1 – 1 E

“Principles of Summoning – 4th Edition. Encyclopedia Ephemeral – 2nd Edition. Iron and Salt; Fighting the Courts. On Roads, the Wood, and what lies Beyond. The Sixteen and the Three: Modern Elemental Theory.” Tam handled each book for a few moments, flipping through pages that ranged from normal print to handwritten cursive in varying colors of ink, then tossed them down into the box. “Was Grandpa an occultist, or a college student?”

I glanced around the room again before answering. The sun shone through long, thin windows near the ceiling, leaving shafts of light visible in the pall of floating dust. Shelves lined the walls, some cleared, but most still hosting old books. Most had titles that made no sense and rambled on about magic and monsters. A lot of them weren’t in English. Maybe a third of the ones we’d opened didn’t even use the Latin alphabet. “Whatever he was, I’m kinda peeved that he never showed us this secret room though. This is what kids live for!”

She looked up at the candle-filled chandelier, down at the wax-stained desk, then over at the two bird skeletons on the end table. Another pointed glance lingered on the symbols scratched and burned into the hardwood flooring. Then she threw a copy of 50 Shades of Gray from the desk at me.

“I can’t believe I’m being the reasonable one, Teresa, but if he’d been the kind of guy to take little girls into a dark, probably soundproofed, room full of bones then we’d have ended up in a mental asylum or six feet underground in the woods.”

“I mean yeah, but he wasn’t. We’d have been fine. It’s not like anything in here’s dangerous as long as he kept us from pulling the shelves over. Are you saying you didn’t fantasize about secret rooms and passages as a kid? About finding something magical, even if it was just a bunch of dusty old books?”

“Nope. I was too busy chasing after the dogs and following the cats up trees to read those Treehouse books you were always curled up in the living room with.”

“There’s a reason I stayed inside! My elbow still clicks from when you dragged me into a tree and dropped me.”

“We were fucking seven! How was I supposed to know it was a raccoon I was chasing and that it would jump at us? Plus it’s not my fault you let go instead of hugging the branch!”

I didn’t dignify that with a response. More of the books dropped into the boxes, the thud setting one of the bird skeletons shivering. I couldn’t even see the rods that had to be keeping it together. Whatever taxidermist had set it out must have been great at their job.

The claw marks under its perch were a bit creepy though.

“I just…I can’t believe he’s gone.”

“Me either.”

It took effort to look away from the bird’s empty eyes. A few extra steps to go around the table and the circles carved into the floor couldn’t hurt, right? Just better footing, it wasn’t like I was avoiding them because I was scared.

~-~-~-~

“Seriously? Eighteen years, and now you start reading? Could you please put that book down and help me carry this?” The door smacked into my shoulder instead of the fragile and extremely heavy box. “You’re the one that wanted this stupid TV anyway. I don’t get what’s wrong with the old one.”

She looked up from the couch and groaned, sliding a red bookmark into place in one of grandad’s old books. “I told you; the old one can’t connect to Netflix!”

“Just get over here, please. Unless whatever’s in that is more important than your precious Netflix on a big screen.”

She propped the door open with a shoe and hefted the other end of the box. “You don’t have to harp on me all the time, Tere. I thought you’d like me reading, anyway. If it’s not one thing it’s a dozen others!”

“Maybe I’d ‘harp’ less if you did your share of redecorating without it.”

“Ugh fine. It’s just so interesting though! I don’t know where Grandpa got all this stuff, but it’s so detailed! This one is supposed to be some sort of history book, I think. Not sure where it’s about, but it talks about Roads and Faeries and some old war I can’t find anything else about. It’s like a textbook, but cool! There’re descriptions of old battles that mention magic and summoning things. It’s like that Ring thing you got me to watch last year, with people dropping fire from the sky and turning the ground into water for miles around. “

“Ok, first off, that doesn’t happen in Lord of the Rings. Ever. Second, it sounds like a terrible high fantasy novel, but without an actual storyline. Too much focus on the world, not enough on characters. Third, you’re eighteen. Magic is great and all, but is it really more important than cleaning out the dust and getting the house liveable?

“Obviously. Did you see all the stuff in that secret room? Grandpa obviously thought it was real, maybe it is! Can you imagine that? I could turn that bitch Jessica into a toad.”

“Of course. You get into something I fantasized about for a decade, and the first thing you want to use it for is to turn your ex into a frog. Because, obviously, that’s the proper response to her dumping you for a guy.”

“What else would I use it for? It’s magic, isn’t the whole point of it fulfilling your wildest dreams and fantasies? I remember that one story you wrote when you were fourteen…”

I dropped my corner of the box onto her foot at that. “For bringing that up, you can figure out how to install this yourself.”

“Teresaaaaaaaaa! Come baaaaaack!”

~-~-~-~

The worst part about living with Tammy was that she had no sense of time or propriety. As in, she thought it was perfectly fine to bang on my door at two in the morning on a Wednesday. Something she was currently doing.

“Come on Tere, I know you’re awake by now. I’ve been doing this for five minutes, so either you’re being obstinate or you’re dead.”

“Just because you learned a big word or two doesn’t mean you can wake me up for one of your random ‘adventures’. Go away, or I swear I’m going to put orange dye in your shampoo right before the semester starts.”

“Bitch, you know I’d rock that color. This is important though! I promise, you’ll want to see it.”

“If you try to drop another dead snake down my shirt, I’m locking you outside. For a week. Not everyone can subsist entirely on caffeine and pizza pockets, so unless you’re bleeding out and can’t see to drive to the emergency room… Let. Me. Sleep.” I threw one of the slippers by my bed at the door, missed terribly, and tried to pull my pillow tighter against my ears.

The pounding stopped and her next words came a few minutes later, once I’d relaxed, in a complete deadpan. “Fine. The books are real. Just come look.”

“Uh huh. Of course they are Tammy. I helped sort through them and clean out that mess of a room earlier this summer, remember? I wish they’d been imaginary after the sore throat from all that dust. Just go to bed.”

“No. They’re real. Like, real-real. As in, my hand is currently on fire.”

“Are you high again? It’s not even July yet, where are you getting this stuff?”

The pounding started up again. Except this time there was a flickering orangey light seeping in under the door. “If you set something on fire to play this trick so help me…”

The door opened, and it felt like time stopped. Tam’s hair was even messier than usual, blue-dyed strands clustered and puffing out on one side like she’d been rubbing it into the couch hard enough to get static. The others were picked out in stark relief by the dancing light that glinted off her eyes. The source was her left hand, each finger tipped by a wavering yellow flame that seemed to coat her nails in a sheen of oil.

“I…you…what? Is…are you ok? What on Earth did you do.” I went to grab her hand and recoiled when I felt the heat. “How are you…”

“The books. One of them was an instruction thing. It talked about how everyone and everything has magic in it and how to use it and then it used making fire as one of the easiest examples. Emotions and will and focus and and and….this. It worked. It actually fucking worked.”

She shook her hand and the fires winked out. All that was left to see by was the moonlight as I met her eyes. “Show me?”

~-~-~-~

Magic. Actual, real life, magic. Fire springing from my fingertips without even the smallest tingle of heat. Tammy’s half-dead pot of basil blooming overnight after a few words and gestures. So many more fantastical things that we were too nervous or weak to attempt, each marked out in exquisite detail in the books, and so little time to learn them.

We only had a month left until classes started at Pinecrest, and we hadn’t even made a dent in Grandad’s library. There’d been a dozen full bookshelves in the little room Tammy called his ‘Sanctum’ and between the two of us we’d gone through maybe a single shelf. The books were dense at the best of times, but half of them were outright unreadable with what we knew.

We had no clue where to start, either. Or what might have something we could understand and use; the titles were no help at all. The starter she’d learned to set fires from was only a couple dozen pages long and, by its own admission, only covered the very basics about what magic was and how to call on your own and what was around you. It made very, very clear that for anyone new, any kind of ambitious spell or ritual would need a bargain or pact with a stronger magus or something else older and stronger to even attempt. It was also, apparently, written in 1873.

Practically everything we found that we could understand was over magical aspects of history or these mysterious Roads that nothing so far had explained. It was so, so frustrating to hear about all these things, to have a small library full of knowledge at our fingertips and have no background to study it with. No training or filter to know what could be applied at our level or what was pointless to read without an encyclopedia or dictionary we hadn’t found yet. It was worse than trying to tutor Tammy for the SAT; at least then I had references to go off of.

The cracked leather book that was apparently a recounting of interviews with half a dozen court mages from Victorian England (apparently they’d used the Roads to move spies into the rest of Europe?) clapped shut as I slumped onto my bedroom table. My head was throbbing; for a book about magic, it was surprisingly boring and, less surprisingly, so full of archaic phrases that it would be a linguistics teacher’s wet dream. In English, that meant it was murder for a modern teenager to read and I needed a nap.

~-~-~-~

“While this author hopes that his warnings stay with the readers, now we move on to the true subject of the text: The Roads.

They, like the Faerie Wood, have borne as many names as there are cultures under the sun, and maybe more besides. The Labyrinth. The Unseen Stones. The Deathlands. The Dream Paths. All identical, for a given definition of the word. While they may change in subtle ways across the world, due to the whims of the Fae or as a murky reflection of the world beneath, there are features and warnings that always hold true.

The Roads are inherently Other, where magic drifts in the air and things that have never walked the Earth, even in the memories of the longest-lived immortals this author has known, roam. They weave through the Wood and the Earth, a skein finer than the finest lace. Where magic gathers or the world runs thin, mortals and monsters and anything in between can pass through. To the untrained eye, such as an adult bereft of the Gift, these passages are hidden. They may live their entire lives unknowing of the magic around them, ignorant of the danger passing through that one spot of twisted grass they unconsciously avoided entailed.

Even a single step into the Roads takes you out of the world you know into something raw, primeval. Whether dirt or stone or, in these changing and uncertain times, asphalt, the passages will lead to unmistakable paths. No reputable accounts have ever told of a beginning or ending of them, or of any pattern to the construction. They twist and branch and come together in a mandala that defies all attempts at unified mapping. Exits are unmarked except by mortal hands, thinnings in the world along the trails or deeper in the Wood. To wander the Roads is to tread the realm of the Fae, to risk arousing their ire or suffering their tricks.

Despite the risks, the Roads are the lifeblood of the occult. A world of flowing, ownerless magic that can be shaped at little risk and no inherent debt. Somewhere out of reach of any mundane authorities, where even the more supernatural ones fear taking heavy handed actions. A place where thousands upon thousands of years of magi have tread and died. Where, for the brave, secrets and riches just wait to be found.

Despite the dangers and the shifting nature of the Roads, some communities of practitioners and our…less human counterparts have forged cities in the Roads themselves. Focal points where paths tend to connect to each other, sanctuaries where magic is applauded. Other parts of the Roads are twisted and knotted in ways outside our comprehension, scarred permanently by unknown cataclysms. There are even, rumors say, worlds akin to our own, lying in the unknown places that exist beyond the courts of the Fae.

In an effort to remain factual, this author will only discuss the areas he and his associates have personally verified the existence of, and then proceed to speculation and recounting of the disparate tales of the Faelands and what lies beyond. In alphabetical order they are: The Ashlands, The…”

“No. We’re not going into this place where he flat-out says you’ll get lost and die if you can’t see these supposed holes in reality.”

“Please? I’ll bake you cookies!”

“You’ll burn cookies and then have me make new ones. I already said no.”

~-~-~-~

“I can’t believe you talked me into this.”

“I told you the cookies would work. The cookies always work.” Tam’s smug laughter left me gritting my teeth as she skipped ahead. The awkwardly shaped, but much lighter, bag of food and implements was bouncing against her back. I was stuck clutching the heavier bag of books like a bowling ball, since I’d have tipped over with it on my back.

“The stupid cookies never work. Being flat out told by Grandad’s notes that this was the easiest way to do the ritual on short notice. Especially since we didn’t exactly find any magical batteries or have months to eat magic food.” A clod of dirt broke off and plashed into the stream below us, nearly sending me pitching backwards. “Stupid dirt and stupid hill and stupid magic. I thought the point of all this was to make our lives easier. Not to climb hills in the middle of the woods when it’s almost a hundred degrees outside. Where’s my doddering old mentor with a ridiculous hat, isn’t that how this is supposed to go?”

Tam, the inconsiderate brat of a sister that she was, just laughed. I vaguely wished I had a free hand just to throw something at her, but alas, I only had the two arms. Not even enough physical freedom to gesture for a spell. We weren’t good enough yet to do direct physical effects without hand gestures or other mnemonics. At least I wasn’t; Tam was barely eating these last few weeks and she tended to pass out while reading more often than not. Who knew what all she’d figured out.

At least this would be worth it. In another instructional book she’d found a ritual about “Opening the Eye of the Soul” or “Lifting the Veil of Ignorance”. Parsing through the inane descriptions and text, helped by some notes Grandad must have written in the margins, we’d puzzled out that it was to allow visibly seeing magic. Or rather, to see through the unconscious glamour that almost every magical creature, creation, or location produced and recognize shifts in the baseline of reality. To see the ways in and out of the Roads, or any beacons or messages that other mages left out. In other words, it was something completely essential to doing anything more than casual magic.

Grandad’s notes had been a lot more helpful than the actual text, including some rather…colorful epithets about the intelligence and parentage of the author. He’d marked out the easiest method he’d seen for training his apprentices, the procedures to shape the magic without an intense knowledge of theory, and the closest entrance to the Roads. Apparently he’d had several students before. Really made me wonder about some of the strangers we’d seen at his funeral, since maybe a third hadn’t been anywhere near his age group. Knowing this put a whole new light on all the visitors he’d had when we lived with him over the summers.

If tromping for almost fifteen minutes up and down the forest just to get to the area and then spending another forty just trying to find the stupid bend in the creek where the entrance was supposed to be was the norm, then I’d be perfectly happy to never deal with the Roads again. Yeah, screw messing around with all this complicated and dangerous stuff. I’d just stick to normal magic in the future or just forget about it. Who needs magic to work in a lab, anyway? Alchemists? There hasn’t been a famous one of those in centuries. I’d like to see one of them win a Nobel Prize. Or even keep the EPA from busting down the door.

“Teresa, you’re rambling again.” Oh. Maybe I wasn’t just complaining in my head. “Also, alchemists are apparently a pretty big deal. Turns out most sane magicians don’t want to try making things that could blow up in their faces.”

Stupid alchemists.

By the time we found the thicket of trees nestled in the bend, my top was glued to my back with sweat and my arms felt like jelly. My legs weren’t much better. Tam might have run track, but the most athletic thing I did was bowling. At least there were some nice shady rocks to sit on across from the apparent hole in reality.

“Hey Teresa.” She continued as my head turned, “Catch.”

I didn’t see it before it smacked into my chest, but a slightly smushed brownie and a water bottle dropped down onto my lap. Maybe Tam wasn’t so inconsiderate after all. She was still a brat though.

After a few minutes of rest Tammy started to dig around in her bag. Out came two tiny knives we’d taken from Grandad’s study, one golden colored and the other silver. She handed the silver one to me, hilt first. The blade was the length of my palm, etched with curving lines that I was pretty sure were just decoration and not anything inherently magical or meaningful.

“We’ve got everything, right?” If we’d come all this way for nothing…

“Yeah, everything that Grandpa listed. Salt, chalk, compass, mortar and pestle. You’ve got the diagrams and the references. Bread and milk for an offering. A dried bud, an uprooted basil stalk, and a seed for the past, present, and future. Two chips of jade, two bowls, the bottle of spring water, and the big beeswax candles. Earth, Water, and Fire. The air is supposed to be our breath, right?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“Then we should be fine. A bit uncomfortable, but I doubt magical ash will cause any infections.”

“Ugh. Don’t remind me.” The knife clacked against the rock as I shivered. This entrance, and most of those around here, led into the part of the ethereal world known as the Ashlands. The book about the Roads had described it as one of the most widely encountered regions. It had debated briefly on whether it was related to places burned by fire, or if the fires were related to the local Roads coming under the sway of the Ashen Court of the Fae.

According to the book, it was filled with burnt trees and ash that coated the ground and stirred itself into clouds when disturbed. With the ritual for some godforsaken reason needing us to be naked to ‘embrace the touch of magick’, and part of it requiring us to sit…there was going to be ash in places I’d rather not have anything. Grandad hadn’t commented on that part of it so we, unfortunately, were going to get very well acquainted with the Ashlands. And, if I had my say, with the stream on this side of it before we got dressed again. I did not want to have ash in my underwear for the entire walk home. That was a recipe for chafing.

Tam was already up and stretching again. “Well, let’s get this over with.”

The trees that were our destination were hard to focus on. My eyes kept trying to slide off them and onto the stream on either side of the loop. We’d walked past it twice before Tammy realized the rocks matched what Grandpa had described. After a few false starts where we found ourselves unconsciously stepping around them, we both shouldered our way through the first of the low hanging branches, the wood catching at our bags and clothes as we pushed deeper. The air felt heavier, harder to breathe. Light from the canopy dimmed and my arms dragged against something too diaphanous to be branches. Then, like a bubble popping, we were through and my shoes slapped down on stone, quite literally kicking up a cloud of silvery dust.

My balance suffered as the trees vanished between heartbeats, replaced by a monochrome landscape of blacks and silvers. Like charred bones the charcoal husks of trees stretched as far as I could see, fading into a slate grey mist. Atop the branches and along the ground a layer of fine ash lay still, silvery white powder mixed with black grit and chunks of carbon where branches had long ago fallen from the trees. The sky was a blanket of thunderclouds, shining with a diffuse grey light with not even a hint of a hidden sun, and it seemed to be bearing down on us. In the distance, unbelievably massive trunks speared into the cloud cover.

The air wasn’t exactly heavy, but some indescribable quality separated it from what we’d been raised in. It pushed at my ears with a pressure bordering on uncomfortable, but they didn’t pop no matter how hard I tried. Each breath left me feeling…lighter. Like a step would carry me further, or like I wasn’t quite tethered to the cobblestone road beneath my feet. To my left, Tam had gotten over her wonder. Her bag plopped gently onto the ground, her hand flickering alight moments later. Streamers of liquid fire longer than her hair dripped to the ground, sizzling and dying in showers of sparks. They left divots in the ash and blackened streaks along the small patch of stones our entry had scraped clean.

“That’s. So. Cool.” She flicked her hand and the streamers winked out, the last droplets breaking the ashen crust on this place’s stagnant version of the creek and hissing back to nothingness. The books had said this place was full of magic to draw from and that people used it to power or amplify spells. I hadn’t expected us to do it that easily.

“Yeah” I found myself shivering as I sat down my own bag. A tentative wave of my hand sent an unformed gust of wind out. Back home I could barely push over a textbook standing on end without giving myself a headache. Here, it was a nearly visible cone that sucked up the ash below it and crashed into the creek, sending a thin spray of mist into the air and rippling across the black water. All I felt was a point of pressure in my head that vanished after a few breaths.

A few more sweeps of air and we had a patch of weirdly smooth dirt a bit away from the entrance that was mostly ash free. Tammy drew in the ritual diagram while I started sitting out our reference books, flipping open to the pages we’d marked out beforehand and laying them out on what would be her side of the diagram. She’d be reading out what we needed to say and I’d repeat her.

The compass she kept when running was spinning like crazy as she tried to figure out the cardinal directions, so we just guessed. The outer diagrams were just chalk and salt, a complex circle with lines radiating both in and out. Two trapezoids back to back filled the center. Reaching out to the edge from each was a rough diamond with circles at each tip.

While she filled in the diamonds, I grabbed the mortar and pestle. In went the various basil parts we’d brought, and a few drops of the dark, still water of the creek. Ground together, they made a nearly black sludge. Once I brought it back, shuddering at the feel of the grit that had already gotten into my shoes, the diagram was finished. Outside the furthest three points from the trapezoids, the offerings were laid out. Furthest was the jade, green and glittering. To the left was the candle and to the right a ceramic bowl of clear water. I sat the bowl of muck down right outside the main circle.

“It’s ready. We’ve just gotta, y’know, get naked and get in the circle.”

“This is exactly why I never want to join a sorority.”

“Less talking, more stripping. Don’t forget to coat the knife with the gunk.”

I turned away halfway through her speech as she started to shuck off her shirt. Identical twins or not, she had no shame. I could hear her stuff landing on the now-empty sack the components had come in, then the clink as she scraped her knife along the bowl and settled into the center of her trapezoid.

“I turned around, prude. Hurry up.”

Shaking a bit, from nerves more than anything else, I tried to. Shoes and socks, first. Then shirt and pants, neatly folded, set on the first patch I’d cleared of ash. Bra and underwear followed, and then I smeared the paste onto my knife, careful not to cut myself. Yet. As I gingerly stepped into my trapezoid, I tried to take a calming breath. Instead I choked on the ash we’d stirred up making all this and tried not to throw up as I gagged on the acrid, burnt taste. A few pats on the back from Tam and sips of water later, I settled down and held out a shaky thumbs up.

I was ready.