//------------------------------// // Act Eight: No Flash Photography // Story: Delinquency // by Daemon McRae //------------------------------// Act Eight: No Flash Photography Sigil magic is one of the most widely-known, and poorly executed, arcane practices in the world. There’s no guarantee that what you’re drawing is going to do exactly what you want, and altering a sigil, even on accident, is all too easy. Wards, spells, glyphs, all depend on accuracy, detail, and knowledge. Even the simple wards can be rendered completely ineffective by running water or one line where there should be two. To craft a detailed, massive, and intricate design takes patience and confidence. Some forms of warding magic are so particular that not only will making the smallest mistake render the ward ineffective, it may actually change the entire function of the spell. This is why most sigils are done on the floor, where it is easiest to ensure space, correct mistakes, and all but guarantee efficiency. Walls are valid, too, if you don’t mind crouching on your knees for the annoyingly detailed parts most spellmakers like to put at the bottom. Many symbols and glyphs are also dependent on what material is used to draw them. Chalk seems to be a universal constant, if not one hundred percent reliable. One of the theories behind its usefulness is the basic fact that you are drawing with what equates to raw earth. Elemental materials are distinctly effective, and earthen ones invoke a sense of stability, permanency, and make a great medium for mental and magical energies. Hence the widespread use of crystals as foci. Of course, this all falls apart when you introduce Equestrian magic, but such combinations are exceedingly rare. There is one medium that is considered by many to be a guaranteed success when drawing sigils. Blood, being a combination of all five elements, is one of the most potent material components in any kind of spellwork. It’s capacity to carry oxygen grants it similar magical properties to air, its connection to water is obvious, and the various minerals and metals in the human body are viable mediums for earth magic. While there is some dispute as to whether life is in fact the fifth element, it is a powerful source of magic, especially when willingly given. Blood is a symbolic lifeforce in spellcasting, which is an art and science that relies heavily on symbolism. Those of you who may wonder where the element of fire comes from, well. There’s a reason we say fire in our veins. Human emotion, especially pain and anger (which comes in copious amounts when you’re bleeding profusely), shares many spiritual properties with that of a roaring flame. Although some spellcasters like to light the whole thing ablaze just to be sure, which has received mixed reviews as to its efficacy. Considering all of these factors, a large, well-drawn, highly detailed sigil done entirely in blood, and undisturbed for a long period of time, is a very dangerous thing. Sigils, glyphs, and wards are meant for continuous magic, creating a constant effect in a localized area. Think of it like leaving your motor running if your car ran on fission energy. Eventually, something is probably going to explode. “That is a lot of blood,” Treble groaned, eying the massive drawing with a mixed sense of curiosity and appall. “It must be old, too, if we couldn’t smell it coming in. Hell, I still can’t smell it. Usually the smell of blood lingers for years. It’s the copper. Kind of like that weird taste in the back of your mouth when you walk into a factory or a boiler room.” “That’s all well and good,” Raven said with more than a drop of condescension, “But WHAT THE HELL IS IT?!” Not taking his eyes from the ceiling, Treble shrugged. “No idea. I only recognize a couple of the smaller symbols. You see there and there, where the larger circle has smaller circles in it? The small symbols in those are like links in a chain. Or better yet, more like extra spices in the recipe. It’s additional effects to whatever the core function is. Hold on,” he added, taking out his phone. He snapped several pictures, getting as much of the cryptogram as he could, doing his damnedest not to miss an inch. After he was done he sent the lot of them to Spooky, grumbling under his breath as the poor reception forced him to use the much less efficient file transfer their push-to-talk function offered. “Hopefully our resident freakyologist has an idea what this mess is supposed to do. It might take a while to get a response, so we might as well keep looking around. At least there’s good news,” he added with a hopeful smile. Indigo, who up until that point had been doing her best not to revisit her lunch, groaned an incoherent sentence. She was deeply regretting the extra pepper flakes on her tacos. She tried again, with more luck, “Good news? What’s that?” “If this sigil was put here as a trap, it would have gone off by now. Either it’s done its job, or it’s still doing it. Either way us finding it doesn’t seem to affect it. Miss Inkwell, is there a basement to this little house?” Treble asked, in an effort to distract his superior from the dried blood above their heads. She stared for a second longer, then seemed to snap out of it like a trance. “Well, yes and no. There’s a basement under the entire house. It’s all one solid structure. But there is an entrance to the basement from this house.” Treble felt an eye twitch. “I swear to god if someone uses the word catacombs I’m going to go out to the courtyard, climb up to the roof, and sleep there till this mess is over.” Inkwell smiled sheepishly. “Well, they’re not catacombs in the classical definition of the word. Just a large underground labyrinthine structure that extends several meters in every direction past the walls of the house.” Whatever contest Indigo was having with her gag reflex, she seemed to be winning. “And why the hell did you not mention this before?! Is there a way out through the basement?!” Raven shook her head. “Unfortunately, no. It’s basically a giant secret passage to get to other areas of the house. Remember, this estate is rather old, and dates back to a time when the ‘help’ wasn’t supposed to be seen doing there jobs. They’d scurry through the basement from one task to the next to give the house the illusion that the place basically cleaned itself.” “What, they didn’t build false walls and secret passages upstairs for that?” Treble asked. “No. That wasn’t Dry’s style. He wanted good, solid construction through and through. No fake walls you could crash through on accident, and nothing the rats could hide in. Although that doesn’t keep them out of the house entirely, it seems,” Inkwell drawled, as a squeak or two disrupted the otherwise quiet room. Indigo stomped on the floor. “Well, if he wanted it good and solid, why’s there a big-ass empty room beneath this one?” “Probably because the entire basement is lined with concrete or something like it, right?” Treble volunteered. “That’s right,” Raven agreed, with a nod of her head. “Originally it was just to act as support for the rest of the house, but with the Cold War and the immigrant scares over the last century or so, the other, less savory members of the family have reinforced it into what equates to a fallout shelter. I’m entirely confident that if the house itself were to implode or collapse the only way anyone underground would know is that the power went out. For a few seconds, and then the generators would kick on. Remember, my family isn’t exactly small. Even the less savory branch members were considered important enough to the history of the Inkwell name that the main family made sure there was enough room underground for the lot of them. It’s basically an entirely different house down there.” Treble kneaded his temples, not looking forward to what he was going to say next. “Alright. As much as I absolutely HATE the idea, we’re going to have to search that basement. Whatever cold spot Twilight detected under the sitting room is most likely in this underground structure, and if it’s large enough to be detected above ground, it’s massive. Which means we should most likely deal with whatever’s causing IT first.” Indigo looked around sadly. “I could be home right now, watching Netflix.” ---------------------------- Spooks, having calmed down considerably, had moved the new book on to the table in the middle of the room, as the rest of Buried’s journals and notes were shoved unceremoniously into the trunk. A few other texts sat out, but they, too, had been set aside to allow the group to gather around the tome. Bones tapped his fingers on the desk as he poured over a section, while the rest waited on him to say… something. “Ok,” he said after a minute. “Ok, I think I have an idea of what might be going on here.” Dusty gave him a look of disbelief. “How much of an idea?” “Like… three-fifths of one. Maybe. Half. Half is good,” Spooks offered. “Look, this whole section that talks about the Inkwells doesn’t actually talk about them. It’s all generalities and vague descriptions. Most likely because, and I should have noticed this sooner, of the publisher.” He dog-eared the section he was on, and flipped the book back to the front two pages. Rubble read the legal script upside down. “Copyright Buried Bones, Published by… oh, fuck me. Inkwell Publishing?! THAT’S why they have this book?!” Dusty groaned. “That explains a lot.” “What do you mean?” Twilight asked, raising an eyebrow at Double D. “Think about it,” DD drawled. “Who in their right mind would actually publish any of the crazy-ass old man’s bullshit? Nobody. Absolutely no one. All of the stuff we have is hand-written, but this is basically an official text. And a huge company, a huge family wouldn’t touch a loony-tunes family like the Bones unless they had to.” Spooky leaned back in his chair. “So that’s it. Grandpa had some dirt on them. That’s why he wrote about their family secrets. That explains why there’s only one copy of the book, at least that we’ve found. They probably retracted every other copy and maybe even destroyed them when they found out that there was even a single sentence in here that made them look like anything less than benevolent philanthropists. Whatever he knew, it was enough to convince them to publish the book in the first place, but once they did, I bet they shoveled so much legal crap on him that he had no choice but to let them do what they wanted with the printed copies. I’d bet even THIS copy wouldn’t exist if not for family pride.” “Well, there’s some good news, then, isn’t it?” Twilight offered hopefully. When Spooks gave her a curious look, she explained, “Well, he probably couldn’t tell you about it, could he? Not with an army of lawyers breathing down his neck. You’d probably come knocking, demanding a copy, and they wouldn’t let you get five steps past the door if you read it, just to hide the fact that they had something to hide. I don’t think he kept this a secret from you because he wanted to, Spooky.” Bones’ diminished presence seemed to inflate, ever so slightly, with her hopeful words. “Yeah, maybe. Right, I said I had an idea, didn’t I?” Rubble nodded. “Yes, and we’re all aflutter waiting to hear it,” he chided. Flipping the book back to his marked page, Bones pointed out a few more lines. “Look, this part talks about this… great secret they had, or whatever, right? No matter how big or small it is, it has to make them look bad, or they wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to bury it. But there’s another part, back here,” he shuffled the pages until he found another dog-eared page, “That talks about secrets in general. Namely, secret magic. Now, there’s a whole bunch of magic designed to hide things and keep stuff out of sight and out of mind. There’s an entire school of magic dedicated to it, in fact.” “There is?” Twilight asked brightly, the student in her rearing it’s excitable head. “Yeah, it’s called Obfuscation,” Dusty answered. “I use some of it in the warding I do for the hideout. It’s the kind of magic that hides stuff in plain sight. Like the ‘nothing to see here, move along’ kind of stuff.” “Exactly,” Spooky chimed in. “But there’s another kind of ‘secret’ magic. The kind designed to lock stuff IN. Most Obfuscation magic is like the padlock on a treasure chest. Your run of the mill ‘keep out’ kind of thing. But there’s a sub-school to it that’s just the reverse. Instead of keeping people OUT, it keeps something IN. This part right here? It talks about secrets in blood. Blood magic is nasty, powerful stuff. Really potent, really hard to do, really dangerous if you get it wrong.” “Do you want ghosts?” Dusty chuckled. “Because that’s how you get ghosts.” “For lack of a more eloquent explanation, yes,” Bones deadpanned, rolling his eyes. “Blood magic gone wrong can dredge up all kinds of negative energy. Like an Ouija board for the living, you never know what’s gonna pop up. Also, don’t use Ouija boards. Bad. Anyway, if I’m reading between the lines correctly here, which I like to think I AM, he’s basically telling us that whatever’s here is a secret being held in place, not hidden from the rest of the world. Which may explain why the grandfather’s passing triggered the hauntings.” Seeing Twilight about to ask more questions, Rubble preempted, “Blood magic works a few different ways. The most effective, especially for long-term spells, is to use blood that’s willingly given from someone who’s still alive. And if they hang around the place the spell is cast, they act like the lock on the door. The blood in their veins keeps the spell strong.” “Which means that whatever’s here no longer has a guard dog,” Spooks lamented. Then his phone went off. Then again. After a few more chimes, he finally fished it out, and scrolled through the array of messages he’d received. His eyes widened, and he scrolled faster. “Twilight? Please god tell me that you have a printer in all that crap.” Slightly incensed, Sparkle said, “Of course I do! And it’s not crap, it’s-” “Great, do you have a micro-USB cable?” Spooks interrupted. “Well yes, but-” “Good. Get it out. I need to print this stuff,” he pressed on, scurrying over to her computer banks. Rubble gave him a worried look as they went about hooking up the phone to the computer and printing off the large number of files. “What the hell are you doing?” “Treble,” Spooks answered. “He sent me a bunch of pictures of this… glyph he found. It’s MASSIVE. I mean an entire living room ceiling massive.” Dusty whistled appreciatively. “Wow, they must really want it to work. When you draw a glyph,” he added, seeing Twilight ready to ask more questions, “Detail is really important. The larger you make it, the easier it is to get the smaller details right. Like high resolution.” She nodded, seemingly in understanding, as Spooks tapped his foot impatiently waiting for the last few pictures to print. A few frustrating minutes later, he scooped up the lot and gestured for them all to follow him into the foyer. Rubble groaned, as Twilight helped him up, and brought a smaller chair for him to sit in while she, Dusty and Spooks put together the large pictographic puzzle they’d just printed out. It took several minutes still. Finding where certain lines met, judging overlaps, and accounting for Treble’s lack of photographic prowess, eventually they got what looked to be as complete a picture as they were going to get. When all was done, Rubble whistled appreciatively. “That is… that is an ENORMOUS sigil!” “Look at the detail,” Dusty breathed. “I’m decades behind what they did here! I mean, I only recognize a few of the smaller markings in these circles. Here and here. And don’t get me started on the script in the inner rings.” “What IS it, though?” Twilight asked. At which point all three of them tuned to look at Spooks. Sensing the eyes on him, he looked up. “What? I have almost no idea! I only recognize a handful more than Dusty does! Not to mention I’ve never SEEN this script before!” he protested, pointing to a large circle of written text in a language he didn’t recognize that encompassed the majority of the inner ward. “Lemme see that,” Rubble grunted. Twilight begrudgingly helped him to the floor as he stubbornly leaned over the mass of pictures. “That… that’s Enochian. Shit, that’s Fallen Enochian.” “...how the HELL do you know that?!” Dusty demanded. Rubble gave him some serious side-eye. “How do you NOT?! Don’t you remember the spells we watched that priest perform when that rain demon popped up during finals week? We almost all failed our classes because he made us stay late to help us write them all!” Spooks nodded. “He’s right. I mean, I can see some Low Enochain in it… but how do you know it’s Fallen?” Rubble rubbed his temples. “Ok, one of these days I’m taking you all to my church. Look, you know what Enochian IS, right?” The other boys nodded. Twilight, however, raised her hand. “Um, I don’t.” “It’s a language developed by humans to talk with angels,” Spooks explained. “Low Enochian is like… common English. You use it for basic spellcasting and script. High Enochian is used to speak directly to an angel. Like, as close to face-to-face as you can get without getting your mind blasted out of your skull at the speed of light. Fallen Enochian is… it’s nasty stuff. It’s a mutation of both High and Low Enochian, taking the spellcasting aspects of Low and mixing it with the direct communication of High. It’s the kind of script and spellcasting you use when you want to bind an angel and drag them from the High Heavens down to Earth.” “Or up out of the pit,” Rubble added grimly. “Yes, there is THAT,” Bones groaned. “...but this doesn’t make sense. I mean, now that I know what I’m reading I can kind of make sense out of it. GOD this lighting is terrible, Treble. But this isn’t a spell to bind an angel.” “What is it, then, Professor?” Dusty grunted. There were a few minutes’ silence as Spooks poured over the sigil, now that he had a better grasp of what it did. “It’s… well, it IS a binding spell. But they’re not binding an angel. They’re asking the angels to HELP bind… whatever is under this lock. This center glyph, though… what the hell IS it?” Twilight leaned to and fro trying to look around the boys who had huddled over the puzzle. “This part looks familiar,” she mused, pointing to a smaller circle connected to the larger ones with a few lines. “It looks almost like Latin, but… it’s gibberish.” Something sparked in Rubble’s head. “What do you mean, gibberish?” “I mean that, if I’m reading this Latin correctly, and I AM, that it’s just nonsense words,” Twilight groaned. Maybe they’re using one language to write another? Like a cypher? But wouldn’t putting a code into a glyph make it… not work? It doesn’t sound like it would work,” she mused. Spooks nodded. “You’re right, it wouldn’t, unless the entire glyph was the puzzle. It’s called cryptomancy, and it’s basically the high-security bank vault door version of magic. Takes years of study, decades, and a really sharp mind. Not to mention all the little details you have to get right. No, that’s not what this is. This sigil is too… strong? No… that’s not the right word. Oppressive. Whatever it’s trying to lock down, it’s doing it TIGHT. Cryptomancy would be a good idea here, but mixing it with Obfuscation is hard as hell. Usually you use cryptomantic sigils as either time-locks or incomplete spells that need extra work to finish. This is… permanent. There’s no room for being tricky, here, and… Rubble? What’s that look?” Rubble had taken interest with the segment that seemed to be confusing Twilight. “You said this is Latin?” She nodded, seemingly annoyed by the writing. “Yeah, but it’s just… nonsense, like I said.” “Did you try… reading it backwards?” he offered. “What? Why would anyone write Latin backwards?! That’s not… it’s… oh my god they wrote Latin backwards,” she groaned, taking a closer look at the picture. “Let’s see...” Dusty moved rather quickly, given his seating position. Then again, he was the fastest person in their group. In a second he’d clamped a hand around Twilight’s mouth. “Do. NOT. Read the Latin backwards. DO NOT DO THAT THING YOU’RE DOING,” he said, very sternly. Spooks nodded. “Agreed. Do you want demons? Because that’s how you get demons.” “Oh my GOD, Spooks,” Rubble groaned.