Chapter 13: Practitioner (4)

Staten Island, NY “There.”  I read along with my finger by candle light. The process of awakening one’s third eye, or sixth sense, as some c

Staten Island, NY

“There.”  I read along with my finger by candle light.

The process of awakening one’s third eye, or sixth sense, as some call it, is relatively easier for those with the ancient blood running through their veins.  The gifted simply need to draw a circle (shown below), sit inside and drink the vial.  These elixirs were traditionally made of witchroot, and a drop of mage-blood, often from one’s parents.  But the practice has changed over the centuries.  Many families have devised their own version of elixirs, ranging from a variety of ingredients according to family talents.

One famous example is the Blackers family, prior to their decline during the Black Plague.  A family with well-documented roots in necromancy, they were known to use Vampire’s Blood or even scraps of Greater Ghouls.  

Some families even devised ways to distill Spiritual Essence.  This practice emerged as a belief in the late second century, that the make-up of elixirs could have effects on the spectrum of one’s talents.  The lack of research is inconclusive.  Nonetheless, more often than not, prominent mage families have adopted this practice and take pride in their formulae.  Often, the recipes are guarded fiercely.

For the ungifted, the ritual –coined the ‘Gifting’– requires a few more steps.  One–

I stopped reading there, skipping ahead to the diagrams.

A circle with seven points.  Not a seven pointed star, but just seven points on the boundary of the circle, with specific items on top of these points.  The items all represented something.

Fire

Water

Earth

Metal

Wood

Life

Death

The Five Elements.  Yin and Yang.  The aspects of everything that made up this realm..  The fundamental building blocks of the world.

Or so it went in Korean Shamanism, apparently; according to the book.  There were other rituals for waking my talent, but I chose this one.  Mostly because of my mom.

“No wind?”  I joked but it naturally fell flat.  I was nervous.

I read a bit further, to see how I could make the ritual circle.  Luckily I didn’t have to have the exact elements.  Just aspects of them, a representative token, if you will.  Good.  Because I wasn’t about to start a bonfire and start chanting around it inside an RV.

“Cauldrons and witches,”  I muttered, scrambling around the RV and looking for things the substitutes.  “Jesus and Mages.”

 My heart wasn’t pounding so much as it was squeezing in on itself, being wrung dry.  It felt wrong.  This whole situation.  Strange, alien and unfamiliar.

But I continued.

 In the end, I gathered everything I needed.

Chalk for the circle.  Candle.  A water bottle.  A glass plate.  My gravity knife.  A sheet of paper.

I moved the couch and coffee table, creating a wide open place.  I followed the diagram, trying my best to draw a perfect circle.  Then I placed the items in their appropriate places.

A burning candle for fire.  A water bottle for… well, water.  A glass plate for earth.  My gravity knife for metal.  And a sheet of paper for wood.

“It was wood.  Once.”  I said, trying to make myself feel better.

I stood up and looked at the incomplete circle.

It looked like a mess.  What parents see after they come back grocery shopping and a hurricane called children with crayons swept through the living room.  If they were witches and about to do some unholy ritual.

God, imagine that.  Coming back from errands to find your kids summoning fucking devils in the middle of the living room.

I laughed.  

What the hell was I doing?  What the fuck?  Was this real?  Was I really going through with this?  What if this ‘elixir’ was a poison meant to kill me?  Emyrith could be in with all of them.  Then they’d all split my parent’s inheritance amongst them.  The police would find my body, a witchcraft circle and rule it as a crazy accident.  God knows there are enough crimes in NY that cops wouldn’t look twice at a scene like this and rule it worthy of their attention.

I breathed in and let it out.  Slowly, little bits of it at a time.

It felt wrong.  But it felt right.

Like I was getting close to the answers I was seeking since this whole thing started.

I sat down in the middle of the circle.  In middle school, they used to give out these free science magazine for kids.  The ones with yellow outlines.  I remember reading an article that said you could control your mind by controlling your body.  And sitting down kind of did, it made my thoughts less overwhelming.  Everything was a little less silly and more believable once I let my eyes digest the surroundings.

A dark RV.

A chalk circle.

Five items.  Five elements.

I picked up the gravity knife and set the edge against the tip of my finger.  I held it over the circle.

What did life mean?  A newborn babe?  A doe?  Some kind of animal?

The other symbols had been easy.  Life and death however…

I had to get creative.

“My blood.”  I kept speaking out loud.  Before, it had been to fill the silence.  But the next parts were iffy.  I was making things up.  The Prerequisites: Standard said that it was up to the Caller to decide on the symbol.  That each family had their own styles.

But I didn’t have a family.  They were dead.

It also said that the ritual descended from an old pact.  A pact with higher powers.  Powers to the first Callers, the Mages, of this realm.  That they demanded tribute.  A promise.  A price for power.  And life was one of them.

Maybe these Powers would be willing to let some rules bend if I explained myself.  That was my thought process, at least.

“My blood for my life.”  I repeated.  “Because… it pumps through my veins.  Through my heart.”  I swallowed, “And my parents gave it to me.”

And closing my eyes and biting my tongue –I heard somewhere your brain can only focus on one pain at a time– I slid the knife over my finger.

I keep the knife sharp with a small grinder I picked up from a junkyard.  It sliced through the soft skin of my index finger.  I felt the moment it sank in, breaking through the resistance that my skin gave and released a singer droplet of blood.

It fell on the circle boundary perfectly.

I set the gravity knife down back  onto the spot for ‘Metal’.

Then I reached for my paren’ts letters, holding it over the part for ‘Death’.

“For me, death… death is…”  

How do you put into words what death means?  Doesn’t it mean something different to someone?

“For me, my first meeting with death happened because of my parents.”  I began, reaching for the words, making sure they were formed before setting them free.  It felt unjust to let this be a mindless ramble.  I wanted to convey exactly what I meant.

“When they died,”  I put my parent’s letter down on the circle.  “I didn’t just lose my mom.  I lost a part of my mom that made up who my dad was.  And I lost the parts of my dad that could only be met through my mom.”

“Death is loss.  Loss of more than just a single life.  It is the loss of memories.  Of…”  I struggled, “Of what makes me… me.  I lost the parts of my mom and dad that should have made me who I was… and the parts of each other that existed only in me through them.”

"The way a music can be a photograph, like how..." I reached for the words, "Like how you can just eat something and remember your mother's hug. That's what they were supposed to be for me... and that's what I lost."

It made no sense and I ended up rambling after all.  But I continued, too caught up in the momentum to stop.

“But at the same time, that loss made me who I am today.”  I grabbed the vial of elixir, unstoppering it.  “So in a way, through loss… I gained parts of my parents that I wouldn’t have gained without.  I am who I am, because I lost them… and gained them.”

“Death is the end of one, and the beginning of another..”  I finished while gazing at the pair of letters.  “Yeah… I guess.  That’s it.”

That felt about right.

I took the elixir and downed it in one gulp.

The way it felt going down my throat; rather than taste, it brought forth imagery.  I instinctively closed my eyes to picture it better.

An mental image of a silver ropey snake-like thing, slithering and spiraling down my esophagus into my gullet.  There I imagined it, not dissolving, but dissipating into countless parts of itself, spreading through my body and settling in the nooks and crannies.

Chest.

Abdomen.

Navel.

The Heart.

And more.

Accompanying this strange sensation was a tingling which traveled up and down the back of my neck, traveling up till it felt like someone was holding a string attached to the top of my head.  Then an itchiness that sprouted all at once.  My hands, feet, ribs, everywhere.  But it disappeared as soon as I wanted to move my hands to scratch myself all over.

Finally, a weightiness that seemed to swirl around the middle of my forehead.  Like a needle, spinning rapidly and drilling into the skull.  It didn’t hurt.  Rather, it itched.  The same itchiness almost drove me crazy earlier but I froze still, scared that something was wrong. 

Then…

Then nothing.

A stillness descended in the room.

I was breathing hard.  Chest heaving, trying to suck in large mouthfuls of air.  And I was cold too.  My gray hoodie was drenched down to the middle of my chest.  Along with all this was a soreness that usually came after I strained myself in gym class the day before.

I slowly opened my eyes.

Nothing.

Oh.

So it was nothing.  It had been fake after all.  I’d just been nervous.  

This whole thing had been nothing but a load of bull–

Something banged the windows so hard that the glass rattled on the panes.

I all but jumped out of my pants, breaking the circle and stood up so fast that I almost fell.  Catching myself on the nearby couch for balance, I turned to look at the window behind me.

Someone screamed.  I later realized it was me.

Let me correct that.

I fucking screamed.