Only once had Enodia allowed her to summon a spirit, one she used for scrying. Slowly, staring into a pool of water, colors had swirled up, shaping into images in a distant mirror. It had allowed her to spy upon the inhabitants of the palace, to watch Poseidon as he drew yet another hapless slave girl into his bed. Oh, the girl didn’t dare resist, but from the look upon her face in their coupling, she endured the process rather than enjoyed it.
But for a hair of difference in station and the will to stand up to him, that could have been Pyrrha wincing beneath his unwanted thrusts. And seeing that had been enough to resolve her. Once, she had believed Poseidon kinder and more worthy than his sisters. But while they vented their frustrations with petty cruelties visited upon any they could, at least Pyrrha could empathize with their desire to demonstrate some degree of power in their lives. Indeed, Styx and Perse had been named Nymphs themselves, and were thus destined for eternal mediocrity.
Poseidon, though, had no frustrations worthy of the name. This world was his to claim and abuse, the people in it existed but to service him. If he weren’t Tethys’s son—if the Titan queen did not, in fact, encourage this behavior through not speaking against it—Pyrrha might have been inclined to ask her how Tethys, a woman, achieved dominance in such a world.
Tethys and Phoebe alone comprised the females of the Ouranid League, and Pyrrha kept circling back, wondering how they attained it. Ah, but then, the answer was in front of her all along. She had no idea how Phoebe had managed her position, but Tethys had the Telkhines—mer spirits—working for her. Combined with Okeanus having died in Kronos’s assault, Tethys had seized the Aegean through sheer arcane might.
Was that not, then, the perfect model for how Pyrrha could begin to build her own sphere of influence?
Thus, when Enodia had at last given her blessing, Pyrrha had traced spirit glyphs along the beach, forming a wide circle. The glyphs were key, Enodia had taught her. A foolish sorceress could simply call up a spirit by name and it might well answer. Many such sigils represented the soul of one entity, and if you knew the glyph for a spirit, then that one would definitely answer, drawn right up to the edge of the Veil, and effectively invited in by the summoner. The circle served to ward against the evoked entity, to invoke other spirits in order to counter its influence. Like the stones of an arch supported one another, the ring of spirits each served to compel and hold back the others, so a sorceress could focus her energy and will upon just the one she needed.
Oft named sirens, mer were spirits of Water. On the seashore, they could be called up close to the Veil. Sitting upon a rock in the midst of the circle, Pyrrha stroked the back of a chicken she had claimed for this purpose, trying to calm herself as much as it. She glanced up at the moon, trying to judge the lateness of the evening. It had to be closing in on midnight now, and she needed to trust Enodia would arrange things as she had promised.
She needed to begin.
Poseidon was a symptom of all wrong in the World, and someone needed to chasten him. He was the perfect person to test her own limits on.
But … she had never incanted aught without the presence of her mentor. Nor had she counted on just how hard her heart would begin hammering at the idea of casting a spell without Enodia watching over her shoulder. Yes, she had practiced this, as much as one could practice such things without risking the invocation of actual spirits. And true, Enodia had inspected her glyphs before departing for the polis.
Still, one misspoken syllable, one faltering of her will, and Pyrrha would suffer under the thrall of any one of the spirits she now invoked or evoked.
When she spoke, her voice reverberated in her own head, the discordant resonances of Supernal feeling apt to shatter her skull. It was the language of spirits, and the purest language for incantations. It was also supremely alien to the human tongue. Her words sent vibrations thrumming through the air, pulsing like shockwaves through the Penumbra. Perhaps, had any outsiders walked the beach at this hour, they would have felt an unnamable wrongness seeping into the air. Perhaps they would have heard the words she spoke and thought them the ravings of a madwoman.
Perhaps, even, they would have dared brave the malaise that would saturate this shore and watch her, as she drove her knife into the chicken’s breast, letting its hot blood wash over her hand before casting the bird into the circle. Blood and death, after all, acted like a clarion to the Otherworldly.
But no one came from the Mortal Realm. Rather, her onlookers drew in through the Penumbra, drifting towards her circle in ones and twos, shadows upon the fringes, drawing nigh slowly, like circling sharks. The dead came and watched, hunger in their eyes, tongues lolling. They were first. Then, from the woodlands, she watched as a tree split, and a naked female writhed from it, lurching free. The entity pitched onto the ground, then scrambled forward almost more lizard-like than human. Her flesh was discolored, with a texture that appeared bark-like, and her eyes held a faint green luminosity.
She was followed by two lampades, the pale mist spirits wafting in on vaporous currents and moving to circle round the perimeter of Pyrrha’s ritual.
It was the approach of the mer, though, that drew her attention. Covered in scales and barnacles, with flapping gills and fins, the creature appeared almost like a humanoid shark. Its too-wide maw leered at her and its opalescent eyes nictitated in a way that made her squirm, though she
