spirits – Nightshade Stories

The Baby Monitor

July 12, 2022July 23, 2022 by smithaw50, posted in BLOGGING 101, fantasy

Chapter 1: The Husband

The nursery was done.

John had checked all the new tech to make sure it worked. He’d spared no expense on the bells and whistles, and stated to himself that if a spider farted in its web anywhere near the new baby’s crib, they’d know.

Taking a step back to admire his work, he turned to his wife Megan and smiled.

She smiled back, but it was more like an attempt than an actual smile, and John’s brow furrowed in concern.

The baby growing inside her seemed to keep her wan and listless, so her smile was weak. He also noticed that her eyes, usually so bright and full of life, were red and tired from fitful nights of sporadic sleep.

He knew she needed to see a doctor outside of their regular appointments, but she kept assuring him whatever was ailing her would pass, so not to upset her further he backed off to let her sort it out.

Looking down at her now, he couldn’t do that anymore.

Something was wrong, and what should have been a happy occasion was turning into something dark and maudlin.

Not meaning to make it about him, but doing it, John decided he couldn’t live with that if something happened to his wife because he was clueless.

Also not meaning to make decisions for Megan, but doing it, he wouldn’t let her wave him off anymore; she was going to see a doctor whether she wanted to or not, and if she didn’t want to go to an office, there was enough to pay for a house call.

Now that it was settled in his mind, he held her hand and pointed with his free one, explaining all the bells and whistles, what they did, and why he installed it.

Chapter 2: The Wife

He’d done a great job, she could see that.

He always did, and probably always would do a great job.

He did a great job selling you to marry him, after what you said…

She smiled as he nattered on, remembering she’d told him she’d never get married.

Now here they were, not only married, but in a self-made nursery.

How did we get here, Megan? Where did you go?

No, this hadn’t been in the plans, her plans anyway, but he’d been so excited when she told him that she actually got caught up in it.

The weeks flew by at first, and she enjoyed his attention, but at times he became cloying when she just wanted peace. He’d fire questions at her as if he’d never taken sex ed in school sometimes.

She knew it came from a place of love, that he wanted to look after her. He liked looking after her. He liked needing to be needed.

That’s what husbands are for. He said it so much for so long, she began to get caught up in that too, but now, standing beside him, her belly stretched and stretching farther, she was simply no match for the seemingly endless waves of energy he exuded.

Seeing the concern in his eyes appear as his smile vanished, she knew then that whatever he saw in her face was not good. She also knew what he’d say next when he finished his guided tour of shiny new tech she couldn’t care less about, and that she wouldn’t be allowed to say no this time.

Chapter 3: The Baby Monitor

These human things, they never learn. They make it embarrassingly easy for us to enter their world, and make their lives unbearable before we make them ours.

The little ones, the portals, are the most vulnerable, newly cast from our own world. They are the easiest. They have no strength to resist us, but they know something’s wrong, and cry.

The parents arrive then, concerned and fussing, soothing the portal until it goes back to sleep.

Some of us slip from the portals to stay and make sport until they all leave the house.

Other times, they’ll summon their clerics to summon their gods to be rid of us.

Some of us take the portals back, but to other places, and the big ones get sad and don’t stay together.

In the old times they placed their wards and slept by the portal’s side, or had the portal sleep beside them so they could protect it if we sent our familiars.

Not so, now. They have given the care of their portals over to these things they call cameras, with machines that make hissing noises to sooth the portal and make it rest.

That’s when we strike.

Even now, this one leeches the female’s soul as well as her body.

I think it wants to come back and bring her with it.

The male will intervene, and have someone try to make her whole again.

We shall see, but for now we wait.

And watch.

The Passing: Where All Roads Lead (Chapter 23)

September 2, 2020September 2, 2020 by smithaw50, posted in BLOGGING 101, Uncategorized

Tyrel stayed within shouting distance, but the tension between him and Zephyr might as well have been manacles, one for each of them.

I grew frustrated at the constant looks of trepidation, hate, fear, and disrespect they were trading. Zephyr had actually cursed, not a few times, and that made Tyrel even more suspicious and hostile.

“Are the two of you going to be this paranoid the entire trip?”

Tyrel made a face at me that was supposed to be stern, but he looked so forlorn instead that I laughed, which made him blush and smirk at himself. It released some of the tension.

In the end, it didn’t matter how he behaved, we had to travel together for a goodly distance yet, and to do that without leaving possibly leaving each others’ bodies on the side of the road, we had to trust each other.

Perhaps it was Tyrel’s suspicious nature that allowed my seed of doubt about the Cancelers’ motives to take root.

There was a lot to be done, and we’d have to come up with a plan for accomplishing two seemingly impossible things. At the very least was the question of which one to do first. I was thinking of drawing out the Traitors Guild by dealing with the Cancelers first; they’d think they had an ally, so they’d be more likely to re-emerge and reveal themselves. Then we’d turn our attention to them, and I realized that would be Tyrel’s turn to wonder about me.

I wondered about me too.

The other unknown was Zephyr; he was old, and large even for a raven, so he knew how to keep himself alive. Whether or not he’d be content as a storage space for Abdiel or want to intervene was the question on his part. Sometimes familiars picked up residual magic just by being around it for so long.

And if Gran was able to send him to me through the spirit world, I had no idea what she told him.

We’d have that conversation when we made camp for the night; I needed to know if he had any knowledge of the Cancelers, and if he could help us stop them, since he said he was linked more to Abdiel than me.

Stopping to rest and eat, Tyrel and I discussed finding a faster way to travel, that neither of us was fond of the work required by horses, but that didn’t mean we were open to riding other things either.

I told him my idea of engaging the Cancelers first. He thought they were the more dangerous enemy, and suggested we seek to root out the Guild members instead.

“But the Cancelers are mostly centered in one location,” I countered. “We don’t know anything about the Guild, like how many, or the amount of power they have. It would be easier if they thought someone was fighting the Cancelers on their behalf.”

He was reluctant to agree with that, but he finally did.

So calloused, weary feet would have to do for now, but considering the sketchy plans we generalized against a backdrop of daunting details, against the scope of our missions, it hardly seemed worth it.

It would also turn out to be the least of our worries.

The Passing: Present Company Accepted (Chapter 22)

September 2, 2020September 2, 2020 by smithaw50, posted in BLOGGING 101, Uncategorized

The day was going to be sunny and warm, and Tyrel and I maintained a less-than-strained cordial silence as we walked toward the city of the Cancelers’ stronghold. Tyrel still hadn’t told me its name, and out of respect for his thoughts on the idea that those who’d raised him were using magic for their own ends and had to be stopped, I left him to turn them over without pressing him.

Abdiel and his growing horde of dark spirits had taken the raven’s body, and it gave the most ear piercing, soul wrenching call somewhere between a squawk and a scream, its body puffing from the displacement until it looked like it was about to pop, the feathers all but standing on end.

It was unpleasant to see, and even more so to hear, but the pain in my shoulder as it gripped me and drew blood, even through my tunic, made me cry out.

It was the fastest way to accomplish things if not the safest. During the process I had to trust Abdiel to keep control of things, and except for the sharp, racing pain of Zephyr’s involuntary clench, he did.

Tyrel looked on with a dispassionate helplessness, knowing he couldn’t help me, and not sure if he would if he could. Now in his presence my stomach was mildly upset as opposed to being in pain when Abdiel occupied me.

I wondered if even the distance now would be enough, as Abdiel’s detection of his presence had grown sharper.

Zephyr’s body slowly deflated, his eyes regained their midnight blackness, but there was blood on his feathers, and some on his beak. I took a small piece of rag of something unimportant at the moment, and used it to clean him as he perched on my arm.

Now that the ordeal was over, Tyrel walked over to us to test things out.

Zephyr watched the Canceler’s approach the way a king watches a beggar about to plead his innocence in murdering the queen.

*****************

Tyrel watched him too, but not like a beggar; it was more like an enemy he found in an an empty alley, and only one of them was going to walk out of it. But he spoke to me, never taking his eyes off the bird.

“Anything?”

I closed my eyes, took stock of my body, feeling surprisingly whole for a change. I’d thought it would be as if a part of me was gone, a piece of my insides carved away, but all I discovered was that I was hungry.

“No. What about you?”

He shook his head, still watching Zephyr, but now it bothered me to see it.

“What’s wrong, Tyrel. You’re staring at him like he’s an enemy.”

He looked at me then. “I don’t know that he’s not.”

I sighed, my hopes for an absence of conflict as we traveled now dashed. “You’re being ridiculous. He’s just a bird.”

“No he isn’t, or he wouldn’t be able to harbor the spirits in himself, much less shield them from me, and he speaks the human words he knows like one of us. He’s a familiar, Tina, and that doesn’t make him just anything.”

The words, though not said scornfully, stung. But they also gave me pause. Having grown up a witness to Gran’s magic, it was easy to forget sometimes the world around us didn’t see things through our eyes; a raven familiar to one such as Gran would still be…just a bird.

I finished cleaning Zephyr. If blood prices are always part of these things, I can understand the king’s concern…but he’d used the wrong approach, and now we’re all involved in a possible war that didn’t have to happen at all.

No, the king hadn’t seen things like we did, and certainly not the Cancelers, but whereas the king wanted to eliminate the perceived threat, Tyrel and I were on our way to make sure the Cancelers weren’t trying to use the ruse of aiding him in that quest as a means to their own ends.

I smiled at the thought that I was traveling with a Canceler to make sure that all they wanted to do was kill us too.

There was reasons people felt the Great Purge had been necessary, and I would do well to remember them. I’d been tasked with finding the Traitors Guild, and if the Cancelers were indeed hoarding magic in what they claimed was a Void instead of actually purging it, that had to be stopped as well.

How far a Canceler would go with a newly made witch to accomplish those things was an open ended question.

For now he was willing, but I had to think about what I’d be willing to do if, or when, that was no longer true.

The Passing: Growing Strength (Chapter 19)

June 17, 2020June 17, 2020 by smithaw50, posted in BLOGGING 101, Uncategorized

Abdiel had finally settled the others, then himself, as I sat on the edge of my bed back at The Crystal Harp. I took the liberty of ordering wine. The bartender looked askance at me because of my age, but decided the coin was worth the risk. Unlike The Dregs, lawmen spot checked places like these under the King’s orders to demand ‘fees and taxes’.

Slavers, however, were perfectly respectable; the king left them alone. No one wanted to be on their bad side. They were known to kidnap family members from those who’d ‘reform’ them.

“Leave me tomorrow. I need to think of a way to work with Tyrel.”

The longer we stay with you, the more difficult the leaving will become. And we risk ourselves as well; he is not the only Canceler, and they roam. Another might chance upon us not realizing Tyrel was already here. He’ll be punished if they find that out.

He sent me a vision, unwelcome, of Tyrel naked, spread in the air, and beaten with barbed whips, blood spattering with every strike as his head lolled forward, and crows danced and plucked at the scraps of him already torn.

I retched, but fortunately wasn’t hungry. “Don’t send me those unless I ask for them!”

Silence. His response whenever he wasn’t sure what he’d done wrong, or when he knew it.

I regained my composure, ragged as it was, and sleep was a wanderer with lodging in view.

“Once again, you might have told me that earlier.”

We are newly bound, Tina, in new circumstances. It is not a light task Hannah set for you. Make no mistake, we are maleficent spirits, and she wielded great power over us. She asked me to aid you in the transition, but you are young.

If you are not worthy of the task, we will set ourselves free. I will not tell you more than you need to know because this is a challenge by our predators.They are the only beings that could cause our ‘death.’

“You’re already dead, are you not?”

Not as you die. It is more a dissolution. We feel it pull on us whenever you are in his presence. The others cling to me as I root myself in Hannah’s power within you,but it is taxing, and if we leave you now before you have it all, the pain might drive you mad. It will feel like a tearing of your insides.

. I showed you the Cancelers, and told you of their power. We have none over them other than what you might devise, but neither do we have the luxury of time for you to create a spell.

I took a moment to consider what he’d just told me. I was tired, and afraid, and but for Gran’s power protecting me, they would have slipped my own worthless attempts to bind them and shed blood all over the land.

“So let me ask you this: is the quest to destroy them Gran’s gift to you for helping me?

You may deem it such. It is here revenge on the Traitor’s Guild as well. As for Tyrel, there may be another way.

There was no happy compromise to this.

“And what is that way, Abdiel?”

You are strong enough now. Speak with Hannah.

The thought of seeing Gran again, in any form, set off in me a fireball of emotions.

At the core of it though, despite what I would have liked, was the necessity. In an odd way, it was good of Abdiel to remind me the spirits I contained were dark in nature and purpose.

Abdiel guided me through the ceremony, and the wandering sleep walked past and on into the night.

********************

But for the shining eyes, she was as she’d been in life; deceptively plain, like a snake of late autumn colored scales in a pile of late autumn leaves, sepia in tone.

“Gran.”

“My child. I’d hoped you had no need to disturb my rest.”

“I’m sorry, Gran. Abdiel and I are still…adjusting.”

“What is it you need from me, dear?”

“There’s a Canceler here. We’ve met more than once. He says it’s his job to kill me, but I made him a proposal. I just don’t know how to make it work without taking his life.”

“He made his mission clear. You can do no less.”

“At the moment, we have a truce. He can lead me to where the Traitors hide, or at least get me started.”

“That will save time. And what will you do for him?”

“We haven’t talked about that, yet. How do I stop him from weakening us as we travel?”

“Shield them.”

“How?”

“In a familiar.”

“They won’t weaken?”

“The familiar’s designed for it.”

“What kind? You never had one.”

She smiled. “I never needed one.”

That stung a little. “What kind, then? A cat?”