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Paranormal Prompts aims to bring you w...
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Hi everyone and welcome to our newest prompt! This week, we'll be featuring a word prompt. That means you can interpret it as literally or as figuratively as you'd like, provided that there is a clear link between your entry and the prompt provided. For more information, make sure to check out the guidelines below!
WORD PROMPT:
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WINNERS:
Please note that winners are not listed in any specific order. You can read the rest of the entries in the comments section below!
The magic they taught was meant to be forgotten long ago, but the book survived. It was a living thing, that tome, and it was patient. At the right time, it could arrange to be found by an empty mind. A mind it could manipulate, fill, and devour. It thinks it is immortal and perhaps it is. For is not the weakness of humankind eternal? The greed? The lust for power? These vices and impurities are just eyelets waiting for the hook of the darkness. But, though the book is eternal, so is the persistence of the light, the good, and the pure of humankind. And so, though the magic they taught emerges and refuses to be forgotten, so rises the power of the light to drive it back into hiding. This is the nature of the Aeonian Cycle.
For the first time, I'm trying the art of disguise. After all, it isn't easy to walk around unnoticed when swirls of ink cover your body like a morbid canvas painting. It is even harder if you happen to draw weird symbols with blood. I would immediately be identified as student of magic- magic that had long been forbidden but not as much forgotten as it should have been. After all, it was meant to be lost to time. Unfortunately, not all of us are lucky to have our wishes granted.
The magic they teach is one that is meant to be feared and respected alike. The world fears it would be too much, but only a seldom few know that a time would soon come where we would have to hope that it would be enough.
Sorcerers (even in training like me) have the power to reanimate the dead. We can bring them back in full. True, they may be unpredictable at best and murderous at worst, but our ancestors have walked among many greats whose wisdom and strength would be lost to the ages without necromancy. I stop by an isolated garden on my way back to the hideout. You may believe that you'd find such people at a graveyard, but seriously, do you really think we can give life to the dead in a place where others are buried? You can't create life. You can only transfer it, and there's no place more suited than a garden. No one notices a single dead leaf or flower, though the bigger the life taken, the longer the dead get to roam the land of the living.
This is the first time I am going to practice my gift outside the class. It is forbidden, but I just need to know if I am as capable as they say. Quickly, I kill the bird closest to me. Murmuring incantations, eyes closed, I draw with the pool of blood. Suddenly, my skin begins to itch and my eyes water as my throat dries up. I look up in horror as I notice that I have drawn the wrong symbol with blood- a pentagram. Forget saving the world- if I can't find a way out soon, my powers won't be sufficient even for me to save myself.
His yellow eyes should have given him away, ditto his otherworldly weirdness, but I saw only the new boy's black hair framing his razor-sharp cheekbones and his darkly ironic attitude.
After a week of flirting, I agreed to meet him in the woods after school.
I was hoping for my first kiss and I got it. But what started out sweet and soft turned into a sharp bite that left me stunned and virtually paralyzed on a bed of dry leaves.
As I watched his dark figure retreat, he raised his arms above his head and let out a triumphant whoop. Later, when I could move again I stumbled home through the moon soaked woods, relieved to be alive.
The next day during homeroom, my relief turned to rapture when I saw on the teacher's bulletin that Jacob Winnick had withdrawn from school.
But then the visions started. Weird, nightmarish thoughts planted in my brain like poison weeds.
I thought about Jacob's kiss and terrified I was harboring some dangerous infection, I made a tearful confession to my mother.
After insisting I repeat my tale, she took a deep breath and told me all about Jacob Winnick, how he had been the dark Goth lord to her grunge-loving teenage witch. How as a joke she had promised him her child, how they had signed a pact in blood. I had a photo of her from that time. With her short spiky hair she looked so cool, so filled with attitude, but I had missed the fear in her black-rimmed eyes.
"I should have warned you," she said through shuddering sobs. "But I had no idea he would come back."
While I sat there stunned, she left the room for a moment and returned with a book. She plopped the leather-bound tome in my lap. It felt heavy. Wrong.
"Better bone up on the literature."
"What in God's name are you talking about?" I asked.
"Don't," she whispered, darting her eyes to the rattling window pane. "We serve them now."
"Who's them?" I asked, terror rising in my throat like a hot flame.
Her gaze held both sadness and resignation. "The Dark Ones."
