The Last Moon Witch Read online

  Kanruo shivered as he and Notia knelt in the snow.

  “We do not weep for the departed, for they are at peace,” Notia began softly, her hand clutching Kanruo’s.

  “They are all around us, carried in the goddess’s arms,” Kanruo replied, holding her hand a little tighter. Even though the words said not to weep, she always did.

  “We do not lament, for they are safe now.” Notia’s voice wavered.

  “They guide us, whispering through the goddess,” Kanruo answered her. Perhaps the answers he sought were woven into the echoes of those who had come before him.

  “We rejoice in the lives they lived and knowing that they are once again home.” Notia sniffled.

  “Their cycle has ended. The Crone has taken them to the dark moon.” Kanruo swallowed. A lump was forming in his throat now, too.

  “Where they received their place among the stars. So mote it be.”

  “So mote it be,” Kanruo echoed her. He let go of Notia’s hand and with cold fingers struck a match, lighting a single stick of incense and sticking it in the snow next to the meal.

  As he resumed his place next to Notia, snow started to fall, emitting soft crinkling noises as it trickled through the tree limbs. Notia took his hand once more. As they watched the snow fall, Kanruo pressed his gift to her into her palm.

  “What’s this?” She looked at the item. A piece of selenite was carved into a crescent moon with a single shard of amethyst fused to it.

  “Happy Yule, Notia,” Kanruo told her softly as she hugged the pendant to her chest. “And thank you for everything.”

  She hugged him tightly as the incense ember slowly burned out. “You are, and will always be, the greatest gift the goddess has ever given me, Kanruo.”

  5

  “We use the sickle like others would use a wand or athame. It is both a tool to create and a weapon to destroy. Now, concentrate. Visualize the magical threads around you,” Notia’s voice guided him.

  He stood with her sitting behind him in an empty room, deep in the bedrock below the house. Its granite walls were painted in warding runes and sigils. Kanruo held his sickle out before him, rotating his wrist slowly around in a circle.

  He felt the blade catch on one of the invisible strands. It pulled taut as he applied a gentle pressure to it.

  “Found one,” he called back to Notia.

  Manipulating the threads of magic and atoms was simple enough. Using the sickle, however, required more finesse. A light touch, lest the wrong bond become severed.

  “Good. Now wind it thrice around the blade. As you do, pull the power toward you. Store it within the blade.”

  Kanruo took a deep breath and slowly began to coil the magic around the sickle. The razor edge glistened in the dim fluorescent lighting as the power flowed into it. The handle vibrated minutely as he finished the final wrap.

  “Oh,” Kanruo whispered as the realization dawned on him. “I’m charging it. Like we do with crystals, right?” He glanced back at Notia.

  She nodded. “Yes, the sickle can act as an energy sink. And like crystals, your intentions matter as you charge it. For now, we have given it a neutral charge, but over time, the blade will acquire a patina based on the intentions and energies you put into it.”

  “Cool.” Kanruo grinned at the sickle. “How do I fight with it?” The curved blade was descended from a centuries-old farming tool, when magic and harvest rituals had been practiced among villages. It didn’t have the reach of a straight blade and only one cutting edge, making the art of combat trickier than most weapons.

  “Quickly.” Notia walked up to him and with a wave of her hand created a doppelgänger. “The blade will cut through bone and most metals. Catch a limb in it to end the battle quickly and disable your opponent or behead them.”

  Kanruo slashed at the shadow, feeling the weight of the weapon in his grip, adjusting to how it cut through the air.

  Notia waved her hand, and the mirage shifted. This time, the phantom was taller and brandished a long sword. “If your opponent has greater ranged weapons than you, the principle is similar. However, you must exercise caution when searching for your opening.”

  The phantom lunged at him, sword swinging.

  Kanruo jumped back, throwing the sickle up. Metal clanged against metal, sending up a spray of sparks. The sword’s blade cradled in the curve of the sickle as Kanruo struggled against his opponent.

  “Now, what do you do?” Notia quizzed him.

  Kanruo grunted. It took all of his strength to keep the long sword from crashing down into his skull.

  “You have halted the attack, but you cannot win from this position. Think.”

  Kanruo bit his lip, focusing on the opponent before him. He shifted his weight to the side. He twisted his arm around as if he were drawing down the moon. The circular path freed his sickle from its lock with the sword and sent the long blade clattering to the ground. He whirled, moving the sickle upward, splitting the phantom open from groin to belly.

  The illusion faltered, smoke rising from where it had been wounded. Then, damaged beyond repair, it wasted away into dust before him.

  The sickle felt good in his hand, like an extension of himself. The power flowed through him and trickled into the weapon. The potent connection made his pulse pound.

  “Well done. We will practice forms, counters, and blocks now. As you progress, we will work on incorporating them into sparring.” Notia rose and took a step forward, reaching for her own sickle.

  As she did, her ankle suddenly wobbled and she pitched forward.

  Kanruo dropped his blade, putting his hands out to catch her. “Notia!”

  She sucked in a deep breath. “It’s fine. It’s nothing.” Notia tried to put weight on her foot, and it gave way, sending her sprawling into Kanruo.

  “We can practice forms another time,” he assured her as he helped her stay standing. She’d never had these problems before. What was wrong? “Come on, let’s do something low-impact instead.”

  Notia sighed. “Very well. Control drills.”

  Kanruo groaned. “Anything but control drills.”

  “With practice comes refined magic.” Notia limped back to her chair. “When combined with the lore of our craft, great things can be done. You cannot always depend on your komainu to protect you.”

  “So, no taking the easy way out?” Kanruo picked up his sickle and fastened it to the sash wrapped around his waist.

  Notia snorted. “Nothing about our lives is easy. Do you think it was easy for me to gain mastery of my illusions? Or to control the flow of my premonitions? It takes work, just as it does to produce a machine that passes the Turing test. Our magic is no different.”

  “So now I’m programming my spells?”

  “Now, you’re being a smart ass.” Notia crossed her legs and began to massage her weak ankle. “The four elements may not heed your call, but your manipulative abilities allow you to go deeper to the very atoms that make up our world. You have the potential. You need only apply yourself. Now, envision the threads that bind our world.”

  “Already done it.” Kanruo began to walk in a slow circle. Moving helped him concentrate. It revealed the layers of magic flowing through his immediate vicinity.

  “Good, faster than last time. Recite to me the composition of graphene.”

  “That one’s hard!” he protested.

  “Recite it.”

  “Ugh.” Kanruo closed his eyes, and his pacing came to a stop as he envisioned the carbon compound. It was a remarkably useful material that atomically arranged itself in a 2-D honeycomb pattern.

  Three sheets, each only as thick as a single atom, could provide a bulletproof barrier that was invisible to the naked eye.

  “Carbon one forty, hydrogen forty-two, oxygen twenty.”

  “Very good. Form a barrier with it.” He could hear Notia rummaging around in one of the pouches she had on her belt.

  “You’re going to throw something at me, aren’t you
?” His brow furrowed as he tugged at the magical threads, gently nudging the atoms around him into place, coercing electrons to and fro until they were arranged in a hexagonal wall. The tips of his fingers twitched minutely as he built the structure up.

  “The point of barriers is that nothing goes through them. And if you get one up quickly enough, it can save your life.”

  A sharp plink echoed through the room. Kanruo cracked an eye open to see a glass marble rolling away from him. Notia was grinning.

  “Excellent. Keep your focus.” She threw another marble at him. It soared overhead, and he threw a hand up, summoning the sheet of atoms above his head.

  They both watched as the marble hit the invisible barrier and rolled down it, like water off a duck’s back.

  “Traverse the room while maintaining the barrier,” Notia instructed, readying a fist full of marbles.

  Kanruo paced around the room, using the threads of magical energy to pull the barrier along with him as Notia pelted him with marbles. Not a single one breached the shield.

  “I’m going to try something,” Kanruo warned her as Notia retrieved the last marble from her pouch.

  Carefully, he extended his hands and curled the tips of his fingers like claws, triggering tiny vibrations throughout the barrier around him.

  This time when Notia hurled the marble at it, it ricocheted with an ear-splitting crack. The marble shot off at an angle, smashing into dust as it hurtled into the granite wall.

  They both stared at the spot in shock before Notia coughed and cleared her throat. “Well, I think that is enough practice for today.”

  Kanruo sat at his desk, a spilled bag of Nordic runes next to him as he gradually leafed through the thickest of the damaged tomes. He’d only managed to partially translate the massive volume. The name of its author, Michiko, was inscribed on the inside cover. It was an old name from the previous millennium before the purge, and Kanruo hoped it would contain the answer he was seeking.

  Notia had taught him the moon glyphs and Nordic runes and how to craft sigils of his own as a child. How to cleanse crystals with herbs and moonlight, and how to charge sacred items with his intentions to imbue them with power. But it had always felt like an incomplete circuit, not properly grounded.

  No matter the ritual, it was never truly his but something borrowed.

  He turned over a wood carved rune in his hand. Perthro, from the Elder Futhark, meant to illuminate mysteries. He hoped it would assist him as he painstakingly made his way through the text. What was the missing part?

  The Japanese text was dotted with illustrations that gave him some context, and over time, the characters came more readily to him. The new year had come and gone and the dark days of winter had blended together in a mix of studying, sickle practice, and magical drills as the world gradually grew brighter.

  One illustration caught his eye. A series of grids had characters strategically placed within them. Alongside were sketched pictures of hands in various contorted positions. Kanruo squinted at the tiny half-burnt footnote next to them.

  “Kuji-kiri.” He read the word aloud, feeling its rhythm on his tongue. “Nine symbolic seals . . . cuts?” He hunched over the book and focused his reading light on the smudged characters.

  A few of them looked familiar. He was fairly certain that the one labeled “sha” for healing was the kanji for “person”. Another, “zai”, looked like the character for “in”.

  Were his translations off? Perhaps the characters were symbolic or held a double meaning?

  He turned the page, scanning for answers, but the only readable text was a smudged note about a study done in Mie University in the early Twenty-First Century. Perhaps when it was safe to go into town, he could request the paper through Umeå University’s library system. Until then, he only had the drawings and a few sparse notes to go by.

  “Each hand position is associated with a mantra,” Kanruo read slowly, his finger hovering over the vertical text. “‘Care should be taken, lest an unwanted presence be invoked.’ Geez, Michiko, you didn’t play around. So, how do I do it carefully?”

  Kanruo flipped through a few more pages but found little else related to the hand symbols or the nature of the characters. A few notes depicted energy flowing through the body and onmyōdō, the way of Yin and Yang, but he wasn’t certain how the concepts were related. The texts were more like personal journals than encyclopedias. There was no context, or even a system of organization, to assist him.

  His hands itched, the restlessness that came with new knowledge seizing him. Caution be damned, he wanted to try the hand gestures.

  He picked up the book and headed to the heavily warded practice room beneath the house. The last thing he needed was to send out a spike of magical energy and draw the Union’s notice. Notia’s wards could contain smaller spells, but experimental magic was always best done within the granite room.

  Kanruo sat in the center of the room, placing the tome on the floor, studying how the pictures depicted the hand gestures.

  They seemed to cover broad topics—power, healing, awareness, creation, and a slew of others. They could be done in a chant for meditation or singularly, based on the need. Kanruo selected a simple one first, Jin, for awareness, sealing the bonds within. It was similar to the scrying Notia was gifted with. If it worked, he could incorporate it into his own technique, designing something wholly unique to him.

  Kanruo straightened his posture, closing his eyes as he visualized the character on the grid in his mind. His breathing slowed as he focused on the word, channeling his intentions into it. An exploratory curiosity without direction. Second sight wasn’t his innate gift, but with this technique, just how far could his reach extend? His hands rested in his lap, relaxed, as he pulled at the magical threads around him.

  He brought his hands up, letting the energy flow through his body. His fingers traced out the perthro rune in the air before him. Then he brought his hands together and interlaced his fingers, tucking their tips toward his palms. A stillness came over him as he pulled a deep breath into his lungs.

  Threads of life surrounded him, wrapping him up in the heartbeat of the universe. A nudge here or a tug there shifted the energies as he manipulated the flow around him.

  “Jin,” he whispered the word.

  White phosphorus light exploded behind his eyelids as Kanruo felt his consciousness jerked out of his body. He soared, chasing the tail of a comet through the cosmos as flashes of information bombarded him.

  Then he fell, cantering out of control until the ground of the forest rose to meet him. The rich earth wrapped around him as he burrowed within its embrace. He felt the slow pulse of sap beneath the tree bark, sensing the coming spring. The rush of water beneath Umeå’s river. The heartbeat of every human and creature in Sweden. A thousand thoughts flooded him, drowning out his sense of self. The steady hum of Europe’s ley lines and the aching creak of radiation that floated through the atmosphere.

  For a fraction of a nanosecond, Kanruo saw the flow of time itself, expanding with the universe in all its terrifying entropy.

  As quickly as the vision had begun, it cut short. His mind dropped back into his body with such force it sent him sprawling backward.

  His eyes snapped open and he stared at the stone ceiling, gasping for breath, hot tears rolling down his face as steam rose from his body, the excess magical energy slowly dissipating.

  “Wow,” Kanruo croaked. The enormity of the experience left him in a shaken state of awe. He was going to have to be very, very specific with his intentions. Without a refined application, the magic could easily spiral out of control. And yet, despite this danger, it felt like something had finally clicked into place.

  Kanruo pushed himself to his feet, channeling the residual magical energy back to the ground as he gathered up the book. Excitement bubbled up in him. He had to tell Notia!

  He scrambled up the ladder to the main floor of the house.

  “Notia!” he called, po
king his head into her workroom.

  The room was empty. Strange, where was she?

  “Notia?” He looked in the kitchen. A pot was simmering on the stove. Root vegetables sat half sliced on a cutting board on the island in the middle of the kitchen.

  A tidal wave of panic rose up in his chest. Why would she have left the stove on? She always scolded him about leaving the gas flame unattended.

  Kanruo set the book down on the counter and moved to turn the gas off. That was when he saw her sprawled on the floor beside the stove, a swollen, bloody gash on her forehead. A red splatter on the countertop edge marked where she’d collided with it.

  “Notia!” He crouched next to her, rolling her over, her body a limp, heavy weight. Her pulse was there, weak and frantic beneath his fingers.

  The wave of panic crested, reaching its peak as Kanruo grabbed a rag, trying to wipe away the blood on her face.

  “Notia!” he cried uselessly, shaking her shoulder. But despite his pleading, she didn’t wake.

  “Calm down, calm down,” Kanruo whispered to himself. He had to think, but his mind was blank. He knew the mix of herbs to bring down swelling, to prevent infection, and he knew how to bandage wounds. But his hands grasped uselessly at the air before him. What if her brain had been rattled inside her skull? What if she was bleeding internally? Or if she’d broken something in the fall?

  “Please wake up,” he begged. “I don’t know what to do. What do I do?” He clasped her cool hand tightly. Her magic sang beneath her skin, a dull echo of what it normally was. It faded slightly with each pulse of her heart.

  Wait.

  Kanruo grabbed the old tome off the counter and flipped through it, the blackened edges of pages crumbling beneath his trembling fingers as he searched for the pages depicting the kuji-kiri. It was risky, but he had to try.

  There it was. The hand position for healing, sealing the inner lion.

  Kanruo put his hands together, interlocking his fingers in the complicated formation. He sucked in a deep breath, trying to quiet his nerves.