I sat by the massive desk in the storage room while Peter walked around the place. He wasn’t very happy with , as we had to push his attempt at astral projection back by a couple of days. But I had a good reason, as the situation with the corporation apparently escalated more quickly than intended, with the CEO getting drunk and sending a rather unpleasant ssage to the lawyer. A lawyer he didn’t know was an elf.
The Vatican finally greenlit retaliation after three days of begging for soone in the agencies to take the threats seriously. So yesterday I had a late night job to do. My work turned out better than I thought, and today I was in a great mood, ready to teach Peter.
Despite the pain weighing down on his mind, he still took ti to look over the many things here. For the past few weeks, I had mainly instructed him in his apartnt, carrying the books there so as not to waste his ti on travel, not to ntion the local guard was getting pissy with over the constant coming and going. But today was the day for him to try to project his soul out of his body, and for that, I wanted a properly secured space.
“What’s in there?” he asked, pointing at a massive crate to the side.
“It’s an altar of my god.” He looked at it with a growing frown. “I wouldn’t get closer if I were you. The aura can be sensed even through the wood. But don’t worry, it’s dormant right now. Just think of it as a very ugly decoration in the corner.”
“Should I be hearing whispers?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied with a shrug.
Peter looked at for a few seconds before finally coming to the prepared space in the middle. He sat cross-legged as I had taught him, waiting for the next step. I activated the array and went to join him inside.
“Okay,” I started. “We went over all the motions. I want you—”
“Yes. I can sense the center and my spark. I checked it yesterday. I can also tell the vague shape, as you told . I can...” he began, but then stopped, seeing my raised eyebrows.
“Look, I know you’re in a hurry. But it’s one of the most dangerous skills to practice without extensive knowledge. My experience won’t be anything like yours. And to make it worse, your spirit is not like anything I have ever seen.”
“I know,” he said, looking at with a bit of anger. “Hard to listen to you repeating the instructions when I’m in pain.”
“You’ve been in pain for the past few weeks. Five more minutes won’t change much.”
He was about to say sothing, but then took a deep breath and cald himself slightly, although I could still see his leg going up and down like a sewing machine.
“Good. Now, where is your spark? Describe it to .”
“Deep in my chest, as if between the breastbone and spine, but also much further away. And... a bit to the left?”
“Good.” I nodded.
I had examined his soul a couple of tis, and his description should be accurate.
“And how about the outline?”
“I...” I could see he choked on that question, but I needed to be sure.
“Describe what it looks like to ,” I insisted.
“All fucked up,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Fucked up isn’t a shape.”
“What does it matter? I’ll either push it out or not. What does my describing it—”
“So that I know how well you practiced the ditation. Learning to sense one’s soul before sensing the mind isn’t exactly common practice. So, describe your shape to in excruciating detail. Pretty please.” I hissed the last two words with a fake smile on my face.
He waited for a few seconds, hoping I’d back down and let him attempt the skill, but I just sat there silently.
“My left hand is much bigger than the right, almost the thickness of a man’s torso. It’s also longer, reaching about halfway down my shin. My left leg and back follow a similar principle, with growths over them. There are also crater-like wounds where the faces were. Happy?” he said.
“Extrely,” I confird.
He seed to have a strange knack for working with his own soul. Learning the ditation was a long shot, but it did the job surprisingly well.
“Now, if you perform the skill correctly, you will initially see only darkness. So of the rewiring of the soul to sense and see its surroundings will be done instinctively. Other parts will have to be done later, once you reach that level. But at the beginning, you will be just floating in the nothingness. You will also feel a pull directing you back into your own body. I want you to follow it.” I raised my hand before he could protest. “I know you want to spend ti outside your flesh. But for now, it’s just a test. Understood?”
He nodded his head as I watched him, completely unconvinced by his expression.
“Good.” I sighed. “Ready when you are.”
Before I even finished, he closed his eyes and began steadying his breath.
“You can’t hurry serenity,” I dropped him a pearl of wisdom straight from my father’s collection and then got up to prepare the herbal tea.
It was a drug that helped with entering the deep ditation needed to perform the technique for the first ti. I put the crystalline cup in the middle of the small magic circle and began pouring hot water over the herbs as the magic activated, working the ingredients. As I worked, my eyes were on Peter.
To be honest, I wasn’t exactly hopeful about the attempt. He was a weird case. He absorbed the knowledge of souls and techniques like a sponge. Sensing and manipulating his own spirit also ca surprisingly easily for an untrained person. I attributed those to his sizable soul and the constant ache, as the spirit made itself known to him through it. But... to perform astral projection, one needed to know one’s own being beyond just the shape and placent of the spark.
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But I did owe him a try.
Pushing the thoughts aside, I carried the tea into the circle and sat back down across from Peter, passing him the cup.
“Watch out, it’s hot—” Before I finished the sentence, he gulped down the contents.
Not comnting, I took out a small drum and began beating a steady, simple rhythm, trying to match his heartbeat. After a few minutes, Peter began to sway in the rhythm, slowly but surely raising his hand. He brought his fist up into place near where he felt the spark, and taking a short swing, he hit his own chest, using the pressure to begin pushing his soul out. Once I felt a change in him, I also perford astral projection to watch.
And the sight I witnessed once out of my own body was rather strange. It could best be described as watching a ghost try to escape from a statue in which it was sealed and fail. He would pop out part of his soul in one place, but that would imdiately cause it to get stuck on the opposite side. If he got the left arm out, the right would stay stuck. If the torso moved back, the legs would stay firmly in place. Each ti, he would hit himself harder and harder, and I could see panic slowly rising on his face despite the herbal tea.
I began repossessing my own body shortly after, as it was becoming dangerous. His spirit flailed from side to side, slowly injuring his body. As I popped back into my own flesh, there was a small line of blood running from his nose.
“Stop,” I said and squeezed his shoulder, but got no reaction.
Another impact shook his body, as the soul inside thrashed desperately.
“Stop!” I shouted, and this ti, I placed my fist on the upper part of his sternum and raked my knuckles down.
The process was usually painful enough to break the concentration of most people. But it didn’t seem to move him, as another shake began to throw the body from side to side as if he were getting possessed.
“Fuck’s sake,” I swore as a bit of blood poured from his mouth.
Without thinking much, I went for the hook, but then stopped my hand, deciding it might have unseen consequences. Instead, I cast a small Pierce spell and fired it into the pad of his thumb.
The delicate skin getting cut did the job, as he opened his eyes, looking around in confusion and panic. He tried to say sothing, only to start coughing up blood. Thankfully, as I checked his mouth, it turned out to have co from him biting his cheek rather than his lungs.
“Fuck,” he said as tears welled up in his eyes.
I could see sadness, desperation, and blind anger on his face. His lips began trembling as he clenched his hands into tight fists, the knuckles going white.
“Why?” he only managed to say before his voice broke.
“I have to get you a bandage,” I lied and got up to leave him alone for a while. “We’ll talk once I’m back.”
I wasn’t the most social person, but it didn’t take a genius to know that having a breakdown in front of people one barely knew wasn’t exactly pleasant.
I went out and walked around for fifteen minutes, thinking about the reason for the failure. I had a theory about why he failed, but the redy was simply to try talking to him. Groaning at the incoming complicated social interaction, I reentered the storage. Peter looked better now, just hunched over in deep sadness, with much of the anger gone.
“You have the bandage?” he asked, looking at his injured finger.
“No, I was bullshitting,” I said, sitting back down.
He raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything.
“Do you know why you failed?” I asked.
“No,” he answered. “I sensed the shape as you told , I sensed my spark as you told , I did everything—”
“Did you talk to your mother about your father, as I told you?” I cut in.
His eyes went to the side imdiately at my words. “What does it have to do with anything?”
I sighed. We had gone over this once before, but it didn’t seem to register properly.
“If you don’t care about it, then nothing. If it bothers you, then everything,” I repeated what I had already told him.
“Well, like you said, it was in the past and out of my control.” Peter gave the sa excuse.
“It doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is what you believe about yourself. Traumas, guilt, and rage leave physical changes in the soul. When you try to push it out of your body, you have to be aware of your spirit, know what you are controlling, what you are. If you are trying to work with a soul that doesn’t care for your father’s death, but the trauma sits in it, then there is a mismatch. An advanced mage might be able to ignore it and perform the technique. You are not an advanced mage. You need to be true to what you are to have a chance, and you clearly failed.”
“How do you know it’s because of that?”
I looked at him, tilting my head to the side, not replying.
“You said it was fine and that it doesn’t matter!” he snapped. “So why should it? I... I just want to do the thing.” He deflated, letting a stretch of silence hang there before breaking it. “You killed people. You don’t have a problem with doing the soul-pushing thing,” he finally said in a low voice.
I was slightly taken aback. “You thought it wouldn’t affect the ritual because I killed people, too?”
He nodded lightly.
I sighed. In hindsight, I should have spent more ti on the emotional barriers and less on the technique. But that was how I was taught, kind of left to deal with my own demons, taught never to hide from them. I assud he would do just that.
‘People are hard,’ I groaned on the inside.
I closed my eyes, looking for an explanation that would stick with him. One less technical than I was used to.
“You received a classical education, right?” I finally asked, receiving a confused nod in return. “Did you read the story of David, Bathsheba, and Uriah, or Naboth’s vineyard?”
“Yes. I know most of the Bible by heart,” he said with a wince.
“Right. And the classics? Shakespeare’s Macbeth or Hamlet?” I asked once again.
“Yes?” he half confird, half asked.
“Did you get them? The interpretation? The aning?”
“Yes. Killing is bad and doesn’t bring anything good,” he said, still lightly confused. “Why?”
“You see, I also received a classical education from my father. In both the mortal world and the arcane. I read ancient tos as a pasti, but with all those stories, I struggled imnsely,” I said.
“What? Why?” he said, frowning. “They aren't that complicated.”
“To you. You see, I understood the words, I read the interpretations, but I couldn’t get what the whole thing was about. For , they were just stories about shitty amateur killers.”
“Huh?” The boy shook his head.
“Macbeth was the worst, I think. I argued for hours. What kind of a fucking idiot asks his wife to help in a murder if they don’t know she can take it? Don’t use amateurs for the job, any moron should know that. And don’t get started about how he gets caught. Talking to Banquo’s ghost in front of all those people. I an, that thing looked like a non-aggressive little spirit. Exorcise the fucker and sit down to eat, right? I couldn’t understand why my father made read those. To teach how not to organize a kill? Only after so ti did I understand it was the moral code of others with different upbringings, people not raised by a head in a jar and old servants. But before that, I struggled with them for quite a while.”
Peter sat there, clearly confused by my words.
“You see, we both read the sa words, yet our reactions and our understanding were vastly different. Your soul is the sa. For , you didn’t do anything bad. I truly believe that. You couldn’t have overpowered the souls of high-level mages, and any resentnt you had that might have guided them was sothing your father earned himself. For , that’s obvious. But you are different. Your interpretation is different because of your own morality. So you have to reconcile it yourself. It’s sothing I can’t really help you with.” I finished speaking.
Peter sat in silence for a few minutes, his eyes unfocused as he looked in front of himself. Finally, as I was about to tell him to go rest for now, he nodded lightly.
“I—I’ll call Mom,” he blurted out, the words heavy as he struggled with the sentence.
“Good. Call when you’re ready to try again,” I replied.
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