The Throne of Fire (Kane Chronicles, #2)

by Rick Riordan

horror. I knew about sympathetic magic, of course. The idea was to make something small affect something large by binding them together. The more alike the items were—like the corkscrew and the demon—the easier they were to bind. Voodoo dolls worked on the same theory. But execration was serious stuff. It meant destroying a creature utterly—erasing its physical form and even its name from existence.

Now I suspected Sadie had found the answer. It had something to do with a god’s ren. A secret name wasn’t just a name, like a magic word. It was the sum of the god’s experiences. The more you understood the god, the closer you got to knowing their secret name, and the more you could channel their power. If that was true, then the path of the gods was basically sympathetic magic—finding a similarity between two things, like a regular corkscrew and a corkscrew-headed demon, and using that similarity to form a magic bond. Only here, the bond was between the magician and a god. If you could find a common trait or experience, you could tap the god’s power.

Mum had always told us science and magic weren’t mutually exclusive. She’d called them two dialects of the same language.

The thing that used to be Vladimir Menshikov crumbled like a wax shell, and a creature rose out of it—a red snake, covered in slime like a new hatchling. It began to grow, its red scales glistening and its eyes glowing. Its voice hissed in my mind: I cannot be contained!

Nice.

Sekhmet the lion goddess

Tawaret the hippo goddess