[X] Meditate on your past life.
-[X]Try to recall anyway to intensify or increase the result of a ritual.
[X] Meditate on your past life.
-[X]Try to recall something that might help you get around town quickly, preferably something like flight or teleportation.
[X] Explore your abilities.
-[X] A Talisman of Resilience: Your fascination with these new powers is tempered by the realization that you'll have to return to school soon. And at Winslow, you'll face them again. But maybe, you consider, your new powers can help with that. Acting almost on instinct, you move through your house, collecting the proper reagents. From the unused jewelry box you inherited from your mother, a small bracelet of silver chain that, a quick test confirms, fits comfortably around your ankle, and is well concealed by your jeans. From the bookshelf in your living room, an old, dog-eared book of poems. From a waste pile in one corner of your basement, a single link of chain, broken along one side, somehow almost untouched by rust. From the kitchen, a small bowl of the purest water you can get. Taking your supplies to your backyard, you carefully sketch the same triple-triangle symbol you used yesterday. At the center of one triangle, you place the chain link, for old bonds broken. At the second, you place the water, to cleanse the suffering of the past. And, in the center of the third you place a still-growing dandelion, tenaciously hanging on through the Brockton Bay winter, for the strength to overcome the weight of the world. Readying your implement, you open the poetry book to a well-marked page, and speak the words...
Today is Friday. As the week comes to a close, Winslow looms ever heavier on your thoughts. Contact with your implement helps keep you in a hopeful frame of mind, but you don't dare bring another flute to school with what happened to your mother's instrument.
Instead, you hope to create a charm that will inspire similar mental fortitude in you, while maybe also having other effects. You have some ideas, but decide to wait until you have done some meditation before you try them.
A wry smile appears on your face when you consider the amount of time you have spent just sitting the past few days. If you hadn't of had the memories of your past life, you would have been bored out of your mind. You might have ended up staring at spiders or something equally inane.
Clearing your mind of thoughts of possible rituals you could use a spider's web in, you begin to meditate on methods of strengthening rituals. Ideas and hints of knowledge settle into your mind, but once again you don't receive any full memories. Sitting in the middle of your bed, you consider what you learned.
While the crafters of the world your past life came from had rules of magic, they found that overly strict adherence to those rules actually weakened the magic they created. However, the rules did work as useful tips.
For example, more expensive reagents often led to more powerful rituals. Not because of any direct relationship, but because the narratives of entire cultures tended to put more emphasis on more expensive artifacts.
Also, complex rituals usually had stronger effects. You think back on your strengthening ritual. Now that you are familiar with magic, you could probably design a ritual that works better. Maybe a runic setup of three squares with their inner sides forming a triangle, with two more triangle within that one. In one square, put four reagents representing resistance, with the sign for electrical resistance in the center. Repeat that in the other two squares except with the concepts of strength and preservation, add in some words and actions, and there you have a ritual that would outperform the original it was based on.
The last method that came to mind was something called compartmentalization—using a ritual to create a reagent for another, later ritual. While this could be as simple as making reagents magical, like creating absolutely pure water or salt that preserves whatever it touches, it could also be more complex. You vaguely remember a ritual that creates a dimensional gateway between two stone arches. As part of the ritual, a single arch is cut into two arches with a sword enchanted to cut through anything.
As you walk around your room before meditating again, you consider the last method you remembered. It seems similar to creating an implement, but where an implement is the conductor of the enchantment, a ritually created reagent is like a member of the orchestra being given a solo.
Filing away the information, you again start to meditate, but this time on a ritual to augment your movement. You quickly fall into your soul as a memory reaches out to you...
"I don't know how you enjoy something as menial as creating boots of speed, Talia."
You smile calmly at Liliana Lightblade, 15-year-old crafter and fellow student at the Royal College of Rituals. Unlike most students who start at the age of 13, you are almost 20. Their attempts at ingratiating themselves with you are generally cute, so you often humor them.
"I find it quite relaxing, actually. It reminds me of crafting for a single village with my father."
You stifle a laugh as Liliana shoots you a disbelieving look. Despite your background being commonly known, your fellow students still doubt that you are the simple village girl you profess to be. You suppose that being the long lost scion of some ancient crafting clan is
slightly more believable than a random 18-year-old successfully changing their soul. Sometimes reality is a strange place...
You finish up your preparations, and double check your work as you wait for Liliana to catch up. The paws of a cat who died of old age, soaked in water caught falling down a waterfall, are arrayed at the corners of a square for control. Inside the square rests a pair of leather boots with lightning bolts embossed on in silver. The cardinal signs for the four directions surround the boots, and a reagent sits between each sign.
Between North and East sits a portion of a sail that has caught many winds. East to South has bottle full of clouds from a distant mountaintop. South to West holds the branch of a tall tree struck by lightning. Finally, West to North is a fragment of a fallen meteorite.
The square and the cardinal signs are all written in the blood of the soldier the boots are for, so no other man may use them. Exchanging a glance with Liliana, you both begin to chant in unison excerpts from the scriptures of the wind god, your implements firmly in hand...
You find yourself back in your bedroom. In all honesty, the ritual isn't something you can just decide to copy. However, you are sure you can find some way to replace the reagents you can't get a hold of. Maybe replace the cat's feet with four non-living reagents that represent stability, and the meteorite with rain caught falling from the sky. You expect the results would have less explosive speed, but perhaps that would be better, as the stability would most likely be worse without the cat's paws.
Looking at the clock, you see that it's getting late. If you want to create your talisman of resilience, you had better get started. You run through the motions of your water purifying ritual, using your flute instead of blood. You grab the broken link of chain from the basement and one of your mother's favorite poem anthologies from a bookshelf. Finally, you open up your mother's jewelry box. You've never felt comfortable using anything from it, but you feel that this is a cause she would agree with.
You eventually choose a anklet of small silver chain. It fits snugly around your ankle, a perfect place to hide it from
them. You feel despair at the thought of having to go back to face the people who put you in the locker start to bubble up. As soon as you grab hold of your flute, though, a comforting burst of emotion flows into you.
You haul everything outside, where your final reagent sits. A solitary dandelion shoot, not yet flowering, pokes its head up above the ground. You carve a triangle around the plant with a trowel, then form two more in formation next to it. In one you place the broken chain, and in the other you set down the pot of pure water.
You stand next to your ad hoc ritual, and begin by reciting the poem by Georgia Douglas Johnson you chose for the ritual.
"When I rise up above the earth,
And look down on the things that fetter me,
I beat my wings upon the air,
Or tranquil lie,
Surge after surge of potent strength
Like incense comes to me
When I rise up above the earth
And look down upon the things that fetter me."
You then place your flute at your lips and begin to play. You skip past your youthful joy and your sorrowful tenacity, and start right at your desire to improve yourself and the world. The music swirls around your backyard, and once again you lose yourself in the ever-changing melody that represents you and your hope for the future.
When you are done, you close your eyes. You go and pick up the anklet, when—
"Wow."
You spin around. Standing on your porch is your dad, tears on his face. You freeze, wide eyed, but he doesn't seem to notice as he stares at the flute in your hand.
"I didn't, I mean, what was that? I felt like everything was going to get better. Taylor..."
He stops staring at the flute at looks up at you in equal parts confusion and hope. You think quickly, then answer him.
[] You tell your dad everything—magic, your past life, and the fact you just completed a ritual to embolden you at school.
[] You tell your dad a mix of the truth—maybe that you are a cape, or that you know magic but not about the bullying.
-[] Write in the details.
[] You tell your dad you've been practicing the flute this entire week. You're pretty good, right?
Later that night, you lay in bed thinking before you fall asleep. You dealt with your dad, but now you only have two days left before you return to school. What do you want to do with your time?
Choose four!
[] Meditate on your past life.
-[] Write in on a specific topic you wish to focus on.
[] Explore your abilities.
-[] Write in what you wish to attempt.
[] Go shopping (or pillaging) for reagents.
-[] Write in what and where.
[] Do something else.
-[]Write in.
(QMN: Damn, this post was hard to write for a pretty fluffy post. You've got another chance to explain things to your dad, choose wisely, or not. The next post will include both Saturday and Sunday (and possibly Friday evening if you explain to your dad), and will be released on Monday. Shout out to
@HeWhoAdds for beta-ing for me! Edit: if you find a mistake, it's not his fault, since he actually only read half the post.)
