Days Seventy-Three through Seventy-Six
The question of whether Psychiatrist was my next Sequence had been waiting since the morgue. On the carriage ride back, Sisyphus had allowed the word to surface in his thoughts close enough for me to catch it. Before that, he had offered an absurd amount of money for the contact information of a trusted Psychiatrist after detecting Lucien's godhood. At the hospital, the Sequence 9 Spectator had attempted to read me and failed so completely that he became evidence of the difference between his Sequence and mine.
Three separate clues. Convergence might have been responsible for none of them, or for all three. I disliked not knowing. On Day Seventy-Three, I finally brought the question to the shrine and lit the candle.
The silver ritual knife lay within reach on the table, bright against the dark cloth despite the weak evening light. Wax, old wood, and the faint metallic smell of the blade made the room feel more like a place of work than a place of worship for the first time. I rested my hands in my lap while the flame settled. From where I sat, I could see my distorted reflection along one side of the blade.
"My Lady, is Psychiatrist the next Sequence of my pathway?" The question sounded quieter aloud than it had in my thoughts. I kept my attention on the candle rather than the knife, waiting without attempting to interpret every movement of the flame.
"Yes." One word. No ceremony. Evernight's answer came quietly enough that nothing else in the room changed around it. The knife still reflected candlelight, and the faint evening noise beyond the window continued as though I had not just confirmed the next step of my pathway.
My stomach still tightened. Sequence 7. The possibility had been abstract until then. I lowered my gaze. Naming it made the next advancement feel considerably closer than it had when the word belonged only to Sisyphus's stray thoughts.
"Thank You." I remained seated. There was another question. This one had a silver knife attached to it. I glanced toward the blade before deciding that delaying the subject would not make my previous behavior any more intelligent.
Sisyphus had given me a brief lesson in ritual magic before the morgue. Brief was generous. He had shown me how to cut a spiritual wall with a silver knife and an Ancient Hermes word. He had explained that candles could represent the caster, that self-summoning and petitioning a deity were different structures, and that spirits should not be called blindly.
Then I had immediately tested his patience by reciting an improvised five-line invocation in a language unfamiliar to Sisyphus. Nothing answered. Sisyphus had looked at me as if deciding whether employment contracts covered being killed by an idiot employer's summoning experiment. In retrospect, Sisyphus had been correct. The silver ritual knife on the table belonged to Lucien, who had not been consulted about my borrowing it.
"My Lady, Sisyphus taught me enough ritual magic to become dangerous to myself." The candle leaned. I watched the flame angle briefly before straightening again, uncertain whether amusement could be expressed through candlelight and unwilling to make that assumption.
"I would like to learn enough to become less so." Darkness softened around the room. Evernight did not pull me into a dream. Her voice came from nowhere I could identify, leaving the familiar bedroom exactly where it was around me.
"What did he teach you?" Her voice carried no hint as to what She already knew. The question left the work of explaining my own mistakes entirely to me, which was probably deserved.
I described it. The spiritual wall. The candle. The invocation. The messenger. The negative emotion used as payment. My attempted modified name.
When I finished, there was a silence long enough to become embarrassing. The candle continued burning between the knife and the emblem. Nothing in the room offered me a distraction from the fact that I had just summarized an extremely poor series of decisions to a goddess.
"He warned you not to invent what you did not understand." Evernight's voice remained level. The statement required no interpretation, particularly because I could still remember Sisyphus doing exactly that.
"Yes." There was little room to defend myself. I rubbed my thumb against the side of one finger and kept looking toward the table.
"And you attempted it while still inside a carriage with him." The second observation was somehow worse than the first. The memory of Sisyphus's expression returned with uncomfortable clarity.
"Yes." I answered just as plainly. The silver knife seemed significantly less impressive when sitting beside the memory of what I had done with the little information he had provided.
"Why?" Evernight asked. Nothing in Her tone suggested that curiosity alone would be considered an adequate defense. The room remained so ordinary that my own embarrassment felt disproportionately loud within it.
I considered lying to preserve dignity. That would defeat the last two months. There was also very little chance I could construct a version of events that sounded more reasonable than the one She had already heard.
"Curiosity." Another silence followed. I looked at the candle rather than the knife. The answer was true, but not complete enough to survive the quiet.
"And because part of me believed that if I sounded confident enough, the ritual would understand what I meant." The admission sounded even less intelligent once spoken aloud. I resisted the urge to cover my face with one hand.
"Rituals do not respect confidence." Evernight's answer arrived without any visible reaction from the room. The bluntness of it made the lesson considerably easier to remember.
"I gathered as much." The candle flame steadied. I sat straighter and waited, this time without trying to anticipate what would come next.
"Begin with structure." The instruction was simple. It also sounded suspiciously like something Sisyphus would have preferred I understand before improvising anything in his carriage.
That night, Evernight taught me ritual magic. Not secrets that should have belonged to a high Sequence. Fundamentals. The kind of things Sisyphus had tried to compress into a carriage ride before a dangerous job.
A ritual required a source, a target, and a defined purpose. The spiritual wall isolated the ritual space from ordinary disturbance and reduced unwanted interference. It did not make whatever stood beyond the wall friendly. A candle could represent the petitioner. Additional candles and materials established correspondences depending on the ritual.
Mystical languages were not decorative. Ancient Hermes was especially direct because it carried power in the words themselves. Mispronunciation, vague intent, or careless construction could have consequences disproportionate to the mistake. I found myself looking toward the knife again while imagining how many ways my earlier experiment could have ended badly.
An honorific name was not a poem. It was an address. Changing one because I preferred the sound was the spiritual equivalent of altering a street number and hoping the desired person still answered. That comparison was sufficiently humiliating to ensure I remembered it. I suspected that had been intentional.
"If I do not know a spirit's proper description?" I asked. The question came after several minutes of listening, once the distinction between knowing a type of spirit and knowing a particular spirit had become difficult to ignore.
"Do not summon it." Evernight's answer left no room for experimentation. The candle continued burning with the same ordinary steadiness as before.
"What if I know what kind of spirit I want?" I tried a narrower version of the question. Knowing a role still seemed useful even if a personal identity remained unknown.
"That is not the same as knowing whom you are calling." Her correction was immediate. A category could apparently contain far more danger than I had considered from the safety of a carriage.
"What if I pray to You first?" I asked. The solution sounded reasonable for approximately the amount of time it took to say it.
"My attention does not convert recklessness into knowledge." Evernight's response arrived with the same calm precision as the others. I looked down at my hands.
"Understood." I meant it this time. The difference was that I now had enough information to understand what I was agreeing not to do.
Evernight continued. Contracts with spirits were not automatically permanent, sacred, or safe because they occurred inside a ritual. Terms mattered. Payment mattered. The spirit's ability to refuse mattered. So did ending the ritual correctly.
"Do not leave a door open because the conversation pleased you," Evernight said. The wording made me glance toward the silver knife again. I had already shown an unfortunate tendency to let curiosity extend things beyond where caution would have stopped them.
"That sounds like advice applicable to more than ritual magic." No answer came. I chose not to push my luck. The candle had burned noticeably lower by then, and the knife's reflection had narrowed with the flame.
On Day Seventy-Four, I practiced the spiritual wall. No summoning. That was a rule. Evelyn watched. I placed the candle, held the knife, and repeated the Ancient Hermes word Sisyphus had taught me until I was certain I had the pronunciation correct.
"Barrier." The silver blade moved through the air. Pressure thickened around the room. The first attempt was uneven. I could feel one side of the wall more clearly than the other. I dismissed it instead of trying to repair a structure I did not fully trust.
I tried again. The second was better. Evelyn observed the candle while I checked the pressure along the edge of the room. The difference was subtle enough that I had to stand and move slowly around the space before I was satisfied that I could distinguish the boundary from expectation.
'This is less impressive than I expected magic to be.' Evelyn's disappointment carried more amusement than criticism. The third spiritual wall held evenly, and the candle flame barely moved within its boundary. I dismissed it before the flame burned too low. Nothing dramatic happened, which I considered progress.
On Day Seventy-Five, I practiced stopping. That sounded ridiculous until I tried it. The beginning was easy. Every part of me wanted to see what came next. Curiosity was not a valid reason to complete a ritual.
That sentence went into my notebook. Underlined once. I left the rest of the page blank. The emptiness beneath it made the point more effectively than another paragraph of explanation would have.
On Day Seventy-Six, I practiced one more time. Evening had settled heavily over the manor, muting the view beyond the glass until the window reflected more of the room than the grounds outside. Inside the spiritual wall, the candle flame was the clearest point of light, and every small sound seemed to stop at the boundary I had raised. I remained there only long enough to verify that the wall held evenly before dismantling it in the proper order.
Days Seventy-Seven through Seventy-Nine
Books and loose notes had spread across my desk until there was barely enough clear wood left for the lamp. Outside, the last of the daylight thinned over Tingen while I compared a memory from Earth against everything I had learned about spirits in the world where I had awakened. The problem was that the spirit I wanted came from a story in my old world. That made every part of the idea suspect until proven otherwise.
A great black dog. A guardian associated with roads, homes, darkness, and Somerset, though stories about it appeared in other parts of the region where I had once lived. The Black Dog. I had no reason to believe the spirit world cared about folklore from somewhere that might not even exist within this universe. I brought my question to Evernight.
"My Lady, I know a story from my old world." The candle burned steadily. "It describes a large black hound. Protective. Associated with a specific place that does not exist here." I hesitated. The problem sounded increasingly obvious as I described it.
"I would like a messenger. I do not intend to call a name from another world and hope the spirit world fills in the rest." I kept my attention on the flame while waiting. That restraint alone felt like evidence that the previous several days had accomplished something.
"Good," Evernight said. The word came quietly. Nothing about the answer was elaborate enough to hide the approval behind it. I smiled despite myself.
"Thank You." I resisted the urge to immediately ask another six questions. The dream that night was simple.
A road stretched beneath the crimson moon. Mist lay low across the ground, obscuring everything beyond a short distance. Something enormous walked beyond the edge of sight. I heard claws strike stone at a slow, unhurried pace. Evernight stood beside me.
"There is a spirit that may accept the role you want," She said. Her attention remained on the road ahead. The creature in the fog continued moving without approaching far enough to become visible.
"Is it the Black Dog?" I asked. The hope behind the question embarrassed me slightly once I heard it aloud. Some part of me had apparently wanted an old story to survive intact across worlds.
"No." Evernight's answer was immediate. I felt strangely disappointed. The claws continued beyond the mist.
"It has no interest in the name your memory gives it." The unseen creature moved in the fog. Its pace remained steady enough that I could not tell whether it was circling us or simply traveling along another road.
"Then what is it called?" I asked. A personal name still seemed like the simplest way to address something I intended to summon repeatedly.
"It does not use a human name." Evernight's attention remained on the road. The answer made the question of ritual identification considerably more important.
"You do not require a personal name to summon a spirit whose accepted ritual description you have been given." Three lines settled into my mind. Not as spoken language at first. As meaning. I concentrated on them rather than the unseen movement in the fog.
A spirit friendly to humans that wanders the roads of the spirit world. A black hound that keeps watch over the threshold and the lost traveler. A messenger willing to answer the call of Eve. I repeated the sentences carefully. Evernight corrected the second line.
Eventually it turned into something completely new. The final wording settled into my thoughts with a clarity the earlier versions had lacked. I repeated it until none of the lines felt uncertain.
The wanderer at the edge of castle.
That which protects house and home.
The dark that eats from the open hand.
Messenger of Eve.
"May I call it tomorrow?" I asked once the wording felt stable. The creature remained somewhere beyond the mist, close enough that I could hear the occasional scrape of claws.
"If you prepare correctly." Evernight did not explain what correctly meant without being asked. Given the previous lessons, I suspected that was intentional.
"What does it want?" I asked. Payment had become one of the first things I thought about after learning how spirit contracts worked.
"Ask it." That answer worried me slightly. Speaking to a spirit was not something I was immediately expecting to do. Then I realized how silly the hesitation was. How could I intend to summon a messenger without expecting to speak to it?
"Is it likely to ask for blood?" I asked. There were enough unpleasant forms of mystical payment that eliminating them in advance seemed prudent.
"No." The answer came before I could begin imagining quantities.
"Souls?" I continued. If I was going to embarrass myself, I preferred doing it before the actual summoning.
"No." Evernight remained facing the mist.
"Years of life?" I asked. The unseen hound continued walking somewhere beyond the visible road.
"No." Three possibilities eliminated. I considered what remained.
"Does it like bread?" Evernight looked at me. I realized that I had droned on with questions for much too long. The dream ended. I woke up laughing.
On Day Seventy-Eight, I prepared rather than summoned. Fresh bread. Cooked meat. Water. The silver knife. A clean candle.
Paper for a contract, though Evernight had warned that the spirit's agreement mattered more than the paper. I also wrote my desired terms in ordinary Loen before attempting anything mystical. Writing them without ritual language made it easier to notice where I had left something vague.
Messenger service when called. Payment each call. Right of refusal if the destination or task posed danger beyond what it accepted. No ownership. No claim over my soul, body, memories, or future.
No automatic claim of guardianship. Any relationship beyond messenger service would be separate from payment. Evelyn read the list with me. Her attention paused on the last condition longer than the others.
'You included friendship,' Evelyn observed. The observation carried immediate amusement. She had apparently noticed what I was trying to keep administratively separate.
"Separately." I refused to defend the distinction further. It seemed perfectly sensible to me.
'You want to befriend the giant spirit dog.' Evelyn did not sound convinced that this improved matters. Her amusement sharpened.
"Yes." The answer required no elaboration. I continued arranging the items for the following evening.
On Day Seventy-Nine, I performed the ritual. The room had been prepared until it felt almost unnaturally orderly. The clean candle, silver knife, folded paper, bread, meat, and water each occupied its chosen place, while the closed window kept the colder night air from disturbing the flame. Nothing remained within reach that I had not deliberately placed there.
I locked the room. Checked the window. Placed the shrine behind me rather than inside the working space. I was not summoning Evernight, and Her presence was not an ingredient in the ritual.
The candle represented me. The spiritual wall rose evenly. I checked it. Then checked it again. Only after that did I begin.
"I summon in my name.\
The wanderer at the edge of castle.\
That which protects house and home.\
The dark that eats from the open hand.\
Messenger of Eve."
The flame bent. The room deepened. Not darkened. Depth appeared where no depth should have existed. The familiar walls remained visible while something farther away opened between them.
A road formed beyond the spiritual wall. Mist rolled across it. Claws struck stone. Once. Twice. The intervals between each sound were slow enough that I had time to become increasingly aware of how large the source might be.
Two eyes opened slowly within the mist. They were high enough that my first thought was that Evernight had neglected to mention scale. A black muzzle emerged from the fog. Then a head. Then shoulders.
The hound was enormous. Larger than any dog in the original Evelyn's memories. Its back would have reached well above the waist of an ordinary adult man. Standing beside me, it would have made a Great Dane look merely large. Black fur swallowed most of the candlelight.
The creature stopped on the far side of my spiritual wall. It did not attempt to cross the boundary. Its eyes remained on me while the mist moved around its legs, intelligent without feeling human. I was suddenly grateful for every evening spent practicing the boundary.
"Thank you for answering," I said. The hound watched me. Its posture did not change enough for me to interpret whether the courtesy mattered. I decided not to invent meaning where none had been offered.
"What payment do you require to carry a message?" I kept both hands visible and did not move toward the prepared food. Payment first needed to be agreed upon rather than assumed.
Its voice came from somewhere deep behind its teeth.
"Food," the hound answered. The single word carried enough weight that I felt it more than heard it. The hound remained beyond the wall.
I waited.
"Each call." The clarification followed after a moment. That sounded considerably more manageable than most possibilities I had considered.
"What kind?" I asked. The hound sniffed once, and its muzzle tilted fractionally toward the table.
"Warm," the hound replied. The answer was simple. Evelyn's amusement moved through me before I could ask the obvious next question.
"Meat?" I glanced briefly toward what I had prepared. The smell had faded beneath the candle wax and cold air, but the hound clearly noticed it.
"Yes." Its ears remained forward. The answer did not sound particularly demanding.
"Bread?" I asked. The hound's ears shifted. That was the first obvious physical reaction I had received from it.
"Yes." I nodded. Warm food was an unexpectedly ordinary price for something that had just stepped out of a road that did not exist inside my bedroom.
"I can manage that." The hound remained still. I took out my written terms. The paper suddenly felt very human in comparison with the creature standing beyond the spiritual wall.
"I would like you to carry messages for me when called. You may refuse a destination or task you consider dangerous." I kept the page lowered enough that I could still watch the hound. Nothing in its posture suggested objection.
"No ownership." The hound's head lifted slightly. The correction, or perhaps clarification, came before I could continue.
"No ownership." I repeated the term exactly. That condition was easy to accept.
"No claim over me beyond the agreed payment." I kept my voice even. The wording had been one of the lines I reviewed most carefully the previous evening.
"No claim." The hound remained motionless after answering. The mist behind it shifted across the road.
"If you carry a message, you do not alter it." I glanced down at the paper only long enough to confirm the next term. The distinction between carrying and interpreting mattered.
"Words carried as given." That was better phrasing than mine. I nodded. The hound's version removed ambiguity more neatly than the line I had written.
"Agreed." The hound moved one paw forward. The spiritual wall rippled. It did not cross. Not yet.
I took a breath. The contract itself was settled enough that what remained no longer belonged to business. Evelyn was paying very close attention now.
"There is another thing I want to ask." I kept my hands away from the paper. "This is separate from the messenger agreement." The hound waited without shifting its weight.
"I would like to be your friend." Silence followed, filling the room. The spirit stared at me. I briefly wondered whether I had managed to embarrass myself before a dog from the spirit world. Then its tail moved once behind it.
The impact sounded heavy.
"Friend is not service," it said. The distinction matched the one I had tried to write into the agreement. Its gaze remained fixed on me.
"I agree." I did not need to reconsider that condition. Friendship obtained through obligation would defeat the point.
"Not payment." The hound's voice remained low. Its tail had gone still again.
"I agree." The answer was just as easy. Whatever developed beyond the messenger arrangement would have to exist separately from food or work.
"Time." The word took me a moment. Nothing in Gurt's expression clarified what it meant by that word.
"Time decides?" I asked. The interpretation seemed obvious once I formed it.
"Yes." The hound's answer settled the matter. I smiled.
The hound stepped through the spiritual wall. For a moment the room seemed too small for it, all dark fur and heavy shoulders beneath the candlelight. The ordinary furniture made its scale worse, because there was nothing dreamlike about the chair, the table, or the floorboards beside paws that belonged to something from the spirit world. I tensed.
I understood its passage through the wall to be permitted by the agreement we had just reached. Its paws touched the floor without sound. Up close, the size became ridiculous. I had to lift my hand to place it against the creature's brow. I did not do that yet.
First, payment.
I unwrapped the bread and meat. The hound lowered its head. I held out the loaf. Its jaws closed around it without touching my fingers.
The bread darkened. It broke into motes of shadow, vanishing between its teeth. The hound licked its muzzle. Its tail struck the floor once. Then again.
I laughed softly.
"You're welcome." The creature lowered its head. This time I placed my hand against its brow. The fur felt cold at first.
Then warm. Something settled behind my ribs. Not ownership. Recognition. A path.
The certainty that if I called using the agreed description and terms, the spirit would know the call belonged to me. I kept my hand against its brow for another moment before lowering it. The sensation remained after contact ended.
"What should I call you when I'm not performing a ritual?" I asked. The hound considered. No word came. Instead, images touched the edge of my mind.
A dark road. Fog. A house with one lit window. A threshold. A traveler finding the right path home.
I frowned.
"That is difficult to say at breakfast." The hound's tail moved. The movement was small, but I had begun to suspect it was amused.
'Gurt,' the original Evelyn suggested. Her answer came quickly enough that I almost laughed. Her attention had been unusually bright since the hound crossed the wall.
"The story from my world called a similar creature the Gurt Dog." The spirit looked at me. "Would Gurt offend you?" The hound sniffed. I waited rather than assuming silence meant acceptance.
"No." The answer came without visible offense. That was sufficient.
"Then Gurt, for convenience." It accepted that with all the dignity of a supernatural guardian being nicknamed because I lacked the vocabulary for a road in fog. The room felt warmer. I looked toward the shrine.
I bowed my head slightly.
"Thank You, My Lady." The candle flame behind me darkened toward violet. The change was subtle but immediate enough that I knew I had not imagined it.
Gurt's ears turned toward it. I looked back to the hound. The creature showed no alarm at the change.
"Do you want to leave, or stay for a while?" I asked. The ritual itself was finished enough that I did not want to assume continued presence was required.
The spirit settled onto the floor. Apparently, it had chosen to stay. I sat beside it. Its shoulder rose almost absurdly high beside me, and the furniture looked even smaller with both of us occupying the same patch of floor.
After a while the hound disappeared into darkness. The spiritual wall remained. I dismissed it properly. Only after the room was entirely ordinary again did I turn toward the shrine for a second time.
The contrast was almost disappointing. The walls were only walls again, the window showed only Tingen's night, and the lingering smell of bread and candle wax belonged to a bedroom rather than a threshold into the spirit world. The violet cast had left the candle. Evernight's presence remained faintly near.
"My Lady?" The darkness waited. I had one more thing to say. It had been building for weeks. I remained seated rather than returning immediately to the chair.
"I feel more loyalty toward You than I do toward Lucien and Mara." The sentence was uncomfortable because it was true. I looked down at my hands rather than the emblem. Gurt's absence had left the room feeling unusually empty.
"They saved me." That was the simplest description of the first night, even if the truth beneath it remained more complicated. "They gave me shelter. Work. Information. A life." I looked down at my hands. None of those things had become less important simply because the relationship surrounding them remained difficult to define.
"I care about them, somewhat." Care and loyalty were not interchangeable. Gratitude and trust were not either. "But with You, I have never had to earn the right to keep a boundary." The candle burned quietly. The observation had become more obvious each time Evernight accepted a refusal without demanding justification.
"I know that may change. I know I understand very little of what You are or what You want." My voice softened. "I am still grateful. Thank You. Truly." I remained still after the words ended, unwilling to turn gratitude into a request simply because She was listening.
"Your thanks are received." Nothing more. No promise that my loyalty was wise. No demand that it deepen. Evernight's voice remained quiet enough that the answer felt almost private despite what She was.
I nodded. Then Her presence began to withdraw. The room did not change dramatically. It simply became a room again. The candle became wax and flame.
After a while Evelyn spoke.
'You like Her.' The observation carried enough warmth that it did not sound like an accusation. Her attention remained close while I looked at the dying candle.
I smiled.
"Yes." I extinguished the candle. Smoke curled briefly above the wick before disappearing into the dark room.
I was exhausted, though hunger still gnawed at my stomach. I slipped out of my room and crossed the upper floor toward the staircase. The wood creaked beneath my feet as I descended. At the bottom, I noticed the fireplace was lit, its flames casting long shadows across the room.
A child sat in the chair opposite the fire. On the small table beside him stood a glass bottle, and from inside it, a single gleaming eye stared back at me.