Pendulum: An Aes Sidhe Novel

by A. Omukai

  Cailean. In her last vision during the last ritual, she had seen him by her side. He wasn’t here anymore, hadn’t been for a while, and her attempts to call him had failed. She shaped his image in her mind, every single detail she could remember. His dark eyes, white, ragged fur, lean, but strong body with the play of muscles clearly visible whenever he moved and his attentive, intelligent face, dominated by a powerful jaw and pointed ears. She kept the image in her mind, alternated attention to various details, from his fur to the intelligence flashing up in his eyes, to his long, sharp fangs. His rough, mossy smell.

  The air next to her flickered, crackled, the smell of ozone came from nowhere she could distinguish, and a gate ripped open the vulnerable tissue of space.

  Ailbhe gasped. The Aes Sidhe was not a magic user, and the magic on Gliese 667 Cc differed from that of Earth, but she could see what was going on.

  The gate didn’t look like one of those she created as jump device for the ship. This one had no clear, defined boundaries. It flickered like the hot air rising from the tarmac just a few days ago, that now seemed like an event from the distant past.

  And there he was, by her side, letting out the howl that had scared the people of old so much, that had given his kind a reputation as a portent of death.

  Her eyes were closed, but it was him. His voice was unique, and his aura was so familiar, she’d find him every time without fail in a crowd of identical Cu Sidhe. And the gate he had used to appear stood wide open and didn’t close. But Gwyar didn’t show. Had the planet instructed her to summon him to open the gate for her?

  There she stood in the blue-green twilight of the island in the grotto, suddenly presented with a way out into the Otherworld, and no element to spawn the spell she had set out to do: The spell to block and divert the pendulum moving towards chaos, with way too much energy powering its swing.

  She could take the gate now, or she could stand and fight, but it wasn’t even a choice anymore.

  She was Deirdre MacBreen, her life dedicated to protecting nature, and restoring balance was a keystone of what her calling was all about.

  Nature might not reciprocate.

  She was very aware of the infection spreading out more and more even now.

  Cailean’s howl had ended in a whimper, as if he had turned his head and seen what grew inside her flesh. Maybe he had. Could he help her here in this situation? What was it that the planet spanning life form expected from them?

  It was difficult to keep her structure together. Not only did her spirit hold more energy than she had even thought possible, the runic symbols at her feet did nothing at all.

  The piece of birch wood didn’t show any signs of life, as the paraphernalia needed to call the element usually did. It still felt alien and lifeless, more like a stone than wood. No energy flew into it, and Gwyar didn’t consume it.

  Was it the wrong item?

  Had she not paid enough attention and grabbed something else instead of birch?

  No way. She had been deliberate. Everything she had intended to use, she had checked carefully. There was no mistake possible.

  This wasn’t an issue with the ritual. Everything was perfect, from the grove to the flow of magic, to the foundations of the spell she intended to cast. There was no reason this didn’t work, and yet, she found herself unable to call upon Gwyar. There was no use trying out if any of the others would work — neither Nwyfre, nor Calas would help her here. The resulting magic would become something completely different, something she hadn’t even thought of.

  No, this didn’t work out. Maybe her vision of the spell was too vague. The image she had was that of a grand dam, stopping the incoming flood and forcing it into a controlled stream.

  Even while she was thinking about it, the image fizzled out, and so did the structure of the spell she had woven. The piece of pine lay in her hand like the dead piece of a tree it was, and no infusion would wake it up now. This ritual was a failure, but it was not over yet. She would go through it thoroughly and find out what caused the blockage.

  ***

  She must have overlooked something. What was it?

  Consecration of place, check.

  Consecration of time, check.

  No guardians, those would have been counterproductive.

  She had located her spiritual centre, if at an unusual spot, but that hadn’t hindered her last time either.

  No connection with the Earth mother, but she had already established that that hadn’t impaired her ability to grow and fill out her grove.

  Her roots had grown in the same pattern they had last time. The shape her spiritual body had assumed during this ritual had assumed a more pronounced form, and emphasized the change she had gone through, what she had become after her infection.

  The problem had been the rejection of her birch wood offering. Normally, evoking an element would consume it, and the spell would take effect. It was as if a small piece of a bridge was missing, just before it reached the other shore.

  Deirdre changed her tactics. She no longer tried to contain any energy. There was no way to release it as a spell, and she couldn’t grow infinitely. Instead of taking in more energy and hoarding it, she gave up control over the magical stream.

  She turned her focus inward instead and slowed down. First her breath. Already slow and regular, she slowed it down, breathing in and out consciously.

  The first signs of panic abated. Good.

  She felt Cailean’s presence next to her. The Cu Sidhe communicated nothing. He just stood by her side, and that was all she needed to feel reassured. Cailean would have her back.

  What she had done wrong wasn’t the question.

  What hadn’t she done right?

  Thinking back, what had she learned, but never fully understood about the problem she was trying to deal with here?

  All the places she had seen that had been hit by an overshooting chaos cycle had ended in blackened, dead spots with an energetic deficit. Not only no life force left, but an actual negative state, sucking in magic from around it to balance the negative pressure. It had reached out for her vigour when she had come too close.

  The problem was not too much magical energy flooding in; it was the lack of energy, the vacuum that sucked the affected area dry and took all life with it, before the pendulum could swing around to head the other way.

  That was it.

  The eternal cycle of gaining magical energy and releasing it to do・ whatever it was they had watched on board the ship, when the planet had fired something into space.

  A negative state followed the event, a period in which the planetary entity took in energy from the environment like a glutton. Somehow, their appearance here had led to a reaction that reminded her of an anaphylactic shock. The energy that normally ended up feeding the wrong reaction, while the needed function received too little, like a human’s blood pressure dropping so low that its cells and organs didn’t receive enough oxygen.

  No, this planet didn’t need a dam to block energy from filling the vacuum.

  Its magical energies needed to be redirected to fill it, so it would suck up the energy swinging too far into a negative state.

  And how would she go about doing that?

  32

  Flow

  Deirdre didn’t break her focus for even one second. She kept it up effortlessly. Concentration had always been her strong suit, even though technicalities had eluded her from time to time. Her outstanding ability to zoom in on something completely, and her laser-like focus, had made up for her weaknesses in the past. This had not saved her from defeat this time, but it certainly would help avoid a failure cascade. Which meant changing the course of the ritual in the middle, without stopping it first and re-engaging.

  Not only was this something she had never attempted in the past. To her knowledge, nobody had ever done it.

  There were good reasons to finish what one started, even if it failed. Residual patterns from the first spell could linger and caus
e problems. All the energy she had sucked in through her roots and tried to channel had just evaporated before it could even touch her magical patterns, as laid out by the runes.

  Following the flow was an important part of druidic magic. She took magic from underground sources, from the planet itself, then channelled it through whatever material the spell used, which in this case would have been birch wood.

  The channelling itself meant using the force of the element called upon to press the magical energies into a form defined by the runes.

  She hadn’t even arrived at those last two stages yet. The process had fizzled out somewhere around the halfway point, with her being unable to evoke Gwyar. And without an element, there was no way to force the magic into the spell, to have the runes shape it according to her formula. It was like attempting to enter a house through a closed door.

  Maybe, if one could brute force it, but she couldn’t even imagine how to achieve this. It didn’t matter how much energy she collected for her spell, if she had no blueprint to build the house itself, or if she had no way to move the materials to the building site.

  Growing her roots and sucking in the energy had worked well enough to assure her that the planet, or whatever acted in its place, would support her efforts. Not only had it given up copious amounts of magic freely, it felt like it flooded her and make sure she had enough to use for the spell.

  She wasn’t the personification of an oak tree. Until now, she had looked at it as an alien influence, taking over part of herself, not as something that already was part of Deirdre MacBreen. For her, it had been ‘the planet’, not ‘Deirdre’.

  She had started with a premise that hadn’t been compatible with the way she usually formed magic, and wouldn’t that then lead to a misfiring spell automatically?

  Maybe.

  She hadn’t felt a noticeable change in the flow of the ritual itself. The amount of energy transferred through her stem had been enormous, but it had worked just as she would have expected it to under normal circumstances.

  Assuming the problems had started here, wasn’t it fair to assume that there had to be additional adaptations to the way she needed, in order to perform the spell?

  If the nature of magic on this planet followed different rules, it wasn’t impossible that maybe the druidic elements used here differed from Earth, too.

  Thinking back, she had made spells work here using her traditional methods, on the surface of Gliese 667 Cc. However, she had been using a different element, Calas, and she had had a different spiritual body.

  This planet had no oceans, and Gwyar symbolised the sea.

  While there was no ocean on spaceships either, the materials of which the vessels were made came from Earth, so performing a jump ritual by Earth rules wasn’t a weird thought.

  Maybe the problem didn’t have to do anything with this either. Perhaps this element, Calas, just didn’t appear in the list of forces she could evoke on this planet.

  She had seen some tiny little rivers. Actually, she had seen quite a lot of them, but none of them had been big. Then again, she stood on an island in a grotto underwater, connected to an enormous lake, in this very moment.

  Her thoughts raced around in circles, and she reached the same conclusion again and again, no matter how much she thought about it.

  If she had no element to evoke, she had no way to channel the spell.

  A literal key element was missing.

  Whenever she reached this same verdict and got frustrated, she imagined herself as being nothing but a sponge, just taking in energy and growing. What would happen if she didn’t stop the process? What if she didn’t cast her spell and instead gave up control and just let it flow? As things stood, she didn’t have the element she needed to use at her command.

  This meant that there was nothing she could do, even with all the energy the planet could muster, and if the infection spread out, time would run out soon.

  What were her options? She didn’t know. If there were any options, she wasn’t aware of them. What should she do, just let it flow and see what would happen? What was the worst thing that could happen? She could explode, implode, collapse, vanish, whatever. Deirdre laughed. A loud, clear laugh, not defiled by her infected cough.

  With her being the vessel, and magic being something nobody could predict with certainty, anything was possible. Her death could come in any disguise. She would die soon, unless, of course, she abandoned the project and fled through Cailean’s gate now. But she had already discarded this option at the start of her ritual.She wouldn’t give up on this planet. She knew someone she wanted to flee instead, but she wasn’t able to speak right now, and if she interrupted the ritual here…

  She released the constraints she had put on her spiritual body’s roots and let the energy flow into her again.

  They sucked in unbelievable amounts, ravenously.

  She felt bloated, as if she would burst any moment. Her growth picked up speed again and soon, her cap slid through the stony ceiling of the grotto, immaterial, and arrived outside, under the blood red sky. And it didn’t stop. The growth continued and continued and continued.

  Deirdre controlled nothing this time. She wanted to see what happened if she let go. Maybe she could pick up any new, interesting patterns that told her more about how magic differed in this environment. So far though, she just kept growing, and not only in height but also in volume. At this rate, she’d fill out the grotto soon. Still, she wanted Ailbhe to go through the gate, but didn’t see how she could communicate it, and even if she did, the marine wouldn’t leave her behind.

  Giving up the driver seat in this ritual opened up the resources to run an independent thinking process. Interesting, but not enough to speak.

  Something happened, but she wasn’t able to tell what it was at first. It started as a hunch that something wasn’t quite right.

  She didn’t intervene. Was this what she had been looking for?

  The energy that flowed through her stem into the cap stopped vanishing once it reached the top of her spiritual manifestation.

  It kept moving, pressing on, as if her body kept stretching out forever. The form the energy had assumed, not from the runes she had used, but from her own self, seeped out of her without changing appearance.

  How she could even feel that was beyond her. She also didn’t know where those energies went, and what they did, but she knew, on some level, that this was how it was supposed to work.

  The spell, released from her spiritual body instead of the formula laid out in Ogham runes, represented herself, Deirdre, in the way a shadow did.

  It drew a silhouette of herself, only that this wasn’t made of light and its absence, but of magical energies, and it moved over the land, with a clear destination she couldn’t make out, even though she kept growing still.

  At some point, she stopped sensing anything from the edges of her cap. She outgrew herself, and that included her capacity for holding magical powers.

  She didn’t feel the spell itself anymore, but she sensed its consequences at the edges of her consciousness. The energy she had sucked in, the source of magic below her feet, had flown chaotically, formed ripples and currents that had threatened to rip off her roots, and might have, if her grove wasn’t just a manifestation of her will, but some sort of metaphysical extension.

  She knew very well that in the actual world, nothing of this existed. Not the roots, the stem or her cap. All this was part of her tree meditation, a tool she used to become one with her environment.

  But here and now, this was her body, on a level that transcended reality, and the patterns she formed out of the chaotic streams were gentle waves, very similar to how the lake outside the grotto had looked, even when gusts of wind had disturbed the surface of the water. There, the waves had been small and smooth, and moved slowly, and here, her magical waves looked much the same.

  This was the flow the planet had wanted her to produce, not her pressing it into a form and building a barri
cade, as she had tried unsuccessfully.

  In the end, it hadn’t been a failure on her part; the ritual had been fine. It had been incompatible with the actual needs of Gliese 667 Cc and the life form inhabiting it.

  She understood now, and followed the trajectory the energy pouring out from her had taken, extrapolated its course and concluded that where it went wasn’t important.

  What it did was what really mattered, and it was easy to guess what the magic accomplished. She already felt the flow below her calming, being less chaotic than before.

  She herself had been the pressure valve the life form here had needed.

  Cailean next to her dissolved. At first, she hadn’t noticed it, but as the process went on, she could feel his presence lessen, until she didn’t sense him next to her anymore at all.

  At the same rate, the energy stream entering her from below and leaving her from her top slowed, then turned into a trickle, then stopped completely, and her spiritual body shrunk.

  She gained her normal human senses back. The cold of the surrounding air had numbed her extremities, the smell of fallen leaves came back and filled her with peace, and the dripping sound of water falling from stalactites into the water around the island reminded her of where she was.

  The more her spiritual body shrunk, the stronger her senses became, until she finally returned to the actual world completely, and her eyes eventually fixated the silhouette next to her, now coming closer. Warm hands grabbing her arm, supporting her weight. A warm voice saying something her brain couldn’t make sense of yet.