Magic University Book One: The Siren and the Sword

by Cecilia Tan

  Tomorrow was the new moon. Tomorrow he would try the spell to create the amulet that could make a Sphinx tell the truth.

  And if I’m not magical after all? Kyle could see his future disappearing like the cup sinking in Longfellow’s poem about the bridge. No. No, that wasn’t going to happen. He had to keep his confidence up. He knew that much by now, that self-doubt was the worst of the self-fulfilling prophecies someone could inflict on themselves; it could doom a spell to failure.

  But he hadn’t managed a single conjuration or transformation yet, couldn’t levitate things, couldn’t talk to animals—and had felt stupid trying—and had yet to have any prophetic visions of his own.

  Coherent thought ceased as he drew closer and closer to his peak, the sound of his own breathing loud in his ears. He rolled over onto his stomach, licking his palm and pushing it under himself so that he could rut against it. He buried his face in his pillow to muffle the noises he was making—not that anyone was around to hear, but he did it out of habit. His hips jerked as he broke into a sweat. So close, he just needed a little more...

  He threw his head back violently as he came, the orgasm sending a spasm through his whole body. His shoulder knocked painfully against the corner of his desk, which was crammed next to the bed in the tiny room, but he just gritted his teeth and rode out the waves of pleasure that rocked through him.

  He shook his head as the sound of something metallic reached his ears through his post-orgasmic haze. He looked. Loose change was spilling off the desk onto the floor.

  Wait. That was definitely more change than was there before, wasn’t it?

  He looked over the edge of the bed at the floor. That looked like a dollar or two worth, and there was at least that much on the desk.

  He hurried to clean himself up and then set to counting it. I have no idea how much there was to start with, he thought. But it definitely seemed like more. Maybe twice as much as had been there?

  He decided to believe that it was. Yes, that was it. Believe that he’d done it, yes, and now wasn’t he starving? Surely that was proof?

  Good enough. He got dressed and put on his coat and gloves for a walk to the all-night drugstore to get a protein bar. The tiniest sliver of moon was visible over the roof of Widener Library as he crossed the yard. Who wrote or will write the poem that described the wee hours? he wondered.

  When he got back to his room, laden with protein bars and chocolate-covered peanuts and a handful of other things he’d only been half aware of buying, he wrote:

  A shred of mist clouds God’s eye

  Nearly closed, the last sliver of moon

  Dragged into sleep by the weight of waiting dreams

  While hopes escape like precious breaths lost

  * * * *

  In the morning he woke to find he’d written the poem in Longfellow’s notebook, not the one Master Lester had given him. He stared at the page in a panic for a moment, then a kind of calm descended on him as he realized there was no undoing what he’d done. He had to accept it.

  Very well. He added a notation that included his own name, the date, a description of walking toward Widener, and his persistent thoughts about the Avestan Prophecies, “in particular the first and most famous cycle.”

  He slipped the book back onto the shelf on his way to breakfast, but after walking ten or so steps past the door, heading toward the Nummus dining hall, he suddenly wondered if he should fast before the ritual tonight.

  Maybe I should jerk off, too. The moment he thought of it, he knew he would. He blinked, wondering if this was what prophetic moments felt like. It all seemed so clear somehow.

  What he should have done, he would later think, was go to dinner and box up some food to eat later, but after not eating all day, he was afraid he would be too tempted by the dining hall, and would give in and eat something.

  Instead, he just stayed in his room that day, preparing the ingredients and memorizing the words to the ritual. They were in Greek, since it was the ancient Greeks who had perfected this technique. He didn’t know if translation would really work, so it was probably best to just go with what was proven. He was sure his pronunciation was atrocious, but everything he’d read so far said that wouldn’t really matter.

  He had checked the astronomical charts, and it seemed to bode well that midnight would be just about the perfect time to do it.

  He’d also decided that the roof of Gladius House was the right place to do it. The gap from the section of roof directly above his window and the next tower-like segment was not too large. From his window, he could just reach where the two sets of eaves met, then climb up to the flat area above the wider dormer next to his. By all accounts, he needed to be out in the moonlight—well, the lack thereof—and he needed to be somewhere no one could see him. Especially with the twist on the ritual he’d decided was necessary.

  Maybe he was just going nuts from missing Jess, he thought as he packed the things he would need, and had to reach down to adjust his erection in his jeans. He was harder in anticipation for this than he was on some of their dates.

  The wind was chilly as he opened his window as wide as it would go and climbed up onto the adjacent roof with everything he needed in a bag slung over his shoulder.

  Getting up to the little tarred square of flat roof wasn’t hard at all. He knelt facing where the invisible moon should be, and began taking things out of the bag.

  First he drew a circle in front of him with a mixture of powdered quartz and salt, crisscrossed by a few lines. He laid the amulet at the center of the design. Next he took out the flask of materials that had been steeping since Christmas. The scent as he uncorked it made his eyes water, but he coated his fingertips with the stuff and smeared it first on his forehead, then on the amulet itself. He felt nearly as dizzy as he had from the stuff they had been passing around on New Year’s Eve.

  That must mean you did it right, he thought. He blinked. Did it look like the amulet was lit for a moment there, like a beam of light had glanced across it? Or was that just something in his eye?

  Whatever. Now was not the time to get distracted. He had a few more things to do, his throat getting progressively drier and the sound of the wind seeming to whistle in his ears as he finished the last few steps.

  The final thing he did before beginning the actual incantation was unzip his fly and bare his cock. His fingers were still a little sticky with the tincture he’d made, but it was too late to come up with some way to clean them, and he knew from experience that wanking with his left hand was a losing proposition.

  He bit down on an oath as he gave his length one experimental stroke. He didn’t want to accidentally invoke any deities who weren’t welcome. Better just stick to the Greek.

  He began chanting the words, stroking himself in the kind of rhythm they made, and quickly falling into a kind of trance. Somewhere in the back of his mind, as he slipped into the trance state, he was thinking again, That means it’s working.

  It was, in its way, a lot like those times when he and Jess were making love and time ceased to move forward. He only knew time was passing because he could sense the moon in motion. No, the Earth in motion. Well, both.

  In most of the traditional rituals he’d read, the magic user had to have some way of drawing power together, and some way of releasing it. Since none of the things the writings had described had made sense to him—there was always a “and then you just do it” aspect—he’d decided to go with the way he thought it most likely he could do it. With sexual energy.

  He was unprepared, however, for the fact that while he had been stroking himself, low clouds had been gathering in the dark, and he was definitely not ready for the nearly simultaneous clap of thunder and bolt of lightning that hit just as he was shouting out the last round of the incantation, struggling to get the last word out through gritted teeth as his orgasm tore through him.

  Freezing cold rain felt like ice pellets and suddenly stung his skin, and he swore. He stuffed the
amulet into his pocket and his cock into his pants, the only thought in his head that he had to get out of the storm. He was still blinking with the afterglow of the lightning strike in his eyes, and the rain was making it nearly impossible to open his eyes larger than slits.

  The slanted portion of the roof was slippery. He gripped the edge of the eaves, his knuckles white.

  His window looked very far away. Reaching up had been far easier than getting back to it would be. Even if he could sit on the very edge of the gutter, he couldn’t get his feet all the way back onto his own sill—the gap between the two dormers was too wide.

  Shit. He wasn’t even sure he could get back in. But what could he do now? Even if he yelled and screamed for help, the chances of someone hearing him were slim. No one was out in the middle of the night in the storm to see him wave, and he could not spend the night on the roof in the freezing cold rain. He had to get back inside. The window was still open the way he had left it, and rain was wetting the papers on his desk, too. Leaning all the way out, he couldn’t quite touch the green copper gutter above his own window, not without possibly slipping and falling four stories to the sidewalk.

  He swallowed hard. If he died doing this, well, it’d probably be a baffling obituary that would run.

  Kyle leaped out and grabbed the gutter, swinging his legs toward the gaping open window. A piece of the gutter came loose and he fell back, but both legs had made it through the window frame. He grabbed on by spreading his feet with a kick, one calf hooked on the window frame, the other side hooked with his foot. The vertigo was far worse, but adrenaline gave him the strength to sit all the way up and grab the frame with his hands as well and pull himself into the room.

  He fell in a wet heap over the desk and onto the floor, dragging papers and loose change and miscellaneous other stuff with him, but he didn’t care. God, the floor had never felt so good. He hugged it for a while.

  Then he forced himself to get up and shut the window. When he collapsed again, at least it was into bed, perhaps the first time he’d been so glad that the room was that small. He was unconscious quickly after that.

  He woke perhaps two hours later, supremely stiff and uncomfortable. He pulled the amulet from his pocket. Had the ritual worked? He supposed he had to wait until he met an actual siren to find out. He put it in a desk drawer and then dragged himself into a very hot shower. When he emerged from that, he fell into bed again and lost consciousness once more.

  He woke again around dawn, ravenous, the wreckage strewn on the floor visible in the dim grayness evidence that he hadn’t dreamed the ritual or the storm. He hoped the storm wasn’t a sign that he’d failed in the ritual or an omen that he was doing the wrong thing.

  It didn’t feel like the wrong thing.

  Hiding out in the library after hours the next night, however, that felt just the slightest bit questionable.

  * * * *

  Endymion

  by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  The rising moon has hid the stars;

  Her level rays, like golden bars,

  Lie on the landscape green,

  With shadows brown between.

  And silver white the river gleams,

  As if Diana, in her dreams,

  Had dropt her silver bow

  Upon the meadows low.

  On such a tranquil night as this,

  She woke Endymion with a kiss,

  When, sleeping in the grove,

  He dreamed not of her love.

  Like Dian’s kiss, unasked, unsought,

  Love gives itself, but is not bought;

  Nor voice, nor sound betrays

  Its deep, impassioned gaze.

  It comes,—the beautiful, the free,

  The crown of all humanity,—

  In silence and alone

  To seek the elected one.

  It lifts the boughs, whose shadows deep

  Are Life’s oblivion, the soul’s sleep,

  And kisses the closed eyes

  Of him, who slumbering lies.

  O weary hearts! O slumbering eyes!

  O drooping souls, whose destinies

  Are fraught with fear and pain,

  Ye shall be loved again!

  No one is so accursed by fate,

  No one so utterly desolate,

  But some heart, though unknown,

  Responds unto his own.

  Responds,—as if with unseen wings,

  An angel touched its quivering strings;

  And whispers, in its song,

  “Where hast thou stayed so long?”

  Kyle stared at the poem. He was using his phone as a flashlight, huddled in the stacks near where he’d lost Jess that very first day she’d shown him around.

  He was certain, quite certain, that he’d felt or heard something. He’d forgotten it entirely until tonight, when he’d been wandering through the dark building, wondering where the best place to tempt the siren would be. Then it had come back to him, as he’d approached the spot. Someone, or something, had touched the back of his neck, caressed his ear...

  At the time he’d thought it had been Jess, playing around. The assumption that it had been her was one of the reasons he’d been bold enough to ask her out to dinner. He counted himself lucky, then, that she said yes, and that things had worked out so well between them.

  But now he knew something strange was afoot in the library. His reasoning went something like this. If there was a real siren haunting the place, who stayed hidden and only revealed herself at night, if she had been the one who attacked Alex, then he wanted to catch her, and if she hadn’t—well, wouldn’t she know something about the attack? Dean Bell was definitely hiding something, and maybe this way Kyle could find out what.

  This was, of course, all supposing that the amulet he’d made would work, and that the siren would actually emerge.

  Kyle’s plan was quite forgotten, however, as he found himself absorbed in the poem of Longfellow’s. He had goose bumps reading it. The feeling that this one connected somehow to the first Avestan cycle was unshakable.

  He took out his own notebook and began to write a commentary.

  The main gist of most interpretations of the prophecy is that a great cataclysm is coming, and that only a prophesied pair of lovers can avert the disaster. It’s rather unique in that you just never ever see prophecies predicting two people to exist. They’re pretty much always about one individual, one king, or one hero, or whatever. But perhaps that’s a large part of why the first cycle is so popular. The implication of the lovers is that the power of love is somehow one of the qualities this pair possesses in order to save the day.

  Each of the poems I’ve encountered and noted here, beginning with Eliot, feel to me like poetic riffs on the mystery, bringing the prophecy out of the realm of the prediction and down to the level of the personal, the characters and people to whom this great story would have happened. Or will happen to, if one believes there is any actual prediction taking place.

  He heard a sound. Yes, definitely a sound. Would a siren wear boots? It was the sound of boot heels hitting the floor with a determined stride.

  Kyle pressed himself under the desk at a study carrel, wondering if holding his breath would be of any help or not. Probably not. He tried to breathe very softly but couldn’t do anything about how hard his heart was beating. Hopefully only he could hear that.

  The boots went right past him, and the trailing hem of someone’s traditional robes.

  Dean Bell?

  The boots went back and forth a few times. Then a voice: unmistakably Bell. “Faust’s swollen left testicle.” Kyle heard a thump, as if he’d banged his fist against a shelf.

  The sounds of him stalking about faded. Kyle forced himself to wait a half hour crammed under the desk before he emerged, straining to hear any sound that might mean he was still in the building. But nothing and no one jumped out at him, and after another minute of standing stock still, he sat in desk chair and let out a reli
eved breath.

  So what was Bell doing? Was he looking for the siren, too? Or something else? Whatever it was, it sounded like he didn’t find it. And he didn’t find Kyle either. Kyle wondered what kind of spells Bell could use to find someone. But maybe he would have had to know who he was looking for? And wasn’t he supposed to have some kind of powers as dean—or assistant dean, anyway—that were supposed to let him commune with the buildings somehow? Maybe that was exaggerated. More questions Kyle wanted to ask Alex.

  He seemed to be alone again, and soon grew bold enough to walk up and down the stacks again. By most accounts, a siren needed to have sex at least once a month. A true siren would think nothing of having sex with someone against their will if she needed to, though typically they were more seductresses than rapists. Their victims would think that they wanted to have sex with them. And certainly if there were one here, she would have no shortage of horny students who needed help with their exams who would offer themselves up?

  Suddenly Kyle had an idea. He unzipped his fly slowly, the metallic sound of the zipper seeming to disappear this deep in the stacks.

  Anxiety that Bell might swoop around the corner any second transmuted into illicit thrill as he came quickly to full hardness. Come on...here you go...he thought, as if trying to coax a scared cat out from under a couch with an enticing bit of tuna.

  He dropped to his knees, his shoulder bag coming to rest on the floor, as he stroked himself. When he closed his eyes, he could see the goddess Diana, bending down to bestow an unasked-for kiss on mortal lips—

  His eyes flew open.

  Nothing. Just his imagination. He kept stroking himself, looking around in the darkness and trying to be silent to listen, waiting to feel that phantom touch on his neck, to hear that whisper.