“There is a narcissism inherent in witchcraft. To work any magic one must truly believe that reality ought to bend before them. They must look upon the laws of the universe and disagree with such stubbornness that the world itself wavers. A witch steals power from beings incomprehensible to them because it is their right to have, proven by the cleverness with which it was taken.”
- Theory of Final Magic by Lilian Rivers, 1894
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September 30th, 2004
I usually woke up before the alarm clock went off, but I never got out of bed before it did. The earlier I got up, the more time I needed to deal with her. But my alarm was going off, which meant it was time to move.
“I have not betrayed you yet,” I said to the air.
I rolled out of my bed, tucked away in the farthest corner from the door. I hit the alarm on my nightstand as I passed. It was only a few steps to get to my closet.
Said closet was fairly barren. The door hung open, showing the same basic patterns of single-color shirts and pants. There was at least one skirt in there, somewhere. It didn’t matter what I wore, but I only had six minutes until she would get upset that I wasn’t eating breakfast yet. It wasn’t consistent, of course, it varied based on her mood and how late I’d been over the last week or so, but trial and error had shown six minutes was the best time to aim for.
I went to my desk in the corner, the next step. The mirror showed my hair was a mess, black curls tangled down to my neck. I didn’t try that hard to brush it down. It never mattered to her.
My backpack was on the floor, ready to go when it was time. It contained a first aid kit, my ritual supplies, and a few library books. The books were research for personal projects, or maybe I just called them projects so I felt like I was doing something important.
In four minutes I was at the door. I let out a sigh, readying myself for the hardest part. I focused on my own thoughts. Each one was a thread, weaving together into the tapestry that made up my mind. I flew through them, my fears leaving them in disarray. I cut them off mercilessly.
This was a mental trick, a switch that turned me from Claire the Girl into Claire the Witch. The version of me that woke up every morning was a coward, but the self that walked out of my bedroom was a competent apprentice who knew better than to feel afraid of anything.
“I have not betrayed you yet,” I said as I left my room and headed for the kitchen. The first floor was simple, a large central room with doors like the one I just crossed along the sides. Her room was directly across from mine, and between them was an open kitchen area in the back.
The layout changed sometimes when I wasn’t looking. What didn’t change was that it was always made of natural wood, like the entire house had been built by carpenters by hand instead of components made in factories. Even the refrigerator was wooden, though the internal components were modern. The tableware was the one break in this illusion since no amount of rustic charm made her use non-ceramic plates and bowls.
Breakfast was just as routine, taking up to seventeen minutes. I barely paid attention to the food I ate. She wasn’t ever in the kitchen, which was a small mercy, but she needed to hear me moving around to be satisfied.
Idly, I considered whether I’d ever seen her eating food. It felt unlikely that she’d magically removed the need to eat, that was pretty far outside the realm of our magic. She probably just ate away from me so I couldn’t poison her. I hadn’t actually tried to poison her yet, but that was no reason to allow me the opportunity.
After eating and washing the plates, I walked upstairs to the workshop. The staircase was next to the front door, which I noticed and looked away from. I couldn’t look at the door too long without her getting upset, but not looking at all was just as suspicious.
The stairs wrapped around the corner of the house before going up to the next floor. The second floor had an interior balcony, letting you look down on most of the first floor.
Most of this upper level looked like a library. Bookcases spanned the walls, which were a few times farther back than the first-floor walls in blatant defiance of local space. Tools and instruments were scattered around shelves haphazardly, mostly protractors and markers.
“I have not betrayed you yet.”
The penultimate step now. Upon getting to the workshop, I had to refresh the house wards, which amounted to pressing my hand against a small circle drawn onto the wall at the top of the staircase and deciding the wards were refreshed. It barely created any backlash.
A line from the circle moved up the wall into the attic, presumably where the actual ritual circles were. I wasn’t allowed to see them, because knowing what the wards were was as good as breaking them.
“I have not betrayed you yet,” I said. The routine was finished.
Suddenly, I noticed Margaret. She had been there the whole time, of course. If I searched my memories I would remember having seen an old woman with a glass right eye, graying black pixie cut, and permanent scowl standing against the far wall. But until right now it was not possible to know beyond an abstract sense that she was there.
“Finally,” she said. “I swear, it’s like you enjoy making me wait. That’s not a very pleasant spell to keep up, you know. It’s your fault I have to.” She paused a moment, before asking curiously. “Do you enjoy making me wait?”
She didn’t seem that strained. One of these days, when I was feeling particularly brave, I’d need to time out how long she could keep that spell active. I’d almost certainly be punished for it, but as long as I noted the time before the curse set in properly I could get a rough idea. Assuming she didn’t intentionally activate it early to deceive me, which she might.
“No,” I answered. She snorted in disbelief. “What do you want me to work on today?”
If I was very lucky it would be another day of lessons. She was far nicer during lessons.
“You are going to do exactly what I tell you,” she snapped. “Now get the protractor, 18 inches, and Redland’s Psionics Volume 3.”
I suppressed the flinch and started moving. Asking like that had been stupid of me, just giving her an excuse to be irritated. Today was going to be ritual work. An 18-inch protractor meant a big ritual.
The book was deceptively heavy, but I was well used to it. There were two types of books about magic, those written by witches and those written by charlatans. Redland’s Psionics was one of the rare books that was probably both. There was way too much useful information in it for him not to be one of us, but Redland had decided to use the foundations of real magic to convince idiots they were psychic. However, they were the only books on mental magic that didn’t contain fake rituals designed to drive you insane, so Margaret had them anyway.
When I brought the requested materials, Margaret quickly began directing me on how to draw the ritual. Every once and a while, Margaret would stop and tilt her head like she was listening to something. I used the symbols in Redland’s book as references and used the geometry tools to ensure I got all the interior line angles correct.
Ritualcraft is the art of talking to gods, great forces from Beyond our universe so powerful that they can reach into and act upon our world. The gods probably weren’t conscious, they were more like computers than people. And if you knew how to send the right signal, they would respond usefully and predictably.
Unsurprisingly, sending signals to extradimensional computers is complicated. You need to draw symbols called glyphs in a circle in such an order that starting from any single symbol and going around in a full rotation constructs a meaningful ‘sentence’. Each sentence that can be built this way is a component of the ritual, all coming together into the concept of what the ritual does.
There were additional factors, of course. Interior lines to skip glyphs in certain sentences or accent markers to modify how a glyph is read in a specific sentence. There was also some very complex math about the interior angles that needed to be done to be sure you were even calling out to the right part of your god. It was all so complicated that a witch could spend days just designing a single ritual.
I was only allowed to know all this in theory. Margaret wasn’t quite insane enough to teach me how to make my own rituals. But there was only so much magical theory a person could learn before they got a grasp on magical practice.
Which was why I had a pretty good idea of what I was drawing over the next few hours. And it did take hours, the sheer number of interior lines and boundaries I needed to draw perfectly. There was some margin of error but straying too far was liable to drive me insane at best.
This ritual was a monstrous thing, a whole seven glyphs. The basic function was yet another attempt to track Witches of the Whisper. It would identify when someone cast almost any mental magic on someone inside the circle, so long as the attacker was within a certain range. I couldn’t guess the range without a calculator, but logically it would be larger than the last one.
It also had a secondary function, something else that happened when it found an attack. Maybe it drove the attacker insane? I was far less confident about that piece.
Margaret had been “under attack” by mind magic for months now. At no point in her war had the voices in her head ever been successfully tracked back to their caster. She took that as a challenge, an affront to her ability that some witch could hide better than the all-seeing eye of the Weaving, our god, could find.
I wasn’t allowed to have an opinion, so I drew as I was told. Once I was done, I went to the bathroom, as anyone who didn’t enjoy embarrassing themselves did before such a ritual.
“Finally. It wouldn’t have taken so long if… bah forget it,” Margaret said as I came back. She sat down in the center of the ritual. “Have you betrayed me yet?”
“No.”
“Then activate the ritual.”
I hesitated, looking down at the ritual. The process for activating a ritual was fairly simple. I just had to touch the circle and imbue it with the intent, like I did with the wards. It would only be a temporary effect without a permanent sacrifice, which this one probably didn’t have. Margaret didn’t like permanent sacrifices. She considered them beneath her and since I would be the one sacrificing I happily agreed. However, it had occurred to me in the bathroom that this ritual seemed a bit too complicated for what it would be demanding-
An icy chill cut off my thoughts. I gasped and fell to the floor, feeling like I was choking on air. Margaret released the curse just before the dissociation could begin.
I hadn’t even been watching her. How stupid could I be?
“I don’t seem to notice you activating the ritual, foolish girl,” she snarled. “Have you finally decided to betray me?”
“No,” I said weakly, still shaking. My breath was visible as condensation in the air.
“No no, you wouldn’t ever actually grow a spine…” Margaret trailed off. “Are you being affected by the Whisper? All the more reason for you to hurry up and activate the ritual.”
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My choice had been made for me. I took another breath and focused on the ritual, believing with all of myself not only that it would work, but that it ought to work. The pressure in the room built to an impossible height as the ritual was enacted. The Weaving looked upon the ritual and spun a scheme most devilish. The threads turned over one another into a tapestry that fell into the definition of a ruse.
I felt the backlash crash into me, shattering my mind into strands. As I wove my thoughts together, I waited for the ritual to… something. After about fifteen minutes, I was coherent enough to realize this whole thing was just a very complicated ward. Nothing would happen that I could see.
“Ah, you’re back. Now go away.” Margaret nodded to herself. What? “Yes, really. Do something outside of the house. Honestly, is it so hard to imagine I’d do a nice thing?”
It was. Hell, it was several times more likely it was a trick of some kind, but I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity. I all but ran downstairs to my room. I grabbed the backpack and turned on my heel. I was out the front door in just over a minute.
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In hindsight, running was definitely a mistake. I’d just been hit by the curse so my breathing issues were even worse than normal. I had to stop a few times along my trip to have coughing fits that probably made my whole journey take longer, in the end.
It was during one of those breaks that I worked out Margaret’s reasoning for releasing me. She’d needed me out of the house because she thought I was being attacked and anything directed at me wouldn’t trigger the trap I’d just drawn. The fact that she’d sent me out here as if a potential enemy wouldn’t even consider me worth attacking on my own was humiliating but probably accurate.
Still, any amount of humiliation was worth being free several hours earlier than I expected. There was a time when I would be going to Felicity’s shop, but that was a dangerous thought to linger on for too long. So instead I was headed to the Reston College library.
There was a reason that a witch as powerful as Margaret had chosen this college town to claim dominion over. It wasn’t the college library, of course. That was worthless to someone with the resources she had. Instead, it was the leyline crossing under our feet. Leyline crossings reduced the burden of ritualcasting dramatically. The ritual I’d so casually activated back at Margaret’s house would have driven me insane otherwise.
The existence of the leyline crossing meant that some powerful witch was always in charge here, which in turn meant there was a rich magical history here. Many of the books that ended up here were the good kind of magic books, which is exactly what I, a witch without Margaret’s extensive resources, would need.
Reston College’s library was a thing of beauty, practically gothic in appearance. The roof sloped upward in long curves that made one imagine a palace. Inside it was mostly cedar wood, but it was all treated with enough of a finish that it didn’t feel like Margaret’s house. There were far more exterior windows than I liked, but it wasn’t hard to find a study room or a quiet corner where I could have peace.
Rachael looked up from the front desk on my way in.
“You’re here early Claire. No classes?” Rachael had only started a few weeks ago. She was a black girl who seemed about my age, which would make her a freshman here. She wore her hair in threaded braids pulled into a ponytail, which looked great and was presumably difficult to maintain.
“I got away a bit early,” I said.
She started to say something else, but I was already moving past her into the library.
The fewer people I talked to, the less chance my inability to lie became an issue. Every god had a price, like an entry fee for using their magic, and the Weaving demanded your right to lie. Margaret said it filtered out the fools who weren’t clever enough to outwit others without telling a lie.
It didn’t come up that often, but you could only rely on awkward silences so many times before people started getting upset.
I settled down in my usual corner as quickly as I could. It was a carefully chosen spot, with the least total foot traffic. Most importantly, it was a comfortable place to sit that wasn’t in view of any exterior windows.
I already had the book I was reading in my backpack, a copy of the diary of Madeline Dyer. She rose to middling notoriety, relative to the secrecy of witchcraft, in the late 50s for making advancements in spatial warping and summoning magic.
Her crowning jewel was a technique for folding space, creating a hypothetically infinite amount of room within the same finite space. She claimed to have stolen the power from another reality, but it was easily replicable in ours. It was the same technique Margaret used to make her workshop bigger on the inside.
The thing that made her famous, however, was how she died. In 1964, she was killed by her apprentice who collapsed a folded space she was in. It turns out that when rooms are bigger on the inside, suddenly becoming the proper amount of big inside is a problem.
If you were to punch a hole in the wall of such a space, the matter inside would be displaced, effectively teleporting to the nearest valid location in real, non-folded space. It was disruptive as hell, but usually not fatal.
Dyer’s apprentice had found some method to collapse the space without rupturing the boundary, which meant there was no valid location. The result was explosive.
There were a few issues with trying it myself.
1. As far as I could tell, only the second floor of our house was folded. When I entered the house, Margaret would only become detectable once I’d said I hadn’t betrayed her. Intending to sabotage the workshop would count as betraying her. If she wasn’t in the workshop when I collapsed it, she would do worse than kill me.
2. Unless I found a way to protect them, I would lose all of the books in the workshop. That wasn’t a pleasant trade to make. I wanted to be a witch and those books were my legacy. Generations worth of witches had built that collection of knowledge, allowing each apprentice to advance further than their master had.
3. Dyer’s damned apprentice hadn’t ever written down how she did it. It was obvious why. So many witches used expanded workshops that she’d probably be able to use the trick again. Unfortunately for her, every other witch with such a workshop also understood this. She was killed in less than two weeks.
Which was why I was currently digging through Madeline Dyer’s journal. I had already found enough details about her workshop to know how she expanded it. I could even do it myself. I just had to figure out the same trick the apprentice had.
I had a feeling it was about how folded space worked on a more fundamental level. It wasn’t just making a room bigger on the inside, you were getting more matter from somewhere when the walls expanded to fit the new space.
After Margaret was dead, I would immediately and loudly announce how the trick worked. The mad scramble that ensued to use it before everyone worth killing had protected themselves would probably buy me enough time to get my feet under me before someone tried to kill me.
It was a laughably bad plan, which is probably why I abandoned it as quickly as I did.
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“I don’t know anything.” Lie.
“Please, she’s dead Peter! Do you know who would have wanted to hurt her?”
“This is ridiculous, the police-” Another lie, but she cut him off with yet another question.
My quiet sanctum had been breached. I’d seen them approach in my peripheral vision. Some girl had come chasing this poor guy halfway across the library. It was quite a distracting argument the two were having.
Normally the girl would be the unreasonable one but communication, one of my two spells, was insistent that the guy was lying through his teeth.
Spells were the same glyphs that made up rituals. Instead of being drawn, they were integrated into a witch’s cognition so thoroughly that they could produce simple magical effects.
“I was just talking to Jessie. She knows you, are you seriously trying to tell me you don’t know anything?”
“Yes!” he all but shouted.
“That’s a lie,” I said on a whim. I hadn’t looked up from the diary, but this was far more interesting than Dyer’s opinions about her neighbors. She didn’t like them very much.
“No one asked you!” he snapped back.
I looked up from my book finally, glaring at him. It was quite satisfying how immediately he flinched back. I took the opportunity to look over them.
The boy, Peter, was fairly unassuming. White, very scrawny, light brown hair. I took the details in clinically. The girl on the other hand…
I had no idea how Peter was taking her in stride because I surely wasn’t. Her bronze skin contrasted strikingly with her dark red hair, pulled back into a low, messy ponytail. She had a dark green, sleeveless tank top that revealed a surprisingly athletic figure. Beneath that, she had a simple pair of denim shorts. They looked worn slightly and were quite tight, proving the athletic figure continued all the way down.
It occurred to me that I was staring and I snapped my focus back to Peter. Why was I mad at him again? Ah, right.
“If the two of you are going to disturb my reading, the least you can do is stop lying. Lies are much more distracting.” Communication rapidly became obnoxious in situations like this.
“Except I’m not lying,” he pointed out. A cat-and-mouse game would get tiring.
“Yes or no. Do you know who killed the girl?”
“Amy,” the redhead supplied the name.
“Like I said, I don’t know.”
I paused, thinking back to the wording of the question. The girl beat me to it.
“But you do know who wanted to hurt her?” She was getting more animated, making larger gestures.
“No.” Peter had shifted, seeming far more uncomfortable now that he was engaging with two people at once.
“There we go,” I said. “That’s the lie.”
Peter glared at me, but I’d had lessons on intimidation. The poor boy’s nerve didn’t hold long.
“It was Nathan, ok?” he said finally. “I know he was pissed at Amy for something. It involved Madison. But he wouldn’t- he couldn’t even do that to Amy!”
The girl looked at me for confirmation and I nodded. None of that meant anything to me, but clearly, it did to her.
“Thank you,” she said to Peter. “That really does mean a lot, that you want to help.”
She somehow put enough sincerity into her voice that even I believed it. Then I realized that communication hadn’t gone off which meant she did too. Peter shifted uncomfortably.
“I mean… it’s not like I don’t care. It’s just… even if someone did that to her, it’s the police’ job.”
I tuned them out since the disturbance was effectively done. I focused back on the diary. They exchanged a few more pleasantries. She even hugged him before he left, which was odd.
I noticed that I had not successfully read any more of the diary in the time that had taken. I also noticed that she had not left when Peter had.
I looked up from the book to find her staring at me, her head tilted to the side. Her eyes were a vibrant golden color. That couldn’t possibly be natural, was she wearing contacts? She might, she was clearly someone who cared about her appearance. Which reminded me that I was not and looked absolutely terrible right now.
“Yes?” I asked finally. I wasn’t sure I could bear that train of thought much longer.
“Thank you for helping with him. My name is Lily, Lily Florence.”
“Shouldn’t it be Rose, considering…?” Lily seemed the wrong flower to name someone with such vibrant red hair after. That got me a frown.
“My older sister got the name first. There are some red lilies, so Mom didn’t totally abandon the theme,” she said. She looked at me expectantly, clearly familiar with the power of awkward silences.
“Claire Rivers,” I said finally.
“Was it true?” Lily asked suddenly. She moved towards my seat, stopping surprisingly close. “Are you actually that good at telling when people lie?”
I hesitated, considering my response. I’d revealed as much already and it wasn’t obviously magic. Some people were just really good at spotting lies.
The fact that I couldn’t lie meant my only two options were saying yes or shutting up, which would be very embarrassing.
“I’m almost perfect,” I said. The angle Lily was at, I had to look up at her. “I’ve only ever met one person who can successfully lie to me.”
She seemed to hesitate, her hands wringing together in front of her, before talking again.
“Can you help me then? I’m pretty sure I know where Nathan is right now, if you came with me it would go so much easier.”
“No,” I said immediately. This had rapidly become a much larger commitment than I wanted to make. I could see it now, if I let this girl drag me to one interrogation I would end up at another and another. It was actually a pretty good ruse. Was she supposed to be the next Felicity?
“Please,” Lily begged. She reached forward and grabbed my hand, cupping it between hers. “My roommate, Amy, died. I’m pretty sure she was killed. I’m the one who…” she trailed off, looking like she was fighting back tears. “Please. She was my only real friend here.”
Lily’s hands were soft, but they might as well have been a vice grip for how well they trapped my freakishly pale hand. She was surprisingly warm, like she was running a fever. That explained why she was wearing a tank top in September. It was also the first time someone had touched me in nearly a year.
There was no reason for me to get involved. I didn’t care about this girl. I definitely didn’t care to play detective because I was told a sob story.
“Did you know I’d be here?” I asked. I needed confirmation. Lily just looked at me, baffled. “Is this a ruse? Yes or no.”
“No, I have no idea who you are,” she said. “Are you in like a witness protection thing?”
This was going to invite so many questions. It was a terrible idea. She still hadn’t let go of my hand. I needed to think.
“If I do this, I don’t answer any question I don’t want to,” I said, like a fool. Lily nodded rapidly.
“Deal.”
And the bargain was struck.