Brady Tyson & The Two Little Liars

Chapter 4 - Things Forgotten

 "Do you have any allergies?"

"No."

"Have you been sick at all recently?"

"I had a cold at the start of the month."

"That shouldn't be an issue. Do you have any phobias?"

"...I'm scared of needles."

"As in, you're scared of having blood drawn, or you're scared of the needle itself?"

"The needle itself- Akil, what's the point of all these questions? Are we doing some sort of pagan ritual or a medical diagnosis?"

The man twists his goatee across the table from me as Fukuya places the final scarlet candle in the last corner of the table. I wring my hands under it. It seems to me that this small, windowless room at the top of the library would not be a good place to be lighting fires, but this doesn't seem to bother Fukuya as she begins to light them. Akil watches her as she moves from candle to candle, until he seems to have found the words that he wants to say, turning back to me.

"Brady, I'm not going to sweet talk you, since you seem like the kind of girl that can take it. The ritual to integrate you into Ragnarök is both excruciatingly painful and immensely terrifying. This entire battle deals with something that lives in the cracks between worlds. Something that humans were never meant to acknowledge the existence of. As the representative of Thoth it is my duty to make sure that this thing doesn't slip into our world too much before the designated time, that time, of course, being the start of the new millennium."

He stands up, and Fukuya hands him a long, curved knife. Slowly, he rolls his sleeve up, revealing innumerous scars that line his arm. He turns the knife in the air, and before I can cry out he carves a long, thin line into his forearm. Without so much as a hiss of pain, he holds his arm out of the top of the black table, letting the blood begin to pool on top of his arm.

"The reason that all of this relates to my little medical questionnaire is because nothing about this is an exact science. All I have is the spoken word, passed down through many generations to tell me what I need to do to add people to the battle. As such, there isn't any sort of mention of what can make the ritual go bad. There is only one time that this ritual went poorly while I was conducting it, and it happened to a poor man that sought out my duties at the end of September. Of course, there is no real conclusive cause as to what went wrong, but the only thing that makes sense to me and Fukuya is that his singular sneeze is what caused his body to disintegrate on the spot. Going forward, we figured it would be for the best to have a light medical screening before we begin."

"Well." I gulp. "I really hope that that was the scary part of the ritual you mentioned."

Akil just shoots me a wry smile, and as the blood begins to flow over his arm he starts to chant. The droplets fall to the surface of the table one by one, and Akil's voice booms out above them. But he doesn't speak in english. He doesn't speak in any language I've ever heard. He speaks in the way that nails on a chalkboard communicate to each other. He speaks in the way that carrion on the road smells. He speaks in the way that the thing looking at you from the forest's edge sees.

"Muriv repus tnuger et iuq. Srosse. Ivacovni eaitneics enimon mineé setnereaq."

Drop.

Drop.

Drop.

Blood spills out and over the top of Akil's arm, but not all of it is making it down to the table anymore. Underneath his arm the droplets begin to catch on something; in the same way that the morning dew can reveal an otherwise invisible spider web in a grassy field, the blood fastens itself onto a thin line that hangs in the air between Akil's arm and the table. With each passing second it becomes more and more visible, more and more tangible. As the final drop of blood falls from the tips of Akil's fingers the line suddenly twitches in the air, twisting about like a string that's been hooked by a fish.