The Warp and The Weft

Chapter Nine: Stone, Blood, and Sorcery - Rebecca

Rebecca sat back in the padded seat she claimed between her brother and Angelique, reclining as she tapped the end of a Montblanc pen against her white teeth while in another hand she loosely held a book. It was a rather unassuming piece of stationary, it was only about nine by five inches in size with black leather binding containing thick stone paper. The leather was worn smooth around the edges from heavy use over years and the pages towards the front of the book appeared more discoloured and rugged than the more newly inscribed pages towards the middle and back.

Despite its mundane appearance, this small travel sketchbook was in fact Rebecca's Book of Shadows, her personal Grimoire, containing her own woven spells particularly those of a darker and more powerful nature. Unlike Philip, who clung to tradition with his large vellum-leafed, clasp-bound Book of Shadows, Rebecca was more comfortable having a less conspicuous Spellbook that she could work on in public rather than shut up in some dark and mysterious library.

Her spellbook was filled with intricate scrollwork in the shape of Weaver's Knots and complicated diagrams of spell structure and ritual outlines. To any passerby, it would seem like nothing more than an eccentric sketchbook. But to any self-respecting witch, it was nothing less than a goldmine of power. Unlike the ordinary Spellbooks of Higher Witches found worldwide, these spells and rituals were all newborn Weavings under ten years old. Their power was potent and pure enough that merely the inked words on the page pulsated with sealed energy.

The spells followed the talents unique to her as a Weaver with a majority of the spells being worldly in nature. Rebecca has always been tied heavily to the material world. Her magic bound to flesh and earth with most of the Dark Spells within being some form of Healing, Offense, Defense, or Transmogrification while still being found alongside common Spells for Fire, Levitation and Protection.

"You sure that's safe to do up here?" Ange said, nodding towards the book "if you drain the power of this machine, I'll make your afterlife a non-living hell."

"It's fine," Rebecca replied flipping a page "I'm not writing in any spells, I'm just fiddling with some knots."

Rebecca knew spells, when written or copied for the first time, are required to be sealed into the pages of a book. Doing so usually causes a large amount of energy to be pulled from the environment causing power outages and in some cases hard, sudden frosts over the surrounding area. The words of a spell within a spell book must be bound to the pages lest they slip free from their confines and cause uncontrolled mayhem. This reaction is only substantial once a spell is given words by a Weaver through Gramarye, until then the knots are only able to be manipulated by the Weaver forming the spell.

Rebecca read over the lines of text she had copied from an old Grimoire she found in The Mazarino Library, it was quite amazing what private reading material you could access by simply having two highly decorated academics as parents. It was a small 14th-century Manuscript tucked away in a dusty corner of a second-floor balcony behind some almost ancient volumes of detailed botanical illustrations and an old ledger containing entries for some pre-revolution brothel in Versailles.

It was a beautiful book, filled with old powerful spells that tasted like blackberries on her tongue when she spoke them out, they were of no use to her as one Weaver cannot use the spells of another, but she could still feel how the magic rolled in her mouth and filled her lungs. They were mostly old Norman and Breton spells of healing, growth, and old herbal magics, whoever wrote this Grimoire was a powerful healer. Rebecca could feel the old healer on every page, a piece of her soul rested in the book from every leaf and folio through the spine and every binding. It was a power without malice or violence, purely a power of generosity and care.