A Practical Guide to Sorcery

Chapter 278: The Coming Darkness

Siobhan

Time Unknown

After a long while, Siobhan climbed to her feet, where she stood swaying back and forth aimlessly. It felt like she was a puppet and her strings had been cut. She was so heavy, and every movement took an effort of Will, when she had none left to spare. She was well and truly alone, and the knowledge was bitter ash on her tongue. ‘What now?’ she wondered. ‘I don’t even know how much time he erased. How old am I?’ The question was so surreal it made her laugh aloud, though the sound carried neither joy nor humor.

Grandfather’s instructions had been hurried and perfunctory, and he hadn’t even prepared any supplies for her. It was so unlike him. But then again, Mom hadn’t been herself before the end, either.

Siobhan looked around dully. She’d once thought Grandfather had some kind of secret project going on up here, but if he had, it didn’t manifest in any dramatic or interesting way, and she was too weary to go digging. ‘How long before the Red Guard arrives?’ He hadn’t even told her that. She should have asked more questions. At the very least, it might have delayed him for a few minutes.

It took some time for her to build up the willpower to move, and she shuffled out of the workshop and back to her room. She dressed herself warmly, then grabbed her pack and added her Conduit, a change of clothes, and several pairs of socks and underwear. Mom’s visitors had always said that a dry pair of socks was worth its weight in celerium. She considered her scrapbook and kraken-riding spaceflight portfolio, but staring at them, she just felt hollow. What was the point of riding a kraken up to the edge of heaven?

She was not sure when that dream had died, but she was sure she would never find pleasure in it again. She felt old, as if the Siobhan she remembered from the day before and the current version of her were separated by a great divide, a chasm filled with darkness and horrors. Perhaps it was time to put away childish things. They would only weigh her down, and somehow she guessed that she would need all her strength to flee. Instead, she filled the remaining space in her pack with food from the kitchen. She found a few handfuls of coin, her canteen, and a map already inside. The map had a line drawn to Edelbrook, which Grandfather must have prepared for her.

Her favorite boots were missing, so she was forced to wear the backup pair from the year before, which already felt a bit tight on her.

She went into her parents’ room to search for travel supplies, but it was as if Father had scoured it clean when he left. She found nothing, not even Mom’s trinkets. After struggling to think for a while, she returned to the workshop, only to find the door closed and its wards activated. She had been careless when she left.

Siobhan stood in front of the magic-charged lead for a long while, staring at its carved surface in a daze. She had wanted to pack some potions, and perhaps some artifacts, but now she had no way in. Perhaps she could retrieve her harpoon from where she’d stashed it at the beach and make another attempt to climb through the window, but even the idea of that much effort made her want to sink to the floor and give up. And besides, hadn’t Grandfather said that some of the Aberrant-affected villagers had escaped his dome spell? What would happen if she ran into one of them? The feeling of horror and fear that rose up in her was too strong to be a coincidence, though she did not remember why. ‘Okay. Avoid the villagers at all costs,’ she told herself. Even the resolution was slightly reassuring, which in turn only worried her more.

She returned downstairs and opened the door to Grandfather’s room instead, but froze at the threshold, trembling. It took several minutes for her to work up the will to force herself onward.

Her booted feet tapped softly against the stone. Grandfather lay before the crackling fireplace, a battle wand fallen from his limp fingers. The top right side of his skull was missing, with half his head a hollow. Blood and bits of pale brain had spread out before the fireplace, and the flames reflected off of this dark pool.

The old man had met his death with his eyes open.

Siobhan stared, urging herself to look away from the sight of him even as she couldn’t bear to move on. This would be the last time she saw him. It hurt in a way that was new and yet all too familiar. ‘How much pain can one person bear?’ she wondered as tears welled up in her swollen eyes again. She didn’t bother to wipe them away.

Finally, she walked over to him and picked up the battle wand, then took off two rings from his fingers. Neither was particularly sentimental, but they were utility artifacts and could be sold even after the spells within ran dry. She pulled the watch from his pocket and checked the time. It was three in the morning. She still didn’t know what day.

Then she straightened and walked past him, careful not to step in his cooling blood. The artificery table on which he worked with delicate, tiny pieces still had the bright white lamp gleaming down on its cluttered surface. Siobhan picked up the golden medallion that lay there.

Grandfather had never finished it, but it should still be hers. She rifled around until she found a piece of leather and a knife, which she used to cut a strip of cord. She threaded it through the gap he had left for that purpose. When the medallion settled around her neck under her clothes, she pressed its cool surface to her chest.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

She gathered a few more random supplies from his room, then fished the unused Conduit out of his pocket, too. “Goodbye,” she whispered to him. She didn’t close his lids. Let him go into the sky with his eyes open, too. Though, she remembered, he didn’t believe in that.

Since the tower was locked, she returned to her room and leaned out of her bedroom window with her spyglass in hand. The moon was out and almost full, and the night was warmer than she remembered. With her lights off, she watched for a while before being rewarded for her caution.

There were things creeping through the moonlit meadow. They were humanoid but strangely malformed, with huge bellies and spindly limbs. The moonlight almost seemed to shine right through them. Remaining perfectly still before exploding into hurried, scuttling movement, they seemed to be hunting small prey. Field mice, perhaps. ‘Are these the villagers Grandfather mentioned?’ Something in her seemed to recognize them—to fear them in a way that went deeper than her immediate revulsion at their physical form.

She watched until they disappeared to the north.

Down below, the front door opened and closed. Siobhan froze at the sound, her ears tuned.

After a few minutes of random footsteps and a few bangs and bumps, Aimee called from the kitchen in a hoarse voice, “Come down for dinner!”

Siobhan tiptoed to her bedroom door. Some part of her was relieved and hopeful. She pictured it.

She could go down to Aimee in the kitchen, they would eat dinner, and Siobhan would lead her to run away together. Things would be hard at first, but maybe they would find Father. Or maybe Siobhan would find a sorcerer willing to teach her, and Aimee could take a job in their household, just like she had in this one. Aimee would hug her and play games with her, she would teach Siobhan how to make her fancy foods, and Siobhan would not be alone.

But this daydream was a comforting lie. Siobhan did not know what she had forgotten, but she knew it was a blessing of the greatest measure to have the memories erased. Even just the remnant of them, lingering in her body if not her mind, left her flesh sick and pickled with despair, her organs aching and weary with loss, and her blood sour with fear.

Mom was dead. Father had left. Grandfather had killed himself. Aimee would be no help to her.

There would be no help.

If Siobhan went down to the kitchen, she might learn something better left forgotten. Instead, she tied her bed sheets together into a rope attached to the frame, tiptoed to the window, and climbed down the side of the house. The bed-sheet rope ended before she hit the ground, but she was close enough to jump from there without hurting herself.

She’d just begun to creep toward the road when she heard a sudden rustling. She froze, then turned her head ever so slightly to look toward the sound out of the corner of her eye.

One of the ghastly creatures was on the other side of the huge tree that held her treehouse. Its mouth was smeared with something dark that seemed like it could only be blood, and its eyes were bigger than they should have been, with black pupils blown wide.

Siobhan remained perfectly still until it turned the other way, then scrambled to put the house between them. Because she was looking over her shoulder to make sure the creature wasn’t following, she almost missed the thing standing in the middle of the road, just a couple dozen meters south of her house. It was such a shock that she fell and then just sat there staring at it under the illumination of the moonlight.

It was a child, slightly smaller than her, impaled on a carved spike of wood. Their chest was torn open, and something seemed to be keeping their knees bent in supplication, their ribs and arms both splayed wide.

Siobhan had thought Grandfather’s body was the worst thing she’d ever seen, but this shifted her entire paradigm. As if drawn against her will, she stood up and shuffled closer to the child, searching for recognizable facial features. She knew all the village children, even if she wasn’t friends with them.

She’d been half hoping that somehow, this wasn’t real. That it was a fake corpse of a child she didn’t know.

But it was Rory.

She could tell by his hair, the pattern of freckles across his upturned nose, and the fact that the heel of one of his shoes was half separated and flapping loose. Perhaps he had been on the way to her house, hoping for Grandfather’s protection, when the ghoulish creatures caught him.

They hadn’t been friends, but Rory was always eager to see her and happy to follow her around like a puppy dog. And more importantly, he was just a child. No child deserved this.

His blood had soaked into the packed earth below, and his organs had been removed, leaving his torso a surprisingly thin shell of bones and meat. His eyes were bloody, ragged hollows, staring forever at nothing, and he smelled of excrement and meat that was beginning to turn. Maggots had already begun to hatch inside him, which meant that he had probably been dead for at least a day.

Siobhan’s mouth flooded with saliva, and she bent over and vomited over Rory’s feet.

Shaking and dizzy, she wiped her mouth and backed away slowly, then turned and ran up the road. Tears streamed down her face, and her nose clogged, making it hard to breathe. She tried to shove the memory of Rory’s body so far down in the ocean of her mind that it would never see the light of day again. There was nothing she could do.

She knew that she had lived through the last couple of months, but it felt as if she had gone to bed the night before and then woken too late, with the world already broken. There was no justice for those who were too weak to grasp it. She despised herself and her powerlessness.

Her body still felt strange and awkward, but she was careful to pay attention to every movement, while still keeping one eye peeled for danger or obstacles. None of the Aberrant’s creatures seemed to notice her, or if they did, they didn’t give chase. She ran until she’d left her house far behind, then turned and cut into the trees, following along the road more slowly. Under the cover of shadow and foliage, she was less likely to be noticed, but by following alongside the road, she wouldn’t get lost. She didn’t feel safe cutting through the forest alone, especially without a compass.

As she walked in darkness, she struggled to imagine the path that lay before her. Grandfather sometimes told stories about the Cataclysm, though no one really knew what had happened in those days. For some reason, one of those stories came to mind.

When the earth opened up and spewed enough ashes to cover the sky from horizon to horizon, the remnant survivors had known that there would be no salvation. Seven years of false winter had descended, and none would escape the darkness or the caustic rains. Not the old, not the young, not the innocent.

Siobhan looked to the east. Sunrise would come in a few hours, she knew, but the idea of light seemed so impossibly far away.