Dead Billy (cont.)

‘Aw man,’ said Gavin.  ‘Aw man.  Look at all the blood.’

Sean didn’t say anything.  He was sitting on the ratty yellow couch on the far side of the basement, shadowed under a naked swinging lightbulb, lighting up a hit of meth.

It was Billy who had done it, actually.  Not Gavin or Sean.  He had done all of it.  It was Billy who had come home with the big spellbook looking thing (‘It’s a grimoire,’ he had said,), something extra he had pilfered from his mushroom-and-heroin dealer Damien.  It was Billy who had spent hours deciphering the Latin of the spell, checking it a Latin textbook and an online dictionary, and who had bought all the supplies that they would need.  The candles, the pigs blood, the cows heart, the eye of newt, the massive wooden cross, the lighter fluid and the matches, the brazier, and of course the hunting knife.  It was Billy who painted the pentagram in pig’s blood on the ground.  It was Billy who had lit the candles, and invoked the words intoning them aloud in a deep, sullen voice.  Gavin and Sean just kept the chant from the sides of the pentagram, as Billy lit the cross on fire over the brazier, then poured the eye of newt over the embers, then threw in the cow’s heart.  And it was Billy who, at the apex of the spell, as Sean and Gavin’s voices grew higher and louder and as the cow’s heart blackened and the embers were finally snuffed out, plunged the knife into his chest.  A final offering, it was meant to be.

‘Don’t you think that’s risky, dude?’ Sean had said.

‘No no, man it will be all right,’ replied Billy.  ‘It’s just like, a down payment, you know?  After the spell is done, we three will be like gods.  I’ll be fine!  I’ll be better than fine! Don’t you want unlimited power?’  Billy might have been tripping at the time.

Now, the room was starting to smell sickly sweet.  The smells from the blood and the body were overwhelming the smoke from Sean’s meth pipe.   Sean was shivering.

‘Oh shit, man, what are we going to do?’  Gavin was kind of leaning against a support pole over by the stairway, if leaning was something that could be agitated and intense.

Sean kept shivering.  ‘Aw man.  Aw man, this can’t be happening.  This isn’t happening.’  There was a faded orange blanket thrown on the couch.  Cradling his meth pipe in one hand, he wrapped himself in the blanket with the other, got up, and walked past Gavin and up the stairs without saying another word.

‘Sean?’ called out Gavin.  ‘Sean?  We got to do something, man.’  Gavin followed Sean up the stairs.  ‘We can’t just leave him here.  We can’t just leave him like that.’

The door to the basement slammed shut.  A light turned on underneath it.  The lightbulb was still on, but after awhile it stopped swinging. 

Billy didn’t move.

Dead Billy

Billy was dead.  Very dead. 

There was a twelve inch serrated hunting knife sticking out of his chest, the blade plunged 6 inches into the gut, just below the apex of the ribs.  It looked kind of weird, the rest of the blade and that big handle, all wrapped in black leather except for the silvery hilt, just sticking out.  It seemed so out of place, like, ‘Hey, where is the rest of that thing?’  There was blood too.  Blood dribbling out from the wound and pooling on the floor, smeared along the ground from the pentagram painted on the floor to the wall where Billy had slid over to die.  So he at least could be sitting up, you know.  And that he was.  His back against the concrete wall of the basement, the blacks of his Cannibal Corpse t-shirt and jeans all soaked in red, his legs sprawled out and his arms hanging limp, but palms up, as if asking for alms.  His face pale, mouth hanging open, eyes staring wide at some unknown point on the floor, head cocked to one side, the will to hold it to aloft having long since fled.  And everything about him was very very still.

Magic on Venn-La

There are many different magical disciplines on Venn-La. 

• telekinesis. controlling objects with one's mind.  allows for flight.
• scrying. seeing the future or present, or past.  several different methods developed to tap into this, including merely concentrating upon the mind's eye, but also using methods such as mirrors or pools or entrails of beasts. 
• mind control.  usually used for the taming of wild beasts.  use on other kuls is outlawed in most lands. 
• energy control.  like telekinesis, only with energy not matter.  lncludes manipulating fire, light, lightening, but also controlling temperature or creating illusions.
• spirit walking.  making one's spirit leave one's body and go waking and traveling elsewhere, then returning with what information one has gained.
• teleportation.  moving your body from one place to another, traveling in the corridors between reality. 
• healing powers.  The manipulation of energy at a deeper level to heal and alter the body.  can also be used in the cultivationg of plants or animals, imbuing them with more spirit or order.
• transmogrification.  turning one substance into another.  water to wine, lead to gold.  
• necromancy.  controlling the dead or spirits of the once living.  often illegal, and widely viewed as evil.
• wizardry.  simply shaping or altering reality in total with one's own will.  creating something from nothing.  Very rare, often outlawed.  such a being, if suffiently powerful,  can become like a god.

Many of these abilities can be used in a variety of creative ways to perform many technological functions.  

Venn-La

On the planet Venn-La, the dominant species, a race of intelligent beings who call themselves kuls, have long ago learned how to use magic.  After an initial stage of tool developement they began to move more and more to a dependance on the mystic arts.

They build buildings by shaping the earth, create weapons by molding the rare materials.  Feed themselves by creating cauldrons of plenty, or bewitching creatures from the seas, or gardens by controlling the flowering of plants.  They light their houses with orbs of energy floating in the air.  They cook in furnaces lit with magic fires.  They communicate across vat distances by water pools, and in hulls with flying spells cast upon them.  They teleport from city to city.  They have built cities in the air, on mountains upturned and made to float by ancient spells.  They keep cities that float upon the seas. 

Their are two types of Kuls, those with magic, and those without.  The magical ones all have green skin, and are called mors.  Those without magic are orange skinned and called wors.  Kuls of both skin types can breed with one another, and have children of different colors.  Wors have children who are mors, and mors have children you are wors.  Only about one tenth of kuls are mors, and they tend to be women (there are two sexes on Venn-La).  Those born wors train to be great fighters, or fine artisnas, creating the simple tools that will aid the Mors in doing the magic that runs society.

Save for later

The sounds of battle were cleaning up outside, but Torquesville was not there to hear them.  Or if he was, he was willfully ignoring them.  Instead he was focused upon the dirtflecked, unpolished lookingglass set before him, its edges rough yet straight upon his washstand.  He was eying his reflection within, mysteriously, as if expecting sudden moves, though none were made.  The face within rotated back and forth like a cobra, moving from one near profile to the other, the eyes locked in place, forever staring outwards.  He noticed, as if for the first time, though also he was certain the thought had crept about before, that he could not quite place the age of the face behind the glass.  It was much too set, too defined to be within the third decade of life, or even into the early years of the fourth.  Yet the comparative lack of wrinkles meant he could not have been older than five and thirty.  No face should have appeared quite so lived in, and yet so unmarked.  And to top it off, the subtle, practiced motions of the face, the dart of the eyes, the slow raising of brow, the set of the mouth, betrayed the easy practice of a soul that had been living for over a century.  It was a face that was perfectly unnatural.  And it was his. 

"How weird," he thought.  "Men should no longer be living."

Outside, there could be heard the sound of a man falling to ground nearby the tent, and being set upon and torn open by long blades, screaming in wet horror.  The dying sounds caught hold of Torquesville and pulled his soul back across whatever oceans it had crossed.   The fae were making sport of another town, and he had business out-and-about.