Chapter Four: Oh, The Irony!
"And then I was Martin Warner again for two weeks, and I was miserable, and then you guys found me," I said. We came around the corner and Lily's place came into view.
"Wow," Liam said. "I'm so sorry, Natalie… I'm sorry we couldn't protect you. And I'm not sure why you told us all the sex bits… I'm pretty sure we all already knew about those."
"I didn't." The way Simone said it made it clear she wished she still didn't.
"So?" I nudged her. "Did you and Wyatt play 'hide the kielbasa'?"
She grinned, blushed, cringed, and turned away from me. "Oh. My. God. It sounds so gross when you say it like that."
"I didn't hear a denial," Magnus said. "Um… Natalie… look out for the plants."
Lily had a... let's call it an interesting collection of plants in her garden. Maybe half were regular garden-variety (literally) plants, and the other half were... definitely not. The bugshade flowers turned into luminous, ethereal moths at night. The 'virginal creeper'... was not just a term for an incel with hygiene issues. The plant liked virgin's blood and was a traditional favorite among witches because, so long as it got an occasional feeding, its juice could be substituted for virgin's blood as a reagent guilt-free. SyphoPharm had a whole greenhouse of the things, and a host of brave but romantically-unfulfilled high school interns to maintain the plants' mojo.
"Ow! Jesus!" I pulled away from the virginal creeper, a little line of red pinpricks remaining on my leg. They'd only got a milliliter or so, but it was enough to make half of its little pink and purple flowers bloom.
"I did warn you," Magnus said.
"Yeah, but I'm not a..." I looked down at my body, all angles and lumps in Liam's almost-fitting clothes. "Oh."
I'd never gotten laid in my current Martin Warner body. I was technically a virgin... and that's all magic cared about. Technicalities. The creeper, I noticed, barely gave Simone a second sniff... good for her!
Lily's sanctuary was a lot smaller than the Lochlaron estate by design - easier to hide, easier to defend. It was twelve acres of mostly-wooded sanctuary, old trees blooming in eternal springtime, pleasant and sunny every day, save for Lily's scheduled twice-weekly rainshowers. Based on some sleuthy stargazing by Simone and myself, it was somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley, but you'd never find it without a warlock's compass and a bit of soil or vegetation from the place to point the way. Otherwise, if you tried to approach, its subtle influence would turn you right around or send you badly off-course, so you'd never get within a hundred yards of the place. Eight acres of woodland, a sizable Victorian mansion, and a more sizable garden were the whole of the sanctuary. Lily also had a proper ritual circle somewhere in the woods (loads better than Liam's rocky 'henge) but we'd never found it. It was still the middle of the night in the Shenandoah, and even Lily's pleasant little paradise was chilly, with dew beading on the plants and silvery little clouds drifting across the half-moon.
"Do you think she's home?" Magnus asked.
"Well... it's 3:45 in the morning," Simone said. "I'd say it's a good bet."
She knocked on the door and we waited. After a minute, we heard Lily inside, thumping down the hallway and then undoing the dozen wards she'd cast over the door. Try to enter with those still up and you'd be in a world of hurt. She opened the door, clad in her pajamas: gray sweats and an oversized shirt that read 'I'm a witch, bitch!', which I assume somebody had given her as a joke years ago. That she'd never bothered to fit it to herself suggested that it was only ever used as sleepwear. Her hair was in a sleeping cap - all except her one lock of platinum-white hair, which could never quite be contained by ordinary means (I had some experience with this).
"What in the world is…" she muttered. "Who's this?" This was directed toward me, of course. While I was unaware of her ever having met Liam, she'd seen Magnus on the night of the formal, and it was a safe bet she'd conferred with both at least once or twice in the two weeks I was missing.
"It's Natalie," I said. "Um… I'm Natalie."
Surprise crossed her face, and she shuffled out to pull me into a hug, drawing my head down to rest on her shoulder - I had a few inches of height on her, which was a pretty strange state of affairs. "Oh, my poor girl," she said, running her fingers through my short hair. "We were worried sick about you."
I started to cry - not because I felt some deep malaise or personal weakness, but because she was the first of my friends who'd actually treated me normally since I got my memories back. They were trying to help me and they meant well, but they were treating me as Martin Warner (who happened to have Natalie's personality and memories) rather than as real-Natalie, their frightened friend who'd just found herself in a very uncertain situation. I suppose Lily had seen enough magical strangeness in her time that her protégé getting trapped in the wrong body was no big deal. Lily pulled away from me and tugged me inside.
"It's good that you came here. What time is it?"
"It is three fifty-two in the a.m., miss," her clock said, the carved wooden satyr's face moving with lifelike realism. It was just a clever artifice, though - Lily didn't care for spirit indenture.
"Almost time to get up anyway," she shrugged. "Who wants coffee? Tea? Three coffee, three tea."
She picked up her two bells - one brassy-brown and one wrought-iron black - and rang them each three times. Her sets started clambering away back in the kitchen - more magic. Unlike at St. Circe's, where you barely ever actually saw magic (some of the girls weren't students of the occult for any number of reasons), there was very little in Lily's abode that wasn't magic. Her computer, and that's about it. She sat at the dinette and motioned for us to join her.
"Why don't you start from the beginning… and then we'll see whether there's a way that I can help."
+++++
After explaining my plight to Lily, she attempted a few transformations on me, two of them having no more luck that Simone and Cassie had managed, and one of them managing to paste an additional transformation on top of my Martin Warner body without reverting it. She tweaked the transformation some and my perspective dwindled down to very Natalie levels, a mass of fiery red tumbling down from my scalp.
"Did it work?" I asked - my voice was high and silvery, very similar to how it ought to have been (though perhaps with a slightly throatier timbre). She'd given me a St. Circe's uniform (of course). And my face looked… well, similar to my own, though not exact. Doing exact duplication is fiendishly difficult because of how our brains work - there's a bit of built-in flex with face identification, and that flex interferes with the exact duplication of even very familiar faces. But Lily was a hell of a witch and it was pretty close. But it also didn't feel like me - this was me in Martin's body wearing a fairly-convincing real-me suit, but it still felt artificial (and I still couldn't do magic).
"I'll work on making it better," Lily said. "This could be our workaround for the time be-"
My reversion back to Martin cut her off. My perspective shifted back up, my hair shriveled back inward, and my uniform became Liam's clothes. "Shit," I said.
"That should have lasted for days," Lily said. "This calls for serious firepower. Girls, I need you to go gather ingredients for Miss Magpie's Dehexification Elixir… you'll find the directions in my library - just say the name of the book and it'll find its way to you - Rare & Very Efficacious Concoctions. Boys, you follow me out and we'll start preparing the ritual circle. We're going to hit this Gangling Men curse with everything we've got."
"Uh… who should I go with?"
"Simone and Cassie, obviously," Lily said with an off-hand gesture - as far as she was concerned, I was her Natalie, temporarily inconvenienced. "You know more about potions than either of them and, even if you can't do magic right now, I assume you can still recognize rocks and flowers."
We hit the library, found Rare & Very Efficacious Concoctions (rather, it found us) and made our way out to the garden, flashlights in hand. Moonflower, starswort, leaves of gastum, and the skin of a black toad. A white stone and a black stone, and two caps of dreamer's morel. I thought the hardest thing to find would be the toad, but I spotted him right away, ribbiting happily beneath the porch light and taking in quite a haul of moths for the night. The recipe didn't specify how much skin, which usually meant any visible amount would suffice, so I took a little scraping from his back - sorry, toad! - and let the panicking little guy scramble away into the nighttime garden. Then I was off to find starsword, because I doubted either Cassie or Simone knew what it looked like (hint: like a nine-pointed star). It was close to dawn when we finally found the dreamer's morel - Lily didn't have one in her garden, but we found some on a log a few paces out into the woods - at which point we mashed it up and added to our mixture. Then Simone messaged Lily that we were done on our end.
"What's that?" I asked.
Simone scribbled a message into what was pretty obviously a modified notebook of some sort. It took me a moment to grasp what it was - a sympathetic notebook. Half of a notebook assembled in sympathy with a sister half. It was a logical extension of my own idea for sympathetic signal cards - how stupid not to have thought of that! I craned my neck to get a look:
All finished preparing reagents - where do we find you? she wrote. A minute later, a phantom message appeared beneath hers in Lily's unnaturally-neat script:
You don't. I'll be right out.
It was starting to get light enough to see without a flashlight when Lily tromped out of the woods in her night clothes and black galoshes. The three of us were huddled under a blanket by the porch, with Cassie slightly turned from me and Simone on Cassie's other side. None of us had jackets, and the morning was only just beginning to bring warmth. Cassie wasn't exactly distant, but clearly felt uncomfortable enough around me in my 27 year-old Martin Warner body that she wouldn't just lean into me, her cheek on my shoulder or mine on hers. And I found something about that deeply saddening.
"Ready to get transformed?"
"Yes, please!" I said. "We've got the potion."
"And I've got the circle. Potion, circle, powerful spell… we'll hit this bastard with a triple-whammy and knock it down from its pedestal."
Most of the work on the ritual circle involved raking and sweeping - it was a fifteen-yard circle out in the middle of the woods, its big, smooth base carved into the bedrock and inscribed with dozens of interlocking symbols. They weren't quite as juiced up as the tattoos I normally sported, but they had enough magic to wiggle in the periphery of your vision when you weren't quite looking. The outside contained seven meridian stones (the big obelisk-looking ones that you can't move) and five declension stones (the round ones that you adjust for your ritual, and that'll roll away if you don't set them carefully enough). Presumably, Magnus and Liam had done most of the stone-moving, though Lily might have just magicked them into place.
I made my way out to the middle of the circle - the spot for the sacrifice or subject of a particular ritual - and waited for Lily's go-ahead. She read through her book one last time and made her way out to me with a contract. It was a contract for a blood pact to seal the ritual - this would add a lot of power to the ritual by reducing my resistance to it. Ideally, Lily would have my True Name to work with, but you just didn't give that to another witch, not even your Mother Witch, who already knew your last (and most important) witch name. Mine, of course, was Natalia Cadence Storm (*obviously, I am protecting myself here, but for the purposes of this story, let's assume it's accurate).
Lily produced a silver pin from her hair, pricked her finger, and had me prick mine, bonding the contract: she was to perform a transformative ritual and I was to receive it. And perform it, she did, first quickening the potion:
"My power is my blood, my power's my own,
and with it do I join the white and black stone,
sealed beneath moon with the flesh of a toad,
in starlight and sky light sealed with wort and woad,
anneal powers here to create a new form,
I fix my design to create the witch, Storm!"
She handed me the potion and had me drink it - it was the strong potion of a masterful witch, and immediately I could feel its energies suffusing me. Then Lily stepped out of the circle and, with a flurry of symbols, the meridian stones lit up one at a time, their power growing, focusing, and finally blasting inward, all of their combined powers directed at me. Pain lanced through my body and I wobbled and collapsed, suddenly feeling very drained.
"Did… did it work?" I asked. Already, I could tell that it hadn't - I still had Martin's almost-baritone voice. "No…" I staggered to my feet, suddenly very weary, suddenly on the verge of tears. "I just want to be me again," I said.
"I know, dear," Lily said. "We may have weakened it - look." Sure enough, my arm wavered for a moment, the hairs smoothing out and sprouting back up again, the traces of barely-visible tattoos snaking beneath my skin.
"Can we try it again?" Cassie asked?
"We cannot," Lily said. "Not for some time - I'm exhausted, Natalie is clearly exhausted, and the feedback from the curse just turned my declension stones to dust…"
"All that work and they turn to dust?" Liam said. "That hardly seems fair."
Lily sighed and strolled out to me, helping me up from the floor of the circle. "I'll have to order more - or make them myself if I want them done right. It will take months - that's why 'henges don't use them - but I'll get them made. Come on, Natalie, you need to rest now."
I was groggy. The curse had tapped into my own energies to counter Lily's spell, draining me dry and sapping my mental reserves. Lesser witches have driven themselves mad or braindead from a lot less. I staggered back to Lily's, with Magnus and Cassie providing most of my forward motion, practically dragging me along. When we finally got in, Lily led me to the hallway guest room, and I promptly collapsed to the bed, out in seconds flat.
And I'm not sure why you told us all the s*x bits… I'm pretty sure we all already knew about those.
It's called exposure, Liam. Maybe give your audience behind the fourth wall a bit of leeway?
Natalia Cadence Storm (*obviously, I am protecting myself here, but for the purposes of this story, let's assume it's accurate).
Ohh. What a nice little twist. Now, the story feels more like an autobiographic piece of work.
Poor Nat though. All that work and such little effect.
Exactly! You've got to give our humble narrator a little leeway here, Liam!
And as for Nat's unexpectedly poor showing here... maybe there will be an unexpectedly good showing in the near future to even things out? It only seems fair.
One thing that I'm kinda confused about is that Martin/Natalie can't feel the magic affecting the curse. Generally, when something clashes with your ID, you would feel when it is displaced. I imagine something like pressing up against a door or stirring in a pool of water. That this curse has none of those tells is kinda creepy. Constant staring creepy.
No, especially because of the effect on perception, It should have felt like sliding past a lip or tearing a seam as the spell gave out. At the very least, like it wasn't setting in correctly.
Cassie wasn't exactly distant, but clearly felt uncomfortable enough around me in my 27 year-old Martin Warner body that she wouldn't just lean into me, her cheek on my shoulder or mine on hers. And I found something about that deeply saddening.
Grudge magic. A type honed to familiars, or environmental spirits. With a sturdy impression and enough dedication, it erodes mental/physical blocks. (It can affect critical thinking, and has side effects to the tune of strain and sensory interference.) To break down the traits of mutual rejection.
Not sure it would do much against gangling curses, but it’s passive and should apply pressure. Unless they are so insidious as to exploit the sense affection.
(What walls you have brought down, that I can casually talk magic?) Thank you tenfold.