witchoftheflesh | The Increasingly More Explored Woodlands, Sunday Afternoon

Last week, Adrian had invited Yelena and Lydia both to watch him bury his heart and properly claim the land. Lydia, because he thought that a fellow practitioner would appreciate watching a ritual of this size, Yelena because...well, if nothing else, he figured that she'd enjoy having something else to tease him about.

He'd brought out a nice picnic blanket and some refreshments, including several bottles of his homemade fruit beers that he'd shared with Logan, water, fruit juices, a light herbal tea, sandwiches on a thick, hearty bread (made fancy because he'd cut them into quarters), and a nice, freshly-baked cake that he'd cooked because he'd wanted to, not because he was nervous.

"You're fretting," Boston noted, sunning himself in a tree while Adrian made sure that all the utensils and plates were just so for his guests.

"I'm new to hosting," Adrian said. "I want to make sure that everything is nice for them."

"Uh-huh," Boston said. "...You're going to do fine." He wasn't talking about hosting. "We've practiced a hundred times back home."

"I know," his witch replied. "I just kinda wish it had been a hundred and one." Or maybe a hundred ten.

***
Once his guests had arrived and seated themselves, Adrian pulled out his trunk, went over to the black steamer trunk that he'd flown in with and, after rooting around amongst various things (he really needed to unpack this), he pulled out a beautifully carved wooden box and clutched it reverently to his chest. "Would you care to hold it while I finish preparing?" he asked, offering the box to Lydia. Boston made a grumpy sound, but forewent commentary as Adrian knelt down in front of the oak tree, plunged his bare hands into the acorn-covered ground, and began to dig. He moved handfuls of soil with surprising efficiency. "This has to be done by hand," he explained, figuring Yelena, at least, might be wondering why he wasn't using a shovel. "I'm a good digger, though. It won't take me long."

He wasn't kidding. Adrian Blackwood dug a three-foot-deep hole through hardpacked, rocky soil using nothing but his hands. He worked calmly, methodically, but fast, and didn't so much as rip a nail. There had to be some magic behind that, but he didn't say a word the entire time. He just kept going until he had a neat, knee-deep, root-filled pit wide enough to sit in, finished. A hole that size should have taken hours, even with a shovel; Adrian had finished in maybe twenty minutes. "There," he said, brushing the earth off his fingers as he stood up. "Now we're ready."

Adrian took the wooden box back from Lydia. The moment his hands touched it, a hush fell over the clearing. Whatever Adrian was doing had the attention of the whole woods - or at least, the section he'd claimed for himself. Silently, reverently, he climbed back into the hole he'd just made and got down on his knees, placing the wooden box into the nest of roots at the bottom. When everything was positioned exactly where he wanted it, he removed the box's carved lid. The wood came off with a delicate scrape, revealing the object inside, which looked exactly like a human heart. A live human heart. It contracted as they watched, the dark-red muscles pumping in the deep, regular motion of a heartbeat. It didn't look bloody or wet; it was just a heart beating in Adrian's hands as he removed it from the box and began to bury it in the ground.

The hush got deeper with every handful of dirt he scooped over it, and then a pulse began to run through the soil under where they were sitting. The thumping sound got louder and louder as Adrian filled in the hole he'd just made. By the time he stood up to press the dirt flat with his boots, the whole hill was pounding with the beating of the heart. It shook the trees and frightened the birds, filling the air with flapping wings and the crushing feeling of something huge and ancient, something larger than human. The weight of so much power was palpable, pushing down on all of them in a way that made it hard to stay upright. Just when they might have become certain it was going to flatten them to the ground, Adrian brought his hands together in front of him with a clap, and the horrible pressure vanished like it had never been.

"Well done!" Boston called from the branches he'd climbed up into. "That went even better than it did in practice."

Adrian was panting too hard to answer. He'd been perfectly calm the whole time he was filling in the hole. Now that he was finished, he collapsed onto the needle-strewn ground with a gasp, sprawling under the trees with a triumphant smile on his face.

[Text taken and adapted from Hell For Hire by Rachel Aaron, because you know how I love me some perfectly normal canons. While the two ladies mentioned were invited, post is open for other folks, either before or after the ritual.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

mustbeawitch

"I've learned from a few different traditions, more or less," Lydia said. "The most important thing everyone agrees on is that you should never pay on credit if you can help it, because then you don't know when the price will come due or what it will be."

But no one told her that before she did her accidental baby magic and turned the cat into her sister, okay? Whatever the consequences of that were, they weren't her fault!

From:

witchoftheflesh

Oh? And what were those consequences, Lydia?

"Merchants and magic, two things to never approach for credit," Adrian agreed. "One will ruin your life completely, and the other one is magic. I've asked before, right? If your magic uses quintessence?"

From:

mustbeawitch

If you asked Lydia, it was that her father's favorite horse died and he never had a horse so good as that again, and as evidence, she had the fact that the horse died on the first day someone referred to the five Misses Bennets. If you asked her Aunt Phillips, Kitty was why there was never a boy born after Lydia to break the entail, and as evidence for that she had the fact there was never a boy born after Lydia to break the entail. So. Matter of opinion, really.

"I should say not," Lydia said, "as I don't believe I've ever heard that word before in my life."

From:

witchoftheflesh

But...there also hadn't been a boy born before Lydia, so Aunt Phillips' arguments seemed a little sus.

"Good to hear!" Adrian said, breaking out into a huge smile. "It's what warlocks and sorcerers use in my world to cast their spells, but they get it because of their willingness to inflict pain and suffering on others."

Mmm. Adrian was skipping over a big part of that process - you know, Gilgamesh - but he was bitchy about warlocks in particular anyway.

From:

mustbeawitch

"...well," Lydia said, very much afraid that Adrian was about to not like her any more, "one can get others to pay their spell-prices for them, of course," which didn't have to involve pain and suffering, but it was pretty common. "Generally you have to have their agreement..." There were exceptions, and your less scrupulous witches like Harriet or Miss King sometimes obtained said permission by the means of befuddlement spells, but she really didn't want to get into all that.

From:

witchoftheflesh

And this is what happens when we use snark to explain complicated things, Adrian.

"In my world," Adrian explained, "quintessence is only created in the Holy City, and therefore, completely controlled by Gilgamesh. The sorcerers and warlocks that do his bidding are given quintessence in return. And since most of Gilgamesh's goals are things like enslaving demons, keeping the human population from realizing their magic was stolen from them, hunting down 'undesirables' and the like, they get paid in magical power for murder, slavery, and those kinds of things. Your cabal trying to use Miss Lambe as a battery by keeping her a gemstone might count for that, but asking a friend to make the sacrifice on your behalf doesn't sound like it would."

A pause. "So long as informed consent was freely given, of course."

YET MORE PROOF HARRIET WAS AWFUL, LYDIA.

From:

mustbeawitch

You try being fifteen and having a sophisticated older friend who says she's going to teach you better ways to do magic that you gradually realize are horrible. See how you like it.

"Oh, no!" Lydia exclaimed. "We don't have anything like that!" She'd never heard of a Gilgamesh and nor was she going to try to pronounce it! "Well, when Kitty and I were girls we would sometimes trade Mary's dancing skill away on the night of assemblies to better ours, but she never danced anyway so I didn't think she missed it. I have since wondered if that might have had something to do with why she never danced," she confessed, "but then again it was Mary." Could go either way tbh.

From:

witchoftheflesh

At fifteen, he'd still probably been working through his cabal trauma and the knowledge that a bunch of his family had voted for him to go back or something. Regardless of that, though, the realization had hit! Down with Harriet!

Also, while the narrative would never condone such behavior, imagine how hilarious it would have been to trade Caroline Bingley's dancing skills. Not that Lydia would do that any more, surely.

"And I don't think we have anything quite like that," he mused. "Being able to actually trade someone's skill for our own. Hmm." It wasn't his place to chastise Lydia and besides, it sounded like the kind of thing she'd grown out of.

From:

mustbeawitch

Surely not! After all, she was ruined enough that she was unlikely to be invited to a ball where Caroline Bingley was also in attendance, but dash it, did she wish she'd thought of that herself.

Hypothetically, of course.

"Oh, you can make all sorts of trades as long as you know the price," Lydia told him. "When our father's cousin Mr. Collins came to visit, Kitty and I didn't curl our hair in trade for hearing a French horn every time he spoke instead of his--dreadfully annoying--voice." She sighed fondly at the memory. "I'd do it again in a heartbeat."

From:

witchoftheflesh

They'd Charlie Brown'd him. Masterful.

Adrian laughed. "Now that is a spell I have to work on," he said. "We could never sell it to the Holy City, but there's something to be said for personal satisfaction."

From:

mustbeawitch

Truly, it had been her greatest magical achievement.

"I'd be happy to show you how I did it," Lydia told him. "Only Mr. Collins isn't here, thank heavens, so we'd have to use someone else." And no one else deserved it quite as much as Mr. Collins.