Signalling the Stars

The waves toss and churn, spewing sprays of mist. I break the surface, managing one panicked gasp before water crashes down on my face. My vision is blurry, the salt stinging my eyes shut. My limbs flail wildly as I strain upwards but with every movement, the sea drags me back. 

Stay, it whispers. 

I gag on my own breath. Not yet. 

Displeased, the water chills, a current snaking around my limbs. Desperation is the only emotion my half-starved brain can muster and in a last-ditch effort, I go limp. The sea eagerly rips through me and I can feel myself fading away. 

Suddenly I touch rock. I unthinkingly grab onto it and the current loosens. A wave pushes me so hard that my chest slams against the outcropping, ribs screaming in pain. I scrabble for a hold and with my last fiery burst of strength, I thrust myself up. 

The first breath of air I take is brutal, scraping my lungs as I hack and gag. I give myself only a few moments before I pull the rest of my body out of the water. Ignoring the spin in my head and the shakiness of my legs, I bow my head towards the sea. 

“Thank you.”

 Not waiting for a response, I turn and pick my way towards the shore as quickly as possible.

-

The skin on my hands is scraped raw. I stain the sand dark as I drip, crouched under the sun. The cuts on my legs are not deep. I can feel my clothes start to stiffen in the warmth. The bruises on my ribs will heal. I wipe my nose and straighten. It’s good enough- my body won’t quit yet. 

I slowly turn to look around my surroundings. Clusters of rocks glisten in the water, one of them from which I crawled from the sea. Waves lap at the large expanse of sand I’m standing on. It’s an extraordinary white, so pure and smooth. Behind me a cliff rises sharply but I’m already noting possible paths to climb to the top. I shield my eyes against the glaring light and see hints of green up there. This place should have everything I need to perform a signal spell. I glance up at the sky. It’s bright blue now but in a few hours it would darken and I would have to stay the night. I take a deep breath. This would be the first solo spell I’ve done since the disastrous teleportation one. “It’s either this or be stuck here forever,” I say to myself. But should I start with the circle or the conduits? I eye the sea- it glitters invitingly. I repress a shudder.

 The cliff it is.

-

I keep on hearing Aunt Zyra’s voice in my head while I climb. “Foolish child,” she says. “You can’t use a signal spell to actually signal someone. And do you even know how to perform one? I’ve never taught you have I?”

I grin behind gritted teeth. “You can’t directly signal someone. But you can amplify your magical aura,” I grunt. I reach for another handhold. This cliff was nothing compared to the ones I scaled back home. Aunt Z would always make me climb them to get some kind of berry or plant she claimed was essential for the potion she was working on. “Oh and thank you,” I say as I ascend the last few feet. “I only know how to make one because of your grimoire.” After I got you dead drunk, I silently add but imaginary Aunt Z is already blowing her top. 

I shake off my fantasies, heart pounding from the climb, as I venture into the trees. The instructions Aunt Z had scratched on the creamy pages still stand stark in my memory. “Let’s see,” I muse out loud. “What’s a plant I hold dear to my heart?” 

My steps are careful and deliberate but my soles bleed anyways. The ground dusts my feet brown- my shoes were lost when the spell whisked me away. I pause every few minutes to make sure I can see the path I carved. It’s strange that a forest is this quiet though. The only sounds are my inhales, chest flaring slightly each time. It feels like I’ve entered another world, one made of shaggy mosses hugging trees and feathery vegetation spraying every which way. The sun slants down narrowly through the blanket of leaves above, forming small pockets of warmth. I almost think I can see small particles of magic suspended in the air, six-sided and spitting light, but when I reach out to touch them, they spin away into nothing. I must be hallucinating from the heat, I think and double my efforts.

Every plant I come across starts to look the same and I want to scream from the monotony. “How will you ever succeed me if you don’t have an ounce of patience?” Aunt Z appears vividly in my mind, a tall figure in a tailored suit. She sweeps aside her bangs and fixes the intricate hairpin clasping her bun in place. I know all her little habits and she knows mines back. Sure enough, Aunt Z frowns and says, “Stop squeezing your hands. You’ll break your thumbs before I need them for my emotion manipulation potion.”

I glare at her. “You’re not funny.”

“And you’re not thinking,” she retorts. She leans in closer, her eyes a bright piercing green. “Here’s a hint.” I open my mouth to snap at her but Aunt Z disappears, leaving behind a wreath of smoke twisting upwards lazily. Wait- smoke? An epiphany hits me and I clench my hands tighter for a pulse. Then I drop into a crouch, the ferns and bramble scratching my crown as I scrabble through the smaller plant growths. There’s got to be one… It’s the most common plant ever. At last, I pop up triumphant, a sprig of pungent tear-dropped flowers drooping between streaked nails. 

How could I ever forget? The memories of scouring forest floors for these tiny plants all so Aunt Z could extract the scent to turn into perfume. She would burn the remains and the sickly-sweet smell would always make me gag. The early mornings when I was young, where I would watch her dab some carefully onto her neck. Once she hesitated then reached out and anointed me on the forehead. I almost fell off the bed squawking and she turned away, saying I smelled terrible. I caught the small smile flickering across her face in the mirror though. I hated the scent but rubbed the oil in anyways. 

The flashback keeps me grounded as I inch my way down the cliff carefully, the plant stem gently gripped between my teeth. I haven’t watched Aunt Z’s morning routine in forever, not since I began waking up later and later. I spent the wee hours of the night poring over charmbooks in the study or feeding the night-vultures or just a few days ago, devising a way to see Aunt Z’s secret grimoire. Fat lot of good that did me. The only other incantation I bothered learning besides the signal spell was the teleportation one and I ended up on some mystery island.

Back on the shore, I begin planning the spell. A deep shadow colors the sand a plum color as the sun sinks behind the cliff. It won’t be long before it’s too dark for my eyes. I try making a line in the dry sand but the grains immediately start to collapse back in. In order to get a clear image, I’m going to have to go near the sea. I stop a healthy distance away from the waves and give it my best death stare. “Don’t you even dare.”

I start with a basic magic circle, finger smoothly sweeping a path in the wet sand. I hesitate- memorizing patterns was always my weak point but then again Aunt Z always told me that intent was more important anyways. “What’s the point of having a brain if you don’t know how to think?” I murmur and I add in an octagon for luck. In the middle, I draw in a simple protection circle with spokes radiating through each of the octagon’s vertices. In each of the eight sections, I begin creating guidance sigils before I stop and sigh. I’ll just mess them up with my footprints later and I still need to find one more conduit.

-

Dread pools in my core as I stare out at the sea. I tried scouring the shoreline for what I wanted but no luck. My legs tremble and I tell myself it’s from the cold. Even with the blessings of resilience and healing Aunt Z placed on me ages ago, I’ve never strained myself this hard. I take a deep breath. I can’t put this off any longer. I take one step then another, the sand sucking to me like it wants me to stay behind but by then I’m ankle-deep in the water. I shiver and tell myself, The sea likes you. Hell, it even saved you from drowning. Stop hesitating and just do it.

“So um, hi, remember me, I almost drowned today and uh, I have a favor to ask,” I babble, hands waving incoherently. I cringe at my own words. I start again. “Thank you again for helping me today. Um, I really want to get off this island and go home and I need an object to finish my spell and it has to be a rock of some sort and I think a seashell is close enough to a rock so… Would you mind giving me one of those shiny blue-pink ones with the white ridge?” 

I stare at the horizon, where the sky has already darkened, staining the water an inky blue. I sigh and crane my head back. Pink and gold streak above my head to the molten circle sinking behind the clifftop trees, setting the white sand afire. I try to control my panic as I add, “Please?”

Aunt Z always told me that I had an affinity for water which was too bad since we lived so in-land. I never paid much thought to it since the most water I’ve been near was the tub. But then I got it in my head to look through Aunt Z’s grimoire to see if she wrote anything about my parents. It was hell trying to gather night-vulture droppings in the dark then trying to find a way to slip it to her without getting caught. But after I undid the barrier enchantment and took the grimoire from within her mirror, I only found mundane enchantments. She must’ve spelled everything personal away. Because she didn’t—doesn’t—trust me.

Just thinking about it makes my temper rise and I lose my patience. I growl and kick the water. “It’s your fault, you know!” I shout. “Why did you have to pull me off-course in the middle of my teleportation?” Right after the runes had glowed and I floated off the ground, I felt a tug in my stomach. And then I found myself drowning. “I only wanted to test it by going to a beach or something! Why did you have to dump me in the middle of nowhere?” 

The water roils around me and I step backwards, horror and shame curling inside. “S- sorry, I shouldn’t have blamed everything on you. I’m just- just really tired right now.” I slump down into a crouch, waves gently lapping at my skin. I feel as though I’m sinking through the sand and I tilt my head forwards, watching tendrils of hair swirl in the water. It’s strangely soothing, the sea and the sand and the sound of my breath and the waves, so soothing that I don’t register the ground bubbling in front of me until a shiny seashell brushes my leg. I smile and grab it, running my fingers over the ridges. A similar one sits on my nightstand back home, the one Aunt Z found with me when I was a babe.  I rise, droplets spilling like a beaded curtain around me. 

“Thank you.”

- 

The faintest tinge of light left guides my finger as I draw the guidance sigils and sweep away all my footprints until the only ones left are the ones in the protection circle. The flowers and the seashell are placed in front of me within the circle. I take a deep breath and draw the amplification sigils on the outside rim. I survey my creation one last time. The circle is slightly wobbly and the sigils are messy, but it should work. The guidance sigils would guide the magic to the amplification signals. The conduits needed to be ones important to me or else the aura enhanced wouldn’t be pure. And finally, the protection circle would prevent me from being incinerated from the magic. This should make it much easier for my magical aura to be detected, saving me days of being stuck here. “All assuming you’re casting a scrying spell, dear Aunt Z,” I say aloud. I shake my head, refusing to consider the alternative. “Let’s begin.”

I chant slowly, repeating the two lines of runes Aunt Z had written down in her messy hand. The magic circle flares slightly, giving off a silver glow reminiscent of moonlight. I finish eight repetitions and the glow fades into small embers. I think it worked? 

There’s nothing to do now but wait anxiously, heart in my throat. The flowers and seashell have crumbled into dust. The magic continues to trickle from me. I’m not sure how long I can hold it without burning out. Despair creeps on me by the minute but I force myself to remain patient and loosen my hands. 

Suddenly, a trail of light catches my eye. I whip my head up, mouth gaping open slightly. The stars are spread out above, glimmering softly but glazed with a coldness. Except for one whooshing towards me, weeping sparks and glowing a pale gold. It stops fluidly in front of me and I reach out to touch it. It’s cold. I almost flinch back but then it blossoms into a warmth that spreads throughout my entire body. I grin and fling my head back, the tiny pricks above smearing through my tears. I know what this means.

Aunt Z is coming.