A Practical Guide to Sorcery
Chapter 254: A Crown of Madness

Siobhan

Month 9, Day 23, Thursday 3:00 p.m.

It took a couple days of preparation before Siobhan felt safe enough to attempt the crown of madness. Most of that time was spent waiting for Oliver’s contacts to give them some portable and very specific wards based on some of the more unusual containment spells she had read about in the restricted archives. Siobhan wasn’t good enough with artificery or warding to even fully understand them, let alone create the wards herself.

She had gone to Liza’s place again the next day after her encounter with the Red Guard, only to find the woman no longer there. Liza had instead left a blisteringly angry letter about Siobhan’s neglect of her plants and animals, which might have died if not for much of their care being automated via various artifacts. When the letter got to the dead raven beginning to rot in its cage, Liza’s tone had softened somewhat, allowing worry to peek through her rage.

But even if she was worried, it hadn’t been enough for her to stay and look for Siobhan. Liza was gone again, and who knew when she would be back?

Siobhan had deflated. She had hoped for Liza to help with the wards, but they ended up working with what they had. A small part of her wondered if maybe the Red Guard had gotten to her, but if that were the case, she probably wouldn’t have left the letter. And whatever Liza was doing, there were few people as generally competent as her. If anyone could protect themselves, it was Liza.

While Siobhan and Oliver waited on the wards, she re-cast the sleep proxy spell, played around with the utility of splitting her Will into three pieces, and practiced light-refinement to speed her healing and give her mind extra stability for what was to come. She hoped it would be enough. ‘It’s just a viewing spell,’ she reassured herself. ‘Everything I know says it shouldn’t let the thing out of the seal. And beyond that, the creature shouldn’t have much power left, since I haven’t cast the shadow-familiar or swallowed any beast cores since the fight with Thaddeus.’ In fact, she felt strange without the shadow-familiar spell, as if it had become a sort of security blanket.

They set everything up at Liza’s, since the woman wasn’t there to object and her house was already configured and warded for magical experiments. It was probably one of the safest places in the entire city. When they were finally ready, Siobhan cast the light-refinement spell once more, cleansing and energizing her mind before moving down to the lower cells with Oliver.

If anything went wrong, he could trigger a series of increasingly obscure and powerful wards to keep her—and anything else with her—contained. He also had an entire collection of potions on hand to heal her, stabilize her mind, purge foreign influence, and a dozen other things. Some of them had been almost impossible to get and were only available because of Oliver’s connections to the Night Market and a wide selection of smuggled goods.

Surely there was more that they could have done, but with the requirement of secrecy, their options were limited.

She shared a glance with him. They both nodded silently, and she stepped into the prepared cell. Her hand was clammy around her Conduit, which she held as much for comfort as utility.

She wore only a thin cotton night-dress, appropriate for sleep. All her other artifacts and sources of magical interference, including the transformation amulet and warding medallion, waited outside the cell. She did not want any insights to be contaminated.

One part of her Will would block out all external distractions and focus only on casting the spell. Another would notice and interact with the spirit realm and allow itself to be distracted and enlightened. The third would watch and wait to be needed. All would experience the effects, technically, but only one would pay attention to them. She hoped this would allow her to avoid the pitfall that previous casters had fallen into.

Rather than an extensive spell array, casting the crown of madness required a simple artifact, some of the caster’s blood, and a ritual.

The artifact was a crystal singing bowl with a basic spell array engraved into the bottom, which would activate as the bowl was being played. Rather than discrete charges, there was a total amount of power that could be used up, and it would drain progressively faster the longer any particular casting session went on.

The bowl was a pale cream and mostly smooth, except for a razor-sharp edge cut into one side, just below the rim. Siobhan held it in front of her in her left hand, her Conduit in her right, and dragged her right thumb across the sharp edge. The wound began to drip blood immediately. She dabbed her thumb onto both temples, then the space between her eyebrows. This “crown” of blood was probably what the spell was named after.

Then she brought her thumb down to the rim of the singing bowl and began to drag it across the rim in a slow circle.

The crystal began to sing at once, creating a ringing sound similar to what one could create with a damp finger on the rim of a wine glass. Except the sound Siobhan was creating here was much deeper, too profound and resonant to reasonably come from such a small bowl.

The hair across her body rose as an ephemeral chill rolled across her. The sound grew heavier and more complex, as if matched by a host of invisible counterparts. The ringing tones dug into her bones and pulled at her mind, and the blood from her thumb dripped slowly down the inside of the small bowl and pooled in the center.

The blood would act as an attractor for spirits, who craved such material for its power, but that was not her purpose today. She whispered the chant, since she would actually rather not be heard by whatever might be listening, at least this first time.

“Crystal sings to pierce the veil,

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Blood burns bright to mark the way.

By blood and song I seek the path,

Through veils of flesh and bone and breath,

Below the world of mortal things,

Where truth eternal softly sings.

I am the blood that feeds the deep,

I am the song that breaks the sleep.

Grant me sight beyond the seeing,

Grant me truth beyond mere being.

Song to bridge the space between,

Blood to bind what lies unseen.”

Whoever had created this spell had been a bit of a poet. Chants almost never actually needed to rhyme, though many people found those that did more appealing, or more impressive. What did she know? Perhaps the denizens of the spirit realm appreciated it, too.

However, the results of the chant were immediate and obvious, if somewhat hard to define. The world was tinged with an eerie tint, and she felt as if she were being watched. She had an impression of surreality, or perhaps unreality, as if all the world was a shallow, shoddy dollhouse and perhaps she was merely a doll, too, who existed for the amusement of a much greater, outside force.

‘The spirit realm isn’t here. It isn’t affecting the world, only my perceptions,’ she reminded herself. As she continued to ring the bowl, she noticed that the lines of the room she was in were all wrong and the angles had gone skewed in a way that would make it very difficult to hold up the roof. She blinked at it in confusion.

Siobhan swayed a bit until the third part of her Will gave the one observing the spell’s effects a nudging reminder that she probably didn't want to fall over. She sat down. The stone was strangely soft and warm beneath her, like shaved skin from a frankly enormous giant’s inner thigh. She stared at it in wonder, too. Was each bump and divot in the stone one of the giant’s pores? The hair on her arms shifted, and she was suddenly quite suspicious that an invisible entity had just brushed across her, though, admittedly, it had felt like a slight breeze.

The third part of her Will found this fascinating, too, but forced itself to remain undistracted, and reminded the part actively casting this spell of that. Her prior experience with the spirit realm, though limited, helped somewhat. When she felt stable, she stood up again.

Siobhan had set up a big, gilded-edge oval mirror to observe herself while she cast the spell, and now she turned to it. She saw herself, at first, looking a bit strange and dramatic, but not in any particularly insightful way. With a step closer, and then closer again, she was able to peer into one of her eyes. She looked into the dark pools until she seemed to fall through the hole. The darkness extended for a long time, with galaxies of breathtaking colors and sparks of memory flashing by in fascinating attempts to distract her, but she kept her focus on her mission.

Eventually, she saw a cube in the darkness of her eye. It was stone, and just about the size of a jail cell. There were no windows and no doors, and it looked as if it would last a millennium…or, no, as if it had already weathered a millennium. It was cracked in places, and a crimson fungus grew out from the inside, slowly widening the gaps like weeds growing up through cobblestone.

A thin strand trailed outward from the stone box to her, though she could not see where it connected. There came a repetitive tapping from the inside that reminded her of a bird’s beak on stone.

Light from the corner of her eye caught her attention, and Siobhan looked away from the mirror to her shadow. Its eyes were glowing out at her again, though it still stretched in the opposite direction of the light and lay flat on the floor, just like a non-magical shadow should.

Siobhan blinked, and for a fraction of a second, she saw something else in place of the shadow. She blinked again to repeat it. A skeleton wearing tattered shroud-cloth lay there, so long dead and removed from the before that who it once was would never be recovered.

Siobhan smiled at it, even though she had hoped it wouldn’t appear. She was not afraid, though perhaps she should have been. “Will it be another request to remember you, then?”

It remained silent, but she could feel its surprise, its wonder, and its wariness.

She wondered if the spell would give her insight into the truth, beyond just her natural sense of the creature’s emotions. “What would happen if I do remember you?” she asked.

It spoke in an even softer, stranger voice than normal. “I will fashion your dreams into a pickaxe to break out of this place with, and your memory into a guideline to lead me to freedom.”

Siobhan tilted her head to the side, breathing deeply of the smell of old resin mixed with the salty scent of sea aster, and below it all, brimstone. “And once free?”

The glowing eyes curved as if smiling. “I will build a place for myself.”

Siobhan swayed slightly as the world rose and fell like an ocean wave. The ringing of the bowl felt as if it might shake her soul loose from her body. “What does that even mean?”

A faint sense of hunger and spite flowed from the shadow up through her feet. “I will eat your soul and wear your body like a fine garment.”

Siobhan chuckled and blinked heavily, then shook her head. She knew she was reacting abnormally. There was fear in her, and anger too, but it was all an undercurrent, with a cocoon of gauze filtering and muffling her responses. ‘I feel like I’m dreaming,’ she realized. ‘And that could be dangerous.’

Above it all, as always, there was her intrinsic desire to know, and with the knowing, to grasp control. Aloud, she said, “But, see, if you wanted me to let you out, why would you tell me that? Now I’m even more inclined to kill you.”

She hesitated as a strange feeling filtered up through the shadow connected to her feet. “Ah, but that’s what you want, too.”

A flash of fear came, then something confused, and then a boiling, tar-like rage that coated everything.

The scent of cloves and copper burned her nostrils, and the air dug into her ears and tickled the fine hairs inside. She did not flinch away.

It didn’t know what it wanted. It was just desperate to escape in any way possible. To cover the fear, it snarled and snapped, a response that was familiar to her. “I want to trap you in here with me until you go insane and break us both free. Or you could just open the veil.” Its form shifted for a moment, the shadow deepening to become a doorway. Instead of the place from before, the dark hall filled with statues of giants, it was a brightly lit scene. A dirt road led up to a country home, rough-built but large enough for a family, with a small tower at the back.

Siobhan almost choked, and a rush of fear and longing pushed aside some of the soft film protecting her from the spirit realm. She preferred it that way and, with an effort of Will, did not let herself be drawn back under. “I will never go back there.”

It chuckled. “You made a mistake, Siobhan. To be sure, this spell gives me no way out, and I cannot harm you, but you seem to have forgotten that I, too, can peek into the spirit realm and read the signs your kind leaves in your wake. This spell forces understanding.”

With a sudden rush of foreboding, Siobhan grasped what the thing meant, but it was too late. For a moment, she wondered at her mistake, but realized quickly that it had always been coming to this. Since that night when Grandfather died, some version of this moment had always been inevitable. Siobhan kept her eyes open and her Will primed for battle.

The world rippled like an oil painting melting in a fire, or a whirlpool sucking her down into the depths. All she could see was the creature’s glowing-amber eyes, looming close.

It whispered to her, “Seven steps back in time…lies the source of all your nightmares. Walk with me.”

Siobhan fell into an ocean of memories. They poured over her, and she drowned.

The story continues in A Practical Guide to Sorcery Book VI: A Builder of Dreams.