Mace cleared off the table. “You’re about to get a crash course in Pull magic. And hopefully, I will get a clue as to what really happened to Cornsilk.”

Pull magic was the dark occult to the light of science. Mace never knew why everyone was afraid of the dark. So you couldn’t see in the dark, big deal, Mace needed heavy prescription glasses. And it’s not like your other senses stopped working in the dark. Too many relied on what they could see, but Mace knew what kind of monsters lurked in the light, hidden behind smiling faces.

“Pullers are also called Goetics, which means charmer, and you’ll have to be charming. These…entities, let's call them, expect a certain level of politeness.”

Ringa piped up. “This all sounds a bit occult,” he squawked.

“It is!” said Mace excitedly. “But it’s not that scary, it’s just a bit of trans dimensional communication.”

“I prefer my communication to be stamped, thank you very much. If otherworldly spirits wanted to talk with us we’d be getting ghost writers.”

Mace rolled her eyes. Ghosts weren’t the souls of the dead. No one knew exactly where you went after you died, but you certainly didn’t stick around. Ghosts were the product of mausolium, an element that was able to record a person’s conception of themselves, usually at their most tragic moments. The souls of the dead could be contacted, but they were as silent as the dead on whatever came after.

“This does seem a bit necromantic,” said Thistle.

“We’re not contacting the dead, much less flirting with them,” reassured Mace.

A potato was set in the center of the table while Thistle’s salt shaker stood nearby.

“Before we begin, if anyone wishes to leave, now would be-” before Mace could even finish, the space that Ringa had occupied now only contained black feathers gently floating down. Like comedic timing, the universe functioned on timing. And unlike comedy, the universe was actually funny.

I guess it’s just you and me,” smiled Mace.

Thistle looked nervous. “You seem to be unusually enjoying yourself.”

“I took Goetics as a minor,” she lied.

Pull was expressly forbidden for undergrads at Aethowix. It was bad enough having young adults mess with the fundamental forces of the universe, they didn’t need help from beyond. Mace had creatively appropriated some books on Goetia from the library and spent long nights secretly munching on that forbidden fruit.

Mace held up Cornsilk’s recipe. “Step one, recite aloud the customary joke of the month,” she read. “Why are pterodactyl wizards so quiet? Because you can’t have a loud wiz with a silent p.”

Mace and Thistle sat in silence.

“Eh, six out of ten,” said Mace.

“What’s a terror-dack-till?” asked Thistle.

“It’s like a bird crossed with a lizard,” she said.

“Oh! Like one of those dinosaurs?”

Mace rethought her choice of words. “Well, pterosaurs are lizards that fly like birds while dinosaurs are birds that walk like lizards,” she said, shrugging.

Thistle blinked are her.

“Not important right now. Step two, draw a one-point-six-one-eight foot circle of salt around the potato.” Mace carefully sprinkled the salt, using one of Thistle’s pots and a spare measure as guides. “Step three, call forth the eight winds of the underworld by name: Callunua, Pakipsy, Hubold, Ka-A’re, The Fifth Wind, Ungorond, South-by-North, and The Other One.”

“The winds? I thought we were calling on spirits,” asked Thistle.

“We are, they are the winds, in spirit, that’s what all gods are.”

Gods normally lived just outside the borders of reality, if you could call it living. Most mortals thought of it as some form of under or otherworld, but churning ocean of cosmic flesh was a more accurate description. Beings with unspeakable names and impossible forms packed in tightly in the infinity beyond space and time. Every miniscule space between their writhing forms was occupied by yet another god. Their only salvation was to squirm their way to the surface, hoping for a rock that was a rational universe to cling onto. When they rose from the tumult, their bodies were given rational forms and their minds a purpose. Sometimes, depending on what their believers believed, the god would form an extraplanar shell around itself. Creating its own personal heaven or hell for its believers.

And when a goetic cast a line into this roiling ocean, a god never thought twice about biting it, if you could call it thinking at all.

“Step four, write upon a piece of parchment your darkest secret,” said Mace.

“What?! Why do you have to tell them your secrets?” asked Thistle. “I don’t want some strange god knowing me that well.”

“It’s a part of the spell’s rules of give and take. And the spirit we’re attaching to this potato won’t tell anyone, it has to play by the rules too,” she assured.

They each took some parchment and began to write, carefully avoiding any glances. Mace thought for a moment. She had her secrets, but she needed a particularly juicy one to flavor this recipe. The time she snuck into her mother’s lab to make sugar from cotton balls. Or when she accidentally used botoxygen on herself and could barely see for a week. She smiled at the memories. But a different secret surfaced. Nothing good was attached to this one, and she knew that this was the best she’d be able to do.

She wrote ‘I cannot use phlogiston’.

She folded it, as Thistle did to hers.

“And you’re positive it won’t go blabbering our secrets?”

Mace nodded. “But in the unlikely event it did, it wouldn’t get far. Potatoes rot, so this isn’t exactly a permanent magic item.” She glanced at the recipe again, “Step five, burn the parchment and sprinkle the ashes on the potato.”

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Thistle fished a matchbook from her cupboard. The match burst alight before she could strike it. “Was, um, that you?” she asked.

Mace shook her head.

“I guess the spirits prefer spooky lighting,” said Thistle slowly.

“Yeah…spooky,” she replied. A theory began to form in her mind as she thought back to the pot of unboiled water from earlier. They cooked their secrets in a tankard until they were ash. The potato was seasoned with ash, which was still better than bay leaves in Mace’s opinion.

Mace picked up the recipe again and read, “Step six, speak the command ‘write’ to the potato.” She cleared her throat and spoke the magic word. “Write,” she bid.

Nothing happened.

“Oh right,” she said and gently placed a pencil and paper near it. “Potato, write ‘hello world’ on this piece of parchment.”

Nothing happened.

“Come on buddy, you can do it,” she coaxed.

Nothing happened. They waited for anything to happen. Anything, or more accurately everything happened as the universe ticked on. Everything, except for a potato magically gaining literacy.

“Maybe there’s more to the recipe?” suggested Thistle.

Mace grabbed Cornsilk’s letter and read the last line. “Now, you have your very own dict-tater. Refrigerate after every use.”

She just stared at the paper. Thistle stared at her.

“All of that for a damn pun?!” she yelled. She ripped up the letter and slammed the pieces on the ground. Slam wasn’t the physically correct word with air resistance in play, but it got her feeling across.

“Maybe we did something wrong!” said Thistle, trying to diffuse the situation.

“We did everything on the paper! Of course it didn’t work, nothing this year has ever worked for me!” She flopped down into the chair. “Oh well, maybe we can try again tomorrow,” she said defeated. “I think maybe I’ll just go to bed early.”

Thistle put a gentle on her shoulder. “You know what cheers me up? A good helping of mashed potat-oh, sorry.”

“That’s alright,” waved Mace. “It’s not your fault I can’t do anything.”

“Nonsense! You’ve taught me more magic in one day than reading those dusty old books could in a lifetime. In a hundred lifetimes!”

Mace smiled up at Thistle. She really was a mother, heart and soul. She reminded her a bit of her own mother. Mace briefly thought of her mother. Was she still disappointed in her? She never said she was disappointed to Mace’s face, but moms were like that. Their silence screamed.

“If it’s alright with you,” said Mace, handing Thistle the ashen potato. “I prefer my potatoes scalloped and drowning in cheese.”

That’s odd, thought Thistle, she didn’t remember lighting the stove. But the pot of water sitting on the element was fairly warm to the touch. Bubbles were already starting to form on the bottom. She shrugged and lit the stove anyway.

She began to peel the potatoes as the pot heated up. In any other context, peeling away skin and eyes would land squarely in the horror genre, but here, it would be found amongst cookbooks. Her fingers fell on the potato they had tried to force a god into. Thistle heard somewhere that there were seven gods in each grain of rice. This potato would have practically been a palace for any prospective holy renters. Rooms, comfortable, lots of nutrients, so why didn’t it work? Mace really seemed like she knew her stuff, so why was she hesitant to demonstrate her powers? And she seemed to be really into calling strange gods, from beyond time and space, so why didn’t any pick up?

She shrugged to herself. As a mother, all she wanted to know was on her children’s minds. But she knew that the harder she pried the less they’d give. Mace would be ready to tell her in her own time. Her mind wandered as she peeled. She pictured herself as a detective on the hard streets of Kes Ferino, or as a sheriff in the deserts of Boonteca. Or maybe as a pirate looking for lost treasures in the Kio Islands, deciphering runes on potato skins.

Hang on. Her mind was brought back to the kitchen. Were those letters on the inside of the peel? She gently unspooled it and…they were letters!

Mace read on the window nook of her room. The book was titled ‘Unique Powers Amongst the Wizards’ by Y. Y. Tortola. She picked it from the collection of textbooks Thistle had collected over the years. Most of the books in her library were decades out of date, but they were worn and well loved by Thistle and her family. But the small bookshelf in Mace’s room had once belonged to young children, so Mace picked up the one that looked the least sticky and stained.

It listed several unique abilities that pushers sometimes developed during their lives. When you spent much of your life developing techniques to manipulate reality, you ended up finding shortcuts. And like all wizards in every reality, pushers were very uptight about trade secrets.

She filled the page, her eyebrows knit together, and her heart sank. Staring back at her was a life-like woodcut portrait of her uncle. He looked decades younger, but Mace recognized his tall frame, his sad watery eyes, and the beginnings of his now iconic white beard. Under her uncle was the caption ‘Doctor Yufizard Hickory, Wizard of the 7th Level’. It was well before his teaching days, let alone his ascension to headmaster.

Of course he was in here, she thought. He had achieved the seventh level after demonstrating his new and improved method of remote viewing via telemetry. Initially pioneered by Barbasont Quartet some centuries ago, a wizard could tap into the electromagnetism inherent in Munth’s atmosphere. They would tune the electrical signals in their own nervous system to get signals from leagues away. Finally, a wizard could spy on his enemies and collect valuable information, like when a flock of geese were about to go on holiday down south.

Human brains weren’t naturally built to pick on the kind of electromagnetic signals that animals could, so unless you wanted to know when to mate, remote viewing was useless. That was until uncle Yufizard used rocks instead of air.

He correctly theorized that electricity could travel through metal much more efficiently and demonstrated it using seams of gold in a dwarf mine. He was able to accurately describe a conversation between two dwarves nearly a mile down, who were curious as to why their gold was ‘going all runny’ and ‘boy was it getting hot in here’. He would later achieve the 8th level by switching to copper, which wouldn’t turn the mine into an oven.

And like all good wizards and businessmen, he kept his method strictly secret. No one could replicate the process to even close to what Yufizard had done. He even kept it from his younger sister, Mace’s mother.

It earned him the epithet ‘Arcane Breaker’. Arcane being used in its literal sense of secret, protected, and hidden. Nothing could be obscured from him, not even his own family’s secrets, as Mace had learned the hard way.

Mace heard running coming up the stairs. Thistle burst into the room.

“Letters Mace! On the inside!” she shouted.

“W-what?” asked Mace, quickly closing the book.

“The potato was writing, but on the inside!” Thistle shoved a wet, curling potato peel into Mace’s hands. She inspected the peel. The inside was covered in straight and curving lines, almost like someone took a pen and scribbled a hasty note. The ink was a bit watery, but not illegible.

“That son of a…person,” said Mace, quickly remembering who she was with. “His recipe worked! Do you know what it says?”

Thistle shrugged. They spent the next minutes trying to carefully untangle the peel and match the letters into coherent words. When they were sure they got it, Mace was surprised at how many ellipses there were. What, was he running out of breath when dictating it?

“Look out the window…right…about…now,” she read.

They looked at each other in confusion.

“What do you reckon he meant by that?” asked Thistle.

“Maybe it was a reminder for-,” out of the corner of her eye, Mace spotted two glowing dots outside of her window. Two small lanterns were moving outside. She pressed her face to the window.

“Looks like someone’s out late for a stroll, I wonder how he knew?” asked Thistle.

“Someone very suspicious,” said Mace.

Their eyes followed the two dots until they disappeared out of sight.

“That’s funny, there’s nothing that way except for the grave we dug for Cornsilk,” mused Thistle.

Mace felt herself grin, she finally had a new lead. “Thistle,” she said looking up at her counterpart. “How would you like to have some on the job training?”