A Maze of Glass, Chapter Seventeen, Pt. 1
The final phase of the ritual happened in nine day cycles. If the Confrontation didn’t trigger on the ninth day, another two day Gateway would open and the process would start again. But in the best case scenario, it only took nine grueling, ascetic, laborsome days to complete.
It went like this:
At dawn, Zoe and Jill awoke and meditated on concepts of beginnings, resurrections, and other related metaphorical notions. They considered the day’s destruction of night and night’s destruction of day. They meditated on the topic of relapse.
For breakfast, all practitioners (Zoe, Jill, Sung-ho) gathered for a meal. They shared greetings and well-wishes before the meal, ate the meal without speaking a single syllable, and continued talking after setting the dishes aside.
After breakfast, Zoe and Sung-ho worked on building the Confrontation itself. They folded numerous invocations into each other. They arranged good luck charms and minor protections around the ritual space. They reinforced the existing wards.
Meanwhile, Jill continued to fortify the perimeter and its various ingresses and egresses. She summoned potential interlopers into complicated seals and banished them from the procession to follow. She built up the wards protecting the house, shielding it from notice, and preventing supernatural break-ins.
The practitioners met for lunch, speaking both before and after the meal but eating, again, in silence.
After lunch, Jill returned to her room for further meditation and self-counsel.
Zoe and Sung-ho checked all the boards blockading the windows.
They had a break until sunset.
At sunset, the practitioners met in the ritual space and meditated on cycles, behaviors, and their own failings. They spent sixty minutes self-assessing. After this, the trio continued working up the interlocking spells of the Confrontation. The work lasted up until dinner.
They ate dinner according the same rules as every other meal.
After dinner, under the moonlight, Zoe and Sung-ho listened to Jill talk. Jill talked about relapse and resurrection, about nights that destroyed days and days that destroyed, about her behaviors and her cycles and all of her failings. Once the moon reached its brightest, the ritual allowed Zoe and Sung-ho six sentences each to advise, counsel, and buttress Jill.
After that, they were allowed to do whatever they wanted. But even by the end of the first night, what they wanted was to sleep.
They all had caffeine headaches and Zoe still had lingering nic fits. Sung-ho, freshly quit of a lifelong fondness for coffee, threw up once on the first day. He managed through the second day in a grump, a walking underbreath mutter. By the morning of the third day, things had settled somewhat. As much as they could in a house full of itchy, physically uncomfortable, and utterly exhausted witches.
The third day also went according to plan. As did the fourth. Until.
After dinner, under the moonlight, Zoe and Sung-ho listened to Jill talk. Jill talked about relapse and resurrection, about nights that destroyed days, about all of her failings. Jill stared at the floor in front of her, cross-legged, seated on a sigil. “When mom and dad kicked me out, for a while I guess I thought, I dunno, maybe the world was supposed to eat me. I let a lot of bad people into my life and hurt a lot of other good ones and now I think—or I wonder—whether I did it subconsciously. Maybe I wanted to get hurt. Maybe I wanted to disappear.”
They still had nine minutes until the moon shone its brightest.
Jill coughed. “I think I did. I wanted to—to—to—” she stuttered. She froze. She reached for her throat, gagging. Her eyes bulged, emeralds drowned in milk. Something rattled wheezy and phlegmatic in her windpipe. Something started crawling under her skin.
Zoe lurched forward and Sung-ho put an arm out to stop her. He gestured for her to ‘wait.’
Jill leaned forward and planted her hands on the ground, four-legged. She sucked air, burped, sucked air, burped. Sweat beaded her brow and scarlet flushed her face. “Mmm,” she groaned. “Mmmhmmnnnn!”
Zoe rocked back and forth. Sung-ho kept his arm out straight.
Jill’s visage writhed as if a civilization of slender worms frenzied beneath it. “Hhhuuhhh!”
Zoe pursed her lips. Sung-ho swallowed hard.
Electronic feedback shrieked through the air. The unnatural sound dopplered and faded, echoed and overlapped itself. Zoe grabbed her ears and Sung-ho dropped his arm, grimacing. The candelabra burned bright and hot, flames dancing higher and higher. The flat, chemical stench of burnt ozone filled their nostrils.
Jill puked up a ball of hairy brown-yellow vomitus. Every vein in her body bulged.
“The sun screams butane down on a sea of sizzling black tar!” Jill screamed. Another skin seemed to jerk and stab out from under her own. “The waves bubble, they seethe up to eat the shores.”
Zoe had a hand over her mouth. Every muscle in her body tightened to move.
Sung-ho stared at her in warning.
“There is a war going on behind things,” Jill shouted. “Beneath them! Every story ends the same way. In the long run,” she arched her back, lifting herself up until she howled at the ceiling. “The seas eat the shores, the skies choke, the land blisters, this world is track marks and hollow cheeks. There’s a war going on in every story.”
Zoe could’ve cried. One hand clamped over her tight-shut lips, joints aching with the want to act, she felt the impulse crawl up her neck and across her scalp, felt it tingle in her sinuses. She could’ve. But she didn’t.
Sung-ho held onto her other arm, grip weak from the day’s efforts. They’d seen things like this in cases of possession or infestations of psychic or semi-psychic entities—rare fringe occurrences so improbable that most agents didn’t train to deal with them, anymore. But as a byproduct of a ritual spell? Never.
Jill shot to her tip-toes, standing rigid as a nailed-up scarecrow. “The sun is a spoonhead sizzling, the seas boil black tar, my veins, every story, a war, above and below, macro as micro as macro as apocalypse. Don’t you get it, yet? Under the surface there’s nothing. Under the surface there’s just me!”
A high pitch scored the crackling air.
Sung-ho removed his hand, bracing for action. Zoe pushed herself up into a crouch, ready.
Jill collapsed. She hit the floor as limp as a haystuffed icon dismounted. A static-colored drool oozed out of one side of her mouth. For five seconds that felt like five years, Jill neither blinked nor breathed. Then she screamed, curling up fetal inside her sigil.
The alarm clock announced the moon’s brightest moment. Sung-ho slapped it off.
“I’m so sorry,” Zoe said.
But Jill just kept crying.
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