Pentagram

Zen's Gift

                Mika came upstairs a few minutes later with another mug of the same tea, and she quickly shoved it into my hands. "Drink it, now."

                The way she said it made it sound like it was an emergency, and either way I had to listen to her. So I quickly downed the contents of the mug.

                "What is this tea?" I said as my mind cleared, "It's working miracles."

                "We call it a sanity potion." She paused, "I drink some after I witness something...well, unsettling."

                "What do you mean?" I blinked.

                "Akaya...I've seen a lot of things in this city." She stared into my eyes, "No matter how many times you see something terrifying, you can never be truly desensitized. Without this potion, I would have gone insane a long time ago."

                "I take it all of your habits have reasoning to them?"

                She nodded, "The two baths a day rule is an excellent example. That bathwater helps draw out extra magic energy that our human bodies cannot handle. If we didn't take those baths two times a day, we'd have to let out large quantities of magic every few weeks - and when someone lets out a lot of magic, it's not normally something pleasant."

                "Are there other ways to regulate our magic?" I blinked.

                "For a familiar it's easy. Just use magic once a day, until you're exhausted. For someone like me, it's harder. Even if I exhaust all of my magic, it will simply begin building up again. Familiars are limited to a certain amount of magic every twenty four hours, or every half day Metropolis time." She paused, "There's also creatures that feed off of magic. Dramyling are like magic leeches, they'll attach themselves to people and feed off their magic...there's also meditation, and a few other methods. But the bath is the most practical, since you should be taking two every day anyways."

                "Oh."

                "Now Akaya...what exactly did you see?" She frowned, "I've never seen someone shaken up that badly from that room."

                My head started pounding again., I saw my reflection in Mika's eyes.  My pupils were small,  and my eyes were too wide.

                "I had one of the boggarts leave a pot of the sanity potion outside of the room. If you need more, just tell me." Her voice sounded distorted to me.

                "Please..." I started.

                She took the mug from me, and walked out of the room, returning seconds later with the cup full. I took it from her, and sipped the salty liquid from it. "There was...something. A tree, covered in blood." I shuddered, remembering how violent things became. "At first I saw these people...images or something.  There were at least a dozen of them and a dog, and they..." I stopped, eyes widening, "They walked straight through me...and their eyes, they didn't have eyes! They didn't-"

                Mika put a comforting hand on my leg, "Calm down, keep drinking the potion."

                "I don't know what happened exactly. Bodies were hanging from the tree, the tall grass around me became stained with blood. And I heard screaming...so many screams. Mika, I've never been so shocked in my life. I thought I was going insane!" But the sharpest memory was the pair of piercing yellow eyes that flashed through my head. "And I saw these eyes. These terrible yellow eyes, filled with so much hate and malice..." I took another drink of the sanity potion, hands shaking. "And whatever it was, it said three words."