Cormac gathered flowers as he walked in the clearing, small pale things growing wild at the edge of the lane, and set them down one at a time along the perimeter of a circle he’d traced into the dirt with a stick he found lying around.
One in the north, one in the southeast, one in the southwest, three points of a triangle wide enough to hold nine sleeping bodies without crowding them.
‘It’s based on the standard candle rituals but it should be fine with just flowers.
Symmetry matters for this sort of thing as well,’ he thought, putting the last flower’s stem into the soil with two fingers.
‘Or so I think based on my understanding of ritualistic magic in LOTM.
I probably shouldn’t test the theory by cutting corners on my first proper go, but oh well, I’m praying to myself anyway.’
The circle itself needed to be quite large, larger than he’d first guessed, and gathering the nine unconscious Foundation agents into it became, by mutual and largely wordless agreement, to sir knight.
He carried them two at a time, one under each arm, with the brisk efficiency of a man moving sacks of grain rather than people, and laid each one down inside the boundary with a gentleness that rather undercut the efficiency.
Cormac added his suitcase to the pile last, tucking it neatly between two of the sleeping agents.
‘A secondary test,’ he thought, patting the leather once.
‘If this works on luggage as cleanly as it works on people, I’ll know the ritual doesn’t actually care what it’s moving unlike Klein’s first rituals.
I’m a full Great Old One just separated one so I have reasons to believe I have more authority right now’
Once the circle was set, he crouched at its edge for a long moment, looking over the nine unconscious faces with an expression somewhere between thoughtful and predatory, and then began, without any particular guilt, to go through their pockets.
He left their clothes alone.
That much felt like a line worth keeping.
But their weapons came off first, set aside in a small glittering pile of crystal-set metal, followed by slim cases of identification bearing names and sigils he didn’t recognize, and a modest sum of money that he assumed had been tucked away for exactly the kind of monetary trouble a man far from home might run into, like this situation.
And then, at the bottom of the fourth agent’s coat, exactly what he’d been hoping for.
Two more of the small dark rectangles, thin and unassuming, looking exactly like normal floppy disks that no one would suspect if they never saw how it works.
‘Excellent,’ he thought, holding them up unbothered by the lack of sunlight due to his night vision.
‘With the picked pockets, I’m starting to think I’m on the wrong pathway.
Perhaps the Marauder pathway would’ve been more fitting.’
Sir Knight, watching this particular part of the process from a few feet away, had turned to look pointedly at the treeline, his posture radiating the specific embarrassment of a man trying very hard not to appear to be standing lookout for a common thief.
Cormac laughed at that, low and genuinely amused.
“Please keep watch for me, my friend,” he said, tucking the disks into his own coat.
“Make sure nobody wanders up and disturbs this process.”
“Gladly,” sir knight said, already turning fully away with the relieved haste of a man given permission to stop watching something he disapproved of.
Cormac knelt at the edge of the circle and began.
He selected, from the small handful of flowers still left over, a single white bloom he found himself drawn to more than the others, delicate and faintly luminous even in the fading light, and set it before him as a catalyst.
None of his three pathways leaned particularly well toward ritualistic magic on their own, so he did what any sensible man with more raw fire power than technique would do, and simply channeled his spirituality outward through everything within reach, weaving it through the discarded swords and wands and other crystal-set weapons until a faint, humming wall of spirituality rose invisibly around the circle’s edge.
He entered Cogitation first, settling his mind the way he’d learned to, layer by layer, sediment finding the bottom of still water.
‘I don’t know Hermes,’ he thought, closing his eyes.
‘Or any of the proper mystical languages for that matter.
But Latin’s dead enough, and used by enough spiritual circles back home and probably even here, that it should be enough to carry the intent.
Close enough is probably good enough.’
With sir knight’s help with the incantation, as he barely had any interactions with this language, he recited the words he’d prepared beforehand.
“Tenebrae aeternae;
Unitas universorum;
Spatium et tempus in unum coniuncta;
Gratiam Dei benignam imploro;
Sacrificium meum ut accipias precor;
Belladonna, flos mortis, praebe mihi ducatum tuum;
Dahlia nigra, flos infelicitatis, largire mihi benedictionem tuam;
Achillea, flos discordiae, praesta mihi tutelam tuam.”
The darkness around him thickened as the last word left his mouth.
It did not fall so much as gather, pooling into the edges of the circle the way water gathers into a low place, and the stars above him dimmed one by one until the sky itself seemed to have forgotten it was supposed to hold any.
The birds had already gone quiet sometime in the fighting, but now even the insects stilled, and the trees themselves seemed to hold their breath, not a single leaf stirring in an air that had stopped moving at all.
He recited his Honorific Name again, silently this time, in the private space of his mind.
‘The Eternal Darkness.’
‘Singularity of All.’
‘Space-Time-in-One.’
He knelt there, felt his mind slip, and left his body behind entirely.
He awoke among the white flowers again.
The field stretched around him exactly as he remembered it, pale and patient in every direction, the orange twilight folding down from a sky that needed no sun to light it.
This time his own voice reached him with a clarity none of the other whispers managed, a hundred distant murmuring prayers all clamoring at once beneath the one that was properly, unmistakably his.
‘Right,’ he thought, more than a little irritated by the noise.
‘That’s quite enough of that.’
“Silence.”
He said, to all of them at once, invoking a bit of his Silence authority, and felt the murmuring fold away obediently, and only then did he turn his attention to his own prayer and answer it.
The nine agents arrived first, still deeply asleep, followed a moment later by his suitcase, all of it settling gently into the flowers around him exactly as it had left the mortal side of things.
‘Well,’ he thought, looking around properly now that the work was done.
‘Now that that’s sorted, what exactly is this place?’
The answer came to him slowly, piece by piece, the way understanding always seemed to arrive for him lately, already finished by the time he noticed he’d been building it.
A divine kingdom, probably carved out somewhere in some sort of underworld, not unlike Calderon City that belonged to the Phoenix Ancestor Gregrace, tucked away somewhere in whatever this world called its own Spirit World.
What convinced him of it, more than anything else, was the pilgrimage in front of him.
Spirits, souls, and the occasional undead thing, drifting in slow unhurried processions through the far edges of the flower field, all of them making their patient way toward the mirror and the River of Eternal Darkness that waited behind it, crossing over the way pilgrims cross into a holy land.
He did not disturb them.
A few, clearly lost, drifting in aimless little circles at the field’s edge, he guided instead, tracing quiet paths through the flowers with a thought, and they followed those paths obediently, gratefully, without ever once looking back at him, perhaps out of fear, perhaps they simply had no mind to do so, he wasn’t sure.
‘Good,’ he thought, watching the last of them find its way.
‘Let them have their peace.
True death is the right of every living being.’
He turned back to his own ritual after that, and found, examining it properly for the first time now that he had the leisure to, that it was crude in places, rough at the edges the way anything is when it’s the first attempt, but it held.
‘Good enough, probably because of the Space-Time-in-One symbolism which made gathering things easier’ he decided.
‘For a first try, more than good enough.’
He checked the contents of his suitcase next and found everything present and accounted for, and emptied it out entirely save for the tea and the money, his two most valuable possession, scattering the rest of its contents behind him in a loose, unbothered pile he’d sort through properly later, he will not sort through it.
He reached, with his connection to his other half, the vast and patient thing copying him behind the mirror, and used his Slumber authority gently to press the nine sleeping agents deeper into their sleep, arranging their limp bodies into a neat, orderly row.
‘There,’ he thought, surveying his work.
‘Tidy.
I hate leaving a mess,’ he lied as naturally as he breathed.
With the experiment concluded to his satisfaction, he turned his attention to the divine kingdom itself, and reshaped it.
A temple rose where he willed it, drawing its inspiration from something half remembered from his old life, stepped and terraced in the manner of the great Mesoamerican structures, tier upon tier climbing toward a summit that did not yet exist until he decided it should.
He placed the mirror at the very top.
‘Let them climb for it,’ he thought, watching the great structure settle into permanence around him.
‘A little exercise before rest never hurt anyone.
Living or otherwise.’
Then, almost as an afterthought, he wove his own authority of Misfortune into the temple’s summit, a quiet, patient little curse that would ensure any misfortune a crossing spirit had caused in life would be experienced by them, just as they made others experience it, before dissipating forever into the river’s waters.
‘A small toll,’ he thought, satisfied.
‘Mostly because I’m bored, I mean why not right?.’
And with that, the work was finally and properly done.
He felt himself begin to sink, gently, the way a stone settles at the bottom of still water, back down into the body he’d left kneeling in a dark and silent path in 1929.