work as a barista."


    "What were you studying if you don''t mind my asking?"


    "Uhh, Classics."


    "Wow, uh... I didn''t expect that."


    "Why?" I asked.


    "Well most of the people I know who studied Classics were like... I don''t know... Kind of snobby. Stuck up. You don''t seem like that at all."


    "Well like, Latin literature is nothing but fucking and sucking. The poetry is filled with elaborate dick jokes. When you''re reading it in the original it''s doesn''t all seem so uhh... austere"This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.


    And with perfect timing the waitress returned to leave another glass of ruby red wine at my side.


    Mark stabbed his plate of spaghetti with his trimurti and twirled it around like Shiva dancing with his serpent. "So how do you go from trashy movies to the cornerstone of western civilization?"


    "Well I see myself as an archaeologist of sleaze, really. Like, the culture critic Walter Benjamin observed all art ever produced is like, imbued simultaneously with the sum total of its perceived past and inscribed with a glimpse of its imagined future. So sleazy movies are kind of like this weirdly subversive glimpse into the primordial libidinal soup that our society and our parents and all the authority figures around us decided to repress, to get really Freudian about it.


    Grafitti on the walls of brothels at Pompeii, Weird genre porn from the ''70s, It''s all the same! That''s why I like wallowing in the gutter. At least it''s honest!" I shrugged theatrically before gulping down more wine.


    "So anyways, why did you decide to go out with me in the first place?" I asked, midway through finishing the last slice of my pizza.


    "Well" he said. "I have a thing for weird girls."


    I laughed nervously and downed the end of my second glass with the inevitable sense that tonight I was either getting laid or murdered.

 Chapter 7 (D) - The Sigil

    "So there''s this one old horror movie from 1970 that I found on youtube like ages ago that I''m obsessed with called Equinox. It''s basically like, imagine if Evil Dead happened to the cast of Scooby Doo. It''s nonsense." I said. "wanna come back to my place and watch it?"


    Mark smiled. "Sure."


    We finished our food. Mark took care of the bill and I left a generous tip for the lovely waitress.


    Mark followed my car through the short drive on the I-91 back to my cabin in the woods, the lights p


    "Wow, this place is a real dump." He said as he walked up to me, standing outside my door as I fidgeted with the keys.


    "Well it''s my dump, I''ll have you know!" I said letting him in.


    We walked into the kitchen to see Artie coiled on the washing machine in the kitchen, her yellow eyes slowly prying open at our arrival.


    "Awh, hey little guy" Mark said, sticking his hand out to give Artie a scritch behind the ears.


    Artie batted his fingers away, bore her talons, and hissed, before resuming to lick her paws.


    "She''s just the murder-muppet, don''t mind her." I said, taking Mark by the hand and leading him into the bedroom.


    Mark had a look around the living room while I fired up the widescreen monitor I had rigged to my laptop through hdmi cables on the desk beside my bed. I took special care to load the snapshot of the sigil I had drawn and brought it up on my phone for easy access.


    "You know this place is actually pretty cool. I like the antiquarian hoarder vibe." Mark said.


    "Thanks, it''s mostly my dad''s stuff. He collected all these books when paperback started to be a huge thing back in the late sixties."


    "Oh wow, how old''s your dad?" He asked.


    "Dead." I said.


    As he walked over to the bed I finally loaded up youtube and hit play on Equinox. The movie, as with all great things, starts with an ear-piercing explosion as a winged skeleton-bat creature dive-bombs into a cardboard graveyard.


    The artifice of my carnal ruse now in play, I dropped the facade, wrapped my arms around Mark''s shoulders and waist, and pulled him towards me, pressing my lips against his and jamming my tongue in his mouth.


    He took hold of my hips and spun me around, pushing me down onto my bed.


    I unfurled my arms up above me as he scoured down my body with his, unbuttoning my shirt and revealing my pale skin beneath. Mark returned to kissing my mouth and struggled off my top.


    We continued to make out on my bed, him fondling with my sides and my back until I realized he must have been struggling to figure out how to take my bra off. I did him the courtesy of unhinging it myself and peeling it off to reveal my breasts.


    Mark kissed my nipples, and began to grope my breasts while he kissed and licked underneath my arms. I shuddered with goosebumps at the unexpected caressing.


    "Oh, um, okay." I muttered.


    "You don''t shave. I like that." He said.


    A pinge of instant regret shot through me at those words, but we were too far now, I continued to race past the red flag.


    Mark pulled back and stood upright, leaning over the edge of the bed above me. He pulled off his shirt revealing his flat yet undefined chest and ran his hand up my thigh, taking hold of my left foot and shoving my toes in his mouth.


    ''Uh oh.''Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    I unbuttoned my jeans as Mark tugged them off with his left hand, still kissing and licking my feet.


    "Ummmm...." I hummed.


    "Can you help me out?" he asked.


    "How?"


    "Sorry." He said. "I''ve just got a really specific thing..."


    "Um, okay, what do you want me to do?" I said, laughing to myself.


    "Just..." he began unbuttoning his jeans and unzipping his fly "...help me get going."


    I grit my teeth and lowered my legs, awkwardly hovering my feet around his groin.


    Mark took hold of my heels and rubbed my soles against his flaccid cock. The feel of his rubbery foreskin against the balls of my feet made me wince.


    He pushed and shoved at my feet, pulling and tugging against his soft cock. I sighed in resignation, waiting as the little nub of flesh slowly hardened. The whole thing reminded me of rubbing two sticks together to start a fire in woodland survival, or, more accurately, like kneading and rolling up a lump of pizza dough.


    I sighed and looked to my phone out of boredom. My eyes traced the curves and angles of the sigil, weaving in and around and trying to trace its contours and intersections on the back of my eyelids.


    Mark tugged and jerked at my legs with more speed and abruptness. Then his grip slowed and loosened and he moaned in exhaustion as something warm and sticky leaked all over the side of my right foot.


    "Aaaahhhh... aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" he hissed in ecstasy.


    "Hey, what the fuck!?" I exclaimed.


    "Sorry." He said. "I''m spent. You just got me really excited." He sighed.


    I shot upright on the bed. "Look dude, I''m kink friendly, but this is really something else! I thought you were getting what you needed to give it to me!"


    "I was! You just got me all excited." He explained. "You''re really beautiful."


    "Okay! So are you going to get me off?" I growled looking into his weary eyes.


    "No can do. I''m spent." He said in a guilty but satisfied daze. I scoffed as he shuffled around the bed, looking like he was about to lie down.


    "Wha-? Uh, no." I pushed him away from the bed, preventing him from getting on it.


    "Change of plans." I announced. Pushing him down onto his knees with my feet and pressing his face against my pussy.


    "Uhh... I mean, I''m down... I just don''t really have any practice."


    "I''ll help, just go for it." I said, looking down at Mark''s eyes


    I lay back and splayed out across the bed, beginning to massage my breasts, holding the sigil displayed on my phone just in front of my gaze.


    The swiping of his tongue was just a soft flicking, and focused on entirely the wrong spot. I stayed quiet for a few seconds, until I had to say something.


    "Up a little." I said softly, trying to sound like I was into it. But he completely overshot it. Practically lapping at my landing strip, while sounding like he was having the time of his life. I stared up at the ceiling in disbelief as I tried again.


    "Down just a little." I said sternly, this time not bothering to disguise my frustration.


    He breathed shakily and he readjusted his chin, his heaving breath bringing me more satisfaction than his tongue had.


    He missed it. Again. You''d think he had his eyes closed or that he was avoiding my clit on purpose. I sighed in frustration.


    "Mmmm? You like that?" He moaned, mistaking my annoyance for pleasure.


    "No." I said plainly. Grasping his hair as I physically led him right onto my clit. "There." I sighed.


    As the tip of his tongue began to finally hit the sweet spot, I felt some of my tension subside. His tongue lapped at me slowly, but far too lightly. His light flicks pushing out nothing more than the occasional sigh. But I was getting nowhere fast with this.


    I grimaced in frustration as I took charge of the situation, bearing down on his face, swirling my hips in circles on his weak tongue. Finally beginning to let out a few real moans. My energy now focused on my orgasm as well as on the sigil I held glowing in my left hand.


    The lines of the symbol began to blur in my vision as my grinding became less rhythmic, my moans growing louder. My stomach clenching as my body began it''s trembling. Suddenly feeling him struggling against me, until he pushed me away.


    "Sorry- I can''t!" He gasped, "I''ve got to catch my breath!"


    "Come on! Really?! You couldn''t hold out for ten more seconds?!" I groaned, taking matters into my own hands for the last time as I fiercely chased after my orgasm with the tips of my fingers.


    "Sorry." He whined, wiping his mouth.


    I built up speed just as I got to the edge, letting myself cum with quick little circles. My eyes fixed on the intricate lines and angles of my sigil, gasping out and trembling softly as I finally reached my goal.


    As my muscles spasmed, and the blood rushed to my head, the lovers opened the door of the moon, as the heavy breath of exhaustion left my lungs, I felt that the devil waited, sitting in his parlour on the other side. I closed my eyes, and still the angles and curves held scrawled in particles of iridescent strobing behind my lids.


    I turned to see Mark sitting on his heels, on the floor near the end of my bed stroking his dick at the sight of me. A look of slack-jawed amazement painted on his face. He started to say something.


    "Sorry. I''ve got work tomorrow. Can you go?" I cut him off, rubbing my forehead as I stared at the ceiling.

 Chapter 8 - Whats in the Cards?

    In The Hour of Mercury, On The Day of Guland, the Moon a Crescent:


    I woke up late Saturday morning, feeling fresh and restored. No thanks to my lover''s efforts.


    After everything that had happened over the last week, and feeling a moment of relative calm, I decided it was time to read the cards for the journey ahead.


    I crept down and sat in front of the altar to Hekate I had constructed between empty bookshelves in my living room. I had constructed her three-faced image out of a slab of clay that had long since dried. Her features were more rough and vague than I had wanted, but it was the making of the statue that had been important. In loving devotion I had somberly kneaded her faces and pinched the spikes of her crown.


    Before her altar I had laid three black candles, which I took the opportunity to light with matches. Beneath the candles I had laid some pieces of obsidian I found among the little artifacts that my dad had collected over the years, and some old ornate keys I had found just checking the nick-nacks at the antique stores I''d often pass by when I went into Northampton. Between these various offerings I kept my personal deck of tarot cards, hoping that my goddess would favor them.


    I had chosen Hekate as my matron because she was the ultimate embodiment of magick. She was the face of the primeval goddess of magic that the Egyptians called Heka. She was the threefold goddess of the place where the crossroads met, the avatar of Selene when she restored Dionysus, the pride of Artemis who walks the earth unbesmirched, she is the silence of Persephone in the netherworld. The Chaldean Oracles recognized in Hekate the very embodiment of the neoplatonic oversoul. She is the image of cosmic sympathy, the mind of The One that poured itself forth into individuated reality in order to experience itself, the epicentric point where all lines meet.


    But I didn''t have the kind of sense of confidence other pagans do that their gods listened- for the moment my devotion to her was just por supuestro. I couldn''t feel her presence save in the sorcery I cast in her name.


    I poured out the wine into the bowl of the brass goblet I had laid before her: "Goddess Hekate, I offer to you this libation in goodwill!"


    I closed my eyes and began to shuffle the tarot cards in my hands as I muttered: "Mistress Hekate, Threefold Goddess, Reflect before me the crossings of my path!"


    When I felt ready I staid my fingers and opened my eyes. I drew the first card and laid it out in front of me in the classic ''celtic cross'' reading pattern.


    <figure>


    </figure>


    The first card I pulled, which represented where I was and the present situation, appeared as a golden nude young man with a cheerful expression on his face burst forth from a caduceus held aloft by a babboon, showering ritual instruments- daggers, wands, goblets, and amulets across a blue sky. It was The Magician. What a cliche!


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    The second card I pulled, which represented the obstacle that stood in my way, appeared as a great brute clad in spiked armor pressing down great maces, entrapping a trio of hapless victims in a vast cage of interlocking bars. It was the Ten of Wands. ''Oppression''.


    <figure>


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    The third card I chose, which represented the past of my situation, appeared as a man laying upside down, pinned against the ground with a great boulder, surrounded by six more boulders embedded into the earth to either side of him. Above him looked a great beast holding pins and a hammer with which to bind him. The seven of disks. ''Failure''.


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    The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.


    </figure>


    The fourth card I chose, which represented the future was a skeleton slashing a great scythe across a cloud of human figures cast into the air and above a coiled scorpion. It was Death. I wasn''t going to make a rookie mistake and take it literally, the death card simply represents change and the end of the cycle. In this spot, the presence of the death card was a positive sign. Still, it''s kind of hard to get over the foreboding presence of the cavernous eye-sockets of the grim reaper yawning out in front of you.


    <figure>


    </figure>


    The fifth card I chose, which represented the external goal that I sought, appeared as a Minotaur looming amidst a starry sky. To his left a hunter fired arrows up towards a vulture hovering above a man surrounded by two women to the Minotaur''s right. The figures all stood upon a pyramid- it''s corners three wheels, two black, but the one on the bottom left in red. It was the three of disks. Change.


    <figure>


    </figure>


    The sixth card I chose, which represented the internal goal or motivation that I was gravitating towards, appeared as a judge wearing the headdress of Osiris, holding down a sword between the arms of a great scale, upon each equally balanced bowl was rendered the Greek letters "alpha" and "omega"- It was Justice.


    <figure>


    </figure>


    The seventh card I chose, which represented the advice for what I should do to succeed or avert disaster, appeared as an open book, between which reclined an old man with a long white beard who held out and inspected an orb of the starry sky in his palm. The book''s front cover was a cross pierced in an intersection of six swords, and upon its back was a burning heart constricted by a serpent. Beneath the man floated four geometric shapes of blue, yellow, red, and green, and looking about all of them was the great faceless mother of the night. It was the six of swords. Science.


    <figure>


    </figure>


    The eighth card I chose, which represented the external influences that would affect what I was trying to do, appeared as people cast aloft from a collapsing spire, vaporized by a monstrous mouth shooting flame. To the structure''s left circled a dove and to its right roared a serpent with the head of a lion. Above it all cast down a great watchful red eye. It was The Tower. Unquestionably the nastiest card in the deck, but what did it mean that it should hang over the path ahead? Bad news.


    <figure>


    </figure>


    The ninth card I chose, which represented the hopes and fears that I had, appeared as a great horned three-eyed goat, who reigned over two spheres of figures trapped in bondage. It was The Devil. I guessed this draw was probably literal, but I also considered that the devil in this case also might imply some fixation on materialism or falling into some kind of temptation...


    <figure>


    </figure>


    When I pulled the tenth and final card, which represented the outcome of the whole shebang, a soft smile spread across my face. On the card was a king and queen bound together by wrapped hands, foremost among unified pairs of a black and white child, a red lion and white eagle, all atop a serpent-entwined egg. Above the couples floated a Cupid, his weapon poised. I had chosen The Lovers, Maybe I had reason to be optimistic after all.

 Chapter 9 (A) - Fire and Brimstone

    In The Hour of Saturn, On The Night of Guland, the Moon a Crescent:


    For the rest of the lazy afternoon I studied the details of the Grimorium Verum as I pondered the cards and hemmed and hawed about whether or not I should take up Rene''s offer to go to the bonfire tonight. Eventually I caved and decided I''d show up. The cards had advised me to follow the path of science and use my knowledge of the nature of things to guide me, and so what kind of scientist isn''t willing to get messy and make some mistakes?


    Just after sunset, as the details of the day began to blur under heavy shadows across a dark blue star-pocked sky, I drove on the road across Sunderland under-looking the peak of Mount Sugarloaf. Just before crossing the Connecticut river, I turned right into the roads that ran north along the woods and mountains between the towns of Leverett, Shutesbury, and Montague, and found my way to the little place beside the road just before Mount Toby where a series of cars had been parked in single file.


    I got out and climbed up the slope of a path at the top of which rang a thumping bass beat that echoed through the trees. The path opened up to a flat meadow atop the hill, and in the distance I saw figures mingling in the field, orbs of light darting above and between them.


    The fires spun and circled round, and in their center a group of thinly dressed women and men swayed and thrashed to the speedy EDM beat for a sparse crowd of onlookers, standing a safe distance around. The flicker of the whirring poi sticks was dizzying, and the smell of the smoke and the heat of the flame lulled me into a sleepy, almost disassociated feeling.The author''s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    Rene, her colorful tattoos on full display between her crop top and her long skirt, spun around in circles and thrust her body from side to side, casting the trail of flame in dizzying geometric patterns. Her eyes were closed, her thoughts completely lost to the heat of the flame against her body and the rhythm of the track.


    Whenever I had thought about picking up poi dancing for a hobby I just couldn''t get over the grim fantasy that I''d swing the wrong way and light myself up. It was like that same kind of existential dread that comes with standing atop a tall ledge and thinking of jumping off- the terrible part of it is that there''s some small voice in your head that kind of wants to do it.


    The drum and bass song came to its end and Rene began to slow in her turns and power down. The sparse crowd that hovered around the dancers clapped and cheered at the performance. Rene held the flaming wicks steady beneath her wrists, and walked towards the spotter who stood around the dancers. The spotter smothered the wicks beneath the flame-retardant blanket, and Rene straightened her spine and let out a deep sigh of relief.


    She turned to see me clapping in the crowd around her, and, even without wielding any pyrotechnics, I saw her eyes light up.


    "Ahhhh Silvanaaaa!!!! You came!" Rene squealed, lunging at me in a big hug.


    "I did! Any sign of Grant?" I asked.


    "Nah, I haven''t heard anything, yet, but don''t worry! You''ll know first thing if he shows!"


    I sighed. "So what''s going on?"


    "They''re just setting up the bonfire. Let''s go find Kurt!"

 Chapter 9 (B) - Fire and Brimstone

    Further into the campground, past the poi spinners, the crowd thickened around a long strip of orange glowing coals, strewn several meters over the ground.


    Atop the simmering path walked Kurt, perfectly embodying the robust and hairy persona of some barbarian, striding boldly and slowly across the burning ground. The crowd cheered as he roared in triumph, holding his foot to the ground as long as possible with every step.


    After several moments of epic trespass across the infernal trail, Kurt leaped onto the cool sand at the other end and began hopping up and down like he was on a pogostick to the crowd''s cheers and laughter.


    "Come on Babe! The water''s fine!" He called back to Rene and I.


    Rene looked at me. "Hey, you should give it a shot! It''s not as bad as it looks. Just walk quickly and don''t look down if you don''t want to!" she said as she kicked off her sandals and took her first steps onto the coals.


    Rene''s march across the coals was lighter and brisker, but she walked with a kind of grace and balance, almost as though she was still dancing, that was just as impressive as Kurt''s masochistic ordeal.


    "Hey Silvana, come on! Give it a shot!" Rene called back as she darted into the refreshing dirt and buried it between her toes.


    When the crowd heard Rene they start to cheer and chant "Sil-va-na! Sil-va-na! Sil-va-na!"


    I hated that. I took a deep breath and hovered my bare foot over the ashes. I could feel the heat of the fire begin to touch my soles, and it amazed me that the glowing cinders didn''t immediately scald my skin.


    For a moment, something heavy came over, and I just stood there, my eyes absorbed by the glistening embers which twinkled up from the earth.Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.


    Within seconds the heat that simmered on the bottom of my feet had intensified to a searing sting. I let out a reflexive yelp and hopped back from the coals, frantically kicking my heels into the grass and the dirt.


    "Awwwwwhhhhh!!!!" The crowd whined in disappointment. It sure is a wonderful feeling, physical pain coupled with communal shame.


    I rounded the mob and joined Kurt and Rene on the other end by the large stone-circle bonfire, which now bellowed up its yellow tongue into the stygian night as high as Kurt himself stood.


    "Sorry." I said. "Guess I let you guys down."


    "Oh my god, Silvana...!" Rene scoffed. "Don''t even worry about it! It''s not some kind of contest!"


    I let out a deep sigh of frustration.


    Rene reached out her arms and drew Kurt and I by the shoulders. "Hey look, there''s somebody here I want you to meet. Why don''t you two mingle and I''ll be back with company and some beer, capiche?"


    "muy buena, mi amiga." I confirmed.


    "EEeeeyyyyyy necessito mas cerveza mi amor! Yo no puedo siento mis pies!"


    "Bahahahaha, Fuck you!" Rene cackled as she slunk off into the eldritch dark.


    "Hey Silvana, nice to see you come out!" Kurt croaked merrily at me between pipe puffs.


    I laughed. "Kurt, You see me just about every day. Aren''t you sick of me?"


    "Well when I''m on the stove I''m just in a different world. Rocking out to some groovy tunes, y''know?" he explained handing me a bowl. "It''s strong stuff. You up to it?"


    "I''m a coward, not a teetotaler. Gimme!" I said taking the pipe and striking the accompanying bic lighter with my other hand.


    "This stuff''s called Charlie Barracuda. It''s a 75 indica/25 sativa. It hits your body like a freight train and it''s got kind of a ghostly head high that lingers around."


    I lit up the weed and inhaled deeply, yawning out the smoke like a human volcano. It tasted faintly of blueberries.


    "So what have you been up to lately?"


    "Oh you know" I said between coughing "summoning a demon. Selling my soul. Etc. etc."


    Kurt laughed. "Been there done that!"


    I smirked a shit-eating grin. "Seriously?"


    "Hey you ever hear of trance drumming?"


    "Of course."


    "Man, sometimes you get into these sessions where you just go somewhere else, you know? I don''t think all those tribesmen are kidding when they say they meet the ancestors or the gods or whatever when they just fall into the rhythm."


    "Are you trying to tell me that the sonic journey of a Hypnotoad set takes you all the way to Wonderland?" I asked.


    "Well, only when I''ve taken a tab or two. But I''ve also just played some ceremonies with some Quimbanda folks out in the Berkshires." He explained.


    "Oh holy shit, that''s rad!"

 Chapter 9 (C) - Fire and Brimstone

    "Hey Silvana, there''s someone I want you to meet!" Called the devil herself, arriving with some conjured fiend.


    "This is Tom. He does vocals for a hardcore band called Psychomantis."


    "Yo!" Tom greeted me, saluting me with a beer bottle.


    "Sup." I acknowledged.


    "Okay so let''s play a game!" Rene implored us.


    "Oh no." I lamented


    "No no! A fun game! The funnest thing to talk about while stoned!"


    "Okay. Listening."


    "So what''s something in life or in pop culture that you just- like one day you just have this insane world-shattering realization about it and you can''t believe you hadn''t noticed it for like, a forever."


    "Like, give us an example?"


    "Okay, I''ll start, so do you guys remember that song, Mambo Number 5 by Lou Vega?"


    "Uhhhh" I stammered drawing a blank.


    "A little bit of Monica in my life, a little bit of Jessica da da da" Tom mocked.


    "Right! Exactly! Okay, so back in the early 2000s when this thing dropped, inexplicably it was like everywhere. It was like this huge pop hit."


    "Right."


    "So anyways, as a kid I never really had payed attention to what was going on in the lyrics. I was just like, ''boy that guy must just sure like hanging out with a bunch of different girls.''"


    "Yeah, it is like really weird that a song about all these chicks that this guy banged, presumably prostitutes, was literally everywhere." I said.


    "Right? So anyways, I was in a carpool with this group of kids whose parents my mom worked with, and there was enough of us that their mom would put on radio Disney in the car, and like, they would basically take pop songs that were big at the time and if there was any swearing they would edit in something Disney themed or something."


    "Uh oh." Tom said.


    "So they played that song Mambo Number Five, and where they should say the names of the girls they edited in Disney characters so like "A little bit of Mickey na na na, a little bit of Donald da da da a little bit of Pluto...'' And that''s when I, as an nine year old girl came to this horrifying primordial realization of, like, ''oooohhh, he''s talking about fucking all these cartoon animals..."This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    Tom and I chuckled.


    "Okay Silvana, you''re next." Rene said.


    "Oh me?"


    "Yeah!"


    "Well mine''s pretty classic. When I started smoking pot for the first time when I was 18 I would get high in the bathroom and the pipe eventually got clogged with resin. So I went to go find something to unclog it, and I was looking through the drawer in my mom''s stationery desk, and I found pipe cleaners, and like, for the first time ever, while stoned, my mind actually processed the idea of the word ''pipe'' and ''cleaner'' together, and I spent the next hour just stunned there was actually a practical use for this fluffy wire shit besides gluing them to art projects in first grade. It was like in that moment yeeeears of propaganda and brainwashing were deprogrammed. Like, I just figured out the exploitation of labor is endemic to capitalism itself and Jefferey Epstein didn''t kill himself all at the same time."


    "That must have been a beautiful hour of not being able to get off the couch." Kurt said.


    "Oh, it was!" I affirmed.


    "Okay babe, your turn." Rene implored Kurt.


    "Okay, well, mine''s not as impressive but it''s pretty recent."


    "Do tell!" Rene compelled him before chugging down her bottle.


    "So I was just on one of those weird Wikipedia rabbit holes where you''re basically clicking through a subject- for me recently I''ve been trying to find all these classic novels I''ve never heard of. I think I want to get around to doing more reading soon.


    Anyways there''s this book, The Master and Margarita. Apparently it''s a Russian satirical novel about the devil coming to Moscow, and he has a mistress named Margarita. So like, the first time I heard about this novel years ago, probably back in college, I couldn''t even imagine that Margarita was like, actually someone''s name and not the drink. Like in my head I thought this was like, Jimmy Buffet erotica or something."


    I snorted.


    "Okay, Tom, what was your blind spot peering into the fabric of our reality?" Rene asked.


    "Oh I''ve got a good one!" He said.


    "Do tell!"


    "Well my ex eventually got me to watch RuPaul''s Drag Race, and I was like, super disappointed because when I''d first heard about it like... I kind of knew it was a drag queen show, but for some reason in my head I had imagined they would all be in little go-karts actually racing. You know, like some kind of queer version of Mariokart or Deathrace 2000."


    Kurt and I began wheezing with laughter from our stomachs.


    "Needless to say, the real thing was fine but it was a pretty big let down from what I had for some reason imagined in the back of my head for the last four years."


    "Fuck, Deathrace is a great movie." I said.


    "Oh, you''ve seen it?" Tom asked.


    "It''s sublime 70s sleaze. Of course I''ve seen it." I said.


    "Silvana watches weird-ass movies like most of us breathe air and eat food." Rene explained.


    "Hey what can I say, I''m a masochist." I said.


    "Have you seen The Room?" Tom asked.


    "Do bears shit in the woods?" I grumbled. "I''ve met Tommy Wiseau. He''s legit a vampire, you know, King of Vampires: Vampire King of Alcatraz."


    "Ahaha, what a story, Mark! Anyway, how is your sex life?" Tom asked in an ambiguous European accent.


    "Don''t worry about it." I retorted in kind.


    I looked down at my phone to see that it was already almost 11. There''d been no sign of Grant, and then I remembered I''d have to be up and fresh at dawn for the next step of the ritual.


    "Shit you guys, I think I''ve got to go." I reluctantly groaned.


    "Come oooonnn!" Whined Rene. "Stay with us! Fuck Grant! We''ll have a good time!"


    "Nah, I''m sorry! I''ve got something tomorrow I''ve got to be up for really early."


    "Are you sure!?" Rene asked pouting, clearly pretty fucked up at this point.


    "Yeah, sorry. I''m sure I''ll be back at one of these before the end of the summer..."


    "Okay, well text me when you get in alright?"


    "Will do!" I said. "Oh and it was nice to meet you uh..."


    "Tom! And it was nice to meet you too, Silvana!"


    "Cool! See you guys on Monday!" I said as I wandered out towards my car and drove the lonely road through the woods home.

 Chapter 10 - The Hazelwood Wand

    In The Hour of The Sun, On The Day of Surgat, the Moon a Crescent:


    On Sunday morning I got up early, before the sky had begun to lighten, and set down Artie''s bowl for the morning. I put on my shirt, jeans, and my hiking boots and packed my backpack with a water bottle and the gardening shears. I walked out of the cabin, locked the door behind me, and set out towards the deep woods behind my house.


    After living here and exploring them so often the paths and turns of the dark woods were almost like the veins and arteries of my body. Even in the dark of early morning where only the pale blue sky was visible between the twisted dead branches of the trees, I knew to make my way across the straight path into the deeper forest tiled in stones and pocked in orange fungus. As I walked every few meters, squirrels and birds fled from the path into the foliage at my approach. At the glacial boulders that sat at the end of the long walk in I turned a bend up a steep hill with a dead tree trunk at its peak. As I crossed the hill, the claws of the trees raked my cheeks and after that I descended onto a riverbed that bubbled placidly into Echo Lake.


    Then I hiked up some more hills until I reached the great swamp. Thankfully the mosquitoes hadn''t begun to swarm as they would later in the morning. I jumped across a few trunk bridges laid over streams by fellow wayward explorers and I trudged through the muddy path at the other end, thankful to be in my heavy boots.


    Past the swamp the path opened up to a grotto of pine trees, circles of glacial boulders and toadstools so giant that I had always imagined this place to be the valley of the elves. The way the golden rays of the afternoon sun would peek through the swaying trees always seemed to me like something out of a fantasy novel or some fairytale picture book.


    When I passed through the valley I came to the crossroads where I would sometimes leave offerings for Hekate. To go left would bring me to a sunny meadow that ended in a small pond where I would often see enormous herons and eagles come to linger. Today, however, I went right, which drew me deeper into the forested woods towards the mountains.


    I first walked down along the long winding road, paved sporadically with boulders sunk as cobble stones past a crumbling stone wall by the side of the path. Someone must have lived here a long time ago, but I had no idea when or who it had been, and I had never found the remains of any house in the area when I wandered off the path. Finally as the trail began to climb into the mountains, I arrived at my destination: The Grand Altar


    I called it "The Grand Altar" because that''s all I could imagine when I would see it. It was a great, roughly rectangular boulder, around the size of a small bedroom and twice my height. Its roof was a pure flat square of smooth rock and its shape left the impression that it was not natural, as it surely must have been, but hewn by some unfathomable masonry in days immemorial. The Grand Altar loomed in a shadowy ravine by the mountain path that seemed foreboding, as if you were being watched the entire time you lingered there. It was hard for the sinister landmark not to conjure up images of blood sacrifice and black sabbaths.Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.


    Of course, I was not here to visit the ominous stone, but to harvest from the foliage that grew around it. I found the cluster of hazelwood shrubs I had picked out on an earlier sojourn and took hold of one of the long, whip-like branches, bearing a row of round heart-shaped green leaves along its upper length.


    There, running my fingers through the thin branches, I called out the orison of the hazelwood wand: "Lady Qlepoth, you are sly and farseeing, lend to this wand your whispers! Lady Qlepoth, offer to it your foresight and your prophecy!"


    I held out the proper length of the branch and centered the blades of the shears around its nape, and the moment when the sun surmounted the mountain and a sheet of yellow morning light came flooding down the side I severed the arm from the tree!


    Just then, in that moment of triumph as I held up the hazelwood branch in my hand, I saw it standing up there above me on the slope. At first my eyes just caught the black contours of its thicket-like antlers in shadow amongst the treetops, against the shining dawn sun that cascaded down the mountainside. Then as I squinted, and my vision adjusted to the light, I recognized that I looked upon the shape of a man. A man garbed in a long black coat, who wore the grinning skull of an elk for a face.


    For some time I just stood there, frozen in fear at the realization that something had been watching me. Something had heard my words. Some other''s thoughts gazed through the dark, cavernous eye-sockets that were fixed upon me.


    Then he took his first stride down the slope towards me. An instinctive and overwhelming terror sunk in my stomach. The realization ran cold through me that I was so deep in the woods that, if I was to be attacked, no one would hear my screams.


    I bolted holding the shears in one hand and the hazelwood branch in the other and I ran and ran down the paths, across the streams, over the hills, and finally back to the door of the cabin. I had crossed the thirty minute hike in what seemed like five minutes. My heart was pounding and I had lost all my breath as I struggled desperately to find the key. I finally found it, opened the door, and slammed and locked it behind me.


    Artie greeted me with the same sweet and sleepy demeanor as if nothing had happened. I chugged a great deal of water, set the branch and my pack on the workbench, and took some relief that at least the final component of the ritual had been gathered.


    Taking a rest before I began to work I tried to place who it was that had been watching me out in the woods. Plenty of people hiked those trails on the weekends, but that early in the morning? Did I have a stalker, or was the danger going to be more mundane? Was I going to be getting a fine from woodland management? No, don''t be stupid. Nobody cares about this sort of thing that much.


    I tried to dispel these worries and set about to preparing the hazelwood wand. Just as I had the Elderwood, I stripped off the twigs and leaves that protruded from the long branch and carefully set about whittling the thin bark and sanding the exposed surface. The wood this time was not hollow and naturally thinned at its end, making the wand appear like a long, bony finger.


    Finally I carved the seal of Qlephoth with great care and diligence onto the wand''s center. The seal''s long interwoven spiral lines gave the impression of the unspooling of fate''s thread. The hazelwood wand was to be used for divining and oracular insight, as Lady Qlepoth was, of course, a spirit of clairvoyance.


    I held the wand aloft over the lit mace, frankincense, and aloe wood and took a sigh of relief. There would be no more skullduggery. All the materials for the working had been procured.

 Chapter 11 - The Tempest

    In The Hour of Mars, On The Day of Surgat, the Moon a Crescent:


    I sat down, shaken by the encounter I had faced in the woods, and not sure whether a threat lingered or whether it had all been some kind of misunderstanding. With every passing hour the danger seemed to dissipate, and the hazelwood wand seemed to gleam with the sheen of having triumphed over adversity.


    Grey clouds and a slow but heavy breeze hung over the lazy Sunday. I decided, with the most risky and exhausting of the ritual tasks complete, to spend the rest of the day curled up in bed with Artie and some Mystery Science Theater reruns.


    I listened outside as the towering trees outside the house creaked and swayed. The pitter-patter of light rain drizzling the leaves hissed across the forest. The faint rumble of thunder echoed in the distance.


    Artie perked her straight-eared head up, stretched herself to her feet, scampered to the long window, and gazed out onto the patio from underneath the work table. She stared out there, her eyes fixed on something for a long time. Artie was fascinated by water. I had seen her stare at a dripping fawcett for a straight half hour, so at the time I didn''t think much of it. A thunderclap, this time far louder and closer than before, broke her concentration and sent her darting under my bed, much to my pity.


    The booming thunder grew louder and more frequent. The rain grew loud and heavy, hammering the roof above me. I turned round and glanced out the window to see that a tempest swirled outside, battering the forest and submerging the earth. There were still hours of daylight left, but the sky was a dark navy blue and the forest was black as night. Just as I had taken in the scene, a searing bolt of lightning shot down further up the driveway, illuminating the whole cannopy in a bright flash. All the lights went out.


    "Shit." I growled, trying to think of how I should go about adapting to the darkness and the deprivation of pleasant distraction. I knew I would need a flashlight, but I forgot where I had put it, and immediately saw the folly in groping around for it in the darkness.


    What I did have plenty of, and easily on hand, were candles. I stumbled off of the bed and crept down to take up and light the three torches at Hekate''s altar with the bic in my pocket from the other night. I set one down on my nightstand and carried the other with me down the hall. I found the flashlight easily in one of the drawers in the bathroom.


    The power was out, so it was either the breaker or the power lines somewhere on the way to town. If it was the latter there was nothing to be done but wait for the power company to fix it, probably sometime tomorrow, but I figured it was worth a shot to go out and try the fuse. That lightning strike sure did look awfully close, and I missed the soothing ineptitude of The Giant Spider Invasion.This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.


    I put on the dry soiled hiking boots I kept by the door and donned the plastic poncho that was crumped up in the drawer under the sink.


    As soon as I stepped out the door my face was pelted by heavy rain drops and I waded ankle-deep across the flooded ground. I tip-toed my way by torchlight around my house out to the side facing the lake. I opened the circuit breaker and tripped the universal folk remedy of turning it off and on again.


    No light save the candle shone through the living room window. "Fuck." I grumbled. The outage must have been all around town. There was nothing to do but wait. I sighed and returned to the front door when I noticed something amiss.


    The door was open. Wide open.


    That wasn''t unthinkable. The door''s hinges were loose, and the door wouldn''t stay shut on its own, so I would lay the handle of an old gardening shovel on it to to keep it closed when it wasn''t locked, and I knew I had done that as I went to check the breaker.


    It was bad out of course, and it wasn''t beyond the realm of possibility that the strong winds had blown the window from its position, but the shovel didn''t lie on the ground beneath the swinging entrance, but rested leaning against the adjacent wall of the cabin. Someone had moved it. Someone was inside my house.


    I stood outside trying to think of what I should do. I think I just stayed out there in the rain looking in for several minutes. What if I was overreacting? But what if I wasn''t? What if an intruder was in there waiting for me, and what would they do if I broke from my routine? What if they did something to Artie? I took a deep breath. I decided to compromise in my course of action.


    I took up the shovel and walked inside the kitchen. There was noone there, and I heard nothing inside, but beyond the fridge there was a blind spot from the hallway leading to the bathroom. I gripped the handle of my shovel and shined the flashlight out in front of me as I rounded the bend. The hallway was empty.


    I walked backwards with my flashlight fixed on the hall until I crossed the threshold into my living room and dropped the shovel, quickly grabbing the ritual knife again and holding its blade in front of me. I scanned the large dark room with the flashlight and nothing was out of the ordinary. I quickly ducked under my bed and shined my light to see Artie coiled in a defensive posture in her cthonic chamber, hissing empty threats. I got into bed and wrapped the covers over me, holding the knife out from my breast.


    I just lay there, clutching the dagger, casting its edge into the sinister darkness. Still, there was no sign of life, but every slap of water and every crash of the wind I scrutinized with suspicion. After what felt like many hours of the softening, drizzling rain and the dimming light of the sun I drifted off to sleep.


    In the pitch black as I lay there, though I cannot say whether it was real or a dream, I swear I could hear the shifting of beams and the creaking of footsteps coming from my parent''s bedroom on the other end of the cabin.

 Chapter 12 (A) - Back to the Grind

    In The Hour of Jupiter, On The Day of Lucifer, the Moon a Crescent:


    I awoke groggily the next morning with a start as Artie began to paw at me. I rose to my feet and inspected the sunlight flooded house with my dagger drawn as I crossed the hall and checked my parent''s old bedroom. There was no sign that anybody had been there. The night''s suspense must have just been my imagination after Sunday morning''s encounter coupled with the chaos of the storm.


    The power still hadn''t come back on, so I was frustrated to realize I would need to go to work without any refreshing shower to wash off the sweat and restore my hair from yesterday.


    I drove to the cafe and started to pick up the noon shift. Rene greeted me from behind the counter at my arrival. "Heeey, so nice to see you come out this weekend!"


    "Yeah, it was fun. Thanks for getting me out of the house." I said.


    "So what did you think of Tom?" she asked.


    "Oh... Tom? He was alright."


    "He''s single y''know. He thought you were really funny."


    "He''s just kind of uhh... not my type."


    Rene laughed. "Well, Okay Silvana! Then what is your type? Like seriously, why are you so hung up on someone like Grant? You''ve barely even ever talked to him!"Stolen story; please report.


    "I just..." I paused to think of what to say. It was actually a pretty good question. "I want someone in my life who reflects the strength I feel in myself. Someone who shares my ambition, the breadth of my aspirations. I want to be with somebody who impresses me and know that I impress them."


    Rene looked at me for a few seconds trying to think of what to say. "Okay, I mean, that makes sense."


    "You think it''s stupid, don''t you?"


    "No! No! No! Silvana! Don''t put words in my mouth! You wanting that out of a partner is totally valid and I get it!" she said. "It''s just not what I look for."


    "Well you''re the one who can actually keep a relationship. What do you look for?" I asked.


    Rene shrugged "I just look for a guy who makes me laugh and who treats me like an equal, you know? Like, Kurt isn''t some kind of ineffable supernatural creature, he''s my best friend. I always feel good when I''m around him and he makes me laugh constantly. When things get tough we know how to give each other space or to support each other and work together when we need help."


    I sighed. "So what you''re saying is what I want is stupid and naive."


    "Bullshit! No I didn''t! Don''t put words in my mouth! What I want for you is to get what you want and that''s perfectly fine!" She exclaimed. "I just don''t get why Grant."


    "Well like... I just... I used to see him every day in school and he just had this way about him. Like, he was really smart and passionate about things, and witty, and somehow above all the bullshit around me, and I just wish he had seen that in me too."


    "Well like, maybe he isn''t actually that smart or passionate or impressive or whatever if he was there for so long and he never noticed you. I mean, I see all those things in you. I think you''re great!"


    "Maybe." I sighed. "I just can''t get him out of my head. It''s so rare I meet anyone who makes me feel that way. I can''t really explain it."


    Rene sighed. "I get it."

 Chapter 12 (B) - Back to the Grind

    Compared to the hustle and bustle of the morning, the afternoon on Monday was pretty slow paced. A handful of customers filed in and out: a father and son sharing hot coffee and a cookie, a writer and her agent discussing the draft of an article over iced tea, and that same grad student who showed up for a few hours every other day.


    By seven it was dark out and starting to get around time to close. The grad student was the only one still left. He continued to pore over his research materials and his notes, seemingly without ever picking his head up from the page.


    I started sweeping up the floor of the almost empty cafe. I did always like to leave people as much time as I could to finish whatever they were doing- I never wanted to be that asshole, you know. Anyways as I was cleaning up I caught a glimpse of the book he was reading.


    It was a page of squiggly stellar sigils- Aldebaran, Algol, and Betelgeuse, and beneath them long and thick descriptions of their attributions.


    "Uh, excuse me." I said.


    His head darted up, he''d been so absorbed by his reading that he hadn''t even noticed I was there. He was dishevelled but handsome. I''d never really taken the time to look at him. He had thin blonde hair and green eyes under his round spectacles. He wore a chocolate brown leather jacket and a flannel shirt that I could only imagine being terribly sweaty in this late summer heat.This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    "Is that The Three Books?" I asked.


    "What!?" he said.


    "Agrippa? Is that Agrippa''s Three Books of Occult Philosophy?"


    "Ooooh" he exclaimed. "Yeah! H-how''d you know that?" he asked with some trepidatious suspicion.


    "Well, when I was in undergrad I wrote a little survey article on the transmission of hermetic philosophy to the renaissance. I ended up talking a lot about Agrippa and the sources he was drawing all his lists of magical properties from."


    "Oh... Um... Wow. Wasn''t expecting anybody for a hundred miles to actually know what I was reading. Yeah I''m doing some comparative stuff on Agrippa right now?"


    "You''re a grad student, right?" I asked with a smile.


    "Uh, yeah, I''m interning at the Renaissance Center at Umass." He briefly withdrew his glasses and pinched the sides of his weary eye-sockets. "My dissertation is on the ideological and political context of neoplatonism in the late renaissance. I end up going back to Agrippa a lot."


    He looked me in the eyes. "Sorry. Anyways, is there something you wanted?"


    "Oh, no, sorry, I just needed to say that we''re closing up soon."


    The student looked at the watch on his wrist. "Shit! I didn''t notice the time at all!" he exclaimed, bolting to his feet and frantically stuffing his books and laptop into his bag.


    "Well, hey, I was a Classics major! I''m into all this stuff! We should nerd out sometime!"


    "Oh. Cool. Uhhh, maybe someday when I''m not so busy. Like, maybe by the end of the decade!" he chuckled to himself.


    "No, but seriously!"


    "I''ll say ''hi'' the next time I''m in, but I can''t make any promises." He said halfway to the door, before turning around and offering out his hand. "Sorry, my name''s Eli."


    "Silvana." I said, shaking his hand.


    "Well Silvana, thanks for all the coffee. Good luck learning all the secrets of the cosmos."

 Chapter 13 - Sliding Deeper

    In The Hour of The Moon, On The Night of Lucifer, the Moon a Crescent:


    After I had closed up and driven home I was relieved to see nothing awry upon my arrival home. Artie greeted me with an uncharacteristically languid meow and so earned her bi-daily bowl of treats. I collapsed onto the sofa with a stupid grin on my face, still pleasantly surprised by the chance meeting at the end of my shift. I looked to the workbench through the hollows of the bookshelf that served as a makeshift room divider, and took further pleasure in knowing I had made it almost through the whole ritual week.


    That''s when my phone started buzzing in my pocket. I checked who it was. It was Annie.


    "Hey! What''s up?" I answered.


    A heavy silence hung on the other end.


    "Hey Silvana. I... I need to ask something." Annie said.


    "What?"


    "Are you... up to something? Like... are you... doing something weird?"


    "um... maybe? I mean, hahaha, you know me! I''m always doing something weird! Why?"


    "Whatever you''re doing I think you should stop." she said with terse seriousness in her voice.


    "What!? Why!?"


    "Because I just... I felt something really weird when I was checking out that necklace you made. Something about that image on the stone is really weird. And... and you know those things that show up in my room when I try to sleep sometimes?"


    "Yeah."


    "Well it happened last night and I think that shadow... whatever they are... I think it was talking about you. I looked up that name you gave to that stone, ''Scirlin''... Silvana... are you... are you trying to summon a demon?" she asked.


    "Oh don''t be so dramatic! Of course I am! Annie, what have I got to lose!?" I exclaimed.


    There was a silence on the other end of the line. "How could you be so thoughtless about stuff like this when you know what I go through."


    "Oh look Annie, this isn''t the same thing at all! The demons aren''t just bad nightmares or cartoon villains, and they aren''t all the same."


    Annie rasped with a tone of indignation in her voice."So you''re just ignoring hundreds of years of people saying this is a really fucking bad idea because you read some weird books, and you think you know better!"The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    I sighed in stubborn exhaustion. "Of course, Annie. Why would I believe two thousand years of polemics from pedophiles, nazi collaborators, and slavers. Nothing in any of those books has shit on the authoritarian soul-swallowing ponzi scheme that is Christianity! Besides, what else am I supposed to do? Wait for the bank to tear me away from you and the last things I care about the same way Dad was torn away!?"


    There was another moment of silence on the other end. "I didn''t know you felt this way about it."


    "Look, I''m sorry Annie. Just trust me. I can take care of myself."


    "If you had seen the things that I have then you''d know that you can''t." She said.


    "Well, I''m well past the point of no return, so just with me good luck and have a good night, okay Annie?"


    I heard Annie whimper as she cracked her goodbye. "G-goodnight Silvana."


    I hung up and slumped over the couch. I regretted how I had spoken to Annie. Maybe there was truth to her cautions. Even the old grimoires themselves say you have to always keep your wits about you when you deal with these things, but I was surely too far to look back now. I had to Orpheus this shit.


    I decided I needed to unwind and drill the bad vibes out of my skull.


    I loaded the octobong, a waterpipe I''d bought a few years ago with an elaborate blue-ringed octopus sculpted onto the base, with water and chunks of ice from the freezer. I retreated back to the couch and packed the bowl with some Hyksos OG, a cross between the sativa Tutankhamun and indica Kosher Kush, and lit it up. My lungs filled with the bold smoke that tasted like a mixture of jasmine and chocolate, and melted into the couch.


    My whole body tingled and I felt like I was floating. Ideas and images flooded in the particles of dancing rorschach hieroglyphs behind my eyelids. I massaged my stomach and felt my warm skin, my hands wandering to my breasts and my inner thighs. I took a deep breath and began to touch myself lovingly.


    I slipped my fingers beneath my jeans and panties and pressed down to tease and graze at the skin around my clit, squeezing my breasts. I started to think about Grant, about his nimble body pressing against mine and pulling me towards him. As I thought of his face a kind of forlorn sadness came over me, like it was too hard to pleasure myself knowing I would never feel his touch.


    Instead, my imagination began to move to my new acquaintance. I felt Eli hovering above me, his green eyes, his stoic self-discipline focused on the exploration and conquest of my body. I began to grind my clit in spirals of ecstasy as he pressed himself down and entered me, slowly penetrating deep into me and languidly withdrawing, like the battering and receding of the tide. I imagined his palms weighing down on my flesh, gripping my waist like I was something to be studied in detail and exhausted once all pleasure and carnal experience had been extracted. I became wet and with heavy rubbing a deep pleasure began to rise in me.


    I pushed further, imagining Eli pinning me down on the ground and smothering me beneath his chest. I reached down my left hand and shoved my middle and index finger into my pussy and groped the roof of my g-spot like teasing the trigger of a gun. I felt Eli''s pelvis hammer into me, beating me down and liquefying me in a puddle of passion. I grabbed hold of his shoulder blades and pulled him close. As I came, I looked straight into his eyes, and there was no longer the aloof dispassion of the man I had met that day, but a determined intensity that burned orange like the coals of the bonfire.


    "F-Frimost!" I moaned as I began to cum, my infernal lover unphased, only intensifying his lust, thrusting harder, deeper, and faster, pounding my insides in pure uncompromising desire. With every thrust he drove me down deeper and deeper into the crevasses of the pillows beneath me, smothering my quivering body in heat and darkness.


    "Frimost" I murmured longingly, splayed out over a sweaty lake of flame.

 Chapter 14 (A) - Meet the Demons

    In The Hour of Mars, On The Day of Belzebuth, the Moon a Crescent:


    On Tuesday morning I woke up groggily to my phone alarm while it was still black out. Artie perked herself up in front of me on the bed and straightened her spine in a long yawning stretch. I felt the same apprehension as to the prospective of waking, so hit the coffee machine and expected to waste some ten minutes sipping liquid awareness from my cup between the arms of my chair. I was happy that after this working there would be no more early mornings in the near future, but today was unquestionably the most important preparatory working for the ceremony. I needed to be fresh.


    Once it had cooled, I took a deep sip of the coffee and swirled it around in my mouth. Then I fished through my tools on the workbench and brought out the pen and ink, the parchment, and the lancet, as well as my copy of the Grimorium Verum itself.


    I wasn''t squeamish about the sight of blood or a little bit of pain, but there was still something trepidatious about my approach as I used the lancet to draw it from my finger. It was like a game of chicken I played with myself, gently pushing the razor firmer and firmer against my flesh until finally it broke the skin.Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    I withdrew the lancet and held my pierced tip over the open inkwell. Just a few drops was all it would take to contaminate the ink with my essence. Blood in the goetic workings is a means to establish a link, not ambrosia for the damned.


    The parchment was the most important single object in the ritual. The Grimorium Verum prescribes an elaborate process of animal sacrifice, curing, and purification, but this was beyond the means of the vast majority of modern practitioners. I had bought a few sheets of the highest quality vellum I could from the local art store that I had set about fumigating and purifying, as with any of the other tools in the book, but this deviance from orthodoxy still nagged at me. I liked to be a traditionalist where I could.


    I set the parchment down on the table surface, withdrew my copy of the grimoire, and set about inscribing the demonic seals I would use in the evocation.

 Chapter 14 (B) - Meet the Demons

    The demons of the goetia derive from many disparate sources and traditions, many utterly lost to us. We know that some were plainly pagan deities changed to demons in the imagination of Early Modern Europe. Occultists speculate that they may be spirits of the dead, or more popularly cthonic spirits hearkening to some lost folk tradition analogous to the faeries of legend or the loa gods of the Carribean syncretic religions. Whatever the case they surely do not arise from a Christian theological view of the world.


    Although the demons themselves and their ranks vary wildly between the surviving magical tomes, they are always presented as within a feudal hierarchy: kings, princes, dukes, barons, that sort of thing. In spite of this consistent arrangement their relationship to each other is only explicitly established in the Verum. The demons must be summoned in descending hierarchy of rank.


    First the magician must summon Scirlin. Scirlin is not some high king, but the intercessor spirit of the Grimorium Verum. The one who must be conjured before all others to establish a connection with the infernal realms. First I made his seal and added my initials into the spaces as I''ve shown below:


    Next comes one of the three kings who reign over the demons: Lucifer, Belzebuth, and Astaroth. Lucifer ruled over the demon I was planning to conjure, so I drew the seal of Lucifer in the West underneath Scirlin:


    <figure>


    Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author''s preferred platform and support their work!


    </figure>


    Next comes Aglierap, a deputy of Lucifer, whose two seals with the likeness of beastly lions I drew underneath the previous two:


    <figure>


    </figure>


    The next was Duke Syrach, but I could find no seal in his likeness, so continued to my desired.


    Finally there was Lord Frimost, the spirit I wished to call upon.


    <figure>


    </figure>


    Lord Frimost was a spirit said to hold power over passions, women, especially, but I presume this had more to do with the writer of the grimoire than the chauvinistic limitations of his power. Frimost was the patron of the cojuring wand, the supposed supervisor of the Verum''s compiling, and said to be the most respectful of the spirits. The conjurer, it was said, would be remiss not to offer him the first stone that they found after evoking him. I drew his seal permanently beneath all the others.


    Next I was to write out a contract with the spirit. There was no such advice on what sort of a contract to actually write, so I thought I''d try to be diplomatic...


    "I hereby petition Lord Frimost that he should enter into a partnership with Silvana Smith, wherein both parties shall offer tribute and cooperate in the fulfillment of each other''s goals, insomuch as they deem reasonable, for the length of one year."


    I signed the parchment and collapsed in my chair with a sigh of relief. I had done it all. All the preparations were made. Now I just had to get through a shift at work.

 Chapter 15 - Trash

    In The Hour of The Moon, On The Day of Belzebuth, the Moon a Crescent:


    While I sat at the cash register at the cafe, working my final shift before I would cross the threshold, my mind continued to dwell on tonight''s ritual. Scrolling through the notes on my phone I had already double checked that the incantations and the sacraments would be done in the right order. I made sure I understood what every step in the process was supposed to do and represent. I had even gone through the trouble of making sure that the astrological influences would be right for the hour and the occasion.


    Most of all I wondered how my lord would actually appear before me. To see one of the spirits in the flesh was rare still... Or was I just kidding myself about the whole thing anyways? Well, too late to back out now.


    I was jolted from my dark daydreaming by Grant''s face standing in front of the register. Right before I could open my dumbfounded mouth Rene swooped in and took charge of the situation.


    "Oh, hey again! What can I do for ya?" She beamed.


    "Uh, hey, my friend and I sitting over there just want the turkey sandwich and two lattes." He explained.


    "Sure thing! Coming right up!" She announced.


    Grant turned to return to his table. A grinning Rene slithered to my side and began hissing in my ear. "Come on! Now''s your chance to get his number! Bring him the order and get his number!"


    "I''d really rather not." I whined.


    "Come on! What have you got to lose?"


    "Peace of mind. Equilibrium. Dignity." I said.


    A moment later, Kurt set the food out on the counter and filled with trepidation, moreso than even braving the woods, I brought the sandwiches and coffee to the table where Grant and his friend was sitting.


    Then I noticed who he was sitting with. It was Ashley, one of my high school tormentors, the rich sneering bitch who would ridicule me every day when we were inevitably stuck together in class.


    I swallowed my disappointment that the two of them were together. There was zero opening for me to make any kind of romantic intercession even if I hadn''t been completely chicken shit. I sighed quietly to myself in dismal defeat and started to lay the dishes on the table, when the coffee tipped off of the side of the tray I was holding and spilled all across their table.


    Ashley shrieked and bolted up from the table.Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.


    "Yikes!" Grant exclaimed.


    "I''m sorry!" I cried, frantically bending down and dabbing napkins from the nearby booth onto the over the table, even though the tea had spilled and dripped onto her leather handbag.


    Grant continued to sit at his side of the table which remained unsoiled. I turned my back to hide from him as I began soaking up the pooling coffee.


    Ashley grunted and looked down on me as I cleaned. "Oh, aren''t you that retarded girl who used to sit alone by the bleachers every day after school>"


    I pretended not to hear her and continued to soak up the spill, but the insult opened deep old wounds.


    "I heard she used to give handjobs out there to all the stoners." She said snickering to Grant.


    None of that was true of course, but it still hurt to hear those things after all those years. Like a scratched record that will never stop turning over and over again.


    I now fisted stacks of napkins and rushed to soak up the last of the spill as tears began to pool from my eyes. I grit my teeth in anger and anguish as I stood up.


    "Sorry about that!" I lied as I stood up from the hastily dried table, turning and fleeing without looking back on the couple.


    "Hey!" Rene called after me from the counter as I passed by her.


    "I have to take out the garbage!" I called back. An utter fabrication, but I needed to escape.


    I heaved the blivoted bag out from the trash can in the back of the cafe and into the dumpster that rested opposite side of the cafe''s wall. I slumped down and crouched on the pavement. I tried to keep myself from tearing up at work, but I hadn''t expected to have to relive more of my seemingly endless alienation. High school is like this prison you can never escape, like an identity assigned to you at the most vulnerable time in your life that assigns your status on the pecking order of this feudal hellscape.


    Maybe I was kidding myself. About magic. About everything. Here I am mired in this stymied moment in history, my life decaying and eroding around me. There was nothing to do about it. I wasn''t born into money, and I couldn''t even find stability without grinding myself away, if that.


    As I sat there crumpled up besides the trash my phone started to vibrate. It was my mom calling.


    "Hey Mom, what''s up?" I answered.


    "Hi Honey. Well, the bank just called. Now they''re after some documents that I don''t seem to have at all, and I was wondering if maybe you could look for them with. It''s some incidental parts of the deed, so maybe dad had them stored away with everything in his desk."


    I sighed. "Yeah... Okay... I''ll... I''ll look through dad''s things and try to find anything like that."


    "I''m sorry to have to bother you with this... it just... it doesn''t look good. I don''t think we have what they''re asking for. I don''t think we''re going to be able to get the refinance."


    I sat there by the dumpster for a few seconds in silence. I took a deep breath and felt baked by the warmth of the midsummer sun and the heat of the sheet of metal I leaned against.


    "Okay. I''ll look for any papers that look useful in the old bedroom... If things don''t change by the end of the week I''ll pack my things and move in with you."


    "I''m sorry, Honey." Mom said.


    I hung up and expelled a weary whimper. I hugged my knees and buried my toes into the gravel, staring out at the row of gently swaying elder trees that lined the cafe parking lot while the cicadas hummed their August whine.


    I was backed into a corner. There was no future. My past was nothing but an echoing loop of regret and mourning, and soon even my past would be taken away from me.


    I looked to the back door of the cafe and thought about returning to work. Fuck it. Rene caused this mess, she could take care of the rest of my shift. I couldn''t waste my time with this bullshit anymore. There was only one thing left to do.

 Chapter 16 (A) - The Grand Conjuration

    In The Hour of The Sun, On The Night of Belzebuth, the Moon Full:


    When I got home I set Artie''s bowl in the guest bedroom and closed the door behind her. I took a deep breath, downed another mug of coffee, and spent the hours from when I returned from work deliberating on all I needed to do and in what order.


    Before I had begun the cycle in earnest I had already calculated tonight to be the perfect moment to conduct the ceremony. The ritual cycle in which the tools of the operation were to be gathered and fashioned during a waxing moon implied that the evocation was to be conducted when the moon was full. The Verum seemed to reiterate that Tuesday was the day of Frimost, and that the optimal hours of his conjuration were in the evening hours from nine to ten.


    The star chart I consulted revealed the hour to be opportune to the powers of Jupiter and to Mercury, although a strong presence of Saturn loomed over the working. My cursory internet searches assured me that the saturnine influence would be negated by Jupiter''s prominence, but the inconsistency still nagged at me. Really, I wasn''t sure how seriously to take the elements or the planets or whatever, but over time I''d learned it was hard to remove the hermetic astrological cosmology from any old working like this.


    In front of me I skimmed over all the lines of the ritual I would be reciting and all the stage direction I was to perform. Magick is intrinsically theatrical in many ways, a performance of cosmic forces being made real in the doing. As above, so below, and all of that. Some of the greatest magick practitioners in history had arranged their entire societies and economies around the stagecraft of ritual performance, like the shaman-kings of the Classic Maya or the brahmans of the Khmer Empire.


    All the words and the intricate sequence of events tied to the ceremony were intimidating, but to overwhelm the magician was part of the intent. I had never been much of a dramatist, never extroverse enough, but I knew how to act as though you meant something and that''s what was important. Magick is all about taking an authentic expression of your mind and will and projecting it out into the world. For much of the ritual there would be no harm in glancing at a printed script, and aside from the few clusters of ''barbarous names'' the Verum compelled I utter, there would be no harm in some improvisation here and there so long I spoke with clear intent.


    After a few minutes of pondering I stretched up and arranged the ritual space, moving my father''s towering bookshelves like cutting down timber and clearing the space where I set down my mat on the floor, onto which I had painted the circle and triangle of practice and placed the altar table in its center, all facing East, as with all such rituals which approached the power of Lucifer.


    On the altar table I laid down and lit a thick wax candle, which I would use to habitually strike the coals I would place within my censer to burn the mace, aloe wood, and frankincense. I put out the elderwood wand to the right, the hazelwood wand to the left, and between them I placed the great bowl in which floated the aspergillium salve, the ritual knife, the lancet, the inkwell and quill, and dead center I set down the parchment with the signed seals and my contract.


    Behind those things I placed the black skrying mirror. I had made the mirror a month ago from a circular picture frame I had painted black in the back, so that the well-polished glass gave the impression of a dark-tinted reflection. I placed this at the best angle I could on the altar to reflect the light of the flame and my face. It was said that the demons were unlikely to appear in the flesh on such a routine visit, but preferred to take shape in dim reflection to communicate with the witch.This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    I set down the ritual script I had printed out at the foot of the circle encompassed by the triangle on the ground, and took my place, walking barefoot into the center of the circle wearing my favorite black woolen coat as my ritual cloak.


    I began with the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram, which I no longer practiced with any regularity, but had committed thoroughly to memory as a teenager on my first attempts at witchery. You stand tall facing east and hold your eyes closed, raising your knife to the ceiling and slowly drawing it to your breast, gathering energy from on high. Then you outstretch the ritual knife and turn around the circle clockwise, miming the proper unicursal banishing pentagram- Air in the East, Earth in the South, Water in the West, and Fire in the North, focusing your will to disperse any imbalanced elemental influences from the space for the sake of good energetic hygiene. Yadda yadda yadda.


    I again turned round to the four corners of the circle, this time in invocation, calling forth the four kings of the cardinal directions described in the Verum-


    I stood before the altar and drew forth the elderwood wand. "I call forth and adjure thee, O King Magoa of the East! Bring forth your host of spirits, Masseyel, Asiel, Satiel, Arduel, Acorib, and bless the circle of this holy rite!"


    I turned right and held forth the wand. "I call forth and adjure thee, O King Egym of the South! Bring forth your stalwart knights, Fadal and Nostrachel, and bless the circle of this holy rite!"


    I turned right and held forth the wand. "I call forth and adjure thee, O King Bayemon of the West! Bring forth your daring paladin, Passiel Rosusr and his bannermen, and bless the circle of this holy rite!"


    I turned right and held forth the knife. "I call forth and adjure thee, O Emperor Amaymon of the South! You whose secret name is Sechiel! You whose secret name is Barachiel! Send forth your wise ministers, Madael, Laaval, Bamulhac, Belem, and Ramat, and bless the circle of this holy rite!"


    I returned to face the altar, and now I stood upon the axis mundi. The space of the ceremony was now consecrated.


    The next step was to call down the deities and higher powers who would offer me their authority in the working, an invocation central to all great works of magick since the days of Kemet and Sumer. I was of course eschewing the heavy Christian prostrations of the grimoires, and instead appealing to the sympathies of the cthonic Greco-Egyptian deities, whose grace and strangeness had captivated me since I was a little girl.


    The speech to channel the right energy for the evocation I''d appropriated from Crowley''s Pyramidos rite, which I''d been ambivalent about from the jump. It invoked the full pantheon and cosmology with which I wished to call upon, but It was overwrought, overly dramatic, and overly florid, to the detriment of its utility, as with everything Crowley ever touched. I did my best to paraphrase the opening in a way that felt authentic:


    "The pyramid stirs and shakes,


    Set and Horus tumble in the wastes,


    The heart in conflict Inpu takes,


    The spice of the soul Djehuti tastes


    Nuit reclines, Hadit unbound,


    Thoth the ape, Anubis the hound,


    Isis, widow, bears hope in her womb,


    Osiris, whole, steps forth his tomb!


    Apollo whispers in morning light


    O Pan, my inhibitions ache!


    Artemis stalks moon-soaked night


    O Dionysus, my mad desires slake!


    Hades united, Persephone all alone,


    O Hekate, Maiden, Mother, and Crone


    Venus in lust, Cybele''s love profound,


    Splay open the secrets of this mound!"

 Chapter 16 (B) - The Grand Conjuration

    As I completed the words, a warm and electric feeling rose in me, like the way the air pressure drops at the approach of a storm or the way your ears pop when an airplane takes off. The gods were here now, watching me.


    But I was still too weak, still all too mortal. If I was to walk with the gods I would have to leave my humanity at the door. Now it was time for the step of sanctification, or what the Verum described as flagellation and penance.


    It wasn''t necessary to actually maim myself, but here I would lay all my sins bare. I would gut my hide and tan my skin like the vellum of the infernal contract''s parchment.


    I took the elder wand in my right hand and the hazel wand in my left and mimed the blow of whips upon my back from behind my shoulders. I took a pause to consider my words, I needed to speak from my heart.


    "I am selfish and inconsiderate!" I said, striking my back and thinking of how I had distanced myself from my mom after dad died.


    "But still I stand willing!"


    "I am jealous and spite-filled with poison!" I said, raking my back and chastising myself for the way I envied Rene and how much more exciting and joyous her life seemed.


    "Yet I still stand willing!"


    "I am gluttonous and base!"


    I said, slapping my shoulder and feeling the fat of my back, aware in my posture of the heaviness around my middle.


    "Yet I still stand willing!"


    "I am lustful and desire my body violate!"


    I said, hitting my back strongly and wincing to consider the way I''d let boys use my body just to feel wanted.


    "Yet I still stand willing!"


    "I have been callous and vile." I said, hitting myself in regret when I thought of how I''d spoken to Annie the previous night and of the people around me who I''d alienated and hurt because my heart wasn''t open.


    "Yet I still stand willing!"


    "I am utterly naive, stupid, and drawn to flights of fantasy!" I declared, drawing the wand just to the surface of my skin and stopping. Maybe this was all just nonesense. Maybe I was just running from the inevitable. But you know what? Even so, I knew in that moment it was still worth doing.


    "Yet I still stand willing!"


    "I never see what is good until it is gone, and pleasure turns to ash in my mouth!" I said drawing the wand up, thinking of how much I missed my dad. How differently I would have treated him and the time we had had together if I knew he would be gone so soon.The author''s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    "Yet I still stand willing!"


    Now that I had wallowed in my humanity and cast my iniquities aside, it was time to seize the authority to speak with the spirits. Now I would invoke my goddess, my identity dissolving completely into hers, our voice as one.


    I knelt at the altar and lit another coal, burning incense of frankincense, myrrh, and storax in my lady''s honor. I stood up, held the conjuring wand above me towards the ceiling like a torch, and spoke the Orphic hymn aloud:


    I call lovely Hekate of the Crossroads where three roads meet,


    Adored in sky, earth, and sea in saffron robes,


    Sepulchral spirit who revels amidst the ghosts,


    Persian, fond of loneliness, who delights in deer,


    Nocturnal guardian of the hounds, Irresistible Queen


    Drawn by a yoke of bulls,


    Queen who holds the keys to all the cosmos,


    Nurturer, you who looks after the little ones,


    you who haunt the mountains


    Pray maiden, fall upon my hallowed rites,


    Be always gracious to your flock and delight in my sweet smoke


    With my eyes still closed, I felt the heat of a roaring flame billowing from the tip of the wand and sweat caked my skin. I slowly unveiled my heavy lids, my crescent eyes at one with the howling and silence of the shade-haunted night.


    I knelt and pinched mace, aloe-wood, and frankincense onto the censer''s burning coal. I took up the elder wand in my right hand and the ritual knife in my left, and called aloud the barbarous names from the Verum:


    "Heloy, Tau, Varaf, Panthon, Hominaram, Elemiath, Serugeath, Agla, On, Tetragrammaton, Casily, Come Forth, Scirlin!"


    As soon as I had called out the incantation I felt a warmth rush to my head. It felt right, I moved forward in the conjuration:


    "Lucifer, Ouyar, Chameron, Aliseon, Mandousin, Premy, Oriet, Naydrus, Esmony, Eperinesont, Estiot, Dumosson, Danechar, Casmiel, Hayras, Fabelleronthou, Sodirno, Peaham, Come, Lucifer!"


    After I had shouted the magical words, a great silence came over the black room. I waited for something to happen, and my eyes softened to the flame of the candle on the altar which seemed to glow brighter.


    My eyes wandered from the brightness of the flame towards its reflection in the mirror, and that''s when I saw it-


    The figure of a young boy, like a cupid or cherub of classical statue, seemed to flicker out from the candle. His brightness was brilliant and strong.


    "Hail Lucifer! Hail Light-Bringer!" I greeted it.


    I watched the figure waiver and dance gracefully upon the flame until finally it dispersed.


    I continued on with the barbarous words through the lesser spirits, commanding forth with the elder wand:


    "O Surmy, Delmusun, Atalsloym, Charusihoa, Melany, Liamintho, Colenon, Paron Madoin, Merloy, Bulerator, Donmedo Hone, Peloym, Ibasil, Meon, Alymdrictels Purson, Crisolay, Leman Sessle Nidar Horiel Peunt, Halmon, Asophiel, Ilnostreon, Baniel, Vermias, Slevor, Noelmay, Dorsanot, Lhavala, Omor, Framgam, Beldor, Dramgin, Come Aglierap!"


    After speaking the names I turned again to the candle flame, and watched as it began to grow bold and intense, slashing out in strong licks that shot forth in every direction, forming the impression of a face from which protruded a menacing assemblage of horns and tusks, like the face on Aglierap''s seal.


    "Hail Aglierap!" I called.


    Only a moment after my salutation the flame contracted and swayed gently.


    "Come Syrach!" I called.


    Syrach''s appearance was not so dramatic as his forebearers. The flame now wavered in a way slow yet deliberate, like the rippling of a great cloak of light in the wind.


    "Hail Syrach!" I called.


    The flame continued to sway before flickering once more into an erratic pace.


    Butterflies welled in my stomach. It was time. After all these trials, it was finally time to call those words and bring the aim of my will forth:

 Chapter 16 (C) - The Grand Conjuration

    "C-Come Frimost!" I cried, my grip tightening around the elderwood wand in my hand.


    There was a stillness and all I could hear was my heavy breathing. I stood holding the wand, my vision trained on the skrying mirror.


    I waited for Lord Frimost to appear, looking around my reflection for a figure to arrive in the candlelight behind or before me. I listened to the room, but there was only an oppressive silence that hung over the night. I had heard that the demons could be sluggish or unpleasantly dramatic in their debut, so I continued to remain stoically fixed on the mirror.


    I waited. And I waited. And I waited.


    I decided to call upon Frimost again, though I took care that my calling should strike the balance between respectful and authoritative.


    I tapped the hazel staff on the ground and called again: "Lord Frimost, I beseech you to appear now, before me!"


    I waited expectantly for a few moments... and continued to wait. My legs were tired and the Verum had stressed that Frimost must be called upon while standing, but now shaking in exhaustion, I finally sat down in lotus pose in the center of the circle and continued to wait. I looked upon the burning candle, but only saw it waiver softly.This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    My eyes became tired, and I knew if Lord Frimost were to appear he would do something to arrest my attention. I decided to sit there and meditate, and perhaps as I lay in deep concentration he would come to my awareness.


    Well, at least I tried to meditate, but too much doubt and exhaustion swirled in my mind and I became wrapped up in worry and disappointment.


    This was so stupid. I dress up my fantasies in academic erudition and historicism, but this whole project was as desperate and naive as a tween waiting on their acceptance letter from Hogwarts, only worse. I was too old not to know better. I''d seen too much. There is no enchantment to the world, only constant excuses for ''might makes right'' and all the mechanisms to glibly obscure it.


    I opened my eyes and looked around the room. The candle had melted out onto the altar cloth, and the light was beginning to fade out. I looked again over the bookshelves of my father''s collection. All the literature, psychology, biology, physics, history that he''d been able to get his hands on as a professor, all printed in glorious sixties and seventies paperbacks. My dad had spent his life striving towards rationality and understanding, and here was his daughter, spurning those gifts for superstition and irrationality.


    But it didn''t matter at this point. The bank would foreclose on the house. I''d have to quit my job and move in with my mom in the deep suburbs. Eventually I''d just fade away under the weight of my student loans and perpetual loserdom. I wondered when exactly I''d get around to finally killing myself. How much longer would the skipping record of my life repeat?


    I got up and left the circle and opened the door to the guest bedroom down the hall. Artie emerged from the darkness to pur and rub against my feet. I went to join her in bed and fell asleep crying in self pity with the one creature that I knew loved me unconditionally snuggled in my arms.

 Chapter 17 - Hangover

    I woke up the next day at noon, Artie prodding my face for a late bowl of tuna and kibble. The sorrow I had slept on the last night had left me and in its place was a numb, hollow feeling. The grim recognition of the unchanging nature of things. Even as the light of a perfect late summer day flooded the cabin, mockingly.


    As I drove to work I contemplated the futility of my life from here on out. I''d be living in some dingy suburb on the eastern side of the state. Halfway between Boston and Providence, but too far from Boston to be in Boston and too far from Providence to be in Providence. Just a fate of inescapable wage slavery, indentured to McMansion Boomer petty tyranny.


    The moment I left the car and walked down the driveway to the twee little house with powder blue walls where the coop was, I felt faint. I suppose it was just the intensity of the humid afternoon sun. I braced myself for whatever reprimand Rene would give me for leaving early and opened the door.


    "Hey" I called to the counter as I set down my things.


    Rene poked her head out instinctively to greet me, but her face soured as she remembered she was angry with me and receded back to her post.


    I walked to take my place at the counter and decided it was best to be upfront.


    "Sorry about yesterday." I said.


    Rene sighed. "No, whatever, yeah. I mean, it''s your loss. I just wish when things went wrong you at least worked something out with me rather than just leaving me to pick up the end of your shift for you."Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    "I''m sorry. The other day was an emergency."


    I looked out to see the cafe mostly empty in the afternoon.


    Rene sighed. She wasn''t going to keep up the guilting routine. "It''s fine. Just do me a favor and clean out the restroom for me, okay? Then we''re even."


    "Alright!" I said stepping out from the counter. "I really am sorry!"


    "I know. Don''t worry about it." She grunted.


    It wasn''t often Rene, the most genuinely happy person I even knew, was in a bad mood, but when she was, gods help you, you would be cast into an oubliette of deep shade.


    I took the mop and bucket along with some disinfectant into the bathroom and lost myself in the cleaning. I guess it was the same thing as the ritual: Something to get my mind off the precarity and futility of my life. The restroom wasn''t even that dirty, but putting in my whole elbows and scrubbing every surface to spotless white porcelain also erased the worries from my mind.


    I had to stop for a moment, because the light in the bathroom, which had been blinking and flickering the whole time from a bad bulb, finally kicked the bucket, and I was cast into complete darkness. I stood up, and was about to leave the room to get a replacement, when the light came back on, and I almost screamed.


    There, standing behind me to my left in the mirror, was this thing... It had the figure of a nude woman. Its skin was obsidian black and slicked with some liquid like oil or black pitch. It was rubbing its breasts with its bony hands which ended in long, curled claws. Worst of all was its face, it grinned at me with yellow glowing eyes like a cat with a smile filled with fangs and a tusk that curved up her skull.


    I instinctively turned behind to face it, or in my panic, to make a run for the door only to be ensnared in the fiend''s talons, but there was nothing there. The thing was gone when I looked back to check the reflection in the mirror.


    I fell on my ass to the floor. I started to laugh.


    Holy shit! It worked!

 Chapter 18 - Communion

    Maybe I''d been naive in my treatment of the goetia. Maybe I''d been too eager to dismiss the hundreds of years of warnings and the threats of ruin. Maybe I really had just invited a fiend into my house and my soul was forfeit! Fuck it! My soul already feels forfeit! I could accept the idea of demons and spirits and maybe even gods, but heaven? A two-thousand year old fiction to self-subjugate the masses to class domination? Don''t be ridiculous. Look around! There is no justice in this world or the next.


    When I unlocked the front door I looked suspiciously over the house. It all held silent, but I knew I wasn''t alone. I wondered if my infernal guest still rested in the ceremonial chamber or lurked in some dark corner to ambush me.


    Just then something black and short burst forth from the hall and shot past me towards the living room where I had established the altar. I heard the falling of books and the shuffling of junk. I raced to see what was there- but it was just Artie, chasing a mouse which I deftly caught in my hands and released outside, much to the fluffy monster''s chagrin.


    I looked around the rest of the living room. Nothing seemed out of place. The ritual altar stood the same as I left it the night before. I re-lit the candle and the incense on the altar-top and looked into the skying mirror, but it was still only just after sunset and it would be an hour or so before it was dark enough to use the mirror.


    I flopped down on the couch and took a deep sigh. When was he likely to show up? What was I going to do about it?


    Sure, the polemics told me to expect fire and brimstone, fear and loathing, and sure, it was important to have my wits about me and not to be a pushover, it was a demon after all, but then again, I was planning to work with this spirit for the next year, and how would you feel if you were presumed to be an enemy to be dominated? I didn''t want to start off our working relationship on the wrong foot.


    So taking my cue from all the infamous parties thrown in Satan''s honor, I decided to treat this demon the way I would any other guest of honor. I loaded my hookah and lit some coals on the stove-top. I had a half loaf of a baguette I''d been slowly picking away at from the kitchen drawer for the last week to share, and opened up a bottle of cheap wine my mom had left in the back of the fridge, pouring out a glass for me and a glass for him. I put on some lo-fi, turned on the Christmas lights draped across the room, opened the screen window to let in the night air, and set the orange simmering coals on the hookah bowl.


    I held the hose in my fingers and inhaled deeply of the sweet shisha smoke, belching a cloud of blueberry-vanilla with the numbing tinge of mint that swirled around me like the ghostly white tentacles of phantasmic jellyfish.


    I continued to pleasurably puff from the smoldering hookah and I felt myself become light-headed. It was dark now, and the dim light and smoky atmosphere made everything feel dream-like.


    From out the open window, there came a moderate breeze, which seemed unusual on such a humid summer night, and in with it blew a bustle of long thin green leaves. When the wind had dissipated I billowed another vast plume of the shisha fumes, and, as the smoke swirled, the contours of a human face took form.


    My eyes bulged. I stopped smoking and stood up from the couch, the blood rushing to my head. I caught my bearings and hobbled towards the altar in the other room.


    I sat down before the altar and trained my eye on the skrying mirror, scouring the flicker of the candlelight for a sign.The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    There, standing behind me in the mirror, was a tall man.


    I froze. I didn''t know how to react.


    The man stood with his top almost grazing the ceiling. Wrapped around and extending out from his head was an elaborate crown of woven branches, snaking and intertwining. His figure was imposing and strong, his arms wrapped around his shoulders. His features were soft and full of youth, his skin seemed to almost gleam in the candlelight, but his eyes were hollow.


    After a moment of taking in his features I resumed my composure and asked-


    "Spirit, what is thy name?"


    The man slowly opened his mouth and pursed his lips together as if to whistle. Within the room a sound seemed to whirr like the wind kicking up dead leaves from the ground in autumn, and through the breeze a voice formed and it whispered "Frimost"


    I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. My stomach was filled with butterflies. It was one thing to imagine about this moment for months on end, it was another thing to be there with the object of my yearnings face to face. I greeted him in goodwill:


    "Lord Frimost, I, Silvana Smith, Greet you in amity! I wish to parlay with you that we might form a pact to our mutual benefit!"


    Frimost hung silent for a moment, and a fear gripped me that my manner of speech had been overly eager and improper.


    Then he replied in his smooth voice. "What are your terms?"


    I forgot what to say for a moment. I was still so nervous and awe-struck at his presence. When I recognized what he had asked, I first thought to wrench my contract from the altar, but I didn''t want to break the moment, so I spoke aloud my terms, trembling as I spoke them with care:


    "l-Lord Frimost, I, s-Silvana Smith, would enter into an agreement of cooperation with you! That- That we will help each other to fulfill our every desire in so far as we are able, and to offer one another tribute and friendship, b-binding us to one another for the term of one year."


    Frimost''s expression remained stolid.


    "I accept." He said.


    I let out a deep sigh of relief.


    "What are your desires?" He asked dispassionately.


    I gulped. I was so nervous my tongue got caught in my throat. "R-right now, my family home is in dispute. The property''s mortgage went up so high we are unable to pay it unless it is refinanced. Could you allow that so that I might continue to live here? It''s very important to me."


    Frimost stood silent, continuing to stare at me. I felt foolish bringing something so bureaucratic and mundane to something so otherworldly. "Can... you do that...?"


    "It is done. Is there something else?"


    That was it? Okay... I hadn''t even had anything else specific prepared...


    "I would ask you to assist and instruct me in the ways of witchcraft and reveal to me the secret knowledge of this world. I ask you to grant me my utmost desires! ...Can you do those things?"


    Frimost''s hollow eyes continued to stare pass me, looking upon me, but never quite meeting mine. His mouth broke into a soft smile.


    "Of course."


    "Is there anything that you would ask of me in turn?" I said.


    Frimost let out a deep breath and spoke in a polite, smooth tone. His voice was almost musical. "I would ask that you should construct for me a modest shrine, and leave upon it such things as are found in the forest, sweet fermented libations, incense as agreeable to my kind, the parchment upon which is signed our pact, and soon, at the moment that you should feel my influence fall over you for the first time, save the first stone you see and leave it upon my altar."


    I nodded. "I will do all of those things within the moon."


    Frimost continued to stare upon me with a serious look. For a moment I was confused and frightened something I had done or said had offended him, but then I remembered that the witch must provide the spirit with their license to depart.


    "Thank you Frimost. You are free to go in peace!"


    And it occurred to me to say one more thing, so I turned around and said "And I look forward to getting to know you!", but he was already gone, and had vanished when my gaze returned to the mirror.


    Enraptured by victory I returned back to the couch, skipped the glass, and took a deep chug from the bottle of red wine on the coffee table. I nearly spat out the drink as I started to cackle in joy! It had worked! It had all worked!


    In retrospect, it already nagged at me a little just how easily Frimost had accepted my terms.

 Chapter 19 - The Stone

    In The Hour of The Sun, On The Day of Silcharde, the Moon a Crescent:


    The next morning was bright gold and glittery, as if waking for the first time after a very long dream. I lifted myself from my pillow to meet Artie, stretching in pleasure before burrowing the fluffy coat of her neck into my shoulder and purring profusely. I still awoke with a degree of self-doubt. Had it all been a dream?


    I left Artie her food for the morning and drove to work. I suspected I¡¯d see something happen within the next month, but I didn¡¯t want to get my hopes up too high. The results of magick are usually subtle and ironic.


    I drove to work and parked by the still railroad tracks where the cicadas whined in the late summer heat.


    As I walked into work again Rene peered out at me. I braced myself to suffer her retribution for abandoning work the other day, but she just hovered by the counter, leaning back lazily by the coffee machines.


    ¡°I¡¯m so sorry I didn¡¯t finish the shift yesterday.¡± I sighed.


    ¡°Pfffft!¡± she spouted. ¡°Dude, don¡¯t even worry about it! Have you heard from anybody what happened in town yesterday?¡±


    ¡°Um, nope¡­ Don''t think so.¡±


    ¡°You left right before we had our first summer brown out. Almost everybody on the north part of town was out, so Kurt and I finished what we had and closed up early.¡±


    ¡°Wow!¡±


    ¡°Crazy right!!? And you pretty much finished the bathroom, so we''re even there."


    The early afternoon was busy but mostly pleasant. Some families with kids came for milkshakes and sandwiches. Some colleagues met after work for an early pint of hoppy craft beer, old friends met and gossiped over tea and lattes. I had gotten into a good rythym ringing up the orders and slinging coffee. I didn¡¯t even notice when Grant came up to the counter. I had another nervous startle at seeing him.


    He smiled to me as he drew closer.


    ¡°H-hey¡­¡± I stuttered, averting my eyes in anxiety. ¡°Can I get you something¡­?¡±


    "Actually, I just wanted to talk to you¡­ you¡¯re¡­ Sylvia¡­? Shauna¡­?¡±


    ¡°Silvana!¡±


    ¡°Yeah, we went to school together right? I remember talking to you but I wasn¡¯t sure when we met.¡± He tried to tease out.


    ¡°Oh yeah, I think we were in a class or two together!¡± -for three years of Latin five days a week.


    "Well hey, look, I just really wanted to apologize for my friend the other day. Ashley and I have known each other since we were in preschool. It''s kind of a family thing almost, but she can be a real bitch sometimes."The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    "Heh, yeah." I croaked. "Ashley can be kind of a... bitch... I guess."


    ¡°Well I¡¯m in town right now before I¡¯m heading back to grad school. I was wondering if you wanted to catch up sometime...¡±


    Holy shit. I froze dumbfounded for a moment. ¡°Y-yeah. Sure. That¡¯d be cool!¡± I said as I noticed Rene appear from the corner of the counter, grinning.


    ¡°Any ideas for what to do? Unless you want to hang out here¡­¡± he asked.


    Rene¡¯s eyes narrowed on me as she attempted to telepathically bind me to invite him to her jam session, like some psychic Cyrano.


    ¡°My friend is doing a jam thing this Saturday night. I guess we¡¯re meeting at Puffer¡¯s Pond around... 5?¡± I suggested.


    ¡°Puffer¡¯s Pond at 5¡­ Sounds cool! I¡¯ll be there!¡± Grant affirmed.


    ¡°Oh awesome!¡± I exclaimed grinning, my brain having exploded.


    Rene slyly slithered a hot cup into my hand.


    ¡°Oh, here¡¯s your coffee!¡± I said offering it to him.


    ¡°Ah, I didn''t actually order a coffee!¡±


    "Oh yeah, shit!" I exclaimed. "Well uhhh... just!... take it then! It''s yours!"


    "Well awesome, thanks for the free cup!" smiled Grant as he walked through the booths and out the door. "See you on Saturday, Silvana!"


    "You too!" I shouted. "...Grant!"


    Grant opened the back door just a crack and peeked back in "sorry? was there something else?"


    "Oh no! I was just... you just said ''See you,Silvana'' and I just said ''You too, Grant!'' like, I just wanted to say your name too."


    "Haha, oookay." He said with widened eyes and a slight smirk drawing from the corners of his mouth. "See ya!"


    I looked to Rene who met my gaze with serpentine side-eyes.


    ¡°Yoooouuuu¡¯re gooonnnaa get laaaaaiddd¡± she cooed.


    ¡°Shut up.¡±


    ¡°Well come on, today you¡¯ve got no excuse not to close up!¡±


    At five, after I had turned off everything and locked up, I walked out to my car with a big, stupid grin on my face and sat down, breathing a deep sigh of relief and feeling the warm and glorious caress of the afternoon heat on my skin. There was no way that Grant coming to see me could have been a coincidence. Something new really had happened to me.


    Then I heard a rumbling in my bag on the passenger''s seat next to me. I wrenched out my phone and saw on the screen that my mom was calling me. I swallowed a lump in my throat.


    ¡°Hey, what¡¯s up?¡± I answered.


    ¡°Hi Honey! Sorry, am I bothering you at work?¡±


    ¡°No, not at all! I just closed up. What''s going on?"


    ¡°Well, it¡¯s good news! The bank called! They¡¯re going to refinance the loan, so we''ll only need to pay a third of what we''re paying to keep the house!¡±


    I fell back deep into the seat and closed my eyes. A great relief washed over me.


    ¡°Holy shit! Mom, that¡¯s great!¡±


    ¡°Yeah! I just wanted to tell you first thing! I hope you had a great day at work!¡±


    ¡°Thank you so much! We''ll celebrate next time I visit. I love you! Talk to you later!"


    "I can''t wait! Love you so much!" mom said as I hung up.


    I collapsed onto the steering-wheel and laughed so hard I almost cried. The hole had been plugged, and the hull of my life was no longer taking in water. No matter what happened now there was a floor under me. Only one day after the pact and I already felt like I had won the lottery.


    As the thought dawned on me, blinking red lights and the rail crossing alarm clanged as a train of many multi-colored and beaten decades-old rail-cars tatooed in graffiti of spectacular incantations and sacred hieroglyphs passed me by. I caught sight of its mysteries for only a moment as it had streamed past my eyes like the frames of a flipbook.


    When the bellowing behemoth had slouched for souther pastures, I got out of the car and walked onto the tracks where the thrashing of the wheels and the weight of the carriages against the steel still rippled a rhythm across the line and the great strip of grey gravel.


    Sitting upon the outer railings of the tracks was a little flattened circular white rock, which spun hypnotically and ceaselessly on its axis upon the reverberating metal track.


    I held up the twinkling stone and kissed it in gratitude.

 Chapter 20 - The Altar

    Only a few days past the ritual and my heart had been set aflame in joy. I set about the task on my day off of erecting Lord Frimost¡¯s altar. I arranged a small night table in the corner of the living room on which I laid a green altar cloth. I left the house and wandered into the woods, not as far as I had the other day, but strolling the sunlit paths, scrounging the ground for objects to lovingly dedicate to my Lord. I found leaves and branches, pinecones and walnuts, a wild turkey feather, and a series of speckled and curiously shaded smooth stones I found fishing the shallow riverbed.


    They were all laid out upon the altar with tender care, and above them I lit the upon the goetic musky-sweet combination of incense. I poured out upon the altar a red glass of wine and lit a white wax candle.


    I sat before the altar and smiled. I had nothing but gratitude for my new partner, and I knew it was important to return his good graces with appropriate gifts.


    My objects of devotion assembled, I collapsed in my bed, played chill out music, and lit my piple, cradling Artie in hugs and kisses between fits of self-satisfied laughter. The world seemed a brighter, more brilliant place in spite of its deepening shadows.


    I waited until it was pitch black out, sometime around 9 or 10, and then I went about the task of summoning my Lord to appear and to offer him my thanks.


    Now that the pact between us had been signed, there was no need for the elaborate ceremonialism. I set Frimost¡¯s contract before the skrying mirror, lit the candles, the incense, and wielded the evocation wand, speaking the barbarous words and requesting that my lord should appear before me.This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.


    The flame of the candle began to waiver once again in an intense breeze, and behind me again I felt the presence of a tall and imposing figure.


    ¡°Hail Lord Frimost! I receive thee in peace and friendship!¡±


    Frimost said nothing.


    I held out the stone that I had gathered on the day that I summoned him in my palm.


    ¡°My Lord, for your faith and good works, I would offer you back the stone that you requested I gather when I began to see the signs of your miracles.¡±


    A chilled breath grazed the tips of my outstretch fingers and I coiled them around the surface of the stone.


    ¡°Keep it. When you know that I have been faithful, and that your whims have been satisfied, cast the stone into an abyss, so that I will know that my service has been appreciated.¡± Frimost instructed.


    ¡°My Lord, if I might ask more of you¡­¡±


    Frimost¡¯s gaze in the mirror did not waiver from me.


    ¡°The book with which I conjured you said that you are adept in teaching the sciences and the magickal arts¡­ is this so?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡± He said. ¡°What would you know?¡±


    ¡°Um, if it is no trouble or offense, then speak to me of your own nature!¡±


    Frimost rasped a deep sigh. ¡°I am the bold breeze that rustles the leaves on autumn nights. I am the proud Lord of Desire, and before my will passions spring. I am a million secrets shared across a million hallowed nights.¡±


    ¡°Will you tell me a secret, O Lord?¡± I asked without really thinking, ¡°Something only you would know?¡±


    I felt a presence kneel beside me and whisper in my ear.


    ¡°In those dark woods which surround you¡­¡±

 Chapter 21 - Treasure in the Woods

    The next morning I once again set off into the dark woods in search of the secret treasure that Frimost had spoken of. He has been mum on the details, but assured me that I should be thoroughly convinced of his powers with what I should find if I continued as down the old trail.


    I worried about that thing I had seen out in the woods when retrieving the hazel wand. I could not tell if I had imagined it or if some real phantom had stood before me. Maybe it was the same as the thing I had seen in the mirror, but why had I seen it before I had performed the operation. I¡¯d hiked long and far enough in the woods and never seen anything like that, and I was wandering in midday, so I tried to push it from my mind.


    I walked into the dark woods, past the stream by the waterfront of Echo Lake and up the rocky hills towards the swamp. I crossed the logs lain as a bridge over the running streams and wandered through The Valley of the Elves. From Hekate¡¯s crossroads that forked the path, I chose the left path, unlike last time, and strolled out across the sunny meadow of tall yellow grass and felled trees. Opposite the clearing in the thicket sat a little pond that hosted an impressive beaver damn, though there was no sign of the creatures themselves who I suspected were holed up in their den.


    After winding through a patch of thick old trees with heavy bark, the path now sloped down a hill, beside which lay a what was sometimes a verbal pool in the Spring and weeks of heavy rain. Now, in the mid-August heat, it was a barren mud-bottomed depression filled with stacks of stone and debris. In its center, on what would be an island were there any tide at all, sat a single maple tree, in which lingered the looming shadow of the great blue heron who had taken up nest in the desolate pond.


    I continued further past an red old wooden shed, long uninhabited but with rusty tools and stack of firewood strewn about its yard. was certain that no one had lived here, but I was still wary of the area.


    Frimost had told me that I must ventured further off the beaten path, so I walked past the dilapidated shed and arrived on the paved road that ran through the center of the town. This is where I would normally turn back, as the paths on the other end of the road were less clear and well marked, though I had explored them sometimes on my hikes to Mount Toby. I crossed the road and descended the dark ravine into the unknown.


    After a minute of struggling my way past a thorny thicket of bushes and leaves, I emerged out of the woods onto a long strip paved with gravel and bereft of trees. It was the old railroad tracks that run through The Valley up Vermont to Montreal, the same tracks by which the cafe sits about a mile south. Every day, since I was a little girl, I would hear the whistle of the train engine echoing out all the way from the mouth of the paths behind my house as it passed.Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.


    For a few minutes I followed the tracks north, looking for a clear path further into the woods towards the mountains, when something caught my foot, and I tumbled down onto the white stones that paved the railroad. I struggled to my knees, my palm and knee scraped on the stones, and tried to regain my bearings. I looked to see what had tripped me, and sitting beside me was a loose rail spike. I took it up and inspected it wondering where on the track it must have fallen from, but it was old and rusty, too old to fit amongst the grey spikes that held the track in place. It seemed more like an artifact from the 19th century. It was an interesting and ¡®arresting¡¯ find, so I stowed it in my gathering bag and dusted myself off.


    A few moments later I found a clear path leadings up into the mountains and continued further. I came to a wide gorge that descended down into The Valley. The strange stones and winding shape of the canyon reminded me of Rattlesnake Gutter, a path on the other side of town which had been morphed by the shifting of a glacier during the ice age. It¡¯s winding and sliding walls gave the impression of a titanic stone serpent shifting into the earth.


    As I strafed alongside the canyon I finally saw what I had been looking for, a little cave alcove that seemed embedded into the side of the rockface. Frimost had told me to find a place far beyond my recollection and deep within the earth, and now I looked out upon the path leading there, seeing a platform to the hollow formed by the rocks and large boulders that lay draped across the canyon. Still, I walked with trepidation out onto the natural stone bridge and into the cave entrance.


    The small chamber inside the rock had glittering walls, and slick stalactites which drooped down from the ceiling. Still, the floor was wet and dirty, as though a thick layer of silt sat upon the rockface. From my pack I withdrew the railway spike that I had found and knelt down to use it as a trowel, scraping through the soil to find some sign of the cavern''s previous occupation.


    Sure enough, in little time the railway spike had been snagged on a hard surface. With my very own fingers I wrenched up a metallic and rectangular object out of the wet soil, about the size of a small laptop.


    It was an ancient tin lunchbox, inscribed with an archaic Boston Redsox logo that looked like it came from the early 20th century. Its edges were already brown and rusted. With the railways spike I banged against the edges until it came loose, laying bare the relics it stored inside. Filling the time capsule was a rich hobo''s treasury of bottle caps, a series of baseball cards from the middle of the century, a small personal planner filled with diary entries, and a collection of black and white photographs that chilled me to the bone.

 Chapter 22 - Movie Night

    The end of the week came and it was time again to hang out with Annie. We had decided a month ago to see a screening of the original Alien at the mall, since we''d always wanted to actually see it on a big screen in the dark.


    I idled my car in her driveway and waited a few minutes until Annie came struggling her way out the front door, dressed in an impressive attire of a black dress, black lipstick, and a very chic wide-rim hat. Annie usually made no attempt to fashion herself as presentable, but when she did she certainly overcompensated for her casual uniform.


    ¡°Hey!¡± I greeted her with a sonorous tone.


    ¡°Hey.¡± She responded flatly.


    We rolled out of her driveway and past the scenic farms and green meadows that spread across the road from South Amherst to Hadley. The afternoon sun beat down on the oven-like car.


    ¡°Hey, I¡¯m really sorry about how I reacted the other night¡­¡± I said, being the one to break the silence.


    ¡°Oh, Don¡¯t be.¡± Annie sighed. ¡°I¡¯m the one who tries to freak out my friends over bad dreams.¡±


    ¡°I¡­ believe your dreams though. You know that¡­¡± I explained. ¡°I really do believe you when you say you see ghosts and stuff. I would never dismiss your experience.¡±


    ¡°I know.¡± She said.


    ¡°I just have a different interpretation. That¡¯s all.¡±


    ¡°Look, can we just drop it. Let¡¯s just try to enjoy the movie.¡± Annie said.


    We pulled up to the Hampshire Mall multiplex and got out. I waited to get popcorn while Annie went to the bathroom and then proceeded to wander around the lobby on her own. The energy between us felt weird, and I just hoped we would be in a better mood once we had the movie to focus on.


    When I got back to Annie in the lobby, her eyes were transfixed on a giant cardboard cutout of the minions. I just stood there staring at her, trying to figure out what she was looking at.


    ¡°Who¡¯d pay to see that piece of shit, huh?¡± I said, holding out Annie¡¯s popcorn for her to take. "I mean, children I guess, obviously."


    She didn¡¯t notice me. She just continued to stare at the insipid cartoon cutout.


    ¡°Uhhh¡­¡±


    Annie blinked a few times and spun her head to me my gaze with a furrowed expression. She blinked a few times and her eyes widened.Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.


    ¡°Oh, sorry, yeah!¡± she said taking the snacks from my hand.


    We went to the theater and took our seats in the back of the highest row. The theater was almost empty besides us.


    "So I''ve got some really good news." I whispered in Annie''s ear.


    "Oh. What?"


    "The bank called, and they''re going to help my mom refinance the loan on the house. So all that stuff''s over."


    Annie just stared at me in the darkness. "That''s good I guess."


    ''That''s good I guess!?'' That''s the most she can say!?


    We sat in silence, transfixed on the first act as the crew explored the crashed alien ship, William Hurt was rushed out of the hall of alien eggs, and Ripley and Ash forbodingly argued over the ship''s quarantine protocols.


    "You know, it seems like at least since I did that ritual everything''s gotten a little better around me." I whispered to my friend next to me during the lull. "Like, whatever it was really did work and


    "Fine." Annie grunted.


    "You still don''t understand what you''re dealing with, do you? A perfect organism. Its structural perfection matched only by its hostility." The dismembered android murmured, bleeding on the floor of the spaceship. "I can''t lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathies."


    Just then Annie tapped my shoulder and whispered ¡°Can we leave?¡± in my ear.


    "You wanna go now!?" I hissed, instantly feeling like a dick for making a big deal about it when we had already seen Alien a million times.


    ¡°Yeah. I guess. Just not feeling it.¡± She said.


    We emptied out of the theater and into the lobby.


    ¡°Okay, well, do you want me to take you home?¡±


    Annie again gazed up at that same diorama she had been looking at before the movie started.


    ¡°Yeah. Fine. Sure.¡±


    We rode home for most of the trip in silence. I didn¡¯t know what was wrong with Annie. Then I finally decided to try to break the ice again.


    ¡°Hey, I¡¯ve got some other good news!" I said. "You know that guy I told you about from high school, Grant?¡±


    ¡°Um, yeah. I guess. You''ve mentioned him.¡±


    ¡°He asked me out on a date tomorrow!¡± I laughed to myself. "I''m actually pretty nervous about it."


    ¡°Oh. Um. Cool!¡± Annie said. ¡°Why though?¡±


    I laughed. ¡°What do you mean?¡±


    ¡°I mean, why would he be interested in you now? It took him, like, ten years to notice you? Why are you wasting your time with somebody like that?¡±


    "Well, maybe people are just starting to figuring out who I really am. Maybe it just took a nudge in the right direction." I said.


    "You''re so narcissistic." Annie said. "You can''t even see what''s happening right in front of you, and you can''t even listen to your friend when they try to warn you."


    "Okay, warn me about what!? Sorry, but what''s so nefarious about finally getting what I want?"


    Annie growled in frustration. "The whole time we were in there we were being watched by these things! They were hiding around the movie decorations, watching us."


    I laughed. "Are you trying to tell me you saw ghosts haunting cartoon movie merchandise? That''s what had you so freaked out?"


    "Shut up!" Annie cried. "Just take me home!"


    "Jesus." I muttered.


    "Asshole." she said.


    I pulled up once again to Annie''s house and she opened the door and stepped out the moment I had come to a full a stop.


    "I know you''re not going to listen to me, but watch out for your own sake Silvana!" She barked before she slammed the side door and walked back inside her house.


    After what I had found in the woods the other day I had some reason to be cautious, but so far I had no reason to regret my dealings with Frimost, and tomorrow I would see just how far I could push this envelope I''d had mailed to me from such a far off place.