A Practical Guide to Sorcery

Chapter 275: Horizon Divergence

Siobhan

Month 5, Day 16, Friday 11:30 p.m.

Siobhan’s mind settled back into her body, which was close to Mom’s frame this time. Claudio must have dragged her unconscious body closer to him so that he could keep an eye on her while he worked. This time, Siobhan didn’t even try to get up, instead biding her time. She was sicker and weaker than the last time she’d returned, like having a dangerously high fever combined with acute food poisoning. Despite this, she was hungry, and couldn’t help but feel that her body was wrong—not serving its purpose—and that she should feel ashamed that she was not paying homage with her self-ness.

Siobhan tried to breathe slowly and calmly, afraid that she might choke and drown in her own vomit if she wasn’t careful. She ran through the same meditative exercises that had helped while she was in the spirit realm, and again they soothed her more than they had any right to do.

She cracked her eyelids open again to peek at Claudio just as he stood up and walked to the window. He leaned out, looked south toward the village, and laughed rapturously, lifting his face toward the sky like a drought-parched flower greeting the rain.

Siobhan moved her arm very slowly to lay on the control glyph for Mom’s pseudo-mirror. Once again, she began to silently plead for Grandfather. She recalled each time she’d seen a glimpse of him in that sandy, harsh place. It didn’t feel like enough, so she remembered the sound of his voice, the feel of his hand on her forehead, and his subtle, clean smell. She guided all of her yearning and every mote of her authority into searching. This was not a spell, but it still seemed to rely on her Will, and she commanded the world to bend under her decree with a desperation she had never known.

Grandfather had told her that magic was not all about sheer power. Capacity was important, but force and clarity were both, perhaps, more so. Someone who was very good with the latter two facets could overcome someone slightly stronger than them, all else being equal. And those with better control over what power they could channel were less likely to break.

Siobhan poured all of her purpose into guiding the mirror to Grandfather until it felt like she was draining her very being.

But Claudio seemed to sense something wrong as he looked out at the village. He frowned and turned to see her.

She snapped her eyes closed, but he wasn’t fooled.“You escaped again?” he asked in astonishment. “Is this the resilience of a Naught?” he muttered to himself, walking closer.

Siobhan rolled over and felt a lump in her pocket. She reached her free hand into the leather and pulled out the gnarled root-stick she’d found under her parents’ bed. She brandished it at Claudio threateningly.

He paused, eyeing it with confusion.

“Don’t come closer!” she commanded hoarsely, shooting a glance to the scene on the other side of the mirror, which showed sand dunes and smoke under a red sky, but no Grandfather. Just a little more, and she would find him!

Claudio lunged at her, and she smacked him with the root end of the stick. It did absolutely nothing that one might not have expected a dead piece of wood to do, and Claudio paused for a moment in surprise.

Siobhan gave up on the control glyph, scrambling backward several feet toward the door behind her.

As Claudio followed, Siobhan shoved the stick into his face, the pointed, hard roots scraping shallow scratches into his skin.

He reared back to protect his remaining eye, but with his much longer reach, managed to grab her by the wrist anyway. He squeezed until her fingers released, then bore down on her, pressing her to the ground with his back toward the mirror. “This will be the last time,” he promised her.

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He gripped her head again, ignoring her frantic clawing at his neck, punching at his throat, and attempting to shatter his eardrums. She couldn’t reach his eye. His fingers and palms clamped down on her skull while his thumbs pressed into the outer edges of her eyes.

Stars and washes of aurora-like color burst across her vision as her eyeballs compressed in ways they weren’t meant to, and she lost herself once more.

Siobhan fell to her knees under an alien sky. She stared up, wide-eyed and uncomprehending. In her previous two dips into the spirit realm, her surroundings had been strange and alien, seeping into her thoughts and triggering malleable interpretations of their meaning in her mind. However, she’d still been able to basically grasp what she was experiencing.

This was far beyond that. She’d fallen into a strange and unfathomable land. She could not describe it accurately, because her mind had no reference to grasp its concepts. This was very bad, she realized dimly, because being forced to grasp the ungraspable meant that her structure must be rearranged.

She was in a place of order and void, of destinations and the moment between, of infinitesimal sand and infinite skies.

There were things that looked a bit like walls, or doors, or roofs, which seemed almost to come together into towering monuments—or perhaps citadels and castles meant to house gods. But before her eye could track from one end of a wall to the other, she was no longer looking at a wall, but an expanse of blue sky sprinkled with clouds.

Siobhan forced herself to her feet and stumbled forward, some tiny part of her still coherent enough to be desperate. She needed to find a door, or something close enough that she could dream a door, but the doors here were not doors, they were the liminal space on the edge of heaven, and she knew that if she approached too close, she might fall through. Some instinct told her that if she did, she would never return.

She listened as the prayers of those who still remembered how to kneel filled the void left by forgotten gods.

With every step Siobhan took, the world changed around her, as if it were all some kaleidoscopic optical illusion. “Mom?” she cried, or thought she did. She couldn’t hear her voice or feel her lips.

She watched the void as stars spoke the tongue of fire that burned without consuming.

She closed her eyes but was unable to shut out the eldritch knowledge that scoured away swaths of her with every brush, then realized that she couldn’t feel her face. She tried to close her eyes again, but either they were already closed, or she had forgotten how to do so.

Abandoned by flesh and bone, blood sang the song that only the earth remembered how to hear. And at the bottom of a well that never ended, waited the reflections of all those who had peered too deeply.

And then Siobhan was wrenched away by a tether that pulled on every molecule of her being, even the parts that had been scattered and lost. As she was sucked through the barrier between here and there, the pressure forced her back together.

Her eyes were still open, but it took some time for her to be able to comprehend the images they were sending her.

Grandfather was there, facing off against Claudio. The old man’s clothes were so tattered they were almost falling off him. His face was weathered and raw, and it twisted in a rictus snarl of hatred as he stretched one clawed hand out toward Claudio.

She could feel Grandfather’s Will, a razor edge so sharp it couldn’t be seen, and wouldn’t be felt, with the only evidence of its passing the separation it left in its wake.

“How?” Claudio screamed, trying to stumble backward even as pieces of his feet began to separate from the rest of him. “You’re dead!”

Grandfather stretched out his other hand and opened his fingers to reveal Claudio’s ripped-out eye sitting on his palm. “All I needed was a component.”

Claudio gaped down at his eyeball, reaching up to touch his eyepatch even as his legs fell apart in slow motion, as if he were a crystal statue in the process of shattering.

“The real Claudio Tierney would never have made that mistake. He knew too much to underestimate me,” Grandfather said simply. Finger by finger, he curled his outstretched, clawed hand into a fist.

Tiny pieces of Claudio broke away, hanging in the air as if, with Grandfather’s command, they might all snap back together and make Claudio whole again. But despite his defeat, he tilted his head to the side and gave Grandfather a small smile. “But you’re too late.” He turned his head to Siobhan, and the last thing she saw of him was his light brown eye meeting her gaze, before that too was crystalline pieces.

And then, all of a sudden, the pieces melted into a black sludge and dropped to the ground, splashing like hot tar and then slowly spreading out.

Grandfather was breathing hard. He let his outstretched hand fall, then shook the shimmering black goop off of the other. “That’s how you know they’re really dead,” he said, his tone as calm and dry as if he were showing her an interesting plant while walking through the woods.

A white-hot charge exploded from the base of Siobhan’s skull. She arched uncontrollably off the ground, her back twisting into a bow. She caught a single glimpse of Grandfather’s face twisting in horror before the storm shattered her.