Chapter 17 Blood Ritual #2
Caelum made his way cautiously to the opening in the stone, did a final scan, then angled himself to the right so he could see the dais itself and what was happening on it more clearly.
He couldn’t get close enough to see, not without risking that someone might run into him accidentally.
He kept his eyes on the chanting Magicals, even as he edged gradually towards the right, looking for a place where he might get an opening through the crowd.
Even being as tall as he was, there were just too many of them.
The dais was too high. He needed to find a way to get higher, maybe by climbing one of the stone statues.
At least it was loud enough here that he could worry less about sound.
Finally, he got around the first stone pharaoh, which rose at least twenty feet over where he stood.
On the other side, he found a place with stadium-like stone seats, tall enough that an adult man could sit with his thighs level, his feet flatly pressed to the floor.
The entire span of the white stone benches remained blessedly empty, even of guards, lit only by the torches that illuminated the rest of the cavernous hall.
Caelum didn’t see anyone in his way, or even standing near enough to hear him over the chanting, so he climbed up the first one, then the second.
It was awkward with the cane, but he managed.
When he got that high and turned around, he could see everything.
The ghostly apparition that had hovered over the round chunk of black stone now appeared to be tearing apart in that same invisible wind.
Caelum looked down to the dais itself.
A young, naked woman lay sprawled on top of the black stone.
She was really young, practically a girl, although she had a woman’s figure, and significant curves.
To Caelum’s eyes, she couldn’t have been much more than eighteen or nineteen, but he would have believed as young as fifteen and as old as twenty-three.
Human bones and skulls surrounded her as part of the ritual circle, some blackened, others dipped in gold, all of them arranged in arcane patterns that reminded him of something, even if he didn’t know or understand the precise meaning.
Blood covered her chest and neck, and wetted her blonde hair. It splattered across her pale, freckled face. She’d looked unconscious when he first stared down at her, but now, with the apparition almost gone, she appeared to be slowly coming to.
Robed figures walked out of the circle to approach her solemnly.
They reached her place on the dais, and carefully helped her to her feet.
They began leading her back towards the circle around the bones.
Her eyes were open. Blue eyes, shockingly bright, and filled with the same glow of light he’d seen in that apparition hovering over the ritual circle.
She looked dazed, and overly pale, but she was smiling widely now, her eyes slightly unfocused and manic, but excited rather than horrified, despite the blood running down her arms, face and chest, and now her bare back.
They’d cut runes into her, he realized, and what looked like sigils, but Caelum couldn’t read them clearly through the blood.
That was despite the fact that most of the actual cuts already appeared to be sealed, and shimmered with gold on her chest and arms.
Bones touched his chest compulsively as he stared.
More gold. Why?
He definitely hadn’t been grinning like that after his father made his marks on Caelum’s own chest. He’d been half-conscious, whimpering like a beat dog, unable to breathe through the fucking pain.
It felt like he’d been burned down to his very bones.
He hadn’t slept right for weeks after, and he still had nightmares about it.
What the fuck was the witch smiling about?
For she definitely was a witch.
He could see the familial sitting on her shoulder, although it wasn’t until she turned slightly in his direction that he got a clear view of what it was.
A jewel-toned scarab the color of lapis lazuli sat there.
It lifted its shell to buzz its wings as he watched, almost like it was smiling along with its witch, or even clapping.
Staring at it, Caelum felt his throat go dry.
Mordopast. That was their familial.
But he knew every Mordopast, and the young woman with her reddish-blonde hair, curvy body, and very young-looking face wasn’t one of them. Her doe-like eyes didn’t match with any Mordopast eyes he’d ever seen, nor did the texture of her hair, nor even her skin tone.
Caelum’s eyes fell to the ritual circle carved into the stone.
He turned his head, trying to read runes painted there with blood and something else, but they were already fading as the ritual wound down.
The center ring glowed the brightest. They still shone a hot white under his magical vision, tinted blue like the fire, but it didn’t really help him much to understand what had been done.
He frowned as he read, and tried to piece the different symbols together into a coherent set of meanings.
Djed, the backbone of Osiris. Stability. Regeneration.
Eye of Ra, generally protection, including against disease, magical harm, spirits with ill intent. Also had connotations around royal blood? That might be the relevant bit here.
Scarab beetle, which made sense, given the royal house. Also rebirth, stability, the afterlife, power, preeminence of the god-king. Lotus, the Was Sceptre, Uraeus or cobra symbol, Ka, which represented the soul, or the part of a Magical that survived death.
Most were major symbols used in a lot of rituals. The placement was what mattered, and the exact order and relative size.
It wasn’t a ritual he knew, or had read about.
He saw blood in the center of the circle, but it shone a different hue, nearly silver, rather than the regular, black-brown blood he’d seen all over the woman.
He followed her with his eyes as a witch and an older mage helped her down the stone steps, and then guided her reverently into the crowd.
Once surrounded by the other ritual-goers, she was touched by hands and fingers as she walked among them.
Like the two Magicals guiding her, they touched her reverently, despite her nakedness.
They also bowed and touched their foreheads or their lips after they’d made contact.
A few in the crowd got down on their hands and knees and prostrated themselves in front of her as she walked by.
She smiled benevolently and a little haughtily in return.
When she reached Tomas Mordopast, the current patriarch of the Mordopast House, he enveloped her in a crushing hug and broke into an open sob.
After the witch disentangled herself from him, she wrapped herself around Yorick Orrin, of all people, and the two of them kissed.
It was a prolonged, passionate, definitely not platonic kiss.
Caelum stared down at them as they kissed a second time, astonished.
It struggled to make sense of Orrin caring about anyone.
He knew the Mordopast patriarch, as well, and the old mage was hardly sentimental.
He was father to Vlad, the Mordopast currently attending Malcroix Bones, who was roughly Caelum’s age, although a few years ahead of him in school.
Vlad looked a lot like his father, despite their different coloring.
Where Vlad was dark, Tomas was light. Where the son was black-haired, the patriarch was blond.
Both were handsome, despite their near-matching hook noses.
Tomas had the same green eyes as his son, Vlad, but his were a shade lighter, and set wider apart.
Bones had never seen either of them cry.
He’d never seen the father emote publicly in any way at all.
When the woman with the strawberry blonde hair finally pulled back from Orrin’s more sexual embrace, she had tears in her eyes.
She continued to grip his arms in both of her hands as he motioned over someone else, who wrapped her in a gold-embroidered white cloak.
Yorick Orrin tied the cloak carefully around her throat, still speaking to her and laughing, tears in his eyes as he caressed her face and lips with his fingers.
Caelum frowned, utterly confused.
He looked back at the dais, but the magic was fading for real now.
He did his best to memorize the exact placement and size of all the runes he’d seen.
Then he saw the bones around the edges of the outer circle.
The skull stood at the head, just over four large Ka symbols. It still glowed black and red, but like the inner circle, the ember-like glow was slowly disappearing. Longer bones were arranged on the inside of the same ring, and hip and leg bones formed the circle outside.
If this was a bridging spell, it was nothing like his.
There’d been no bones involved in his own ritual.
He needed to talk to Greythorne, ask him if this was anything like what his father and the other Dark Cathedral initiates had done to him.
He was about to step down from the tall, amphitheater-like bench, to make his way back towards the exit and out of this fucking place––
––when something sharp stung the back of his neck.
Caelum hit at it with his palm, and winced at the pain that shot through him, even before he’d pulled his hand back in front of him.
What the fuck?
He turned around to find a creature standing on the stone step behind him.
He stared at the hairless thing with its rubbery, grey skin and its two large black eyes that swallowed a formless face.
The creature stared back at him blankly, unmoving at first, its small feet flat and misshapen on the stone, its thin arms and hands with long, glass-like claws hanging limply at its side. It was about the size of a small owl.
Oh… no.
The thought barely had time to form when the creature’s previously-invisible mouth fell open. It let out a deafening, shrieking wail, as loud as an air-raid siren. Its mouth hung down more than half the length of its blobby body.
Caelum turned to look at the crowd below, even as he felt the creature’s venom working on his magic, shooting through the aetheric veins that covered the surface of his physical body.
The invisibility spell melted off him in seconds as he stared out over that crowd of Magicals.
His hair color changed next, as did his face.
Every part of his disguise was all gone, even as he fought to spark up his magic and mostly failed.
When his physical vision snapped back into focus, the first face he saw was Sirena’s.
She stared up at where he stood, and slowly began to grin.