Chapter 1 #2
My mother threw Persi one more angry look before turning to me to explain.
“Scrying surfaces—mirrors, water, crystal balls, all of that—it’s not like looking through a window.
It’s more like opening a door and then leaning through it.
An open door will let you see through it, but you can also accidentally step through it, which is likely what happened that night in the garden of Shadowkeep. ”
“It also works in both directions,” Rhi said. “When you open a door, that means someone or something else can step through it. It’s an invitation I’m quite sure we don’t want to extend.”
“You mean, whatever it is I’m trying to see or communicate with might just… show up?” I asked, making a valiant but totally unsuccessful attempt to keep my voice calm.
“In a way, yes,” Rhi confirmed.
“There are safeguards for that,” Persi snorted with a dismissive wave of her hand. “That kind of thing only happens when someone is—”
“Inexperienced? Experimenting? In other words, exactly like Wren in this moment?” my mom shot back.
“Look, I’m not saying we never do it again, but I do think we should work up to it when she has a better handle on her abilities.
There are plenty of other methods to try, and we’re going to start with those.
If we exhaust all those other possibilities, we can discuss scrying, but not a minute before. ”
Persi argued fruitlessly, but she was no match for my mom, and so we had moved on to other methods of divination.
Tarot cards hadn’t been a complete disaster—in fact, with some practice, I felt that I might even get good at them; but as a novice, I didn’t trust myself enough to interpret what was right in front of me.
There were too many meanings for each card, too many combinations to keep track of.
So much of tarot was simply trusting myself, and I hadn’t mastered that yet.
And so Persi, in a fit of impatience, had snatched the cards away.
“Too many choices. Let’s strip this down to the bones. Literally,” she said, and she did indeed mean literally, because now here I was, working with actual bones.
Looking down at the bones and stones in the bowl, I tried to push all the doubts and distractions out of my mind.
Divination wasn’t something even a powerful witch could accomplish while being bombarded by intrusive thoughts.
This part, at least, I was getting noticeably better at.
So much of witchcraft was simply a single-minded setting of intention, and I had grown accustomed to this process.
I took in a long, slow breath. I imagined it filling every corner of my lungs, expanding them like balloons, and then, as I exhaled, I blew out everything but my question, the one I was asking the bones and stones to answer for me.
Allowing my question to fill all the empty spaces in me, I reached out and scooped all the bones and rune stones into my hands.
I cupped them inside and shook them, feeling them rattle against the skin of my palms. Then I lifted my clasped hands to my lips and whispered the question against my own fingers.
I opened my eyes, preparing to throw the bones, and glanced down into the bowl.
Its surface was highly polished, and for a moment, I could see my own reflection.
This did not give me pause. I’d seen it before—I’d been at this for hours.
What gave me pause was the fleeting, shadowy figure that passed over my reflection, moving like a cloud from left to right across the surface of the bowl, like a ripple in water.
I was so startled that I dropped my handful of bones and stones.
They shattered the image like a pebble thrown into a still pool.
They clattered and tumbled over each other as I snapped my head over my shoulder, looking for what could have caused the shadow.
“What are you looking for?” Persi asked, sounding impatient again.
“What? Nothing, I… I thought I saw… I guess it was nothing,” I said, still combing the room frantically and finding nothing out of place, nothing that could have caused what I had just seen.
Had someone or something passed the window?
Was this all just an overreaction? Was I so desperate to see something in the bowl that my brain invented it?
“Wren.”
I sighed. I didn’t want to turn around, look into the bowl, and see that there was no answer waiting for me, merely a jumble of nonsense that I would spend pointless minutes trying to force into sense, as I’d been doing all afternoon.
“Wren.” Persi’s voice was impatient.
“Wren. Turn around and look at this.”
I kept my eyes fixed stubbornly on the frost stars blooming on the windowpanes. “Why bother? It’s just more nonsense. This is pointl—”
“Wren, I’m serious. Look.”
I froze. That bite in Persi’s voice wasn’t impatience, I realized.
It was excitement, an excitement that was seeping into me now, spider-walking along my skin, raising goosebumps, and jumpstarting my heart rate.
It wasn’t possible, was it? Had I actually gotten an answer?
Overcoming my fear, I whipped around in my seat and peered down into the bowl.
Every other time I had thrown the bones and stones, they had simply piled into the middle of the bowl in an unreadable heap.
I had tried to interpret them, of course, but could never divine anything that made any sense.
Now, a very odd formation had appeared inside the bowl, the very sight of which sent a strange shiver up my spine. I shuddered.
“Is it…?” was all I managed to say, because my teeth were inexplicably chattering.
“You’ve done it,” Persi whispered, and as she lifted her eyes to meet mine, there was a light there that I hadn’t seen in months—a spark of excitement that caught like fire on dry tinder, so that I felt myself aglow with it as well.
Persi moved carefully around the table, clearly trying not to jostle anything in the tiny space that might upset the bowl.
I felt rather than saw her press up behind me, leaning over my shoulder so that her long dark hair tickled my face.
Together, we gazed down into the bowl, eagerly taking in the details.
I snatched up my pencil and began creating a rudimentary sketch of what I saw.
There were three rune stones facing upward, their symbols staring up at me. I had studied all twenty-four stones, and so I knew what those symbols meant. I wrote them down as they appeared from left to right:
Thurisaz, symbolizing a challenge to be overcome.
Raido, suggesting a journey or quest.
Dagaz, representing breakthrough and enlightenment.
I could hear Persi muttering the names of the runes under her breath even as I was writing them down. I tried to ignore her and turned my attention to the bones.
They were sparrow bones, boiled and bleached until it felt impossible that they’d ever been part of a real living creature. I’d been horrified at the thought of working with something like animal bones at first, but my mother had intervened.
“We never kill animals for these tools, Wren; that would render them unfit for benevolent magic. Instead, when we come upon animals that have already passed on, we honor their spirits by making earthly use of the shells they’ve cast off.”
I’d swallowed my initial doubts, and set to work learning the anatomy of the bird skeletons, so that I could identify which bone was which and how they fit together. Next, I had to learn their meanings in divination, meanings which had never yet amounted to anything I could interpret.
Until now.
The majority of the bones lay in a heap on top of the overturned rune stones—it looked deliberate, like someone had weeded them out and cast them aside.
My gaze seemed to be drawn magnetically away from them, and I knew, instinctively, that those were not part of any message I was meant to receive.
It was rare for me to feel something so intuitively, and I embraced it.
I focused on the remaining bones. There were three of them, and they had all landed pointing straight downward, bisecting the center line of the cross carved into the bottom of the bowl. I made a quick sketch of their positions, and began to label them.
They were leg bones, all three of them. Delicate little leg bones, thin as toothpicks, and just as brittle.
Behind me, Persi had gone statue-still, and seemed to be holding her breath.
Next, I pulled the little notebook closer to me, the one in which I had taken all of my notes about the various bones and rune stones, and what they all meant.
Leg bones were meant to signify travel, where one was going or coming from, or perhaps a journey of some kind.
They were pointing into the bottom part of the cross inside the bowl, which was meant to signify moving from the present into the past. This coordinated with raido, the rune which also symbolized a journey.
I took the other runes into account and, without overthinking it, wrote down a sentence, my instinctive interpretation of what was in front of me.
Then I placed my pencil down and took a shaky breath.
“Well?” Persi finally asked, her husky voice snappish. “Let’s hear it!”
It took a moment for me to find my own voice, and when I did, it was barely a whisper. I read the words I had written in the notebook.
“The answer to my question lies behind me. In order to find the enlightenment I seek, I need to take a journey into the past,” I said.
I looked up at Persi. She was frowning, but not in her usual judgmental or bad-tempered way—this was a frown of deep contemplation.
“A journey into the past,” she muttered, her lips barely moving. Then she tore her gaze from the bowl to settle on my face. “What was your question, Wren? What specifically did you ask?”
I swallowed hard and then, with trembling fingers, turned the page backward in the notebook to reveal the question I had written there. Persi’s eyes widened as she looked down at the words.
Where is the Darkness?