FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

``````

How To Invoke

by Pyrasaur

Knot your fists. Release them. Wonder why you bother, and then open the book's faded cover as always.

Antiquity strikes you, that stately reek of vellum and pigments kept in a cellar since no one knew when. The smell doesn't calm you. You know this spell too well, each ink-wrought syllable that falls useless off your tongue every time you try, every damn time.

Don't get frustrated. Magic is a lofty thing, they say, too noble to heed a mortal's anger. Keep calm. Count your breaths, in and out. Your heart rate slows within your own ears and the book's smell stops feeling like a taunt. One more long breath out. Dust spins in the silent air.

You ought to begin. So you do.

Choose a new assortment of totems from your menagerie box, the one you store under your bed like a covetous child. Objects call to you. Gold dust glinting inside a vial; a musty feather you found, likely from an eagle; polished lumps of carnelian and opal; a pack of playing cards thoroughly shuffled, made mysterious. All were deemed magical at some point in human history, and you hope they might be magical enough.

Assemble these things into the designated circle. Chew your lip. Reconsider. Add the battered dictionary that smells of mold and sawdust: you reason that more old words couldn't hurt. Measure out the spaces between these treasures with a yew twig. Wonder if you should bother cutting a fresh twig today ? after all, the spell book doesn't specify freshness. Your eyes on text affirm you: the spell only says a twig pickt near to thee.

Maybe the magic just doesn't care. You've been thinking that a lot lately.

This twig is dry but still fine, you hope. There's no way of knowing. Fiddle with the carnelian stone while your mind wanders, watching light roll over the red facets. It must be wonderful, seeing magic before your own eyes. Magic is the optimism couched in old stories, the hopes of sages and alchemists who saw potential in this bitter world. Magic was the belief of scarred heroes who lie buried now, under duvets of soil and weeds. Magic comes from heroes.

You imagine that those brave, wise folk knew happiness. That they saw sights from a heaven-drenched peak, and called accomplishments down to perch on their offered fists. They must have known a greater purpose. They must have liberated themselves from dusty places and hopeless thoughts.

You're not a hero. You're sitting here in a stale bedroom, playing at divination, grasping at stars. Look again at the spell hand-scribed in the old book and try, try to focus. Push at your cluttered thoughts, because the faded text tells you to do so. Know serenity. Be of clear mind, clear heart, and clear purpose. You wonder if those legendary heroes were zombies, to have no thoughts or feelings clouding them.

Calm as a cloudless sky, says the text. Stoic as the night before the dawn. If only you could keep those virtues in a box under your bed. Mutter the spell's phrases again, draw a breath in terse and hold yourself as still as you're able, with your blood pulsing in tides. Why this facade of calmness? How can anything be powerful through stillness? Strength is in the doing. You sit here in a dusty room, acting out a contradiction; you continue speaking the spell's words but with a viper's teeth, a growling far away in your own ears.

If only you could find magic for yourself. Search it out like a questing hero and grip it in sure hands. Hands clawed, you rake the totem objects out of their fussy alignment, into a dragon's hoard in the middle of your folded legs. If they're really magic, what do measurements matter? They're either truth incarnate, or they're not. How long have you spent mincing millimetres here in your own personal dark?

The spell falls off your tongue faster, cantering into a melody you've always known. Through the screen of your own voice, you think that magic isn't silent or stoic at all. Warriors fought with all their strength. Sages spoke and spat and barked -- whatever it took to make hearts listen. Finally, the dam breaks and you think, what are these words? The carnelian is hot inside your knotted fist and as you utter the spell's final word, you're elsewhere, there's truth all around and it's bursting out of you.

Time is a slippery thing. But it passes, and you find yourself still sitting with a lap full of weighty trinkets, in your dusty spell-reading place. Smell the enormity of burnt hair and ozone. Tremble with the force of your own beating heart. Look to the spell book -- and petrify with horror because its inked words have vanished, the vellum pages gone as pale as unseeing eyes. You've ruined the spell, broken it somehow. Chased away the sages and warriors who lived in that page.

But you're here, and your palm burns bright. You hold in your hand a spark.