Tia lifted the blue stone — which Aaron suspected was lapis lazuli — and laid it on top of the flower in the mortar, then she ran the pestle around the rim of the stone bowl. It produced a thrumming sound that was both gentle and coarse. When she had completed three full circuits, she tapped the mortar a single time with the pestle and both rock and flower were magically rendered into a thick powder.
“One of the reasons I decided to do this with a ritual devised by someone else is that we’re on a time crunch,” Tia said. “But the potential for very powerful magic to be involved made it a strong choice, too.”
“What’s the difference between ceremonial magic and other kinds of spells?”
Tia began to flip through Arcanum Memoria, the little, aged tome she had brought out of her bag, as she answered. “It’s a nuanced distinction, since I use structured magic like the vast majority of casters, but if I had to summarize the difference, I’d say that ceremonial magic and high ritual rely more on symbolic elements than a personal mental framework and they tend to have a weight to them that comes from the tradition attached.”
She finally found the page that she wanted in her book and read through it several times.
“Please try to stay calm and quiet while I perform the rite. The grimoire says we should ‘experience the affected memory,’ but it’s not clear on what that means.”
Tia moved the mortar to the center of the table and began to make complicated gestures over it, her hands moving to form strange sigils and shapes. Then she began an incantation.
“Was genommen wurde, bleibt deins. Dein Geist gehört dir allein.”
Four years of high school German were utterly failing Aaron. He only vaguely recognized a few words after more than a decade without practice.
The powdered stone and flower began to gently jostle and shudder in the stone vessel.
“Magie wirkt durch Eigentum. Wir lehnen den Anspruch ab.”
Each sentence was more emphatic than the last, not in volume or even tone, but something obvious yet ineffable. The words gained a kind of weight as they were spoken.
The dense powder gleamed like a million tiny gems and began to rise out of the mortar, forming a glittering cloud of vibrant royal blue.
“Enthülle, was dem Geist verborgen bleibt.”
The last sentence reverberated through the apartment, like the ringing of a great bell. The sound didn’t wash over Aaron, but struck him like a blanket and stopped, engulfing him.
The cloud of fine dust wrapped around Aaron’s head in overlapping bands, spinning and shifting on unstable axes.
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He’d been looking for a lighter and ashtray. A beer was in his hand, slick with moisture. After all the weird shit at the softball game, he’d quit on quitting, but he couldn’t remember where he’d put anything.
He stood just outside the kitchen, in the living room, frozen.
He’d just seen… something.
Everything was wrong. Not the apartment — that was exactly as it should be. Except that it was as it should be… as he remembered it. Wasn’t he somewhere else?
Only… he had just seen… something.
He couldn’t identify what it was, but he could remember it. It was a person — no, it had been a person — standing by the door of his apartment. The door he always locked, even if he was just going to check the mail.
Aaron needed to know — was desperate to know — who it was.
He set his beer down on the credenza under the window and tried to see them, to will himself to notice. But the intruder only existed as a hazy impression, visible at the edges of his peripheral vision.
He couldn’t see the invader now because he hadn’t then, but he knew they were there because... because when he had tried to see them-
A person appeared, garbed in dark, vaguely militaristic gear, lunging at him with a knife.
Some kind of modern day ninja, he thought. I remember thinking how absurd that was.
Aaron flinched and tried to move away, but he was in a bad position and had no space. The knife struck him in the shoulder. Somehow, it failed to pierce his skin. He was shocked and yet… not.
I knew that would happen, he realized.
Except he hadn’t known it then. And then was now, not then. This is happening now. Wasn’t it?
The disorientation of experiencing a memory as if it were happening was overwhelming. Aaron’s mind was running on two separate tracks. His thoughts were so distant from his consciousness that it was more like reading what someone had written than hearing himself think.
It was like the most intense form of déjà vu; Aaron was a captive observer to a moment of his own life. He knew what would happen next, but had no agency to change anything.
All he could do was experience it. Again.
A second knife — one far more deadly — came out, just as it had before, and the battle began in earnest.
Aaron made a clumsy, half-trained effort to fend off his attacker, who had much more experience. He was propped up entirely by his developing power as a drakus. If he’d known that, then, would things have ended differently?
He cheered for himself internally when he delivered a brutal elbow, gasped when he kicked the couch back into the assassin, and cringed when he ran into the closet and crouched down on all fours.
After crashing into the assassin from his dark corner of the closet, catching him off guard and crushing him against the bathroom wall, Aaron struck him with desperate strength, sending him careening across the living room.
As he walked — or remembered walking — carefully through his apartment, approaching the fallen assassin, Aaron prayed for the memory to end. He knew what was coming and didn’t want to relive it. He didn’t want to become a murderer again and for the first time.
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But the memory wouldn’t end. Maybe it couldn’t.
Then Aaron was kneeling over the dying man, pinning him down with a knee and shouting questions at him. His feelings in that moment were impossible to turn away from, impossible to ignore.
Fear, curiosity, anger, but… no remorse. Shouldn’t he be feeling remorse? Guilt? Shame? Even in a life-or-death situation, shouldn’t he regret the taking of another’s life?
Worst of all, he realized that he hadn’t lost control.
The fallen assassin spat out some words, pausing for awful, gurgling breaths. Aaron had originally taken it for the word salad of delirium, shock, or a brain shutting down; they held a different significance now.
Or they would when now was then again.
“I struck at the serpent… before it could strike at me.. but its fangs have left me dead,” the assassin spat in that gasping cadence. “For another chance, I… give what’s left of my life... leave no trace… and make you forget.”
The last sentence, coming as the last dregs of life left the assassin, rang with power. Just like Tia’s incantation had… or would? No, had.
Whatever the timing of that spell and this one, Aaron felt the world around him changing. Before it could, ribbons of sparkling blue dust streamed into his vision, forming thick bands that whorled in the space between him and the assassin.
The power of the assassin’s words was intercepted by the swirling powder. Aaron couldn’t have said how he knew it, but it seemed to him the blue haze consumed whatever was being carried by the dying man’s words.
Magic; it’s devouring the magic and intent behind the spell, he realized.
Then the assassin was gone, vanished as if he’d never existed. All traces of the fight had disappeared, as well.
Aaron blinked and…
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Opened his eyes to find Tia sitting across the table from him.
Her eyes were still closed, but they slowly opened almost as soon as Aaron was back to his own senses in the present.
And this was the present. This was now, now. Truly and really now.
The rite had uncovered his memory of that horrible night so completely he’d been experiencing his own thoughts twice — those of the Aaron sitting in his new apartment in Upper Manhattan, and those of the Aaron fighting for his life in his old apartment in Sacramento — and it had been disorienting, to say the least. He was trying to process everything when Tia spoke.
“A spell of sacrifice,” she breathed. “You must be a real pain in the ass to argue with once your mind is set on something.”
Barrett had said something similar in their earliest meetings and it stung to hear it again, this time coming from Tia.
It stung all the more because Aaron couldn’t deny the truth of it. Barrett had called it strength of will, but was it? Aaron had rarely heard it framed in a positive light; Barrett and Tia might have been the first. It had always been a castigation for being stubborn, contrarian, and obstinate. But strong-willed? Hardly.
He had trouble sticking to schedules, getting places on time, keeping a rein on his snacking, maintaining a consistent sleep schedule, and a host of other practical little life things that suggested his self-control wasn’t up to snuff.
All of that, however, was his own personal bullshit.
“What’s a spell of sacrifice?” he asked, eager for a change of subject. He had another, more pressing question, but wasn’t ready to ask it yet.
“It’s possible to empower a spell by sacrificing some of your life essence to it, but it’s dangerous,” she said. “Like, really dangerous. It’s irreversible and hard to limit how much goes into it. Magic is greedy.”
Aaron thought back to the burning hatred etched into the face of the assassin in his apartment. If you were already dying, why not supercharge a ‘fuck you’ spell to spite an enemy?
Human pettiness and magic is a truly horrible combination, he thought.
“The most telling thing,” Tia continued, “is that the spell was clearly prepared in advance. That assassin went after you knowing he might die and ready to spend the last of his life to make it easier for the next guy.”
As grisly as that revelation was, it wasn’t all that surprising. They already knew there were people out there hiring mercenaries to jump people in the streets of New York at the risk of violating whatever secret laws there were. That made a lot more sense if it was the backup plan for the backup plan, more desperation move than deviously-crafted scheme.
And there wasn’t shit all Aaron could really do with that information at the moment, so he turned his attention to the next thing that mattered to him, even if he dreaded what he might learn.
“I didn’t think ‘experiencing the memory’ would be quite so literal,” Aaron said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I thought maybe it would be more like when you’re reminded of something you’d forgotten and have a vivid recollection of it. Especially something that triggers a powerful sense memory, like a smell from your childhood.”
“It was definitely more virtual reality than I thought it would be. I can’t imagine how scary that situation was, getting attacked at home without any idea about magic or mythics or anything,” Tia said.
“I mean, you just lived through it so I’m sure you have a good idea of how I felt,” Aaron replied, very casually.
She shook her head. “No, why would I?”
Was it possible Tia’s experience of the memory had been different from his? A knot in Aaron’s guts loosened the slightest bit, but he didn’t know enough about magic to take it for granted. He very much wanted to know If she experienced what he was thinking and feeling in the memory. If he played up his curiosity, Tia might not notice how invested he was in her answers.
“Did we experience the spell in different ways? What was it like for you?”
“It was like I was watching over your shoulder,” Tia said. “I could see everything as it happened, but it was an external view. How immersive was it for you?”
It took a moment for Aaron to decide how he wanted to answer, but he opted for the truth again, even if he was leaving things out. “It was completely immersive; so much so that it was hard to reconcile that it was a memory, not the present.”
Tia whistled. “That’s crazy! I wonder if it was that intense because of our inherited drakus memories.”
Some of the tension in Aaron’s shoulders bled away. He was, at different times, both a coward and a cold-blooded murderer in that memory. The thought of anyone peering that deeply into his mind had been more than a little unnerving. Now that the magic concealing his memory of the fight had been removed, Aaron wasn’t even sure that he wanted to have that knowledge for himself.
He’d suspected the only way he could have survived was if he’d killed the assassin, but he’d assumed it would have been in a cold, borderline dissociative state like the one he’d experienced in the garage and in those last few childhood fights.
Only it hadn’t been.
Aaron had been so surprised — or overwhelmed, or whatever — that he’d never really gotten angry or lost control, even when he’d almost had his shoulder skewered by the first knife. That familiar and hated cold had been there, the tingle clawing its way up his spine and down his extremities, but it hadn’t passed whatever critical mass was the difference between conscious action and near-fugue.
It was the most uncomfortable truth about himself he’d ever had to face: he had killed someone when fully in control of his faculties. He had done the very thing he’d been so afraid of as a child that he’d sworn to accept being called a pussy and a bitch just to avoid the risk of losing control in a fight.
That it was unintentional and in self-defense didn’t really matter; or, at least, it shouldn’t have. He had gotten away with it, too, thanks to the very magic that briefly robbed him of his memories of the crime and that felt wrong. And yet Aaron found that it didn’t weigh on him the way he thought it would have, the way he thought it should have.
There was plenty of regret, even a degree of remorse, but wasn’t Aaron supposed to be hollow-eyed and vacant, gazing off into the middle distance across the wartorn fields or forests of France?
Well whatever, Aaron told himself. You can freak out over your moral turpitude later. Try to stay focused on practical shit, right now.
Hoping that Tia wouldn’t notice the change of subject, Aaron decided it was a good time to explore the other lingering mystery of his earliest days as a drakus: the strange knives the assassins kept using to kill him.