Needless to say, despite your lack of belief in magic, the first thing you did once you were back home and seated comfortably on your sofa bed was to skim through the thick spell book. The spells it contained ranged from simple incantations to complicated rituals. The majority was for mundane purposes, like deflecting bad luck, finding a lost object, or ensuring a good night's sleep, whereas a handful of them was designed to inflict some kind of curse upon someone else.
To your own surprise, only one of the numerous magic spells caught your eye. While leafing through the yellowed pages, you came across a true love's spell that piqued the interest of your very, very single self. The instructions only took up about half the page, which meant that it wasn't as elaborate as most of the other spells you had seen. Out of curiosity, you scanned the handwritten page.
A sheet of paper? Honestly, who didn't have that somewhere in their home? Check.
A pen? Likewise. Check.
Rose petals? Only yesterday, you had bought a small, decorative bouquet of roses among other flowers, so ... Check.
Jasmine incense? It just so happened that you had received a set of incense sticks—jasmine being one of them—as a free sample during your shopping tour the other day. Check.
A pink or red candle? You had both, in fact. Check.
A rose quartz, a ruby, or a garnet? No to the last two, but yes to the first one. Check.
Well, it looked like you had everything needed to perform the spell at home, so that was already pretty much half of the spell done. For some reason, you found yourself hoping that the rest of the spell—the part telling you what you had to do in order to cast it—would be just as straightforward and effortless.
"Light the candle and incense and relax," you mumbled to yourself, reading bits and pieces of the instructions aloud. "Think of all the qualities you desire in a lover ... write them down ... go outside ... look up at the sky and concentrate on a star ... say this ... go back inside ... sprinkle the rose petals ... place the gemstone ... say that ... and ... that was it. Done. Huh."
You didn't know much about magic spells (obviously) nor magic in general, but performing this spell sounded like child's play; it would probably take you only about ten minutes to carry out its instructions, maybe fifteen minutes tops. Easy enough, right? And so, you decided on a whim to give it a go, simply because you felt like it.
Seriously, the worst thing that could happen was that nothing happened, and you had wasted ten minutes or so of your time on Earth, a sheet of paper, some ink from a pen, a rose, an incense stick, and a candle. No biggie. That wouldn't be the end of the world, really.
Alternatively, the best thing that could happen was that you actually found true love. But you highly doubted that. Oh well, you were doing this just for shits and giggles anyway. You didn't expect it to work in the least. (Though to be perfectly honest, a teeny tiny part of you secretly hoped against hope that the spell would indeed somehow work, and you would finally meet your significant other.)
"Well then, here goes nothing," you said to no one in particular and got to work.
After gathering all of the things you needed from around your studio apartment, you began to prepare the spell. Sitting down at the small dining table near your equally small kitchenette, you placed the pink candle in a gold candlestick, the jasmine incense stick in a tiny white vase as a makeshift incense burner, and the sheet of paper in front of you on the table.
Using your trusty old candle lighter, you lit the candle and the incense. While the rich and sweet aroma of jasmine engulfed you, you took some deliberate moments to relax, closing your eyes and inhaling deeply. Then, you turned your attention to the blank lines on the paper.
Tapping the pen against your cheek in a slow but steady rhythm, you stared down at the sheet of paper in front of you. "All the qualities I desire in a lover, huh?"
You didn't have to think long and hard about that. Near-instantly, four young men came to your mind, each of them prime boyfriend material (in your opinion, at least). You wanted your lover to be as resolute, valiant, and composed as Noctis Lucis Caelum; or as passionate, reliable, and confident as Gladiolus Amicitia; or as cool, calm, and collected as Ignis Scientia; or as playful, upbeat, and easy-going as Prompto Argentum.
Oh, who were you kidding? Let's be real: You didn't want your lover to be like one of these men (fictional or not), you wanted him to be one of them—or all four of them. You would never be able to choose between them anyway, even if your life depended on it. Each of these video game characters had his very own and very special place in your heart; you had no favourites.
With a nonchalant shrug of your shoulders, you went ahead and wrote down the full names of your four long-time crushes instead of a tediously lengthy list of specific traits you looked for in a partner. What could possibly go wrong? It wasn't like these fictional characters would show up at your doorstep anytime soon (unfortunately). They weren't real, period. No amount of unlikely existing magic or wishful thinking could ever change that fact.
"Alright, what's next?" You pulled the leather-bound book closer to you, glancing through the spell's instructions. "I gotta leave the candle and the incense burning and go outside with the petals and the gemstone."
No sooner said than done. You made sure that there was no way for anything on the table to go up in flames spontaneously and inexplicably in your absence, pushing the lit candle away from the sheet of paper towards the middle of the table. Afterwards, you crossed the main room to go out onto your apartment's decent-sized balcony.
The air outside was crisp and cool, a nice, refreshing change from the jasmine's strong fragrance. High above your head in the dark and cloudless sky, innumerable stars shined and twinkled, and among them glowed the silvery, waxing moon. Because you lived on the outskirts of town, there were no multi-storey buildings obstructing your view of this beautifully clear sky, and there was next to no light pollution either.
"Brr ..." The involuntary shudder that passed through your body made your toes curl in your big, fluffy slippers—literally, not figuratively—and caused you to pull your knitted cardigan tighter around you. Refreshing or not, the air was still very much chilly. It was the middle of winter, after all, and late evening to boot.
You put down the open spell book on the nearby wooden table and looked up into the starry sky, the red rose petals in one hand and the heart-shaped rose quartz in the other. The brightest star caught your eye, so you focused on that one. Following the instructions in the book, you did your best to visualize the starlight shining down on you like a glittering spotlight and charging the petals and the gem in your palms with energy, causing them to shimmer in your mind's eye.
"Star of love burning bright, aid me in my spell tonight. Unite my true love to me, as I will then it shall be," you spoke haltingly, all the while glancing back and forth between the book and the star so as to not stumble over a word and mess up the spell. This would be fatal, since you were as good as done, and you didn't want to do the whole thing all over again.
Luckily, the first incantation went without a hitch. To carry out the second incantation (which would also be the last), you returned inside with the spell book tucked under your arm. You scattered the rose petals around the candlestick's base on the dining table—careful not to put them too close to the burning candle lest they catch fire due to a stray spark or something—and put the rose quartz in front of it.
The moment you sat back down, the candle's flame popped and crackled unexpectedly, eliciting a tiny shriek from you. "Geez!" you spat. You narrowed your eyes at the candle whose flame had already calmed down again, burning tall and strong like before. "Stupid candle ..."
Only after you had consulted the spell's instructions again did you carry on, just to be on the safe side. Closing your eyes once more, you tried imagining yourself as a bright flame similar to that of the candle in front of you, attracting your (allegedly) soon-to-be significant other like a moth to the flame. Gently, you called, "Hear me as I call to you, come to me, my love so true!"
You let the candle burn out and proceeded to sit there in your dimly lit apartment for a minute or so, unsure of what to do now, before you pulled yourself together and set about tidying up. You put out the incense stick and threw it away along with the sheet of paper and the rose petals; put back the pen, the rose quartz, and the candle stick; and placed the spell book on its designated bookstand on the shelf above the sofa bed in a corner of the studio.
The instructions did tell you that you would have to repeatedly perform this spell—once a month, to be precise—until your true love eventually appeared, but you weren't going to do that. Sure, this one time had been fun, exciting even. But you would leave it at that. You still didn't believe in magic, and neither did you believe that this spell would ever take effect.
In fact, you forgot about the whole true love's spell pretty quickly. The very second you plopped yourself down on your unmade sofa bed, dressed in your comfiest warm clothes, your mind was already entirely elsewhere. Finally, you got around to doing what you had been looking forward to the entire day: playing Final Fantasy XV, your favourite video game, and spending some quality time with your favourite group of virtual boys.