I fussed with my hair in the mirror, wondering if I’d gone insane. My deep blue eyes, in sharp contrast to the sickly pale and rat-like face around them, stared back at me with equal uncertainty.
I had a simple, dark green shirt on. A different color than yesterday, because wearing the same one would make it look like I hadn’t changed. I had tried and failed to locate the one skirt I owned, so it was jeans again.
I knew logically what was happening. If I took a step outside of myself, it was kind of obvious. A lonely girl plans to meet someone very pretty and immediately decides to care about her appearance more. She would not be doing this if she wasn’t going to meet that someone, therefore she is doing it for them.
The problem was that stepping back into myself with that newfound knowledge was terrifying. I’d done this song and dance before. I knew myself well enough to know I was very gay. Inconveniently so, even. It was a weak point, but one I thought I had walled off after Felicity.
And then this flower-shaped wrecking ball had crashed into it at full force.
I sighed. My hair was as good as I was going to get it and it had been for the last five minutes. It at least looked better than yesterday. Enough of the tangles were gone and I’d managed to pull it into a black, wavy lob.
I’d known this girl for one day. I had reinforced my persona in the middle of the day and it barely lasted an hour before she was tearing it down again. I was definitely too lonely.
I glanced down at my phone on my desk. Lily had also only known me for a day, but she’d sent that text. She’d even been careful enough to word it so that it wasn’t clear why she was offering, in case whoever I went to the library to hide from read my texts. She actually cared.
That was the thought that let me recenter myself. I could not afford to have this schoolgirl crush be an issue with the first real friend I might have in years.
After I had recharged the house wards this morning, Margaret had unceremoniously told me to go do something useful. The Whisper ward from yesterday had failed yet again so presumably she was designing an even better one.
Which meant I had effectively an entire day to do my research.
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I spent the walk to the library reorganizing my list of priorities.
1. Develop a long-term strategy for Margaret and Lily. Margaret wouldn’t be satisfied by my excuse forever, especially once the question of a hedge witch was resolved.
2. Research methods that could have been used to kill Amy. It was still very uncertain that it had been magical, but I was willing to bet I could make a lot of headway in determining that using the library.
3. Dyer research. This was the least pressing issue, though it couldn’t be completely ignored. Margaret’s condition was deteriorating and the longer she was left to fester, the more likely she’d do something drastic.
4. Figure out what a GM is.
It had been a long time since I’d made it to the library this early on a Friday, so I wasn’t sure who would be at the front desk. It turned out to be Levi, who was always on his phone. He didn’t even see me come in.
Despite the order I’d put them on the list, I decided to work on the second priority first. The first one was the kind of task my subconscious would be passively working on in the background anyway.
So, let’s say I wanted to kill Amy. How would I do it?
If I were a real witch I’d have a plethora of options. However, a hedge witch was someone who had just stumbled upon something real. They would have one or two tricks at most.
Tricks felt like the wrong word considering the state of the corpse. That’s what was bothering me about this. The corpse had been torn into pieces. I could do that, maybe, with very creative use of animation. It was my only other spell, a fairly weak telekinetic pull.
However, every creative option I came up with involved some form of explosive. Putting enough into the spell to reduce a person to chunks of meat would kill me a dozen times over.
There was no world where a hedge witch could do that with a spell. No, this had to be a ritual. There were no signs of ritual marks in Amy’s room, which meant… I had no idea.
The biggest problem anyone making a ritual encounters is that rituals don’t discriminate. A ritual that affects a city block will affect everything in that block. If you constructed a ritual that would make Amy explode, it would also blow up everyone else within its range, including you. If you weren’t careful, it could even explode things vaguely similar to humans, like mannequins or dogs.
You could create additional conditions, but only ones that would make sense to a god. People were all just interchangeable bags of meat to them.
I immediately dismissed the possibility of any kind of precision targeting from a hedge witch. But what did that leave?
I knew what books I needed to find now though. Witches had been working on this problem for centuries. I needed to find a solution that was possible for someone who didn’t have proper training.
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Five hours later, I was in a study room with several books strewn about and at least a dozen diagrams for possible rituals. It was a simple room, just a rectangular table and six chairs. I’d picked one essentially at random and pushed all but one of the chairs on the side away from the door up against the wall. That lone chair was left on the side, for when I got tired of standing.
Several of the books on the table were in languages other than English, but communication was kind enough to provide me with translations.
I had just triple-checked the math on the ritual in front of me. Either this hedge witch was the second coming of Baba Yaga or...
Fuck, they’d summoned something.
Summoning was the only simple way to precisely target a ritual. It was still complicated as hell, but you didn’t need the magical theory expertise required for any of the other solutions. You could just copy the work of a real witch who’d already made the summoning ritual.
I knew a decent amount about summoning since it was one of Dyer’s specialties, enough to know that I really didn’t want it to be that. Summoning was the act of pulling a creature from Beyond, called an outsider, into our world and binding it with enough restrictions that it would do what you wanted.
Summoning solved the problem of targeting a ritual the same way a grenade solved the problem of targeting a barrel of gunpowder. It was still going to make a mess, but you could at least make it happen in the face of someone you didn’t like.
It was also the kind of field where each advancement was paid for in the corpses of the fools who’d tried something new.
The Inquisition cracked down hard on any signs of summoning. Honestly, I couldn’t blame them. The ritual in front of me, if drawn out properly, would summon something that could kill everyone in this town. Worse, using it would kill me, meaning I couldn’t control the creature to stop it from doing that. And this was just what I’d been able to put together from scraps.
A significant part of me wanted to destroy these books. It would burn away the goodwill I’d cultivated with this library over my life, but maybe it would be worth it to stop some reckless idiot from destroying Reston. An equally significant part of me screamed in horror at the idea of destroying something as sacred as books. I decided to set the issue aside for another day.
If our hedge witch had summoned something, then that explained the state of Amy’s corpse. It wasn't possible to get the precise control necessary to force an outsider to restrain itself. It would keep going until its alien mind was confident the target was dead.
A knock on the study room door pulled my attention. I looked up to see Lily had opened the door.
Lily’s ponytail was looser today, and a few wavy red tendrils framed her face. She had on a v-neck blouse, a pinkish shade of orange. Or was that orange-tinted pink? I had no clue. A pair of denim cut-off shorts completed the outfit.
I had no idea how I had missed someone so extremely noticeable. She looked better than she had yesterday, though considering my hormones I’d probably say that any day.
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She looked down at the table as she stepped into the room. I realized I was standing over a bunch of extremely magical diagrams.
“What on earth are you trying to build?” she asked.
I considered for a serious moment just telling her it was magic. Her friend Amy had believed in magic and it hadn’t seemed to bother her.
Then the rest of my brain managed to catch up with the situation and pointed out the many, many ways that could go wrong. Lily didn’t know about the Inquisition and would never believe me if I told her. Hell, for all I knew she could be part of the Inquisition. Though if that was true, I was already dead for the circle she’d seen.
“One of the things you can’t ask about,” I said finally. She looked at me incredulously before realizing I was serious.
“Alright then,” she said. She clearly found this funny, which made irritation bubble up inside me. “Did your phone die?”
I paused, reaching into my pocket to pull out my phone. I’d left it on silent out of habit. I flipped it open and read the text from three hours ago, though I made sure to keep Lily in my peripheral vision.
Lily: got email from reston. classes are canceled bc prof lansberg is dead
Lily: ill try to find more then meet you at library
Then one from only ten minutes ago.
Lily: r u at the library yet?
I flushed as I realized she’d had to search for the whole library for me.
“Who is Lansberg?” I asked. Lily’s expression straightened out as she remembered the subject matter.
“Math teacher. He taught the class we were trying to find Nathan in,” Lily explained. “From what I could figure out, his wife found him dead. Same condition as Amy.”
I took a moment to think. The same situation, going after one person in the night and leaving another completely unharmed.
“Did Amy have a class with him?” I asked.
“Nope,” Lily said. She’d settled in one of the chairs at a right angle to where I stood. “Her math work we saw yesterday had Mr Manton’s name on it.”
It figures that a girl who memorized people’s class schedules would have stored that away.
“Impressive,” I said. Lily grinned at the compliment and I made a note to give her more. “So, who knew Amy and took his class?” That made the smile drop.
“I don’t know that much,” she said. “Nathan, but probably a lot of other people too.” She looked to the side for a moment before continuing. “We’ll need to try to find more at the club today. Though actually, I guess that might not be happening. People are really freaking out now that a second person has died.”
“I suppose it’ll all die down when they decide it’s a second wild animal.” If my current theory about an outsider was right, the police might have been onto something. I couldn’t help but chuckle at that. Lily gave me a sour look, though a yawn broke her glare.
That someone new had died only four days later was a problem. One or two murders under implausible circumstances were interesting, but not enough for anything but local media to care. If this pace kept up though, we would have a lot of eyes on us uncomfortably fast. With how bizarre the murder method was, that would draw the Inquisition here.
How many serial killers had been caught by Inquisitors looking for witch activity? Sometimes it surely had to be just a mundane lunatic. Did the Inquisition call the police on them? They might just ignore mundane mass murderers. They were exactly the kind of stupid to decide it wasn’t their place to interfere with that.
No, focus Claire. What I really needed to do was more research. If this was an outsider, then a lot depended on figuring out what kind it was.
Lily was subtly inspecting one of the diagrams in front of her. She probably wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it, but I still snatched it to let her know she’d been found out. She looked suitably embarrassed to have been caught.
“Come on,” she pleaded as if the curiosity was hurting her. “You can’t just go making- I don’t even know what these are. What are they?”
“Why-” I stopped myself, too much of my irritation had bled into my tone. “Please, Lily. I said there would be things I wouldn’t talk about. That was part of the deal. If you can’t do that, then leave.” She flinched.
“Ok, ok,” Lily sounded so apologetic I almost felt bad. “I didn’t- never mind.” She started looking everywhere but at me.
“I need to keep working on this for a while,” I said. “Probably only two or three more hours. I imagine I won’t be very good company.”
Lily hesitated. She raised her hand as if to touch me and then jerked it back almost violently.
“Is that like you asking me to leave or- I mean I will if that is but if not would you mind if I stayed? I kind of don’t have any other friends.”
God dammit. That was me asking her to leave. She’d be reading over my shoulder and I highly doubted she was capable of being quiet.
But she was lonely.
“Yes, you can stay.”
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Lily was shockingly good at being quiet. Most of the time she faded into the background, doing something on her phone. Every so often I’d ask her to grab a book and a few minutes later I’d turn around to find it on the table in front of me.
After an hour, my need for new books had dried up. At some point, she put her head down on the table, and after another hour I realized she’d fallen asleep.
The results of my research were not inspiring.
There were two types of summoning, based on which glyph the ritual was focused around. If you summoned an outsider with intrusion, you would get something akin to an echo of your target. It would be held together by the ritual itself, so keeping it permanently would require a permanent sacrifice. These were the kind that could just be banished. It might even be possible with a spell, though not one I knew. This made them the generally weaker but safer version of summoning.
If you were insane, you’d summon something with manifestation. That would actually reach into the Beyond and pull something here. It was still an unnatural form, translated through the god since the worlds Beyond didn’t tend to agree with our silly concepts like euclidean geometry. Since was technically a distinct creature, this kind of outsider could even use its own magic.
The rest of the ritual bound your outsider, restricting its behavior and forcing it to follow certain commands. The rules and limits of bindings varied so much that I didn’t even try to guess the restrictions of the ones the hedge witch used.
Most importantly, if you tried to banish a manifested outsider, you would just break the bindings on it. This would leave you with a creature who is quite upset to exist in a world of euclidean geometry and has nothing stopping it from killing everyone it sees.
The one piece of good news was that there was a way to ward against outsiders of any kind. ‘Not of this reality’ was one of the categories that did make sense to gods, which meant I could probably make a ritual to hurt it.
There was, of course, the other option. The one where this was just some mundane lunatic. But if that was the case, there really wasn’t much I could do. Yesterday had well established that I was no detective.
I set the book in my lap aside. I’d been reading it more to double-check what other books were saying than for anything of value.
I looked over at Lily, fast asleep. I hadn’t even realized she was tired. It couldn’t possibly be comfortable, leaning against the table like that. With each exhale, she blew a strand of hair away from her face. With each inhale, it fell back to where it was. It was adorable.
Lily was a baffling person. There was clearly a lot of confidence buried in there, she showed it to both Peter and Madison yesterday. But the rest of the time she was a ball of constant anxiety. I couldn’t find the common thread. When did Lily the Girl become Lily the Brave?
She was socially competent enough that she could have friends, easily. Hell, she was pretty enough that she didn’t even need competence. Yet for some reason, she was lonely. She didn’t think her only friend had thought of her as a friend.
Though she had seemingly decided that I was a friend. Maybe she could only ever have one at a time? So when Amy died, she latched on to the next person she saw.
It didn’t fit. Well no, it did, but it fit loosely. I was spinning threads around the real Lily but I wasn’t properly capturing her. The rainfall was sliding down the shell.
Something was wrong.
I stood up suddenly, unsure of why. My instincts were screaming that I needed to act.
I did an inventory of the room. Lily was still asleep. My backpack was by the far wall, which had my first aid kit and ritual supplies. The table had books and diagrams on it.
I gathered all the diagrams, since I couldn’t afford to leave them here and didn’t want to destroy my work. I put them in my backpack with my ritual supplies, then put the backpack over my shoulder.
My instincts were frustratingly vague about what the actual threat was. I knew better than to ignore them, but there were too many things I could be reacting to. Did I need to run or hide?
I didn’t have a weapon, which was stupid. My only options for defending myself were getting into a fistfight, which was a terrible idea, and animation, which barely qualified as combat magic. The shell broke against the water.
Something was wrong.
Being prepared this time let me recognize the cause as unraveling, the tears in reality that occurred when gods pushed against our universe with enough force. It happened when activating most rituals, but who would be reckless enough to do that in the library?
Probably a hedge witch reckless enough to leave two obliterated bodies.
“Lily, get up.” I moved over to her and started shaking her awake. She withstood a surprising amount of shaking with only mild grumbling. Finally, I grabbed at her neck and pinched until she had to wake herself up enough to stop me.
“What?!” Lily all but screamed at me as she slapped my hand away.
“Something is wrong. We’re leaving,” I said. Lily looked at me with suspicion, as if I would be doing this as a joke, but she got up nonetheless.
Very worrying dots were connecting in my head. The list of students who had a connection to both Amy and the professor. There was some common thread there, and the odds were good that thread crossed Lily’s too.
I opened the study room door and saw the library extending out into infinity, corridors duplicated and twisting in more than three dimensions.
Lily screamed in horror and I couldn’t help but feel like she had the right idea.