The Warlock

The Helix

Kirra and Oragg were gone for more than a month—a month and a half. In that time, a few things happened in Kadagv. For one, I started visiting Netta on a regular basis. Mostly for cooking, but occasionally, when neither of us particularly felt like it, we would just drink tea and talk about our lives.

Netta was almost twice as old as I was, and I found, for the first time in my life, that it was quite interesting, and a lot of fun to talk to people older than me. There was something of Kirra's youthfulness to her, maybe not physically (I asked her if she wanted to go for a walk; she politely declined) but on a deeper level than that. She laughed often, told stories from her youth, and brewed delicious tea.

In the meantime, the Warlock and I started working on new facets of magick. As we moved from alchemy into druidy, he approached me one evening, with a large, leather-bound tome in his hands, a strange look in his eyes.

"You told me once your handwriting is better than mine," he said simply.

I replied (and this was true), "all I said was that your handwriting wasn't the best."

He shrugged, and put the tome down on the kitchen table. I watched it a little apprehensively, worried about where this conversation was going. The leather was dark-brown, colorless, featureless, but I could feel the magick in the pages, even so.

"This is my grimoire," the Warlock said. "I thought you would perhaps transcribe it."

Without saying a word, I slid the book across the table to me, and opened it. The first page was covered in diagrams, and the instructions (a Rite of Spring) were written out in a hopelessly tiny, nearly incomprehensible scrawl.

"Gods..." I muttered, sifting through the pages, "what is all this?"

The Warlock scoffed. "It's all the knowledge I've accumulated in seven-hundred years of living in this town. I thought you might appreciate it."

"I might be able to... If I could even understand what any of this says."

Daniel nodded. "That's why I want you to start off early. While I'm still here, and you're still learning from me, you can ask me questions, consult me about anything you don't understand."

"I don't have a choice in this, do I?" I inquired, dryly.

The look on his face just then could fork lightning. The Warlock had grown gentler in the past few months, but sometimes his terrible moods could thunder still.

"You do have a choice," he said, grimly. "But I'd like you to do it, nevertheless."

I nodded, slowly. "I'll try."

So we agreed on that. It took me a week or so to get around to starting. I bought a few hundred pages of paper from a merchant in town, bound it in leather, and kept the empty book on the kitchen table. Every time I passed by it I groaned somewhere deep inside, and tried to forget by finding something else to do. Eventually, I ran out of excuses. I started from the first page, from the opening paragraphs. The Warlock usually liked to be straight to the point, and his grimoire was no different. It started right in the middle of everything, with a Rite of Spring of all things.

On the first day, I worked through the Rite of Spring easily enough. But I did need to ask the Warlock some of the words a few times. He had this funny way of spelling m's, n's and o's that all blended into each other like soup, or like the soft peaks of beaten eggs. It made his writing look like tiny strings, which was quite beautiful in its own way, though it only hindered my transcription.

After the first day I thought maybe transcribing his grimoire wasn't such a bad idea after all. The Warlock put plenty of detail into his writing, which was annoying for me at first, as I was the one having to write it all down again. But the actual content of the grimoire was interesting, and thoroughly instructive. Just in that first month of the transcription I learned more about witch rituals and rites that I had learned in all my earliest years of working with the common grimoires in the city.