Souled Out

Chapter 1: Soul Research

Your furniture was in another room, piled on top of your bed, leaving the living room completely devoid of items. You weren't worried about how it might look to someone if they came in, that mess was going to be the last thing they noticed. You had pulled up the carpet as well, square by square, and tossed it into the spare bathroom you rarely used. Except for a concrete floor and bare painted walls, there was nothing else except for you in the living room.

Well, you, blood, and animal fat, but functionally it was empty.

You had no need for a two-bedroom apartment, but it had the floor space you needed and was cheaper than renting an entire house. If this worked or failed completely, you'd replace the carpet yourself, and if this only mostly worked, you probably wouldn't have to worry about things like security deposits anyway.

Or your job. You had cashed in all your time off so you wouldn't have to go back for a couple months, but expecting this to be resolved by then wasn't part of your plan. You just wanted to survive the next month well enough to return to work at some point after that.

Markings were painted all over the walls, floor, and ceiling in blood. Sigils and scriptures you had found and done your best to verify over the last decade. The culmination of your research and the trials and errors of others. The blood stank, but not enough to bother you, and honestly the smell was less offensive than the sharp acrid stench of paint, so you managed to ignore it easily enough.

You placed the tallow candles you had made in the locations you needed, lighting them after they were set. You had considered beeswax candles, but the trials that had succeeded were clear - everything had to come from something that didn't survive the harvest. It had to be a proper sacrifice, and not a symbolic one, and you weren't going to try and eradicate an entire hive of angry bees when you could just buy tallow.

You sat in the middle of the smaller empty circle meant for you and focused on the larger circle in the center of the room. The markings were two-fold, they included your offer and built a barrier between you and what would appear.

Assuming anything wanted to accept.

Assuming anything existed to help.

Shaking your head, you tossed your doubt away, focusing on ritual. You had pointedly decided to cast away your doubts about whether demons actually existed and give yourself to the belief. After all, the reason you were even doing this was because the impossible had happened to you already.

Learning demons were real at this point would simply make for yet another thing you wanted nothing to do with, and yet still had to deal with anyway. Beggars and choosers walked different paths, and you were beyond being able to be choosy. Besides, the blood had been easy enough to get, but you really wanted this to work so you didn't have to make another set of tallow candles. The consistency was weird, and you didn't like how it felt on your fingers.

All you needed to do was focus on the words of the offer, sending them through the channels the sigils had connected you to. This was the only part that worried you, not only were all the instructions frustratingly subjective, but you weren't sure if you could do it. The reason you were even trying this was because you were missing an important part of yourself, and you needed help in retrieving it.

If that missing piece was imperative to "reaching out" or "putting your intent into it", then you were functionally fucked. You twinged with the faintest frustration and anger, trying to at least hold onto the energy of those emotions and throw them into supposed aether. You wondered if it would make your request sound rude or not and found a small smirk pulling at your usually blank expression at the idea of being rude to a demon.