I slammed back into the quiet house, mind reeling. The cold lingered at the edge of my fingertips like the remnants of a demon. I paced across the living room, the glint of the TV within the morning sun casting far more light than I felt should exist in the room. After first drawing my finger back, determined that what I’d felt was just my imagination, my expectation, I had tapped the spot again. Each time that fierce and furious cold refused to leave.
It had been hours, hours, since I’d first observed that monster, and in its wake the floor had utterly refused to warm. Even now, I was certain if I walked back out under the heat of the sun, I would find that that particular portion of dead-ground was still freezing to the touch. I couldn’t think of an explanation; any half-baked thought about geo-thermal vents brought up nothing. A patch of the ground in an overgrown yard was devoid of grass, and the ground felt dead.
My thoughts churned under the scrutiny of that singular instance. Was it my imagination? It had to be my imagination. But I’d tapped that slip of dirt about five times, each coming back at exactly the same freezing temperature. There was no world where I could reason…
I felt it. Some sort of circadian slip; my rhythm slamming into a brick wall. Everything, inexorably, drew itself outwards into abject stillness. Nothing froze; this wasn’t a stillness of time, it was a stillness of me. Like my thoughts had been branching, moving around in some sort of strange spiral.
A singular dot, a promise at the edge of view. I rocked backwards, not quite certain what I was moving away from, but I felt… dizzy. Like, right at this moment, I was standing atop a pillar, and one wrong move could send me cascading into the abyss below me. But I had to move, the only question was which direction.
The window fizzed away, shifting as the static on a TV was. There was only me, and something else. A question mark pounded itself onto the direct visage of reality, and I made my choice.
“I want to know,”
And just like that, I was in the living room again, heart pounding, sieging against my ribcage. I took a careful, shaky breath in, and practically collapsed onto the loveseat, head drooping into my hands. It wasn’t a feeling of being watched, it was the feeling of being picked apart.
I blinked. The build of panic in the background of my thoughts disappeared completely under the steady gaze of the object on the coffee table. In the middle of the table was something no more complicated than a book. In-fact, it was a book; one of those cheap notebooks you’d find in a Dollar Tree, to be exact; albeit, perhaps a bit meatier.
My hand wrapped around the notebook. It weighed about as much as you would expect something of its sort to weigh. As I studied, I found a name etched on to the side in red cross-stitches. Evan. My name.
Steadying the shake that begged to build within my arms, I cracked open to the first page.
*Fire Class: “Level Six”;Movement Class: “Level Six”*
I blinked, before rapidly flipping through the rest of the pages. Beyond that first page, it was entirely empty. The pages were quite strange, too, for a journal. There were no lines to define the borders for text to be written in.
At the same time, beyond the cross-stitching denoting my name, I felt certain, almost too certain, that this notebook belonged to me.
Eventually, I decided I needed to get out of this house, away from… Whatever was happening here. I shoved the notebook into one of my pockets, not even realizing that I’d done so until I already had my phone pulled out.
“Hey man, what’s up?”
I grinned despite myself, “It’s like eleven in the morning, and you’re only just waking up?”
“Do I have work today? I think not. So what’s up?”
“I’m stopping by your place is what’s up. Figured I’d give you an advance warning,”
I could hear him straighten up, “Something happen?”
“You could… Say that, I guess. Just, hang tight I’ll be there in a minute,”
“Alright dude,”
-7
Here was a place where the lights flickered, and gnats made their home beside bald porchlights. If you walked around the right edges of the complex, you’d find abandoned heroin needles, and maybe a man or woman passed out, leaned against the edges of puke-stained bricks. Not a beautiful place, by any means.
Cars were messes and retellings of the Ship of Theseus, held together by thin duck tape and cardboard sealed windows. In the middle of all of that was a large, decrepit giant. He leaned like a man who’d had his back broken five or six times, and his teeth were low, swinging in a breeze that burned the hairs on your nose.
I noticed him, almost like a peripheral. The moment I looked, he’d disappear from my view, becoming nothing more than a small mountain of trash, in a pit in the middle of the trailer park. Ignoring the shiver that went through my bones upon seeing him at the edge of my sight, I rushed straight into the trailer across from me.
Here, the strange cold in the middle of the summer faded, becoming nothing more than a backdrop against a slightly-rustic and worn sort of warm. Ben sat in his living room, an energy drink in-hand, and a revolver in the other.
“Ben?”
He blinked, glancing over at me; the hand on the gun relaxed slightly, “Hey man… You feeling alright?”
I glanced towards the gun, “Not with that thing in the room, I’m not,”
His eyes flickered towards the barrel, “It’s a precaution I have to take, dude, I’m sorry,”
“What… Man, why? I haven-”
“That thing you’ve got in your pocket, pull it out, slow,” His eyes were trained on mine, but something rose from the innards of his voice.
I rose one of my hands, legs starting to shake as I reached down, and grabbed the lip of the notebook. Carefully, I pulled it out. When I had it fully in my hands, he nodded.
“Now throw it over here,”
I did as he said; he caught it with ease, and flicked the book open with one hand, leaning over it even as he angled the gun to aim towards my face, “Standard kit, then,” He relaxed, tossing the gun and the notebook on to the table.
“What the hell is going on, dude?” I demanded, “W-wh… why the fuck were you aiming a gun at my face?”
He rubbed at his eyes, “I could hear it in your voice. You had a thought,”
“I… what?”
He motioned towards the couch; I found myself unconsciously moving over, collapsing into it, “A thought; classical term for ‘awakening’. I needed to identify that there was nothing… Aboriginal about it. As in, no unwanted subtexts,”
“I don’t understand,” I replied, somehow having calmed down, “An awakening? Like… Like some sort of YA Fantasy shit?”
He grinned, but it was not at all a kind expression, “Exactly ‘like some YA Fantasy shit’. Albeit quite a bit more cruel,” He replied, a surprisingly angry expression on his face, before he continued, “That book you’ve got there? That ‘Fire’ and ‘Movement’ are ideas. The idea of fire, and the idea of movement. Let me ask you something. How many ideas do you think exist?”
“I… trillions?”
“Try infinite,” He said with a shake of his head; then, he sagged, before glancing up at me and asking, “What gave you your thought?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, still trying to wrap my head around the entire conversation, and what he was implying, “And what… What are ideas? Like, I know the definition, but it feels like you’re talking about something else,”
“Ideas are spells,” He replied haphazardly, “Your thought. There should’ve been something; they don’t come at random. Was it a monster, or…”
“I woke up last night, and decided to go outside. There was… something. The only name I could think of was ‘wendigo’,”
Ben stared, unblinking and unerring, to the point it started to creep me out, before he said, “You survived an encounter with a wendigo?” Immediately, he was on his feet, rushing back into his bedroom; when he came out, he threw a much larger tome onto the coffee table, and flipped through it.
“Ben, what-”
He interrupted me with a harsh glare, still flipping through the pages, “Nobody survives an encounter with a Wendigo, Evan. You’ve been marked,”
“What does that mean, man?”
His hand stilled for a moment as he stared towards a particular page, eyes narrowed, “The idea behind a Wendigo is simple, but potent. They’re cannibalistic hunters. You can work with that, warp that, if you have the right tools. So we did; well not me, but people like us. They changed, manipulated the idea of a Wendigo. FUCK. Evan… Everything, everything is an idea. The very construct of the universe is an idea, a thought, something born of thoughts, of ideas,” He lifted a hand, eyes still glancing back towards the book, “Okay, okay… C’mon…” Then, for the briefest of moments, a crystal-clear ice took root in his voice, “*mark style: color-red*” I gasped as a rush of power burst through my veins.
We both watched as something pulsing, ugly, and very much crimson drew itself forwards from my chest. Describing the thing would be like attempting to describe an illusion seen through a half-blind eye. There were too many details to parse, and I had the very liquid feeling that I was not meant to parse the majority of them.
“We have the mark,” I said, surprised by the calm in my voice, “Explain to me what that means, why it looks like…That. I can’t- I can’t do anything here if you refuse to give me even the basics, man,”
He nodded, seeming to calm himself, before saying, “Everything is an Idea. I know that doesn’t make sense, it just kinda sounds like words; it did to me at first, too. Umm…” He snatched an empty beer can from his coffee table, “See this? What, if you didn’t have eyes, would this look like?”
“Nothing? I’d be blind,”
“That’s it, exactly. If you couldn’t see, nothing would look like anything. Now… Try to explain a color you’ve never seen before? You can’t, right? That’s because everything, and I mean even the concept of DNA, of existence; it’s all just an idea. W-what you’ve been given, what we’ve been given, is the ability to manipulate those Ideas. But we’re not the only ones, and, and that, is from someone else. Someone dangerous,”
I tried to parse that, and fit it into the strange thing that had happened to his voice, “So the book; the one I got. That’s where the Ideas that I can manipulate are stored?”
He was flipping through the pages, eyes barely on me, “Something like that. It’s a repository. Every Idea you have access to goes into those pages. If you want to cast a spell, you gotta have your book on you,”
“So, it’s a Grimoire?”
He tilted his head, “I choose not to imprint that Idea onto mine. Grimoires are dangerous; powerful, but difficult to tame,” He shrugged, “But from a more modern standpoint? Yeah, kinda,” He finally stopped flipping, eyes narrowing as he looked over the page, “Okay. Anymore questions before I try to cast this?”
Desperately trying to grapple with the situation, I asked the only thing I could think to, “Why is there a giant in the middle of the trailer park?”
Ben opened his mouth to say something, before clacking it shut, “You can see him?”
“Is… That important?”
He groaned, “Everything about the way that your magick works is important, dude. When we get whoever’s tracking you off of your tail, we’ll talk about it,”