The Acolyte & The Alchemist Part VII
The scholars began with small sacrifices.
An unsuspecting spider, swathed in its own web. A lizard, its glassy eyes reflecting moonlight. A goldfinch, its song cut short beneath their whispered invocations. Little things, barely a ripple in the vast pulse of the world’s thrumming life.
They practiced only when the halls of the Conservatory lay silent, when the oil lamps had guttered to embers, and when the other students’ dreams lay undisturbed. The first time, Quill had flinched. The second, his hands had merely trembled. By the third, he had learned how to steady his grip.
And yet, the magick did not answer them.
His hands, once dry and ashen from the endless turning of pages, had softened—warmed by the slick stain of blood. The ink of his studies had been replaced by something more sickly sweet.
But it wasn’t enough.
“It’s not working. We should stop,” Quill murmured, his voice barely rising above the weight of his own revulsion.
The latest offering lay twitching before him, its broken body still clinging to the last embers of life.
A stray cat. A thing with a name, perhaps.
A thing that might have purred beneath someone’s touch.
His stomach twisted.
“This feels . . . morbid.”
Hamra, crouched beside him, did not look away from the carcass. Her eyes—swirls of onyx and fire—were dark, too dark, reflecting none of his hesitation. Cards encircled them in a bright gold ring, gleaming under the moonlight.
“No,” she said, fingers trailing the pages of The Book of Skorn, her lips moving as if deciphering a prophecy mid-chant.
“We’re just misreading the Book. We need five elements represented.” She looked over to their makeshift altar. “But what if they aren’t just symbolic? What if they’re . . . people?”
Quill’s breath hitched. The air between them thickened, taking on the weight of something irreversible.
“You want to bring more students into this?” His voice was sharp, laced with something unexpected, even to him.
It should have been horror.
It should have been disgust.
But he named it for what it was: jealousy coursing through him, hot and thick, curling around his ribs like a vice. This ritual, this madness, was theirs. No one else’s.
Breaching their pact would require him to justify himself, explain this madness to someone other than Hamra. He didn’t know if he could do that.
Hamra lifted her gaze, watching him in that way she always did—like she already knew what he would say, what he would do, what he would become.
“It says here,” she continued, unfazed, “that the elements breathe life into the cards, imbuing them with the power of transcendental magick. We need someone touched by water and earth magick. We already represent the others.”
Quill swallowed. Somewhere, the rational part of him was screaming, clawing at the edges of his mind like a caged thing. Hamra must have seen it in his eyes, the quiet scream of doubt, because her voice dipped into that crushed velvet sound, soothing the scared boy.
“I will never feel the same about anyone except you.”
The words curled between them like smoke, slipping into the cracks of Quill’s hesitation, filling the spaces. He felt a head rush and his eyes dipped to her lips. How could anyone be so devastatingly beautiful?
“That’s why I want to do this with you,” she whispered, reaching for his hand. Her grip was warm, still slick with blood.
She rose from her crouch, moving to where he knelt beside the carcass. Her movements were slow, deliberate, as if the world had narrowed to just the two of them, to just to this moment.
Quill could feel the heat of her skin radiating towards him.
He whispered to her, “Before we include the others, I have another idea—” But before he could finish, she leaned in, her breath warm against his lips.
The scent of blood and cinnamon filled his lungs.
The world blurred at the edges, the ritual swallowing them whole.
When she kissed him, her fingers still red from the fresh kill, Quill did not pull away. He accepted her lips like an unholy communion, baptized by their spilled blood.