Elva Rackthorn and the Tears of Azrael

In a Bind, Part 2

"Well," Elva said, once she had snuck Nyx into the other room, dragged over all her materials, closed the curtains, barred the door, and turned to stare at the demon with her eyes blisteringly wide open. "This is horrible."

"I don't know," Nyx said, looking about the room and sitting down on a couch, bouncing a bit to test its springiness. "Beneath the dust, there's a certain charm to it."

"Not the— not the room, you cretin! The situation." She let out a strangled yowl. "How are you so calm about this?"

"You bound me, you said you're going to unbind me." The demon shrugged, and the sharp tips of his wings tore open the couch, tossing bits of stuffing into air like snow. "Oh, sunshit."

"Careful with those things!"

It was hard to tell, but Elva thought the demon looked a bit embarrassed as he ducked away from the couch. The binding ceremony should have completely healed him completely, but the way he moved, all awkward and unsure, made Elva think that he was still somatically injured. It was possible— if she had messed up her sigilwork enough to have almost been taken by the mists on her entry into the Night World, then it was more than possible their return had been compromised as well. Would that complicate the unbinding?

She looked up from her musing to see Nyx sticking almost his entire upper torso out the window.

"For mercy's sake, don't do that!" She ran over and was yanking him back in without even thinking about it. "Someone could see you!"

"I doubt it. You can't see without the sun, can you? And oh, careful!"

They both tumbled back into the room, and in the tumble kept banging into each other with gangly limbs. As her shadowbound familiar, he couldn't hurt her, so every time his wings smashed against her, they turned into a silky shadowy sort of mist. But the scramble was awkward and undignified, and the mist reminded Elva too much of those moments the first time in 'Twixt where she thought herself gone for good.

So when they managed to settle a few steps apart, Elva glared at the boy and crossed her arms. "Care— careful with those! Can't you even control your own wings?"

Nyx crossed his arms in response and glared, then seemed to notice they had the same posture and put his hands at his hips instead. Then he just sort of sagged. "I— well, truth is they're new."

"Huh?"

"They're new. I didn't have wings before."

"Before what?"

"Oh, before that lovely luncheon we just had." The demon glared at her, and through her bone-weariness and sleepless-giddiness and the general ridiculousness of it all, Elva realized that as weird as it was for her to be sitting in an abandoned room with a demon boy on the edge of tears because he was angry or scared or embarrassed and maybe none of that or all of it, it was definitely just as weird or worse for him. "Before all of this!"

Elva quickly ran through her runework— all she had done was alter some some conjugations; there was no was she had messed up enough to accidentally give her familiar wings. "Is that normal? Demons just sprouting wings?"

"We don't just sprout wings. It's a very important rite of passage. I think— you said we were in a garden. So I think I was probably in my Second Contemplation when we were attacked. It's a ceremony of sorts, a coming of age thing where we can get our wings."

"So you remember the purpose of the ceremony, but not your family?"

"I... yes."

Elva itched to get out one of her notebooks. "Okay, that tracks. It's episodic versus semantic memory. That's a more typical presentation of memory loss."

"More typical than what?"

Ah. It was probably fair, Elva reckoned, that she start to tear up too. Or, her eyes were dry, but her throat felt like she had tried to swallow a pinecone. "Than the last time that creature cut somebody open. The physical damage itself was less severe, but also took longer to treat. And there was no binding ceremony... that might be the crucial difference here." Elva tapped her fingers against the floor. "The binding ceremony is designed to heal all the wounds. It couldn't reverse your memory loss, but maybe it could contain it. Stitch up the damage, as it were, so that the loss was just your personal memories not your general knowledge." She hummed, as she played around in her head with what various models of that might look like.

It was a shame, almost, that she had to get rid of the demon. He would have made a fascinating and valuable research subject to have on hand.

"Oh yes, just my personal memories," the demon spit out, his nails digging into the floor— literally, the sharp black talons at the end of his fingers leaving whitened gouges in the wood. "Just my understanding of who I am and who I love."

"Well, you're talking aren't you? You haven't forgotten how to form words or move your limbs. You're not at risk for catatonia." Elva realized her tone had gotten extra sharp, as if she wanted to cut into the air like he was cutting into the floor, but she couldn't change her voice as she kept speaking. "There's nothing we can do about it now, so please do let me focus on unbinding you. We only have until dawn."

"Well, apologies that I haven't perfectly processed being attacked by a nightmare monster, losing all my, my episodic memories, being bound as your show pet, and being just gallivanted away to the Day World in the past, oh, two hours or so. Give me another, I don't know, five minutes and I'm sure I'll be fine!"

They both stared at each other, chests heaving.

"Unbind me, witch." He finally muttered, flicking his gaze back to the window and the night beyond.

"Yeah, well. I'm working on it," Elva grumbled, standing to her feet and swaying a bit. "Stay out of my way."

She puttered about the room, grabbing the books she needed, and settled in to crosschecking the sigilmancy for the ceremony. Sunne and Moon, Earthe and Sky: Artes of Doing and Undoing had the most comprehensive information on the unbinding ceremony, so she kept that as her main text and spread the rest around her in a semicircle.

The familiar bond is a pact most sacred, and though to break that trust is to violate in a sense the original pact between the Day and the Night, there are times when such a shattering of the sacrosanct becomes tragically required. Though we mourn such necessity, we nonetheless also humbly offer...

Elva rolled her eyes and skipped past a few more paragraphs of moralizing nonsense until the diagrams started appearing. Like most necromantic set ups, while she'd be sketching out a two dimensional diagram on the floor, the vixal enactment of that sigilmancy would be three dimensional. In this case, two spheres connected by hyperboloid— a cylindrical shape that tapered in the middle— all within a larger sphere. A simple and yet uncommon set-up.

The runework itself was pretty straightforward and more-or-less what Elva remembered; she had hoped never to have to unbind her familiar, but in all the contingency plans she had sketched out, she had run by the possibility a few times. Elva tended to prefer chalk for her work, rather than paste, paint, or wire, and in this case it seemed chalk would be amenable with a few supplements. Perfect.

Elva stood in a flurry of limbs, ready to snag her materials and get to work— but upon doing so her vision went rainbow-black around the edges, and her knees went weak, and she realized that as long as Nyx was materialized like this, half her energy was going to sustaining him. And she hadn't eaten or slept for nearly twelve hours.

"Change of plans. We're raiding the pantry first."