Wayward Magic (Magic Underground Anthologies Book 2)

by Melinda Kucsera

  “Egeo—”

  “Dolores, isn’t it marvelous how he already communicates with his higher mind, not just limited to his living one, to be stuck with his living language? I have understood him, and he had understood me perfectly since he manifested, and I haven’t used a drop of his barbaric tongue!”

  “Yes, master. Whatever you say, master. Now, what shall you do with him?”

  “I think I’ll take your advice; I think I’ll replenish my vitality.”

  Heliodoro focused on my valknut in his hand and somehow pulled. It was different than before, he wasn’t pulling me physically closer, he was pulling on my essence, my aura. It was as if I was a water skin; Heliodoro opened the spout and drank up what drained out of me. The sensation felt like I was being ripped into pieces, shredded bit by bit for him to absorb. His aura grew, stretched, and became a brighter shade of yellow, even as I paled and thinned. I tried to run but found I had no legs to do so, I was back in the nebulous, shapeless form that I had entered the hut in. I tried to swim, I tried to flail, I tried everything I could think of, but I was stuck there only a few feet from this crazed man who was draining my spirit into himself. Finally, I thought away and I moved a few steps of space away, but it was too little too late.

  The day was bright and sunny when I finally came to myself again. Heliodoro wore my valknut as if he earned the right to as he rode along through the forest. He was in the middle of a long line of riders with travois and small carts, which I could see quite well from my height of midway up the pines that grew on either side of the rough road.

  How am I this high, I’m going to fall! Oh, I’m not falling, I’m just... Up here?

  I was still an unformed ball of aura, which concerned me. Last time I came to my senses, I had my shape, which I was partial to, and being without it made me very uneasy. I thought about the form of my hands, arms, feet, legs, torso, then my head, and ever so slowly I felt myself slide into my mental outline. It was much easier to see through my shape than it had been the first time I came to myself; I wasn’t sure if that was because I still felt like wrung out wet cloth or if it was because it was daylight.

  I was again wearing my embroidered green wedding tunic. Torhild did each bear, each rune, and each swirl with loving patience so long ago. She hated embroidering, had warned me that this would be the best and possibly the only detailed embroidered shirt she would ever sew me. My heart ached with longing.

  Once my body impacted with the edge of my boundary, it pushed me forward while I worked on my shape. It seemed that I was about the same distance away from Heliodoro as I was able to get away from my hut last night. All the rules of how the world existed had changed so vastly, I felt completely lost.

  Someone below me happened to look up and notice me above everyone and shouted in dismay. More of the traveling line looked up and pointed at me until Heliodoro noticed the commotion, and in turn me. He waved his hands down to quiet the others, then pointed at me and motioned down. I hesitated, not sure if I should or even how to do so. Then I remembered how I was able to move my unshaped form before, however long ago that was, and thought down then forward.

  Which shot me into and then through the earth.

  The earth had its own aura and pushing through it was no easy task. I felt like countless grains of sand pelted me all over my body. I tried to be gentler when I thought about my next motion commands, which got me above ground again with a scraping jolt. I kept up the effort until I managed to float next to Heliodoro on his little, shaggy brown horse.

  “That was the funniest thing I have had the pleasure to watch in ages! Maybe I should keep pet ghosts occasionally, just for the laughs,” Heliodoro remarked, then narrowed his eyes at me. “Why did you listen?”

  “I... No matter what, I’m stuck like this. Raging isn’t going to get me the answers that I want, or teach me how to live after death,” I said. “As much as I hate this, as much as I hate you, as much as I hate whatever you did to my family and friends, you have my valknut and you know how to use it against me. I can make this more difficult for myself and stay ignorant, or I can see what I can learn from you.”

  The old man studied me, and for once didn’t have a crazed, toothy smile. There was a dark intelligence behind those eyes, a calculating and controlled mind that scrutinized every aspect of me. I scratched my arm, only to realize that it didn’t help the nervous itch. Not having a physical body had some frustrating drawbacks.

  “I’ll be honest, Brandur, you’re the strongest ghost I’ve ever come across, definitely the strongest ghost from a sambadda ritual that I have ever seen. You are something of a legend. I wish to learn more about you, and about ghosts. Most of the ghosts as a result of the sambadda ritual are very weak, have a much more limited range from their patra, or have limited communication. Or all of those. You present an interesting opportunity.”

  “You said you almost did it right with me, what was, or I should say is, your goal?” I asked, not sure if I really wanted to know.

  “The energy of the soul, without the soul. Silence from my vessels. I really don’t want to keep your mind, your soul, I just need your energy.”

  “Does it have something to do with you being egeo...” My brows pinched together in concentration. “Egeospi...”

  “Egeospiritus. Yes, it does. Too bad you weren’t born in civilized lands; you are a rare barbarian. You have a mind that works beyond food, fornicating, and fighting. Must be your mixed blood!” The hint of his toothy grin peaked out. “You would have been an excellent scholar. I wish some of my brood was half as smart as you! We would have had much more progression in our work. Anyways, my mind wanders. Back on track!”

  A few of the people ahead and behind us in the caravan shake their heads slowly and eye the old man warily. They seem used to his antics but look at him as if he has lost his wits. Others pay no attention to the waiving arms and stare at me. The ones that act like Heliodoro has lost his wits must not be able to see me, while the others who ignore him must have Odin’s sight. Interesting...

  “I suffer from having the knowledge and the lack of ability to do anything with it,” Heliodoro continued, ignoring everyone but me. “I can see, touch, sense, almost everything that one would need to be able to fully experience the spirit world, except I was also born cursed. I lack the strength of spirit to do anything with what I know is there. I barely have enough energy to just live. I have the curse of egeospiritus as my long-dead mentor called the condition. I need outside sources of energy to do anything more than be a useless lump. More if I wish to do anything with the essence of the world.”

  “That must have been hard,” I responded with a note of genuine feeling. I went most of my life with my abilities either buried within my spirit or I had used them unknowingly. I had about a day of truth before I died, but to have been able to see the truth of the world but not have been able to do anything with it? I at least didn’t know what I lacked in my ignorance.

  “I am up in this barbaric corner of the world to achieve a few things. You could help me.” the man gave me a sly grin.

  My hackles rose. “With what? And why would I help you? You destroyed my village, you killed me! You killed who knows how many of my family, my friends. You expect me to forget that so easily?” Thrum. Thrum. Thrum. I no longer had a heart that beat, but my anger tried to slip the iron grip I kept on it and it gave me a new beat to fight to.

  “Your village was mostly empty when I arrived with my descendants and acolytes. Someone warned them of our coming, we weren’t even able to get the few people we were watching for.”

  Grandmother. Magnhild. I kept my face stony, but inside I was leaping for joy.

  “This news makes you happy I see,” he said, and my head jerked to meet the old man’s eyes. “You forget, or were never taught, but your aura will give you away even if your face doesn’t!”

  He waggled an admonishing finger at me.

  “My brood has proven disappointing. Only some have truly r
eceived my gifts, a few of my curse, but at least all of them have my hunger for knowledge. The issue is, none of them are that bright. I’ll teach you Brandur, and in return, I want to know about the different settlements up here, the different people, your history, your stories, your legends.”

  “What will you do with this knowledge?” I glared.

  “Why, keep it of course! Write it down. Store it. Immortalize it! I might be using The Golden Cup Society for my own means, but they are sponsoring this trip and do expect their archives to be added to for the expense. I may also have my own sweet spot for knowledge, which is what attracted me to the society, to begin with, but I’m specifically looking for two things. A true berserker, one that reshapes into their animal when they rage, and I dream of an exsuspiritus!”

  “You want a myth,” I barked with laughter. “And you want what?”

  “An exsuspiritus! Someone with the opposite condition that I have, they overflow with spirit, energy, power! Beautiful, wonderful power! I also have read multiple accounts of soldiers fighting men and women that turned into bears, wolves, and boars when they fought, then when either exhausted or there were no more enemies to kill turn back into people.”

  “I’ve had a few enemies and allies ask me if I’m a bjorn after a battle, but you saw my armor. In the heat and dust, my bear pelt and bulk would make it very easy to confuse me for a bear warrior, especially with me in a fighting frenzy from the berserker’s drink.”

  “A drink is involved? Oh, who is near that has decent handwriting on horseback? Esma, Esma my girl! Trot up to me. I’m going to have to relay because you hear like a rock to flesh and blood, and worse to the spirits!”

  And so, it continued. Heliodoro proved to be a competent and thorough teacher, I absorbed the knowledge that he offered, and I told him all I could remember of the different sagas, our deities, and of our frightening children stories used to keep rowdy children in line. He wrote everything I told him down or had someone else write it. Relaying what I said to his scribes annoyed him very early on in our travels, so one of the first things he taught me was how to show myself to those without Odin’s sight.

  I was... very inappropriate with what I learned from that lesson. I learned who could and couldn’t see me, then would appear at unexpected times to who couldn’t see my ghost. That was brushed off as part of the nature of the work that they did, but when I started interrupting their rituals was when people took issue.

  Finally, enough people complained to Heliodoro, and he taught me my next lesson.

  The Box.

  “Brandur, I can’t have you wandering and harassing my family and my students! It distracts them, and therefore me, from our studies!” Heliodoro yelled at me and waved his arms in exasperation.

  The dam broke.

  “Their study on how to better kill and subjugate my people? What if you find my family? My friends? I saw what you did to the ones you had found, what you did to me!” I no longer could be a good pupil. I played nice and got what I needed from this crazy old man, now to use it!

  “They are no longer your family, you’re dead! Dead to them, dead to the world! Your mind was locked with your energy, but don’t you see? I’m going to fix that! Then you will be free!”

  “Free?” That made me pause. “What do you mean by ‘free?’“

  “I set your mind free while keeping your soul’s power. You have seen how useful it is to us, to me! These have been some of my healthiest, most productive, and most enjoyable years. That’s because of you! I’ll admit teaching you has brought its own joy, but at the end of the day, you are a distraction. You need to move on, but I need to keep your power. Besides, the people that are here are stupid! Uneducated! You were an angry barbarian before I took you in-”

  “I was angry because you threatened my home, killed me, and murdered the people I care about! “ I flowed at him in my nebulous form and concentrated at the front, the same that I did with those who weren’t gifted so they could see me and slammed into the Heliodoro like a battering ram.

  We had taken over another village and as usual, Heliodoro set himself up in the nicest home. It was a sturdy longhouse with thick wooden walls and beams, a towering roof that looked like a boat flipped upside down, and a smoke hole at the top. The old man...

  Fell back a step.

  I swore up a storm that would have made Thor himself proud. I had been practicing whenever I was alone and had been able to focus and move small objects with effort, but I had put everything into that. Heliodoro should have bounced onto the thick logs and crumpled like an old leaf. Wait, I’ve been able to move objects. I never practiced on living creatures. His aura! It must have protected him from my assault.

  Heliodoro stumbled back another step and clutched the left side of his chest. I stayed formless and slowly backed away as I studied the effect I had. My Odin’s sight showed that my blue aura glowed like a whip welt across the thin man’s front above his sternum and it slowly bled into his sickly yellow aura, but it didn’t mix. Strange, he can pull and use my spirit’s power when he likes but when I attack him, it does not blend and mix with his. Is that because I’m dead and he isn’t? Or do auras not mix? His breath came in ragged gasps and his whole body trembled.

  Then his eyes met mine.

  No more was there the jovial old man, the crazed genius that took everything in stride. If I wasn’t already dead, I was sure that he would have killed me then and there. His sticky and thin yellow aura was being sucked into the blue aura whip wound I left him with, to either push out my spirit’s power, to heal the wound in his spirit, or to absorb my deposited spirit into his. With his other hand, he reached up and pulled my valknut out of his simple brown robes, but I was prepared for this.

  I should have held my temper until he took off my valknut! Stupid, stupid, my temper is going to be the death of my spirit.

  I manifested my hands from my cloud, gripped the cord that attached my Damascus steel valknut, the symbol that should have called the Valkyries down to bring my soul to Valhalla, and tried to break the cord. I had easily broken that tie for others who were like me, imperfectly attached to their objects, at Heliodoro’s direction. The other ghost always screamed, the object usually became useless for their purposes, but there was always a strange distortion about it. I didn’t care what happened, I didn’t care if it ripped my spirit in half as Heliodoro thought happened to the others. I’m done being in your power.

  I pulled and pulled, but nothing happened. My spirit felt bruised, but it was as if my tether was made from steel links, whereas the other ghosts’ ties to their objects were dried out grass stalks.

  Heliodoro pulled on me through my valknut. Not the gentle sips that he has used over these past few years, not the deep drekka of my power like the first time he drained me, but a deep soul-tearing pull that had me screaming in pain. It felt like he was trying to pull me through a tunnel of swords, axes, maces, and spears. Everything I felt like it was being beaten and torn. I resisted; I imagined my spirit as a tight ball and more of it was being pulled back to me, but I could resist Heliodoro’s pull no more than I could have resisted the current while floating in the ocean when I was alive.

  Finally, my will broke and with it, my spirit shattered into the darkness.

  Darkness.

  All there was.

  Nothing more than.

  I don’t know how long I was confined in that darkness. I was alone, I couldn’t expand myself, my senses, or move. When I tried to manifest my living shape, I found that where I was had no space for me to do so. My valknut was with me though, I could sense the cord that attached me to it and it was almost nonexistent, it was so short. My senses could feel the triangular edges as the three overlapped each other. I spent a lot of time flowing through, around, and over my pendant. I quickly memorized every detail, every flaw, every perfection.

  Then I did it all over again.

  I thought about my life, the joys I had while out viking with my best friend Orm and
my wife Torhild. Imagined what my child would look like. I hope they had my hair, but their mother’s sky-blue eyes. Whether it was a boy, or a girl, dark hair and pale eyes would be a fierce combination.

  I poured over every lesson, every observation, I had while dead. With a start, I realized I didn’t know exactly how long I had been dead. I know seasons have passed and come again, to only leave and welcome the cycle of another year, but I couldn’t count how many summers it had been since I last held my Torhild in my arms. I had lost all sense of time, and I hadn’t even realized it.

  Now I was stuck in this gods’ cursed box, with its corners and its velvet-lined interior.

  And its darkness.

  I raged. I screamed. I begged.

  Nothing changed.

  I was still alone, still locked away in this tiny place.

  I talked to myself, recited the sagas, retold my life story. I almost thought that Torhild was there with me but knew she couldn’t be. She was alive, raising our child somewhere. Our fierce, stubborn völva. Fierce and stubborn like their mother, gifted with Odin’s sight and the ability to see and interact with the spirit world like me.

  Finally, I didn’t have any more words to speak or think. I just drifted through the darkness of my mind.

  “Brandur, I command that you wake up!”

  The voice was feeble, weak, and warbled with age, yet it was so familiar. I cringed away from the voice, from the light. Where was my familiar darkness? The silence? I could move away, and that made me more upset. Too much space. No safe corner to hide in the darkness.