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Darnai
In the dark of night, she work her spell to find those she had been destined to be with since her discovery of the grey magic. That had kept her studies into this little known art going, that she would at long last find those who she could actually rely and count on in her life. No one had done that for her so far, and the desperate need she had for them in her heart was what had sustained her for so very long.
She was a Wiccan to begin with, but she doubted that it was still true. The Lord and the Lady had released her from their power in a ritual, leaving an odd marking on her forehead that disappeared an hour later, just before her mother had entered the room to see what she was doing and ensuring that she was not burning any incense.
Her parents. Puritans, both of them. As an only child, they expected her to always be what they were. Unfortunately, they were the most Christian oriented people in the known world, and she did not wish to be like that. It was magick that called to her, what sustained her existence and not the dreary and rigid rules of the Christian religion. She could not long keep up the charade and her parents found out about her practice in the Wiccan arts. They may have not kicked her out of the house, but living with them was not that much better. She had been forced to change her name whenever she did anything "obscene" and blame it on an alternate personality, which was the only excuse her parents would accept.
She did not let on to her friends, however. None even suspected that she was anything but a Christian and a normal girl with amazing grades. Nothing she did even hinted as otherwise, not that they would notice with all of the gossip they swapped over every single slight scandal that occurred within twenty miles of their small town.
When she had been branded by the Lord and the Lady, she had immediately gone to the internet to try and find out more about this gray magick she had been entrusted with. She allowed her fingers to guide her, closing her eyes as she typed into the address bar, and she found a single site. All that was there was a small note in the magickal alphabet she had become fluent in that read, "Greetings to yee who have entered the fold. We are the Greys, chosen by the Lord and the Lady to see to the upkeep of the earth. May the power of three guide yee on your own quest." Below was a list of six who were all Greys, her name being at the bottom of the list.
She well remembered emailing all of them to ask what all of this was about, and they had all seemed ecstatic to find that she had finally come. Between them all, they managed to explain to her the basic idea that she would instinctively know all that she needed once her trio was found and then, after the final test, she would be an official Grey, one of those truly trusted by both the Lord and the Lady to be watchers for them.
When she asked about the existence of God, the Christian one, they simply replied that anything that exists in the human mind and is truly believed in is real. It was the magic of belief that brought them into this world, and the strength of it that kept them here. The blasphemy of the religion created the God in which they so loved and trusted.
But now, her mind was on other matters. She was summoning the others in her trio who would help her and protect her as she would for them. She simply hoped that they were not as closed minded to magic as her parents were.
The ritual was awkward and not quite like any other spell she had performed before. Though she kept her mind fully on the task, she found it somewhat difficult to change her style from what she had been doing for most of her life. As the candles began to flicker at the end and slowly threatened to go out one by one, she said the last words to close the ceremony. "I, Darnai, so wish for those so twined with my soul to come to me so that we may be complete. Oransi Lorancha Lonei, I am released from my duties to the Lord and Lady so that I may better serve them, so mote it be."
Darnai slowly packed up, trying to figure out what was to come next. It wasn't every day a Wiccan got the privilege of receiving the knowledge for a spell from the Lord and Lady themselves, so much in her life was bound to change. Perhaps nothing would ever be the same, as the old cliché went. And perhaps the her world would be better for it.
Darnai went by Darrie to all but those other Wiccans that she knew. Since she knew none personally that name, her magickal one, went unsaid and none had any idea of it. At school, Darrie was a good student, rarely ever missing an assignment and never late to class without a very good reason.
This day, it was because of her family problems, a well known fact throughout school that she had. She was not ashamed of them, and her Socials teacher understood. She simply sat down in class without much hassle and took notes on their assignment for the week, to research their religions and write a paper on them. Darrie smiled at the simplicity of it all.
She began immediately on her paper, sure that she could finish the rough copy for the end of class. As she wrote the word magick, however, something she did not expect happened. Without her invoking anything, the 'k' on the end of the word disappeared. When she tried to redraw it, the lead in her pencil broke. Every time she tried to fix it, something odd would happen to prevent it. Frustrated, she continued onto the rest of the paper, and every time the word magick was written, the 'k' off of the end vanished without a trace, and she could not find a way to replace it.
Highly annoyed, she asked Jasmine, one of her friends in the class, to write in the 'k' for her. The pen ran mysteriously dry when she tried and it refused to work whenever she tried. She went back to writing her own paper, the millionth one the teacher would read on Christianity, and the pen began to work once more. Jasmine did not seem to notice the change, but Darrie began to grow suspicious.
She went on the internet immediately after school on the school computers and hacked her way through the school's censoring program onto a the site that she had found before. She wrote down all of the emails of the other grays on the list and promptly logged off of the internet. There was no telling when a teacher would come in and discover that she had found her way to an 'occult' site and put her squarely in the principal's office.
As soon as she got home, carefully evading her parents who were once more discussing some new plan to get her into a youth group, she headed for her room. She had managed to earn enough money over her years to pay for her own laptop and internet connection so that she could do her work in her room, where her parents feared to tread as it was considered evil to them.
She immediately went into her email and explained her situation in a mass email that she sent out to all of the members listed on the site. Now she could do little else other than wait as patiently as her anxiety over the situation would allow her to. She could only hope one of the others could tell her what was going on, and if it was normal for this to be happening.
Within a day, all of them had emailed her back with a separate message in the magickal alphabet. Together, they basically said it was one of the signs that she was becoming one of them and not to worry. She should also be happy that she was Wiccan when the weird stuff began to happen, since most of the rest of them had come from different religions which did not readily accept magic of any sort. They had all been approached by their own gods to ask them to perform what were tasks of blasphemy to their religion.
With a touch of a smile, Darrie became calm and wondered about the spell she had performed those nights ago. There were supposed to be two others who were going to join her and help her through some period of trial. Before that email, she had assumed she was going to finally meet some other Wiccan so that she could finally join a coven after all of her years of self-study. Now, with the news that the rest had not necessarily been Wiccan, she began to doubt her theory. She even began to doubt the Lord and the Lady's presence that night when they had come to her. The truth for her was now in question.
She continued on with her essay regardless of her problems with the one word, highly doubting that her socials teacher knew enough that the word was wrong. Somehow, she managed to keep her speculation about the validity of religion out of her mind for the days while writing it with some difficulty, though it lingered in the back of her mind.
A week dragged by, Darrie waiting in anticipation for the other two who were to help her through some future task to come, but none came. She did not even know what to expect, how they were to meet, anything. Finally, she decided to retreat to a small, secluded spot in the forest where she had performed her ritual to summon them. What a waste it all had been, no results had come of it and she had begun to think that this was all some elaborate joke being played on her.
"Ow!" a voice said from far above her. "Stupid acorns."
She looked up to try and discern who was above her. It was hard to see through the tree's lower branches but she was able to make out a figure sitting in the higher branches reading a book. "Who's there?" she asked tentatively, wishing the tree would allow her to see the person.
"I should be asking you that," he replied tartly, obviously surprised out of his wits. With a sigh, he said, "Nathan Ray, and who are you?"
The lower tree limbs parted, to the amazement of both of them. "I'm Darrie Williams. What brings you here?"
"The witch wannabe?" he asked. "I always thought you would be more, I don't know, Goth." He caught the venomous glare she sent up at him and he quickly recoiled. "I just came to get away from home and being inside for a bit. Funny thing is, I didn't know that this place existed. Didn't know such strange people hung out here either."
"People?" Darrie asked, clearly perplexed by the word. She was the only one who came here, there was never anyone else here before.
"Yeah, there was this weird guy by earlier," Nathan said. "He's probably still around, come to think of it. He had this weird glowing sword type thing. What kind of guy has a sword in this day and age?"
A guy with a glowing sword? And this guy in the tree who didn't even know about the clearing in which he now sat? This all seemed very suspicious to her, and yet in a part of her mind it all made perfect sense. Too bad that part of her mind did not wish to share with her conscious mind. "Nathan, you mind coming down here?" she asked, her neck growing weary from looking so far up to talk to him.
In one jump, he landed on the grassy earth in a crouch and came to his feet. Nathan was neither tall nor short and very gaunt. His messy brown hair was getting in his hazel eyes beneath silver rimmed glasses as he looked at her judgingly. "How did you do that thing with the tree?"
"What makes you so sure I did anything?" Darrie countered.
"You said it yourself, you're a witch. My logical mind went out the window when the guy with a glowing sword came by. I mean, who carries a sword around in the age of guns? A glowing one, though, I thought I was dreaming or something, but the guy's still over there doing training exercises. I figure magic is something that's not so hard to believe. So, what did you do to make the limbs part?"
Darrie stared in awe. She had thought that he had been dreaming as well, but if there was still a guy walking around with a glowing sword then it might have happened. But if there was someone walking around the forest near where she had cast that spell with a sword, then maybe the spell worked. Maybe these two were the ones she was to summon. "Where's the guy with the sword?"
An annoyed look crossed Nathan's face at the obvious fact that she had yet to answer his question. "He's right over there, in another clearing a little farther out," he replied sharply. "I'll show you."
They passed under tree cover, a tense silence between them broken only by the cheerful sounds of the forest. A song bird flew close overhead and sang a song that sounded almost as though it were a warning. Darrie looked sharply forward, stopping in her tracks and catching Nathan's arm.
"What?" he hissed, looking back to her in annoyance. He tried to shrug off her hand and continue, but her grip held fast. "Would you let go of me?"
A knife shot across the path ahead of them, a streak of reflected light that might have blinded them had the sun not become overcast with cloud cover. With a slight thud, it became imbedded to the hilt in the tree. The hilt had the look of a well made knife of the middle ages, almost like one they would have seen in a text book.
"Oh," Nathan said weakly, not quite sure how to react to nearly getting killed by such an ancient weapon. His eyes had gone wide at the sight of it and he visibly paled as he stood, rooted in place. "That's what."
They stood unmoving, stunned, for a few moments waiting for anything else that might come out at them. A cloaked figure came out from an overhanging tree branch which had been heavily concealed by tree cover and dropped in front of them, landing catlike and sword in hand. Darrie saw now what Nathan had meant by the glowing sword, it's vibrance not shedding any light, but glowing independently of it's master's will. The figure, tall and heavily cloaked so that no features were visible, advanced on them, sword blazing with the odd light pointed directly at Darrie.
*Haha, cliffie. You guys probably already know what's going to happen, but THAT'S OKAY. Half of the story doesn't match up with the other half either, but that's also FINE. My new series, the opener to one of them, anyway.
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