Aside from the smell, the guy is tall (really tall), fat (really fat), and weirdly proportioned in a way that doesn't match any common body types. He's being sneaky as well—keeping to shadows and doing a much better job of not being seen than that should be able to justify. He should be getting second glances from everyone, but isn't even getting first ones. Except from Sadde, of course.

The guy is also not especially observant. He misses Sadde when he glances around to check for bystanders. Then he steps around a corner.

Yeah, that's weird. That's very weird. Why is there a conspiracy, if this turns out to be something lame like the Free Masons or Rosicrucians or whatever she's gonna be so annoyed.

She doesn't immediately follow, she tries being casual, and just looks around that corner as if she didn't care. Sneakily.

Empty.

No obvious exits, either, just an out-of-the-way dead end north of town.

Okay, what. It's a conspiracy with secret passages, really? For real?

...well, it wouldn't earn her respect otherwise, she supposes. Now, is there a place where a guy that big and weird could fit...?

Nope. He had to be seven feet tall if he was an inch, and he was multiple inches.

Of course. Well, it wouldn't be a very good secret passage if it were obvious where it was. She should go look around. Starting with the walls, and a not totally thorough inspection—she won't touch them but she'll, like, squint at them to try to find, well, something.

As soon as she rounds the corner, it's different here. The sun didn't jump across the sky or anything, but its light seems softer. Straight lines and right angles are less frequent. And was that a scream in the distance?

...different how, exactly? Scream in what distance?

She looks around, and at the sun (not directly, but anyway), and at the walls.

Everything's fine, nothing to see here. Walls are flat at first glance as usual and only look concave or convex or both if she checks closely. The sun is acting well within the range of how it normally does on days with different weather from today.

The sound came from the same direction she did. Back outside the dead end. Maybe it was just a peacock. It's April, and those birds' mating calls can sound surprisingly like a distressed human child sometimes.

A peacock... Okay, sure, why not, but that still doesn't explain the impossible geometry.

So, of course, she's hallucinating. Delightful. A secret passage that causes hallucinations, there must be some gas or something here... But she loses nothing by continuing to explore the non-Euclidean walls closely until she has determined just where the heck this weird hallucinogen is coming from.

While she's poking around, the man she was following returns.

He still looks seven feet tall, but then he stops hunching over and it's closer to ten. He bellows over his shoulder, "we've got a fresh one!" and his mouth opens wider than it should. It even looks like he has tusks, short vertical ones like a wildboar. He lumbers toward Sadde.

Returns from where. And what the hell is that on his face, this halluciongenic thing...

"Excuse me? Fresh one?" she says, taking a step back. If she'd been following a rapist she's gonna be really, really annoyed, but why would a rapist have a hallucinogenic gas around a secret passage...? Wouldn't it be much easier to just knock out his victim? And, of course, other people, he called other people, so he's not alone.

Returns from around the corner, of course. The same one she came in through. It's not like there's any other obvious way in or out. She must have just missed the part where he exited right in front of her eyes.

"You should run, little girl." He continues lumbering, staying along one side of the alley so she can flee past him if she decides to.

"That's becoming increasingly apparent and it annoys the heck out of me but sure why not, toodles!" And she runs, reaching behind her back for her pepper spray in one of her backpack's side pockets.

He gives her a head start.

When she leaves, nothing changes back. The road that was definitely straight five minutes ago now curves slightly and narrows. The background looks weird: some places are dark and others are light and those are occasionally right next to each other without any gradation between. And there are no normal people in view. Any of the several people and animals she can see would qualify as number two hundred twenty-two on their own if she were counting separately. The nearest, presumably the one being shouted to, looks for all the world like a woman with the lower body of a snake.

Clearly hallucinating a lot, she should've left earlier, fuck.

Okay, retrace her steps, run like hell back to school, it doesn't matter of people think she's crazy (she might be, at the moment anyway).

Getting back to the school is complicated. Whether by design or not, the effect of the bent geography is that roads tend to lead further up and further in. Before long she'll be absolutely certain that she's running away from the school, but if she changes direction it won't help for very long.

The tall man and the snake woman are pursuing, laughing as they go.

Okay no this makes no sense even if she were hallucinating she's not that bad about knowing her way, she's sure she's retracing her steps. Even if she was hallucinating about how much she was moving, she can't possibly be hallucinating about directions... can she? Just where is she? Where's everyone else, why has she not run into anyone who would want to stop the laughing people?

Well, what if they're not laughing? Perhaps she's hallucinating that, too, and they're trying to help her...? How do you deal when your senses are lying to you?

Does she at least recognise wherever-the-hell she is?

It all looks familiar, like it's a close analogue of the town it ought to be. But there are no vehicles on the roads, or people who look normal, or reliable way of getting between points A and B.

...she's not hallucinating, is she. She just—dropped into some alternate reality or something.

Ugh. Okay, so she'll have to treat everything as if it was true, at least for now. Her senses are not lying to her. What tools does she have? Pepper spray in her hand, her backpack's heavy enough with books that it could be swung, but might be better to just actually swing a single book than the backpack itself. She can run, she's pretty in shape, so in the worst case she'll go ahead and do that. What else does she have? Anything she can use, around here? Are those two still following her?

They're following, and she might be in shape but she doesn't have inhumanly long stride length. Or whatever it is snake people use for transportation. The ground shakes, and before she can spot anything potentially useful the tusked man rakes a claw across her shoulder. Of course he has claws.

She screams. What the fuck. What the actual fuck. She's bleeding! Also she's on the ground, what the hell, that guy's—

She bolts, dropping her backpack, ignoring the pain caused by it when it touches her hurt shoulder, keeping only her pepper spray can in her hand. Run, and hide, she needs to lose them, it doesn't really matter where.

He lets her go, still laughing.

"You can't get away, little girl! I haven't lost a scent in a hundred years!"

"Then I'm going to be your first," she spits, not stopping or looking over her shoulder to check if he heard it. Just run.

Fuck that hurt. Need to lose them, need to throw something in their way, what does she have.

Books, backpack, blood... the pepper spray is probably pretty much it. Nothing in view looks like it'd help escape or fight off a hostile giant. Maybe there's something useful inside a building? If nothing else he'd have trouble with ceilings.

Yes, that sounds best, she'll go into a building as soon as she can't see them or it becomes obvious that won't happen.

The giant is allowing her another head start, but the reptilian one is casually keeping up and watching her run.

And then she hears a normal human voice. "You're injured."

"No shit," she says, not really slowing down as she walks into the nearest building. She doesn't stop to look at what terrible thing might be commenting on her health.

The air behind her shimmers and bends. Out of her view. A young man, only a few years older than Sadde is, follows her through the door. "How much do you know about where you are and what you're running from?"

"Give me a very good reason to answer," she says, looking around for anything she might use to defend against those two, even a door. She looks over her shoulder, notices he's human, then her brain corrects that to looks human, and she resumes her search, making sure he's not too close to her.

"It determines how much I can safely do. Aside from the obvious, that is." He turns to her pursuers. "You two, stand down. If you've been hurting an innocent, here, you know exactly what the consequences could be."

They're already less aggressive than before he appeared, but now they stop where they are.

She stops, as well, and looks at him. "Okay, that's a very good reason to answer," she says, not moving any closer to him and still looking ready to bolt. "I'm riding on an adrenaline high right now, my shoulder hurts like all seven hells where that creature attacked me but it's not disabling me isn't that funny I know literally nothing except I'm apparently in some nightmare world with nightmare creatures and I'd really rather not die," she rambles.

"Nightmare world with nightmare creatures? I can see how you might think that. More importantly, it means those two went and showed you too much. The shoulder's probably the lesser injury." He gestures with his left hand, and Sadde's shoulder glows and heals.

He turns back to the monsters. "You attacked an innocent, in violation of my rules and Suleiman's. I could call you forsworn."

They hesitate, and the snake woman speaks. "We thought she was fair game. A new vestige."

"If that's true—and I'm considering that it might be a lie, if being forsworn is already on the table—it still doesn't excuse anything. You promised not to harm humans, not to bite first and ask questions later."

She will not interrupt the nice man who used magic to heal her with her inane questions. Her inane questions can wait.

The newcomer's still monologuing.

"I think I'll let you go. Swear never to harm a human. Innocent or practioner, directly or indirectly, anything. If you ever form the intent to hurt a human being, you will not act on it. If you are present when any human is threatened by any Other, you will protect them. If that isolates you from every Other you know I don't care, if it makes you attack something more powerful than you I don't care, but I won't call you forsworn. Agree to that, and you can leave with no objection from me." He turns to Sadde.

"Their promises are binding, or are supposed to be. If you think I'm being too lenient anyway, you're in a position to make demands of them on your own behalf."

She blinks. "Oh. Erm. How bi—never mind. I'd... probably change that phrasing? Like what if a human wants to harm another human, there are lots of extenuating circumstances where harming a human's okay even if for sport isn't."

""Other" was capitalized. It's the term for a monster or sentient nonhuman, broadly speaking. If your concern is that I'm not being lenient enough, I'll probably stay with this version."

"Deal," the giant snake/human combination agrees. The other Other is more indecisive on the question.

"Okay but I have no reason to expect humanity is special when it comes to personhood, I'm sure there are nice Others and I know for a fact there are terrible humans. I didn't exactly mean more lenient but I'd definitely phrase it very precisely, if promises are binding."

"Absolutes are dangerous, so I'll just say the exceptions are infrequent.

Being forsworn is considered one of the worse things that can happen to a practitioner or Other because you lose all power and protections. It's considered worse than death because the likelihood of running into something that feels like torturing you for the rest of your existence is just that high. It's theoretically possible that a human attacked by an Other might be in the wrong, but it's hardly a major consideration."

Reminded of what the most obvious alternative is, the giant signs on. "I'll take it." He and his companion trudge and slither respectively toward the exit.

"Which sounds exactly like an argument for being very precise about wording this kind of agreement." Pause. "I'm sounding a bit ungrateful, here. Thank you for saving me from the horrible monsters."

"I had a lot riding on it myself.

At this point, it's riskier not to give you more exposition. Would you like to come to my tower for the full explanation, or talk here?"

"I'm already in the implied-not-alternate-reality nightmare place, might as well go somewhere an actual human lives." Pause. "You are human, right?"

"Yes. Johannes Lillegard, may as well do actual introductions." He extends a hand. It's not the traditional hand-shaking one, but at least it's not some spectral third arm either.

"Sadde Baldwin, I suppose," she introduces herself, and shakes his hand.

When he has his hand back he fiddles with a harmonica-like instrument. Their surroundings shimmer and dissolve, and the two humans reappear in the penthouse of an apartment building. Looking down, it looks very like Jacob's Bell but twisted around and spiraling toward the center. Here.

"The first thing you need to know is that you are in danger. Once you know about the magic and monsters, many protections no longer apply. And you don't currently have any way of defending yourself. You're safe here, but outside of my domain Others will be free to see you as a target."

"Was that capital-O Others?"

"Yes. Ordinary humans won't notice anything different about you, and neither will most practitioners unless you tell them. But you don't by default have any special protections against them in the first place."

"Are these Others universally hostile? What kinds of things are they? What protections did I have that I lost? How'd I lose them? Why aren't you worried about it? How'd you do those things? Heal me and teleport us?"

"There are relatively few Others that have what we would recognize as a moral system. Many are actively hostile, many kill for necessity or convenience, few object to hurting humans. There are harmless ones, but that's more often about inability to be threatening than unwillingness.

The main protection is something called the Seal of Solomon. Three thousand years ago Suleiman bin Daoud started capturing the most dangerous Others he could manage and forcing them to, among other things, agree not to harm innocents. That's as in lack of knowledge, not lack of guilt. Now some large fraction of Others have chosen or been forced to agree, and over time the Seal of Solomon gained enough traction that the universe bends to protect innocents even from Others that aren't bound. It's very nebulous.

I'm less worried because I have magic. Rather a lot of it. Most people in your position who survive long enough to have the option end up becoming practitioners. There's no rule defending us the way there is for people who don't know anything, but practitioners tend to end up with some way to protect themselves."

"Practitioner meaning someone who practises magic, I suppose. Yes, I want to be one of those, after I have gotten quite a bit more information, if you're willing to give me it. If not, pointing to me where I can get it. If not that either... I'm not sure, I'd have to think, so first I want to know if one of those is true."

"I don't plan to keep back anything you need to know.

The biggest tradeoff is that you lose the ability to lie. Technically you can, but you lose power and karma proportionately to what the lie was and who heard, and it's severe enough that I can say practitioners can't lie. Even stating an honest belief and being wrong can cost you. You will have to constantly watch your every word, and if you can't then you'd be better off with almost any other option."

"Well what counts as a 'lie'? Jokes? Sarcasm? Metaphors? What do you mean by 'karma'? How do you measure power? Can Others lie? And what did you mean by the universe protects innocents?"

"Metaphors are safe. Sarcasm isn't. Most Others can't lie, especially older ones, but there are exceptions.

The reason for that boils down to the spirits. There's a collection of half-aware insubstantial beings that surrounds us. Talking about a single spirit, in this context, makes about as much sense as talking about a single bit of air. It's the aggregate that matters. They have short memories and are very literal with their interpretations. The Awakening ritual, when you become a practitioner, marks you as a person to listen to. If you tell a lot of lies, they have a lower opinion of you. You'll be less powerful, your enemies will be stronger, and you'll have bad luck. That's what karma is.

The same thing can work the other way. You've run across dangerous Others how many times before today? Most of them would have been bound by the Seal of Solomon, but not all. And even those that aren't rarely attack wantonly, because they know chance will side against them. To an extent, talking about the spirits and the universe can be interchangeable.

The other thing is that spirits are very old-fashioned. For instance, if you tell someone about our world, the spirits will see it as them being "one of yours." You'd be responsible both for any slips they might make and for what happens to them. That's why I asked how much you knew before healing you. If you had said something about the ogre and the naga being costumed people, I would have said your injury must not be as bad as you thought it was and healed it partially."

"So, I suppose I should also thank them a little, since I was certainly bound to run into this sort of thing eventually and now I have a nice practitioner willing to actually explain me everything without risking my being eaten. How can I tell if an Other is one that can or can't lie? What do spirits do? Just nudge and affect luck and stuff? How does magic work? What kinds of things do I have to do? What—do you have pen and paper? We'll both probably forget half these questions before you answer them."

"Of course. And would you like anything to eat or drink? Selection's almost unlimited.

Practitioners who deal with spirits directly—they're called shamans—typically draw symbols to attract particular types of spirits and make requests for anything from "move these writing instruments over there" to altering someone's perception of time." He pulls a pen and pad of paper from his pocket, sketches a rune on the top sheet, and taps it with his pipes. The paper and pen float to Sadde. "More important is that they affect magical power in general. If the spirits aren't listening to you, you have no presence and can't do magic at all. Conversely, if you're the magical equivalent of a household name then everything you do is generically more powerful. In here, in my demesne where all the spirits know me and all the ones still here think positively of me, I believe the common phrase is "one step below a god."

In most cases, magic works by asking another entity to do something, and having enough credibility that they do. Shamans are one example of that. Some practitioners summon or bind Others, trading on their name-recognition to back up their deals. If you go that route, you'll want to learn to tell what can and can't lie. You'll have a second sight for magical things, and anything bound by the Seal of Solomon will be recognizable using that. I can't tell you how because the Sight varies between individuals, but anything marked that way will be truthful."

"So... okay, magic is about convincing spirits to do what you want? Spirits and other stuff? 'Others'?"

"That's a lot of it, yes. It'd be possible to be completely self-reliant, maybe do very little magic and power it all with your own blood, but in general most things are traceable either to some Other or to the spirits."

"Isn't that a bit circular? You need convince the spirits you're powerful but to be powerful you need to have convinced them you're powerful in the first place..." Pause. "And I'll accept some water," she adds, something having belatedly occurred to her.

A glass of water floats over from nowhere in particular.

"It's very circular. If you're lucky, you skip to the end by being born to a notable practitioner bloodline. Spirits and many Others don't distinguish between individuals well, and tend to treat the current head of House Whatever as interchangeable. Like I said, old-fashioned. Karma is also heritable, by the way, so practitioners with children have even more incentive to play along.

For those of us who aren't so lucky, it's possible to spiral upward by gaining a little power, leveraging it well to get more, and of course never telling a lie. It's also not just power that attracts the spirits' attention. If you convince them your cause is right, or if you act confident even when you're not, you can temporarily get a lot of the same mileage. Stage presence is a valuable tool. Like when I said you could demand something of those two Others. They could have argued that they never made any promises to you, but they didn't, so if you had decided to make a claim the spirits would have agreed you were entitled."

She accepts the water then pauses to take this in (having written down a lot of stuff already). A smile starts slowly spreading on her face. "This looks like a magic system practically designed with me in mind," she says, finally. Then stops. "The Duchamps and the Behaims."

"You know them?"

"You could say that. I go to school with some of them."

"Of course.

They're the main practitioner families here, as it seems you've guessed. The Behaims use chronomancy, that being magic, and the Duchamps specialize in enchantment. They alter connections between people and things or people and people. I am going to have to ask that you not tell anyone I'm here, as I'd rather not go public yet and it's mostly them I'm hiding from."

"Of course." She looks at her notes again then asks, "What exactly is this Seal of Solomon?"

"An Other bound to the Seal can't lie, and can't attack innocents without reason. There are other rules, but those are the most important ones. In exchange, practitioners won't come after them. Suleiman made them agree at swordpoint, probably sometimes literal, but it's a much less one-sided deal today. Spirits appreciate it if you act according to what they consider right, and once the Seal caught on they started considering it right. Now when an Other signs on, they fit into the spirits' idea of how the world works and it acts as a power source for them. It was one of the first and greatest steps toward the practice actually helping humankind."

"Okay. Next, what's a demesne?"

"That's one of the three major rituals a practitioner is likely to do. At least in the most widespread tradition; there are others. The other two are the implement and the familiar.

Your demesne is a place that belongs to you. You lay claim a room, or a building if you're confident, or the north end of the city if you're me. Each neighbor who hears the claim has the right to challenge you at any fair contest. If you lose, you pay a forfeit agreed upon in advance. Possibly along the lines of three favors to be named later, or possibly the challenge was a fight to the death and the rest becomes irrelevant. Once you've won or lost the last contest, that place becomes your seat of power. It won't be immediate, but you'll be able to redefine practically any rule and will be the next best thing to unassailable. You do have to make sure to maintain your connection to the outside world one way or another, and you can be challenged for lower stakes even after claiming the demesne. It can be a significant power source, and is one of the more important marks of a serious practitioner."

"Im—later, let me see..." Notes: "What's name recognition, and is there anything non-obvious about this second sight?"

"Name recognition just means in the ordinary sense. If the spirits or Others you're dealing with know who you are and respect your or your family's history with the practice, they'll pay more attention and be more likely to sign a deal or obey an order. A practitioner in their own well-established demesne has this to the highest degree ordinarily possible; if Suleiman bin Daoud were alive today he'd have a similar advantage everywhere.

The Sight is looking into the spirit world and seeing whatever thing or place is analogous to the real one in the same location. There isn't much to say about how to use it, other than open and close your eyes without moving your eyelids. It'll make sense when you've awakened. Do make sure not to leave it on permanently. It's possible to get stuck in the spirit world that way."

"Noted. You mentioned using blood instead of spirits to do magic. Can that kind of magic be done even by 'innocents,' if it doesn't rely on spirits? And what other kinds of non-spirit magic are there?"

"No. Even you, without fully being an innocent, if you tried that now you'd just be smearing blood on things. The power is coming directly from the practitioner, but the universe does have to know that it's magic that's happening.

By non-spirit magic are you including Others? Using force or payment or knowledge of bindings to get them to use their powers on your behalf is as much a part of the practice as shamanism is."

"Okay, next... How did you spiral up? How'd you get your power? You mentioned half the city was your demesne and other people usually got buildings, how does that work?"

"Not answering that, I'm afraid. I made a promise to someone who isn't likely to call me on it if I break it, but that doesn't free me from keeping it."

A large rat with a brilliant white coat, formerly sleeping, stirs and moves to Johannes' shoulder where it curls up and goes limp again.

"That feels like a challenge. How did you learn about magic, and how long did you wait after becoming a practitioner to claim your demesne? And is that your familiar?"

"It's not intended as a challenge, but I can't say I'd object if people figured it out and imitated it.

I was younger than you are now when I attempted my sleight of hand." (This might mean less than it could, since right now he's only nineteen even if his mind is older.) "I did grow up around magic, so I was rather well informed for fifteen, but didn't have the bloodline advantage when claiming all this. Could have tried earlier, but the contests were bad enough as it was.

This is my familiar, yes. I never did get his name; the ritual was a bit unorthodox to say the least, but I've taken to calling him Janus."

"How'd you grow up around magic without being part of one of these families?"

"Long story, and no one involved is likely to be relevant in Jacob's Bell. I'm not actually sure if the first time they disowned me was before or after the first time I disowned them, but let's just say Johannes Lillegard is not the name I was born with."

"Hmm, noted. You mentioned chronomancy?"

"Pausing time, storing time, turning it back or forward. It sounds very powerful, and it can be, but if power is a currency then chronomancy is expensive. The Behaims tend to be very good at knowing when not to use it. There's more that I could tell you if it looks like you're going to be going up against them, but it's impolite to spread people's secrets without reason. And following convention matters."

"Mmhm. The three things, implements and familiars and demesnes, how do you get them? How many can you have? What are the former two for?"

"There's a ritual for each. Like most rituals variance is allowed, but it's relatively standardized. You get one of each, and it's a lifelong decision. Practitioners who object to being tied down in one place might never try for a demesne, and it's unspeakably important to take a familiar you can partner with. What a familiar is for depends on the nature of the partnership, but one fairly common version involves the Other giving the practitioner a share of power in exchange for a place in the world.

The implement is for everything. It's your metaphorical hammer that you will try to fit to every nail. It's what people think of when they think of you, and that would matter even if it were otherwise normal. Some people use the most powerful magic item they can get their hands on, and usually regret it in the long term. Others use some personally significant object, and risk having other people misunderstand it. It's as irrevocable a decision as the other two, even if a mistake is less dangerous."

"Okay... You mentioned names are important, I think? Or implied it? Is there some—well, how does that work, exactly?"

"A name is an identity, as far as the spirits are concerned. If you lose your name, you lose your place in the universe and will weaken and fade away until you're at least dead. Changing a name can be done safely, usually requiring a ritual, but it does risk changing who you are. At the very least the ritual will alter connections you already have to things and people. If you're considering it, the Awakening is a better time than most so you'll be known to our world under the new name all along. How sure are you that no one in your bloodline is a practitioner?"

"I think my father's mostly just a horrible person, and if anyone in his family does magic they never told me. Conversely my mum was killed by—something, an Other, I'm fairly sure now. It's her name I want to use. Woods, not Baldwin."

"I am sorry about your mum. If it helps, I am working toward the day when that stops happening, even if no one alive today ever sees it." That statement comes across as sounding heavier, like the kind of thing that ought to be accompanied by a gong or thunderclap but isn't.

"In that case you probably don't have to do anything at all to change it. You're just as much a Woods as you are a Baldwin, from the spirits' point of view. They predate birth certificates. And if neither side is a practitioner family you don't have unexpected inheritances to gain from or worry about."

"Good. That makes me feel better." She looks at her notes again. "Okay, I think I r—no, one more thing: just what kinds of things are Others? There's the snake lady and that big guy, what's the... distribution? Are, like... fairies real? Goblins? Unicorns?"

"Yes, yes, and not that I've ever heard of but that isn't a no. "Others" is by design a very broad term. In general if there are legends about a thing, there are probably Others that either conformed themselves to the legend or get called that because they're superficially similar. Or even that inspired the legends. But make sure not to put too much stock in the labels. There's a lot of research involved in knowing what's what and what it means, like that a bright sword would be effective against a goblin but you'd prefer a rusted one if you have to fight a fairy, or what to use against which choirs of demons.

Or you could choose an area of practice that interacts less with Others, like illusions or divination."

"Oh, yes, that reminds me, do I have to choose an area of practice to specialise in, like chronomancy or enchanting or illusions or divinations?"

"You don't have to. I didn't. But dabblers are looked down on—unfairly, I think—until they get powerful or skilled enough to call themselves sorcerers. Choosing a specialization is likely to be useful if you care what other practitioners think of you, and remember that reputation is valuable."

"But on the other hand if I do that it'll be that much harder in the future to then unspecialise and learn the other crafts, I presume?"

"Actually no. It'd be like starting almost from scratch if it's a completely different field, but it wouldn't be harder than if you hadn't learned something unrelated first.

Most do prefer to only advance very far in a single field or related ones for comparative advantage reasons. I know Laird Behaim does augury and basic shamanism, but I'd be surprised to hear he also puts much effort into enchantment."

"Huh. In that case, what's the actual advantage of doing everything from scratch, if you get more rep by specialising?"

"Some people just find it interesting. In my case it plays into the image as implausibly powerful that I hope to have once I go public, and helps avoid predictable weaknesses like a chronomancer or summoner might have. Other people might not have access to advanced texts in any field. Specialized knowledge is another form of currency, and not everyone is rich.

Your choice of field might depend on what you're trying to do with it. Is magic likely to play into any of your long-term goals? You shouldn't be a chronomancer if your goal is to learn as much as possible, for instance, or a diabolist if you want to live very long. Enchantment could be useful if you want to go into politics, and so on. You probably haven't known about magic long enough to have opinions on what to do in this world?"

"...live very long? Well, ideally I'd live forever, that'd be grand, but yeah I haven't really known about magic for long enough, until, what, an hour ago I thought I was following some creep from a secret conspiracy that had murdered my mother, now I find out magic's real. I don't know what field I'm gonna pick, I don't know which fields there are, though I'm leaning sorcerer."

He smiles at that answer. "Ambitious. Does wanting to live forever mean you'd prefer to minimize high risk and high reward situations?"

"I'm not exactly risk averse, per se, but I do want to get the best expected reward I can. And that's not ambitious at all, becoming immortal myself is the bare minimum, you just told me the world has a magic system that seems like it was created with my name on top, I'd want to make everyone immortal, including Others, even if that meant I'd have to colonise other planets to put Others there so they won't eat humans if they're all that into hurting people. And that is not the end goal, either."

"What's the end goal?"

"Utopia. Maybe I'm naïve and idealistic, I dunno, but I don't like the way the world is right now and I want to make it better to the best of my ability, and that doesn't just stop once I've reached any specific milestone. There won't be a point where I'll be, ah, yes, I can rest now, I have accomplished goal X. I want to fix things."

"The main thing that needs fixing, that I'm aware of, is the fact that most Others are homicidal. There are more inevitable flavors of doom available, but nothing that's as urgent.
I do know a possible method for changing the Others, in the long term, but it is multiple kinds of spectacularly bad idea and is approximately a suicide mission. It wouldn't give you phenomenal cosmic power unless you succeeded despite the stacking of several decks and you separately managed immortality well enough to live to see the results. The risk and the unlikely reward are both high enough that I don't know how the expected value measures. Do you want to hear it?"

"Are you joking? Of course I want to hear it."

"The basic idea, figuratively speaking, is to be Solomon. He was wildly successful, to the point where three thousand years later the universe itself considers what he aimed for to be the default. It is theoretically possible to reconstruct what he did and bind Others to a bettter-defined promise of harmlessness, and hope for the same effectiveness that he managed."

"Okay, so, the only reason I'm not saying yes right this second is that I want to know all the specific details of the Seal of Solomon and how it works and what we'd do to improve it and how I'd go about sealing the others, but colour me very interested."

"And also exactly why it's so unlikely to work. Don't let me forget to explain that part.

The Seal of Solomon is essentially a deal saying that in exchange for not wantonly harming innocents—no word on practitioners or well-informed ordinary people like blackguards and witch hunters—an Other will be safe from practitioners. It's sufficiently vague that there are demons that have agreed after surprisingly little coercion, since they can work destruction just as well without directly raising a hand against an innocent. Don't get me wrong, it's far better than not having it, but I'm sure with five seconds' thought you can see that it's not sufficient.

If we were to get Others to agree, for instance, not to attempt direct or indirect harm out of malice, and that caught on like the original did, then in another three thousand years most Others would be peaceful by nature. Three thousand at most, that is. I don't know how long it took for Solomon's seal to succeed, just that it has always been that way in recent memory.

As for how, that varies. Often force, I'm afraid, like Solomon did. There are general principles that would come in useful. Others are repelled by materials that represent their opposites, for very weak ones you can use similarity instead, that sort of thing. But you'd have to get very good at capturing or defeating a large variety of opponents, and there are few rules that apply to all of them."

"Okay, and how would I help with that, exactly? Why is that not something you yourself can—oh, you're bound by the Seal of Solomon."

"There's a terminology difference. "Bound by the Seal of Solomon" is a phrase that gets applied to Others, and everyone forgets that part of the deal applies to the practitioner. But you're substantially correct. Solomon had a hand in the current form of the awakening ritual, and practitioners since then have been agreeing to abide by the deal he proposed. It's part of why the Seal was so successful.

That does mean practitioners before him awakened without making that promise. If you use an older ritual, or something like it, you'd be able to move against Others whether they're bound by the current seal or not."

"Would they know I was not bound by that Seal? ...would it even matter? They can attack practitioners regardless of Seal, can't they."

"It'd still matter for whether they expect you to be able to attack them. As for whether they'd know, I can't say. My guess is that most wouldn't be able to tell and some of the smarter ones would. You'd probably look different to practitioners using the Sight, but this is all speculative."

"But if not being attacked by practitioners was one of the reasons Others decided to be bound by the Seal... there'd have to be a similar advantage to being bound by whatever new Seal we made up."

"What I'd like to say is that the carrot is the ability to participate in human society as equals instead of enemies or temporary allies. But unlike Solomon you won't be able to speak for anyone but yourself, and even if you could it's dangerous for many Others to even be seen by innocents. So unless you get implausibly wealthy in any of the currencies practitioners use, it'll probably have to be all stick."

"Why not just bind me by a similar Seal, as well? If they agree to the new Seal, no one with either the old or the new one will be able to hurt them. I mean, that was already true of the old one, if I got that right, as long as they didn't start the fight the practitioners were hands off, so if the new Seal makes them unable to maliciously hurt humans... Not to mention that if this worked out eventually Others would probably accept participating in society with them."

"Mostly because I'd want to duplicate a pre-Solomon awakening ritual as closely as possible, and that seal was his innovation. But if you were to swear not to antagonize any Other who swore themselves harmless, that could have the same effect. That's all the Seal is, really, is a formal and particularly well-regarded promise. Promises don't have to be embedded in a ritual.

It's not just a question of willingness to live alongside humans. It's that even if this worked, a hypothetical peaceful Other could become karmically responsible for random strangers by walking down the street. Entrance into human society isn't something we'd have to offer even if all the practitioners on Earth were on board."

"Okay, fair enough, I suppose. What exactly would the downside of going with the old ritual be, then? For me, in the current already-bound-by-Solomon world?"

"There are quite a few.

The first one is that the Seal of Solomon has been around a long time, and history has weight. In much the same way as Others who agree to be bound gain a surer place in the world and the Seal acts as a power source, you would be weaker than you would if you awaken the same way as everyone else. The spirits like it when traditions get followed. It's possible you could change that eventually by spinning it differently, but you'd certainly be starting at a lower point on that spiral.

For the same reason, you can expect effects similar to bad karma. You'd be going against the grain of a tradition that includes effectively every practitioner for three millennia. It would be too anthropomorphic to say that the universe would conspire against you, but events would try to nudge you into either abandoning the quest or dying.

And of course it's dangerous. Solomon tackled the strongest opponents that he could turn against stronger ones. Practitioners do not have long life expectancies, and this path involves much more danger than the practice usually does. Any slip could be fatal. Not to mention the fact that some people are happy with the status quo. You might end up with practitioner enemies, who could use the first two downsides against you."

"Well, I needn't start trying to convert people to the new Seal right away, do I, I can get some power somehow before that. And the spirits like confidence, they like theatrics, so I can use that to counterbalance the weight of history a bit? Either as in 'what I'm doing is the right thing and I'll prove it to you' or just the general fact that being confident and showy and dramatic and theatrical is basically a personality trait. Especially because I'm going to get a demesne at least as big as yours, even if you can't tell me I'm not gonna settle for less, so that'll be strike one in my favour."

"Be careful with absolute statements like that once you're awakened. You'll get temporary power boosts as long as you're acting toward the goal, and permanent karma if you succeed, but if you fail then you'll lose more than you gained and be at risk of being forsworn.

That said, I am hoping to get imitators once my position is built up more. I certainly wouldn't object if you managed to take and hold a large demesne somewhere the same way I do."

"Right... I'm pretty sure I can leverage that. That sounds like a good way to get power, I'm cocky like that. Okay. And you can't tell me how you managed to get a demesne this big, but then again I know literally nothing about the ritual or what it is that limits a demesne's size—I presume you can't tell me that, either? ...do I need to know this before being Awakened?"

"No, not at all. You'll have time after. I can tell you, though, everything but how I did the ritual.
There's no hard limit on size, but the soft limits are that larger ones will attract more objections from the neighbors during the ritual and that there will be more challenges from outside to defend against afterward. I handle those by parceling out fiefdoms to powerful Others that want an area to rule in exchange for helping me when challenged. This does mean the demesne has to be the kind of place that Others would want to be. I run it as something like an amusement park, where they can attack humanlike images with impunity the way they and their predecessors could hunt humans before Solomon. And this works.

If you say you're going to do something, you have to succeed. People who gamble with that almost inevitably fail eventually. And remember that you can expect bad luck if you get far enough to threaten the status quo. Even something as simple as "I will bind this ordinary minor goblin" can fail if they have unexpected allies, or die before you manage it, or some large number of other ways. Confidence can certainly make you stronger, but that's not the only variable here."

"Noted. How did you deal with objections from the n—you said you were secret. How did you manage to claim half the city as a demesne and stay secret?"

"A large part of that was before and during the ritual. Can't say. The part that came afterward is mostly space manipulation. Someone who looks will see nothing out of the ordinary, and even a practitioner would have to look at exactly the right point. You shouldn't have stumbled in here, if an idiot visitor hadn't left the door open. So to speak."

"Okay... Yeah I'm done, then."

"You're sure you want the altered ritual? You can expect Murphy's Law whenever you're hunting monsters that are bound by the Seal of Solomon. You'll be able to stop doing that at any time, but the fact that you'll be weaker would be harder to correct. It'd take at least a promise to obey the practitioner's end of the Seal, and possibly also a ritual. And I should stress that this is dangerous. If you were to swear never to give up it would be the next thing to a suicide mission. Not to mention the fact that it would take impressive life extension even to find out if it will ever work."

"Immortality is forever," she points out. "I won't swear never to give up, at least until I'm much surer this is going to work, but."

"The other thing is that it might not even be necessary. Humans are in the process of surpassing Others, and I am trying to help accelerate that. If we're lucky, things that go bump in the night might stop being a threat before your Seal catches on like Solomon's."

"A corollary of utopia would be making everyone who wants to into a practitioner, if the tradeoffs are only the ones you mentioned. And how are you trying to accelerate that, exactly?"

"I mentioned running my demesne as a sanctuary for Others that wish they could still hunt humans. While they're here, they aren't anywhere else. This is supposed to play into the fact that human populations are increasing and changing the world faster than very many nonhumans can keep up with. Goblins, for example, have been nearly barred from developed cities, by accident, as a side effect of the invention of modern plumbing.

Meek little humanity is inheriting the earth. I provide a safe haven for the Others who might otherwise fight it, and humanity wins that much faster. That's why I hope for imitators. Maybe other practitioners with large demesnes, maybe Lords of cities, maybe some other thing. I can't do this by myself, but I can do it as an example." And there's that audible lack of a gong going off again.

"So this is compatible with fixing the Seal of Solomon, but we'd be working along different dimensions. The plans would succeed or fail mostly separately, and two successes might involve wasted effort in the overlap."

"Well, at the point where we're exploring and not exploiting, I think it makes more sense to try many different plans than many people trying the same plan, if it turns out to be untenable. Also, 'Lords of cities'? And you mentioned humanlike images, earlier, right, what are those?"

"Those are some of the many things you'll run across eventually if you have much of a magical career.

A Lord is a practitioner or Other in charge of a city. They have responsibility for keeping it stable and safe, and in exchange they get power within the city. Power in the sense of authority, not force, but those are connected in the usual way. A Lord in their city gains less than a practitioner in their demesne, but it's the same kind of thing. Jacob's Bell doesn't have one. It's a small and slow enough place that it's not important enough to need a Lord right now.

The humanlike images—in this case; there are other kinds—are called vestiges. You can think of them as video game characters from a very realistic and very unsavory game. They're made by making portraits, so to speak, of real people. Completely original vestiges can be done, but it's more like using a metaphorical paintbrush instead of a camera. Vestiges tend not to last very long, since there's no power source and nothing holding them together the way a person has a name."

"...is it very hard to make one of those? If Others accept chasing NPCs rather than real humans just fine why don't they? Or, why hasn't this solution been tried before?"

"Making vestiges is primarily a practitioner skill. Most practitioners prefer to become powerful enough to not have to worry about most Others they'll come across, and leave the rest to someone else. Going out of the way to fight the ones that need fighting is rare, and my solution is rarer. I don't know if I'm literally the first, but for most practitioners the fact that Others can be dangerous is part of the background and not something to change.

The more practical reason is that few things at this scale are easy. My demesne, implement, and familiar are all suited to making this more doable. I wouldn't be able to blame most people for not trying even if they did think of it. 

The Other reason is that the visitors here do consider vestiges a poor substitute for the real thing."

"I see. And altruism isn't running high amongst practitioners, I take it?"

"Rarely. That one is partly on the spirits. Typical practitioners do have obligations to their family or bloodline, they don't have obligations to deal with arbitrary problems. So they focus on what gives them and their children karma and power."

"Delightful. And, what are your implement and familiar?"

"My implement is these pipes. I don't know whether they're the originals from Hamelin or if they were made by someone who definitely should not have had the ability to control children. I use the pipes to direct rat and dog spirits to power the vestiges so they last longer. It's not necessary to the project, but it makes it work better.

Janus is what angels used to be before they started becoming sentient the way humans were. A power of creation, or mostly just preservation these days. He in particular is a gatekeeper, hence the name. This is a large part of why I've managed to stay hidden."

"...I'm several levels of impressed."

"Thank you.

Be careful with saying you'll outdo me; the personal compatibility is more important than the degree of power. It's still safe until you awaken, of course.
Would you like to do that now, collect more information first, take time to think about it?"

"I can get Sealed after I Awaken, you said, and I need some protection now that I no longer count as an 'innocent,' so I see no reason to delay Awakening itself, since it's going to happen one way or another. More information can wait until it's more actionable."

"It is possible to protect yourself with research and fighting skills instead of magic. And by awakening at all you are agreeing to sign on to a world judged by very traditionalist spirits that care more about Right than Good. I'm guessing you won't be dissuaded by that, but theoretically you might object to treating family members as interchangeable or to outdated ideas of hospitality."

He stands, crosses the room, and takes a scroll off a shelf.

"I have a big pile of resources sitting right in front of me with some disagreeable tradeoffs but ridiculous potential, I'm not about to just limit myself to humanity. Besides, I'm sixteen, even a lot of training isn't going to see me able to do a whole lot for a while."

"I thought you might say that.

Power is currency; I may want you to succeed but I'm not going to promise you as many resources as humanly possible." He passes Sadde the scroll. "This, I got while trading for information on the Seal with a very old djinn. An awakening ritual used by some of Solomon's contemporaries."

She accepts it and starts reading it very thoroughly.

It contains annotations on how it differs from the modern ritual. It's very similar, considering the time that passed. The practitioner comes up with a word or description of what each element symbolizes to them. The obejcts involved are slightly different. No dreamcatcher or hourglass. The silver skull, coin, dagger, and some object personal to the practitioner are already there, and the flower hasn't been narrowed down to a rose yet. The inner circle from the current version's diagram is missing, and this calls for killing a small animal instead of making a food offering. Most importantly, the text in the unrecognizable otherwise-dead language is different. It does still specify a lack of clothes.

"You can do it in private," Johannes adds. "This is between you and the spirits, no sentient observers required."

"I don't particularly care, but it's kinda creepy anyway. Erm, something personal, though? Like what?"

"Could be anything. Keys to your first car. A piece for a game that you care about. As long as it means more to you than an identical object would to someone else, it's fair game. It does have to fit in a bowl, though. Boring practical reasons."

"I don't really have anything personal on me. I had a book, but it was in that backpack and I'm pretty sure it's been destroyed by something or other by now."

"Maybe not. Destroying objects can be done without paying admission here; human artifacts aren't necessarily anyone's focus."

Janus brightens, blurs, and disappears. His practitioner reaches through the space where the rat isn't, the end of his arm disappearing, and comes back with the backpack looking no more damaged than it previously was.

"...well, then. Alright, that works. I presume you have the other stuff?"

"Everything but the animal." His familiar reappears, carrying an inexplicably docile squirrel in its mouth despite the fact that the squirrel is the larger.

The other items are the kind of thing practitioners tend to accumulate, so they're in position as soon as the circles are drawn.

She starts drawing the circles, then, and after she's done, she accepts the bowls with the objects. "A dagger, a silver skull, a coin, a flower, and something personal," she says as she positions each object on each of the circles she's drawn. The something personal is not the actual book, but something written in it, on the first page. She looks at the squirrel. "Is it going to try to run?"

Johannes places the candles and other inactive ingredients. Candles may be too recent an invention to be specified here, but it calls for flames and candles are what the audience will be expecting. Same reason the flower is a rose.

"No, it'll stay asleep.
If you're ready to start, I can say something to get the spirits' attention and make sure they know what they're watching. There isn't much risk of them mistaking the ritual for the other one or failing to recognize it as an awakening at all, but this will help minimize it."

"Yeah, makes sense."

Johannes stands. As straight as he has so far, though he still looks like all his weight is on one leg. He's facing out the window overlooking his shadow Jacob's Bell, not at Sadde.

"When I claimed this demesne, I named it a place where rules and conventions have no hold. I said it was to be a sanctuary for those who wish to return to older times. As part of a different tradition, an older tradition, a tradition from those older times, a practitioner is going to awaken. Not as it is done now, but as it was done of old. You will know her as Sadde Woods." This time there actually is a gong.

He smiles at Sadde while saying her name, then leaves the room while she still has clothes on.

Ooh, ominous. She likes.

She strips and sits cross-legged in the middle of the chalk circles. She starts reading from the text, maybe butchering the pronunciation a bit but trying to do her best. She speaks slowly and calmly, partly to reduce the occurrence of said mistakes, and partly to seem confident and self-assured. She gets her stride, and her sentences become a chant, the mistakes less frequent and then nonexistent.

The circles start shifting in and out of her field of vision. Just when she reaches the end of the transliterated text, the circle containing the bowl containing the dagger slides in front of her and stops.

...what now?

Well... the meaning is obvious. "Death," she intones.

As soon as she says the word the dagger is replaced with the silver skull. Either the bowls moved some more or it just transformed. It's hard to tell.

She thinks about it. A skull, the symbol of death, made of silver, made to last. "Permanence."

It wobbles and flattens and turns into THE COIN.

"Ingenuity," she says immediately.

The rose.

"Nature."

And the page from her book.

The room has disappeared, leaving only darkness, only the lines and the bowls and herself, the circles around her more like a descending spiral into space that didn't exist than circles themselves. She smiles sadly at the page.

"This book doesn't really mean anything to me. The story's silly and it makes no sense, I haven't even read it through. But my Mum gave it to me. She left me a message, telling me to be good. That was a long time ago, I don't even remember how old I was, and it's not important. But this is mine, and more important it's me. I'm going to be good. And that doesn't mean behaving. That doesn't mean being a good girl and doing as I'm told, walking in other people's footsteps, being normal and nice. I'm going to be good. This power? I'm seizing it. I will try to make the world a better place, this is my mission. I don't know yet how, or what I'll do, but if I'm not trying to better the world, if I'm not working towards learning more and bettering myself and changing things, for me and for others... I might as well be dead. This is me, and it's who I am. I'm the person who will try."

The bowl containing the page slides back to its corner of the circle that is now a spiral. The darkness doesn't disappear, but the scroll has more text than the last time she blinked. The dagger finds itself on her right, and the squirrel on the left.

She makes a face, but grabs the squirrel in one hand, the dagger in the other, and resumes reading, knowing by instinct what she's saying even if she can't speak the language. "My word is bound and binding. I ask you respect it as such. My actions are my own, but have an equal amount of weight. So I pledge." She doesn't immediately kill the squirrel, though. Instead, she says, in English: "This is a sacrifice, representing the sacrifices I will make, and the sacrifices that have been made. Let them have meaning. Let them have weight. Let them bring less sacrifices, let all the people and peoples suffer less. This sacrifice is one step closer to the end of sacrifices." Then she kills it and returns it to the circle.

The body and blood vanish. The circles swirl around her. They're supposed to be just chalk on the floor, but at the moment it's more like she isn't falling despite the total absence of ground. The white lines start highlighting some objects and leaving others untouched, but it settles into something analogous to the room she was in before the ritual.

She looks around. Analogous to the room? What does the ritual say she has to do now?

That was it. Candles blew themselves out, the smell of incense is a regular smell now, and the bowls have tipped over. The room just looks like the same place but different. She might have to learn to turn her new Sight off.

Her—oh, right. She pays more attention and—

It's breathtaking. Angles, numbers, and geometry, at the edge of awareness. They don't overlay her vision, she can't actually see any numbers, but she knows they're there. There are connections, not everything to everything else, but everything to something else, a sense of order. Not quite like a giant spider's web, because it's more... immaterial than that. Simultaneously more and less fluid than that, the way everything looks like it belongs, the way she can almost tell what will happen if she pulls a string here or another one there. It looks the way doing mathematics feels.

And she has to not use that all the time? She looks for her clothes, finds them, and starts putting them back on. Now how does she turn this off...?

"I'm done," she calls to Johannes.

He and his rat reenter. Since she's still using practitioner-vision, she can see that Johannes has a strong connection to this demesne, and Janus has tenuous ones to everything. He's a shimmering mass of threads in every direction, thin enough that they'd be exaggerated by being called spiderweb, and they overlap in the rat shape at the center. Johannes himself looks comparatively ordinary. His right arm, right leg, and right eye all stand out from the rest of him in a way that will probably mean something once she sees similar characteristics attached to more things.

He sees Sadde wide-eyed and wobbling. "I take it it worked?"

"Yes it worked! What did you say were the problems with keeping the Sight active all the time, again? And what's up with your right arm, leg, and eye?"

"I could say my demesne cost an arm and a leg, but I'd be understating it. I did say the contests could be high stakes. The replacements are magic and therefore more visible to practitioners.

What you're seeing right now is the spirit world, not the real world. The differences are usually small, and almost everything is in the same place in each. If not, some plausible coincidence in the material world will correct the discrepancy. If you leave it on too long, you can wind up with more connection and presence in the spirit world than here, and fade from this one. Also you might bump your shin on a coffee table. Sometimes people do move things in the spirit world but not the material one."

"Well that'd be terribly counterproductive. Is there a way for me to tell how much is safe? And how do I turn it off?"

"Turning it on and off is a primitive action. I can't really explain how. Try to refocus your eyes, it's kind of like that for some people. Stare off into the distance or at something too close to your face to see. It'll get easier when you've done it a few times.

As long as you're using regular vision more than this, you won't be at much risk of the worst effects. It would have to be pretty extreme to cause problems on its own. If it ever gets harder to switch back, that's a warning sign. And you should use it less if you've been relying on things like glamour and blood expenditure that decrease your presence in this world for other reasons."

Okay, let's see... She looks into the distance, but no, that doesn't work... Then her hand, really close to her eyes, but nope, doesn't work either. She closes her eyes.

Then closes her eyes again.

Then opens them.

"Okay, that did it. Glamour?"

"A form of disguise. Faerie are almost made entirely of glamour; it's speculated that they might have started as practitioners underneath. Glamour can alter your appearance, including voice and height and even connections, and it works well as long as you and everyone else play along. The flip side is that it gets weaker with every inconsistency that anyone notices or alleges.

Using the Sight with glamour is usually perfectly harmless. But if you've been overusing either, it'd be like making sure this world doesn't see you as Sadde Woods and then half stepping into another world...it could be hard for Sadde Woods to get back."

"Ooh. How thorough is that disguise? And actually is shapeshifting possible?"

"It's very thorough. With enough glamour I could look like you or either of us could look like a ten-foot ogre. The catch is that the bigger the difference the more likely it is to fall apart, and the worse the backlash will be when it does. It's a good idea to take it off purposely before it snaps. And it's very strongly recommended to leave and remember at least one potentially noticeable difference so you don't lose track of yourself.

As for shapeshifting, few things are definitively impossible. It's a question of tradeoffs. Turning into animals has a long history, but you become more like the animal in hard-to-control ways. It's possible to change bodies completely, and survive, but that's expensive in terms of power and raises the question of where you're getting the new body. Getting the ability to take arbitrary forms at will is probably possible, but I don't know where to learn that or what the cost would be."

"I'll definitely want to look into that. I'm genderfluid, shifting the way my body looks is a huge step beyond just makeup, clothes, the binder, and presentation."

"....Genderfluid?"

"Yeah, you know, gender identity not constant, and sometimes not strictly part of the gender binary."

"If I understand you right, the next thing you say might be that you're sometimes male and sometimes female. I would strongly suggest that you not say that."

"That's—what I was going to say, yes, why would you strongly suggest that?"

"Because you aren't allowed to lie and the spirits judge truth. The very traditionalist spirits."

"I—" Pause. She folds her arms and looks very unimpressed. "The spirits are transphobic."

"The spirits enforce hospitality norms from thousands of years ago. They treat family lines and inheritances as more important than people. I gained an advantage over their system by reinventing feudalism! Yes, the spirits are transphobic!"

"That," she says, "is going to be a problem."

"Yes. Yes it is.

You'd be, maybe not constantly but regularly, running the risk of losing power and karma until you get so far in the hole the universe takes an opportunity to squish you. You'd be running that risk even if you were acting completely safely otherwise. You are going to have to be very careful."

"Am I supposed to, what? Just not say it? Would it be safe to say I present as male as opposed to am male? Or to talk about my gender identity as opposed to my gender? I have some practice policing my speech, that shouldn't be hard, but what exactly should I be looking out for, here? And would the spirits' opinion change if I glamoured myself, or learnt how to shapeshift genders?"

"The spirits will see through glamour. Shapeshifting might help, in the same sense as you could say "I am a bear" if you turned into a bear, but you wouldn't be able to say "I am a bear and not a human." Presentation would be safe in a vacuum; it's not a statement or an action in the sense spirits listen to but they might consider it deception. Deception is usually fine, by the way, as long as you don't lie while doing it, but any practitioner or Other could challenge you on this and the universe would take their side.

If you talk about gender identity, they'd at best not know what you mean. They go listen to the next practitioner over instead, where everything's clearer, and your voice and statements get marginally weaker. Or if they affirmatively misunderstand you, and hear "gender identity" as referring to "the gender that you are," they'd interpret it as a falsehood half the time."

"Why would presentation be any more deceptive than using different kinds of makeup or wearing different clothes?"

"Those might too. In themselves it wouldn't matter; that kind of thing changes much too fast for the spirits to pay attention to the associations. The danger is from intelligent enemies. Imagine someone saying you pledged that your actions would have the same weight as your words, and by wearing that appearance you're making a statement and the statement is false. Then the spirits would pay attention. Your opponent could even say you're doing it intentionally, so the spirits see a lie instead of an honest falsehood.

How much weight this carries would depend on the circumstances. If someone takes different actions based on other people's genders, they'd have more ground to accuse you because it would have cost them. And this could be anything. Earlier I told the spirits "you will know her as Sadde Woods." If it's actually the case that they know him as Sadde Woods then even I might have to claim to have been misled. Though I could at least word it to cost you as little as possible.

If it's someone with no stake at all, who knows nothing about you other than this, they'd have no standing to challenge you. But they don't strictly need that; spirits listen to practitioners in general."

"But that's—" Pause. No absolutes. "That sounds literally just as arbitrary as saying another practitioner could challenge me for wearing jeans instead of a skirt, or for acting deferential when around a teacher or a boss and not otherwise."

"It would be hard for them to say that wearing jeans is a statement of gender. If in your case it is, and they know that, then they might be able to go through another contortion or two and say it anyway.

The one about acting deferential is a good point. The spirits don't divide all humans into people who act deferential and people who are acted deferential around. That'd be a bizarre world. They do divide all humans into male and female. Arbitrary maybe, but what matters is that it's extremely well ingrained."

"Are spirits very local, then? Because gender roles are definitely not the same everywhere, there's no way you can reasonably do a one-size-fits-all categorisation. How do binary trans practitioners deal? And are spirits homophobic too?"

"They're local but mobile, is probably a good way to put it. But it's not about gender roles. For exactly the reason you said, they don't expect particular behaviors of men or women. It's just a statement with a truth value, even if they don't care about the implications.

They won't by default care who has sex with who, either, though practitioners do sometimes end up with promises on the subject or family traditions around what kind of person they marry.
I've never heard of trans practitioners. You probably aren't breaking new ground in ways to have the universe dislike you, but if you're not that doesn't imply anything good about how successful the earlier ones ended up."

"Okay... You said they listen more to more powerful people, right?"

"They do. If you were legendarily powerful, they'd side with you even if you were challenged. Though getting there just got even harder. And you'll be able to be safe within your demesne, once you have one."

"Well, it looks like getting a demesne just became a much higher-priority goal. If I became legendarily powerful and only then started claiming to be one gender or the other, would that be better or worse than having done that all along while getting powerful? Which is to say, will the spirits reward my being consistent about genderfluidity when I eventually get there, or will they simply not care?"

"Good question. It'd definitely be better to be able to say you were consistent all along, but since being consistent all along would involve regularly telling apparent lies it's hardly an option.

If you're successful enough that people talk about the Seals of Solomon and Sadde in the same breath then your name will carry weight and you'll be part of the way toward not having to watch yourself. But remember everything I said about how unlikely it was before all this."

"Might the spirits get inured to the 'lie' or believe it, if I say it often enough? Perhaps if I say it often enough in my demesne and then expand or something? If other people agree with me?"

"From their point of view, it would stay as false as if everyone agreed you were six feet tall. Practitioners aren't likely to stick their necks out that way. You could get most of the same benefit if people agree to treat you as your preferred gender, or people acknowledging that what you mean by gender isn't what the spirits mean.

You will find the spirits more malleable around your demesne than other places. Can't expand very fast, but it's better than nothing."

"Hmm. And I expect other practitioners would come to the same conclusion you did as fast as you did, and that'd be a knife hanging over my head whenever I presented as a boy and dealt with them, or Others who were likely to want to duck me over."

"Yes. Good call on the not swearing, by the way.

The extreme option would be to deal with practitioners or Others only while presenting as a woman, if that's the safe gender, but some won't know to connect the identities. Or won't care. Or, for the less sentient Others, wouldn't be able to call you on it if they did."

"...I already used to do the not swearing part, why is it a good call?"

"Partly because it's often too similar to hyperbole, and partly because the spirits are very literal. Not completely, but very. Practitioners can still swear, but it involves taking a minor risk at times when you're presumably not watching your words very carefully. Many get in the habit of cutting back."

"Well, I suppose I have at least one advantage, then," she sighs.

"That, and you don't have to learn magic by trial and error. Most practitioners don't, but most of the ones who don't get born to it do have trouble there.

Case in point: glamour is rare among humans, but I do have supplies for some. Would you like to try it?"

"Really? Yes! I—" Pause. Squint. "Why are you helping me?"

"A couple reasons. Partly because while I have a lot of contacts among Others, I have almost no practitioner allies and am not likely to make a good impression even after going public. The other reason is because of the Seal. It might be a long shot, but it's taking aim at the same target I am.

Still, glamour is hard for most humans to get. Probably shouldn't be free. In exchange would you promise an honest effort to help keep my presence hidden?"

"Well, of—" Another pause. "Hidden from whom or what? What are the qualifiers of that promise? Just how much of a lawyer should I be with these spirits and honesty policy?"

"They expect keeping both the spirit and the letter of promises, but the letter is always enough. It's safer to not have to, but if you're stuck with a promise you don't like you can act as much like a lawyer as you like. Just keep in mind there might be the equivalent of a prosecutor.

In this case, the secret is from practitioners in general until I'm ready to appear out of apparently nowhere. It has been a few years so far, and will probably be a few more. But there's no obvious way to tell which local Others would pass the information on, and of course informing non-practitioners would be dangerous anyway, so it boils down to fairly strict secrecy."

"My thing with these strict promises is that I can't help but imagine the edge cases and exceptions, being caught between a rock and a hard place, like someone torturing me for whatever reason and, sure, if I'm keeping you a secret then there's no reason for anyone to even suspect I might know something, barring some implausible steps of inference involving where I got my knowledge, but."

"Good to know you're wary of promises.
Edge cases are why I'm asking for an honest effort. Not your best effort; that risks forcing you to throw everything else away for slightly more secrecy. If you get coerced or tricked you'd be free to say you tried, and if there's some unforeseeable emergency where you have to reveal me to someone, you'd just have to look for other solutions first.

I'm being vague enough that it leaves a lot of latitude; if you were hostile this would have to be more complex."

"Well I'd do that anyway." She clears her throat and declares, "In exchange for the aforementioned supplies for glamour and some instruction on how to use them, I do solemnly promise an honest effort to help keep your presence hidden from Others and practitioners I meet, unless explicitly and unambiguously indicated otherwise by yourself, until such time as you find it convenient to make yourself known or to release me from this oath." She's clearly having a lot of fun with this.

She could accept deals just by saying yes, she's seen it happen, but there's no rule against fun.

A glass flask stoppered with a cork floats obligingly over. It contains what looks like blood, though it's a bit too dark.
"The first thing to know about glamour is that it's more about how you treat it than what you use it for. You have to regularly think about it, but never as something merely routine, or it will take the chance to slip and become something ordinary. You can grow it, with attention. This is more blood than the faerie I got it from would have given, but even though all of it is his blood it didn't all come from him.

What glamour does can be either one expenditure for a dramatic effect or an ongoing draw. Since you wanted it for its appearance altering effects, that'll be the second type and very intuitive. You can mix it in with makeup, or just put it on yourself directly. There's none of the mundane health or even disgust problems that blood might normally have. Once it's on you, face for appearance or throat for voice, you'll find you can mold yourself. It'll take concentration, and whether it's comfortable can vary, but you can look like anything in minutes. If you're using it to decieve practitioners, use the Sight. What people see in the spirit world when they look at you directly will follow the glamour you apply in the material one, but there's more to see than just appearance. Draw a line with the blood across a connection to break it, and along one to strengthen or mold it. 

That does make it more complex and adds more differences from your natural state.  Those increase the power it will take and the fragility. That's also why you should avoid layering one glamour on top of another, or turning yourself into anything people will stare at too closely. It'll multiply the number of twists and turns you're forcing reality through.

When you use glamour, it'll feel like you have absolute morphological freedom to choose any form. Don't. Always leave something that you'll notice and that will remind you of yourself. Some illusionists always keep the same eye color, or do a working so that their tongue will betray them if they start thinking of themselves by a name other than their own. Physical characteristics are easier and require nothing but the glamour.

If the glamour breaks, if too many people wear it down with too much doubt, reality will reassert itself all at once. That's painful and costs power, both from you and from the glamour, and can also damage your identity. It's not unheard of to be indefinitely stuck with hybrid characteristics of whatever the glamour was, and you wouldn't even be able to choose which ones. To take th glamour off, you just wash it off while intending to get rid of it. Glamour is cooperative about interpretation."

"The kind of thing I'd use it for would be only, you know, physical sex changes, most of the time, probably. I'm not even sure what kinds of relations and connections I'd have to alter to change that, if any, it's just." She shrugs. "Anyway, how do you make it grow? Is it just... paying attention to the blood? Pet it, give it a name, talk to it?"

"There are probably a lot of ways. Glamour is a very subjective kind of magic. What I did was dilute it with ordinary blood—about as ordinary as blood ever is; it was forcibly taken not freely given, and from animals—and let the glamour expand to charge the wider area, then repeat. Slow process, but effective. You can grow it less slowly than I did by keeping it with you, maybe putting the container in a pocket you often find your hand in so you feel it. Regularly noticing and handling it helps, but don't let it become routine. It will take the chance to fade into the background and become no more than what it looks like. For the same reason you should make sure not to dilute it very much, if you do that; I kept it above nine parts in ten.

Naming it could help. I never thought of that one. It actively tries to be temporary as much as any inanimate object ever does, and what stops it is that you'd be thinking of it as something special."

"Hmm, I'm not sure I can carry a flask of blood around and look at it all the time, especially if I want to be secret from people, especially other practitioners."

"It'll be slower if you don't, but that's up to you. Are you planning to try to be secret? Most practitioners and some Others will be able to tell by looking."

"I'm not sure, yet. The Duchamp and Behaim kids know about the gender thing already."

"And if you suddenly get much better at appearing how you want, someone might take a second to check for magic and see you've awakened. You might be better off just walking into a council meeting and introducing yourself."

"...council meeting?"

"I haven't mentioned those, have I. Monthly meetings where practitioners and sentient Others talk about whatever minutiae affect other council members or the balance of power in the town. For a new practitioner it would be polite to let them know you're here, but deciding not to shouldn't earn you any real enemies."

"Hmm, I wonder what's worse, having those snobs figure me out on their own or introducing." Pause. "I think I'm gonna introduce."

"And this way we have time to come up with a cover story for how you awakened. We can arrange enough details to be true to support a plausible narrative, but somehow I doubt many people would believe there's nothing more to it if you say you stumbled across a copy of Essentials in an abandoned house."

"When's the next council meeting? And how do people not from families usually awaken?"

"Sometimes they do run across information by accident, and meet someone friendly before someone dangerous. Other times a friend from a family with lax rules decides to trust them a bit more than would be wise, or they distinguish themselves in a group that turns out to have practitioners at the core.

For you the hardest part would be explaining how you got glamour. It might be easier to pretend not to be so new at this, if not for the fact that some of them know you."

"I'm not planning on using the glamour very often or right away, anyway. And is it plausible that they may have just not noticed me?"

"Not really. There's some leeway; I doubt they scan everyone daily so they won't immediately know it was literally today, but someone would have noticed if you'd been a practitioner for very long."

"Hmm. Could I pretend I always knew about it, that my mother was a practitioner and had Essentials—I assume that's a book?—and I only chose to awaken recently?"

"They wouldn't be able to see through that by looking. They might suspect something if they've seen you follow an Other without seeming to know what it was, and they might wonder why you waited so long without any practitioner contacts here and why you didn't tell them you knew.

Essentials is a book, yes. Nearly all novices this hemisphere read it. I'll probably have to give you a copy and just hope it won't matter that the edition will be too recent."

"Couldn't I just say I'd rather not say how I awakened?"

"They'll know you awakened somehow, and would guess that that someone in Jacob's Bell is awakening random people their children know from school. That's the kind of thing that definitely affects the balance of power, so you'd have a spotlight on you while they try to figure out what you're not saying. Implying that it was from your mother is probably the less risky. They'll be more willing to follow a request not to ask for more details."

"Yeah, I guess, though I'd need to mislead without lying. What reason could I possibly have not to awaken earlier?" Pause. "Misgivings about genderfluidity is a possibility."

"Could be. Though even then something would have had to change to explain why now. Did you have a birthday recently? Some holiday that might plausibly be a family tradition? Or even an event; "finally managed to complete an arbitrary task" fell out of use a long time ago but still hangs around in some families. If nothing else we could look up recent astronomical events that your mother could conceivably have inherited a tradition of awakening near.

Good reasons are hard to come by. But we don't need a good reason, and there aren't a lot of limitations on where to look for plausible ones."

"My birthday was in November. Arbitrary task would make sense, I suppose. How would I phrase that in such a way as to not arouse suspicions when I don't directly say it?"

"You just say you did the thing and awakened today. The problem, aside from the fact that tasks like that were in most cases calibrated for children, is that it implies an old family which implies they might have heard of it. Probably safer to use astronomy, or pin the delay on your current guardian's disapproval."

"I don't think Tobias would know about Others, and if he did he'd lead a crusade against them and practitioners as unholy abominations."

"See? Disapproval.

Maybe you only recently became confident you could hide the practice from him. Which is true, since you didn't know there was such a thing earlier. The others might disapprove of keeping that a secret, but they know exactly how bad an idea it is to tell someone so you're mostly safe on that front."

"Huh, yeah, not a bad idea."

"Excellent. Then this is for the cover story, and this one is because it's an area I hope you'll decide to progress in." Two books float over. Local near-omnipotence: the world's most convenient disability accommodation. One of the books is labeled Essentials, the other Summonings and Bindings.

She accepts the book, looks at the second one, and raises an eyebrow.

"For your seal. It'll cover capturing Others and paying or forcing them to agree to things. Usually with an eye toward making them serve you; there aren't many practitioners who try to affect long-term behavior."

"Ah. Makes sense." She looks at Essentials, then. "What exactly does this one have?"

"Instructions for the awakening ritual,  generalities on different types of Others, basics of different types of magic, and some history for context on some of the weirder aspects. It'd be a good idea to read Essentials on its own merits, even aside from the fact that everyone will think you have."

"Oh, interesting," she says, examining it some more and opening it to leaf through it. "Does it teach any other kinds of magic? Than awakening?"

"It gives some instructions. Nothing very high-level, but it gives foundations for a lot of categories. Mostly it's about what this whole magic thing is, aimed toward new practitioners. It also includes enough information to do the three major rituals, and some advice."

"Ooh, cool, then I'm gonna figure out how you did your demesne thing."

"I won't hold you to that. To whatever extent it was a promise to me, consider yourself released. For the rest of it...I guess I wish you luck figuring it out. Be careful with statements like that. You just accidentally raised the stakes."

"Hold—oh. Of course. Er. Well, can you tell me if Essentials has enough information for me to figure that out on my own, conditional on my being ingenious enough?"

"The word "enough" is doing a lot of work there. It's possible, especially now that you've asked that question."

"My having asked that question makes it more likely?"

"Having enough information and knowing you have enough information can be very different things.

It doesn't include enough information to succeed, absent luck, but you didn't say you'd try to pull it off."

"Ah-ha. I wonder just how constraining your promise is. Can you tell me how long you spent preparing? What materials you had access to, or at least what knowledge you had access to, or at least where you got that knowledge?"

"If you knew what resources were involved that would give away a major part of it. Unfortunately."

"What, not even the knowledge? Can you tell me about the rest of it, then?"

"Main thing I should say is that there might be more opposition than you'd expect. Not just the usual challenges from nearby practitioners and Others. It's a defiance of convention, and convention has its guardians. If you attract some of the same opponents, they might just decide to kill us both. It was a close thing the last time around."

"...this looks like it's going to be quite the research project."

"If you decide to try it, it would be. My advice would be to aim for a more ordinary demesne, since you in particular do have a reason to want one sooner."

"I also have a reason to want as much power as I can get. I'm thinking I should get an implement soon, something that would help with binding Others, and then go on and do that, maybe find a familiar while I do it, and after that try to claim a big demesne, too. I want to be taken seriously, and I can take my time, I think."

"If you think you can trade off the short term for the long term like that. Maybe you can; you don't have many pressing time limits."

"Right now the pressing need is for knowledge not time, unless you have some bit of it that you think would change my mind about this."

"You could get the same effect with a different order. Take an ordinary demesne, and go after some legendary lost artifact as an implement for the same benefit toward being taken seriously. Also a long shot, but you do have options."

"But legendary lost artifacts aren't quite the right... kind of power? In a way? They channel magic, but I want to convince and awe people and, well, Others. I care less about magical power itself than I care about... let's say... political power, in a way, though that's not the best word for it. I mean, it's more or less the same thing, here, from what I gather, but."

"You might have a distorted impression from only having seen one. A demesne isn't usually used for commerce or delegation like mine is. It's a place that belongs to you. You can and will have to maintain its connection to people and Others, but it's not primarily characterized by that. It'll earn you credibility among practitioners in exactly the same sense as a familiar or implement would.

If you want to save the demesne for last, that is a valid choice. It's just riskier because of your particular circumstances."

"It's not exactly my credibility among practitioners I'm talking about, but rather among spirits."

"It often goes together. A demesne is better for an ongoing relationship with nearby spirits; it's much more direct that way. But only locally."

"Don't they talk to their friend spirits nearby?"

"Metaphorically speaking, yes. That's still local, and much less dramatic than it is inside your space, to the point where it's usually worth simplifying to talk about inside the demesne or out of it rather than near."

"Hmm. Oh, well. Okay, I suppose I'll read that book and figure stuff out and then come up with a plan of action and run it by you for criticism. If you want."

"It's a good idea.

You should also draft what you want your seal to be. I can look that over too if you like, but I'll try to avoid saying anything needs to be added. It might help later if it's as closely associated as possible with you personally."

"It's a date, then! When did you say the next council meeting was?"

"Second Saturday of each month. It's at the church in the park during twilight hours. Schedule's vague, but three hours before and after sunset is the designated truce when there's anything to declare a truce from."

"Fantastic. Sssooo I think I should get out of your hair now, probably, it's dinnertime and if Tobias remembers I exist today I won't enjoy being late for that."

"And I should make sure there haven't been any more emergencies.

When you need to get back, the entrance you found is supposed to be opened by placing power in any form into the correct brick in the wall. Three up and two across, I think but you can check with the Sight. A drop from that flask will activate it; glamour is what it's best suited to, not the only use."

"Is that the nearest entrance to the rest of the city? And can't you teleport me back there like you did earlier?"

"It is, yes.

I can teleport you back, but you'll most likely need the directions for the return trip. Where should I drop you off?"

"Directions for the return trip?"

"For whenever you come by here next. Since I wouldn't necessarily know when or where to teleport you from."

"Ah, quite. I would also, er, prefer not to be eaten by whatever it was that was trying to eat me."

"They won't be back again, probably ever. If anyone else attacks you, tell them you're a human not a vestige and they'll know it's against the local rules. If that doesn't stop them, you have all the high ground and can threaten them with being forsworn. It'll stop them."

"Ooh, that's a good one, then. In that case I suppose I should just walk back? To get to know my way around?"

"You can walk if you'd rather, but it is a theme park where the theme is hunting humans for sport. It can be a bit unsettling. As for knowing the way around, it's Jacob's Bell except that all roads lead here."

"Oh. I'm confused, if all roads need here why would I need directions for the return trip?"

"For getting in to my domain in the first place. Once I'm not secret it'd be possible to just walk north until you're here, but for now the entrances are still hidden."

"Ah. Well, I know Jacob's Bell well enough to find the place I came from. And by the way, you said I was to use something of power on the brick wall—what other kinds of power sources are there, than blood?"

"The specific forms are too many to list. Others have disparate types of natural abilities, some practitioners store their strength or speed for future use, maybe there's a magic jewel infused with light from a unique source. Not all things that contain power are equally easy to harness.

The most important power sources among practitioners are the demesne, implement, and familiar."

"Right. So I see." She stretches. "I think I have a whole lot of reading and preparing to do, then."

"You did get all this dropped on you at once.

Should I teleport you anywhere in particular, or just out to the exit?"

"I did! Hopefully next time I catch you there'll be less in the way of life threats and more in the way of actual meaningful interaction. It's not always you meet a cute altruistic ambitious boy, I should make the best of this. Yes, unless you can teleport me to an unobserved location around home, just out to the exit's fine."

No comment on those adjectives. "Come back any time. Especially when there's less mortal peril involved; that's always better."

The penthouse appears to dematerialize, and Sadde is back on the Euclidean side of the entrance.

She walks home, with a spring in her step. She looks around attentively as she does—are there any people that she will now suddenly realise are not actually humans?

There are at first. A handful of what look like extremely ugly children at first glance and small humanoids at second. The largest of these ones is half her height, but several of them carry wickedly serrated rusty tools. They scatter and disappear from sight when they notice her looking.

How the heck did she never notice them? Serrated rusty tools? Seriously, her brain managed to hide that from her?

The objects looked as much like toys as the Others did like children. And it's entirely possible that this time yesterday she wouldn't have noticed them at all.

As she gets further south and deeper into the city, those don't reappear.

Naturally. She gets home, there's cold dinner in the kitchen, no one interacts with her, which is pretty good, so she eats some, brushes her teeth, takes a shower, and retreats to her room (i.e. the attic) to start reading Essentials.

It rarely goes into usable depth, but it's very broad. How the lying thing came about and why you must never do it. The precise traditions that affected the awakening ritual, so the new practitioner knows exactly what they're getting into. Some common types of Others and practitioners. (In both cases the classifications are humanly invented descriptions, not hard rules about how the magic works. It warns against relying too heavily the labels.) Instructions for the familiar, implement, and demesne rituals, along with what factors should be considered in the choices and a small handful of examples.

The book contains few things that she could theoretically do right now. It's more classifications and warnings than instructions.

Naturally. How about the demesne ritual, then, what does it say?

It's simpler than the implement or familiar rituals, and much simpler than the awakening one. Not a single magic circle involved.

Technically all that's required is speaking the claim, and then the local spirits take care of transmitting it to interested parties and enforcing stakes.

The actual text is equally simple. Most of it varies by practitioner; only a few lines are standardized. She could say it now, if she wanted to. I hereby make a claim. Let this be my statement. I claim this space and only this space. Let this be my challenge. 

By word count, the non-standardized part is most of the ritual. The practitioner states what their demesne is going to be: what it means to them, what they're doing and why they're doing it, what kinds of spirits they want to attract. Usually also a line about how it is to stay a place of sanctuary for their descendants after they die. And of course it ends in Let this be my challenge. If any would deny me this demesne, declare your right to challenge me and find me here. 

A demesne is supposed to be about claiming a place in the community as much as a place in the geography. It declares intent to stay, after all. The spirits react accordingly and concentrate on telling prominent practitioners and Others that there has been a claim. Those listeners get shown the voice of the claimant and where they are, and once they arrive they get first say in declaring a facet of the challenge or excluding something. The book suggests that getting on good terms with likely challengers is at least as important as preparation for defending against them, even if it's less exciting.

Once you've finished the challenges, either by winning or by paying the agreed-upon forfeits, My last challenge met, I claim this place. And then it's your demesne.

Hmm. Does it say why people usually do it room-sized, or how? Where are the physical boundaries of the demesne declared?

They usually aren't. The ritual talks about "this space" and "here," and whether you're in a broom closet or a throne room it's generally unambiguous. The practical limits are that anything unusually large will have more people contest it and for higher stakes, and that a large demesne is harder to hold on to when called upon to defend it. The theoretical upper limit is that it does have to be close enough for everyone in the demesne-to-be to hear the challenge in your own voice, but the other two are the relevant limits.

Hmmmmm! Does the book say much more about who's notified about it and how exactly they get the notification?

Interested parties, as defined by whatever the spirits happen to think. The closer someone is the more likely they are to count, have a demesne themselves counts in their favor, and a Lord if there is one always counts. If you participate in practitioner society, like by attending council meetings or local equivalent, you can be farther away before the spirits don't bother. What matters is whether the spirits think of you as a person whose business this is. Others can also hear, but the book is geared toward practitioners and has a bias toward information on when they will hear.

The notification is speculated to have originally been a magical boost to how far the claimant's voice carries, but with everyone doing the same ritual for centuries it got improved. Now the prospective neighbors on the outside hear an echo of the claim and see a brief illusion showing where the claimant is. "Find me here" would be unactionable otherwise.

"Father away"? So, they don't need to live closer to count, they need to be closer, at the time the demesne is declared? And, relatedly, if you're relatively anonymous it's easier to claim a demesne than otherwise, hmm. Innnnteresting. Is there anything more she'll find relevant about this? And can she find information on the Others as they relate to claiming a demesne somewhere?

Living closer helps determine how hard the spirits will try to tell them, the book anthropomorphizes, but distance at the time affects how successful the attempt will be. Theoretically you could pick a place with no one there, and not have to worry about any challenges, but that almost by definition means no important spirits nearby either. The demense would be almost useless and unwilling to improve.

Sentient Others are in about the same position a practitioner would be. They're about as likely to be magically informed and have just as much right (or lack of right, depending) to contest the demesne whether they get told or just happen to be there. They cannot claim a demesne themselves. Non-sentient Others can usually understand what a demesne ritual means. Even if they're otherwise no more intelligent than an ordinary animal, "someone is claiming a demesne" has become a fundamental enough concept that it doesn't take much brain power for an Other to know how to get involved. But it's more often the sentient ones and the practitioners that make the challenges.

Hmm, alright. Why can't Others have demesnes?

The ability to practice is a human thing. The awakening ritual was all about the relation between the human and the spirits; Others are already in that world. Others can get places where the spirits listen and are loyal to them, but the demesne ritual can only be done by practitioners.

That makes sense.

Next: implements?

(She might just stay up all night, it's a Friday after all.)

An implement is a badge almost as much as it is a tool. Essentials references a longer and more boring text for lists of examples, but it goes through what the meanings are. The Declarative, is the term for what this choice of object says about the practitioner. Decoration and appearance go here. The Authoritative, how it is used and what message it sends—is it displayed or brandished? And the Socio-cultural, what groups of people use this? Accidentally claiming identity with or membership in a people group is unlikely, but it's a risk.

The implement can be nearly any object. It should ideally be infused with some kind of power, whether by having a spirit attached or by being given an elemental charge or whatever, but some practitioners just go with something personally significant to them.

Like with the demesne, there's a permanent connection to the implement. Unlike with the demesne, this means it will always find its way to its owner. Some chain of coincidences will conspire to bring it back even if someone steals it and throws it in a river; the universe considers it right that the owner have their implement. The flip side is that someone with an implement should expect to have it with them at almost all times. This can be embarrassing if it's a sword and it probably shouldn't be furniture.

Hmm. Does it have to be an object? Could it be, perhaps, her own body instead?

Whoever wrote Essentials did not consider that question. It's certainly assuming the implement something that can be held in the hand, but the rituals could be done (if awkwardly) standing inside a magic circle instead of outside.

Extrapolating from what's in the chapter, the main risks would be that either nothing happens at all and she re-tries the ritual with something else or that it technically works but doesn't gain her anything. She does already have complete ownership of any power in her body, after all, and it is already an extension of herself more literally than any implement.

Well. She'll keep this in mind. Anything else about implements? What kind of information does the other book have, does this book say?

Mostly examples. Pages and pages of them. There's a matching tome for each ritual; Implementum lists off common tools and describes their messages.

It's ultimately a personal decision as much as a practical one. How she wants to represent herself, what she wants practitioners to think when they see her. But the boundaries of what can count as an implement are flexible. Like with the demesne, most of the limits are soft ones.

Very well. And the familiar?

Something between an ally, a servant, and a lifelong companion. It does not strictly guarantee loyalty; the Other and the practitioner keep their own interests and there are cases of one dominating the other. Cooperation is preferred. A typical form of the exchange is an Other more powerful than a human allowing the practitioner to draw on that power in exchange for whatever sustenance they need: an anchored place in the universe, often, and seeing the world from a human's point of view. Humanity can be a precious commodity. Other arrangements are possible: maybe the practitioner is offering power in exchange for knowledge or some skill, or there's an agreement between some group of Others and a family of practitioners.

The Other usually takes an animal form at the end of the ritual. The Other does have to be at least intelligent enough to agree to statements during the ritual, and should have compatible personalities and goals with the practitioner. Violating that is perfectly possible, but tends to result in the equivalent of an unhappy marriage with no possibility of divorce.

And what happens if either the practitioner or the familiar dies?

(...for that matter, does this book mention an afterlife?)

Familiars can't ordinarily die as long as the practitioner is alive. Anything that would otherwise kill them will feel like a painful blow to their human, and power will be sent along the bond to keep them alive. What happens when the practitioner dies depends on the Other. Its animal form dies, but this usually does not kill it.It was stably alive beforehand, after all.

There is an afterlife, but little is known about it. Afterlife quality probably depends on karma. There are Others and even practitioners who can work with souls and presumably affect it, but to be fair no one's positive whether that's changing the destination or creating a fork.

Huh. Well, what do the souls say about this afterlife?

Nothing. Souls don't come back from there (if there is a there; practitioners in general could theoretically be wrong). The relevant magic, usually done by practitioners called valkyries, prevents them from going there in the first place.

'Course. Nothing's ever easy. And it's getting pretty late, and her father might get angry if he remembers she exists the next morning and she's not there. Of course, he'll also get angry if he remembers she exists the next morning and she is there, but it's a different sort of angry.

She decides she'd better actually catch some sleep before doing anything. She's not sure whether Johannes thought it was obvious or was just that disconnected from the real world, but it so happens that the council meeting is tomorrow, so. She'd better be well-rested. She sleeps.

She wakes up much later than she'd expected to (fuck! stupid alarm clock, stupid batteries), puts on clothes, and eyes her door. The familiar dread fills her stomach, and she has to steel herself to potentially face Tobias' cold ire, orders that promise retribution if disobeyed. She inhales deeply, and opens the door, tiptoeing downstairs towards the kitchen in socked feet. Tobias is nowhere in sight, but her step-mother is there, doing the dishes. "Your father missed you at dinner last night," she says, not taking her eyes off what she's doing. "He's going to be very cross with you when he returns, tonight."

That information mixes with the dread like molten lead. "Where—where did he go?"

"It doesn't matter."

"Right. Is there breakfast?"

"Some. You slept in, so you missed it and prayer."

She acknowledges this information with a nod, and decides she will have breakfast somewhere else. Not at home. "I'm gonna eat out, and go to work," she says, to no reaction from Beth. Another sigh, and she goes back upstairs. She brushes her teeth, returns to her room, and puts her shoes on. Her eyes scan her bedside table, sliding over the dead alarm clock (must replace batteries), the book she's been reading (need to finish it by tomorrow to return it to the library), the vial with blood, okay nothing useful there—wait. Look again: alarm clock, book, blood—blood—right. The blood. She needed to name it. "You'll be called Bob," she says, and giggles at her own silliness. "I wonder what I can do with you?"

She grabs her backpack with the books, then the blood, and looks at it. She opens the vial and inserts her index finger into it. "What do I do with this..." She closes the vial again, shoves it into a side pocket of her backpack, and goes to the bathroom, then stands in front of the mirror. "By the power of Bob," she murmurs softly, "my eyes shall be gold coloured today," and she smears both eyelids with the blood.

She opens her eyes.

It doesn't do anything obnoxious like turning them into the metal, or changing the color of anything outside the irises. She sees exactly what she was picturing ahead of time: gold-colored eyes.

That is the coolest thing. But she won't keep it, so she washes her face, willing the glamour to wear off.

It feels like it's peeling off, but once it's off it disappears. No used glamour.

There is now slightly less in the flask than there was before.

What, less than just the original amount minus the amount of blood she actually put on her face?

No, just less than she started with.

Aaalright. So she'll practise this later. For now, Bob the Vial of Blood will stay in her bag, and she'll go out to get breakfast at a small cafe over there.

There she is! She gets in line.

And she can successfully buy food without incident. Nothing trying to eat her or anything, and if anyone recognizes her as a practitioner they don't say so.

So she will find a table to eat her muffin and drink her coffee, and then take Essentials from her backpack and go to the implement ritual section. How does that ritual work?

It's much more straightforward than the demesne one. There's a magic circle involved (diagram provided) with the object on the inside. The actual words are mostly freeform. The practitioner stands over the circle and describes their history with the object, what it means to them, what they plan to use it for, and generally why their implement is this instead of some other thing. There are a few set phrases, but since "implement" is an atomic concept it takes less to get the spirits' attention. What gets said during the ritual will shape the observers' perception of the implement. It's not the biggest factor, but it might make the difference between a talisman being seen as what it's made of or what it's a symbol of.

After the ritual the practitioner becomes better at using their implement for its preexisting purpose, analogously to doing a task by bare hand instead of with gloves. The implement does not gain magical properties it didn't already have, but magic done with the implement is easier and more effective. If it's something that requires skill to use, the wielder does not automaticallly gain that, but they will find practicing easier. Having an implement also lends more weight to a practitioner's words when talking about something where it could be used as a symbol. A threat means more coming from someone whose implement is a sword whether or not they're currently brandishing it.

Yeah, she's gonna be her own implement. She knows what she means. She has some time before she has to go work, but does she have a place to do this? She can't do it at home, she doesn't want to rely on Johannes... Does she have time to do it in some secluded wooded area, perhaps? She looks at her watch, chomps down the rest of her breakfast, and decides to go for it.

The council meeting doesn't start until evening. She's got time. Just has to make sure no one who doesn't already know about things sees her.

Well, time to look for a fairly secluded wooded area! Good thing Jacob's Bell is tiny and has lots of those.

It doesn't literally have signs pointing "Secluded Area This Way," but there are few enough people that getting privacy is no challenge at all.

Yep.

Okay, so, ritual preparation, what must she do?

A diagram, with this particular weird setup of circles arranged in triangles. The implement goes in the middle, and the practitioner (normally) stands on the outside. Incense or open flames in the background to make it look more like a ritual are encouraged but not strictly necessary.

En... couraged? Why the—okay she's not setting a fire. And the particular setup, well, she'll start copying it with indents on the earth, drawn using a twig, how about that, does that work?

Medium does not matter for this one.

Encouraged, not mandatory. That's just part of the theatrics, not an active ingredient. If she could arrange for a thunderstorm that would be even better.

Of... course... A thunderstorm. Right. She'll just. Hope the fact that she's gonna get a very unusual implement will help.

What are the fixed parts of the ritual, and what does she have creativity to tweak? She wants to get this right.

Very little of this one is fixed. A few phrases. This is my tool and this is my badge come up once toward the beginning and once toward the end, and she has to say that no one else has a claim of owning the implement. Can't have an implement that's less than entirely hers, after all.

The rest of it is up to her. Things to talk about are why this, what does she see herself doing with it, what it means to her and what she hopes it means to others if those are different. Origin of the object and how it came into her possession probably don't apply so much.

Very well, then. She walks into the circle and says, "This is—" then pauses. She returns to the book. Does it say anything about... well, separable parts of the implement? Like, say, suppose she did that right now, would the ritual think her shoes are also part of the implement?

No comment. It just says the implement on the inside of the circle.

O... kay, but um. She's winging this, might as well act as if she knows what she's doing. She gingerly strips naked and makes sure she's not holding anything, then steps back into the circle, and starts intoning.

"This is my tool. This, I present to the world, and all that shall know me." She ignores the mid-morning chill as best she can, not letting her voice waver, and spreads her hands out to the sides of her body (but still inside the circle). "This is my badge, and by this shall I be seen and recognised. This belongs to no other. I belong to no other. My body is mine own tool, and no one else's, for me to shape and use as I see fit. Hear these words, and know them to be true."

The background cooperatively moves. Everything outside the circle shrinks and darkens while the inside seems to expand. Looks like the obvious failure isn't happening; this did get recognized as a ritual.