The Warp and The Weft

Prologue - Philip

Philip Bishop-Clairmont reached into the air to his left, grasping a golden thread that shimmered like ichor in the dim light of his New Haven bedroom. He pulled it towards the small pulsating ball of light that hovered in front of him, over his well-worn desk of cherry wood his father had made sometime in the 19th century. The small orb of light had a blue thread the colour of the sea jutting from one side and a thread of yellow that billowed like a gust of wind from the other, the clear vestiges of an incomplete spell.

Philip is a weaver, a rare type of witch with the innate capability to create new spells, a talent unavailable to regular witches who require the existence of spells made by weavers to use their power. He sat straighter in his chair as he began to shape to golden thread into an elaborate configuration in the air with seven crossings, the seventh knot.

Like all weavers, Philip took the threads of the world and knotted them into shapes and patterns to form the order of spells from the chaos of nature. Philip gently drew the shifting orb he had created using seven threads of varied appearance and power into the centre of the pattern made using the golden thread of worldly power. The orb was the completed form of the sixth knot which had in turn been made through the combination of the fifth knot with a watery blue thread, this addition will bind the magic to the water of the clouds the new spell is tasked to manipulate.

Philip had created this spell several times over the past month, adjusting his technique and making variations with the words he planned to bind the knotted threads with tonight. Over the past few years, he had created dozens of spells, not merely out of curiosity or to study his powers but for necessity, as weavers cannot use the spells of other weavers, they can only use their own.

Philip had to create spells for simple things such as lighting a candle or healing small cuts, spells included in any other witch family grimoire that would have been studied by teenage witches his same age. However, the spells he created were not the only method by which he could use his gifts.

He had a great connection to the power of flame, a burning ability rarely seen in witches, something that sets him apart from those who rely on spoken spells to shape their power and pushes him towards witches who could simply use the magic that already existed in his very skin. Even so, as a weaver, he had the ability to borrow the powers from the other elemental lines of Air and Water. Though his control of these abilities, while still powerful, was often tenuous at best and unreliable at worst.

As Philip closed the seventh knot around the sixth, the loose threads of Air and Water were pulled into the glowing orb as the spell began the process of stabilizing. The golden threads settled over the orb as it shrunk down to a single glowing point, Philip let out a sigh as he examined the completed spell.

He gently pushed the spell to the side as he flourished his hand towards his bed to his right, from beneath the mattress came a golden leatherbound book. He flipped to the first page and began to write in the final words of the spell to accompany the knot. This unusual preparation for a single spell was not unjustified, as the inclusion of the golden thread in the knots changed the spell's nature into that of higher magics.

Unlike regular spells, higher magic spells contained additional threads within their structure such as black threads of death and silver threads of godly power that provide particular attributes to a spell that increase its power and therefore increase the cost of its use. The preformation of these spells did more than drain a witch's energy, they were addictive and often caused physical and psychological damage to the practitioner.

This was the first of Philip's higher magic spells, and as he finished writing on the last of the page in his new book of shadows, a higher magics grimoire, he called to the spell to his left. Philip pushed his long fingers through his ear-length, ember-red hair as the spell sat before him. His hair caught on a hangnail of his chewed digits, he released his messed hair and reached for the light before him.