Episode 252: Out of Body (Talise)

The door creaked open. “Niels!” Talise sighed in excitement.

Blonde hair turned the corner – not Niels. Talise took a deep breath and tried to relax on the bed. 

“It’s only me, I’m afraid.” Ulysses shut the door behind him. He approached her bed with his hand in the air. “You’re warded; alarms won’t work. Neither will speaking to your dragons.”

“You’re here to take me,” Talise stated. “Isn’t it early?”

She wouldn’t see Niels again.

“Something changed elsewhere,” Ulysses explained. Not thoroughly. It was one of those adults I know better things.

Talise looked at the two bassinets that held her sons. She stood. “I’ll be okay?”

Ulysses’ lips formed a smile, but his eyes hung low in a sigh. “You will be. You wouldn’t have been, but as I said…something has changed.”

Talise walked to the bassinets and kissed her boys on the head. Caspian. Alde. Her last moments with them, until fate.

It was the first time she couldn’t fight something.

No…the second. She was helpless the second she met Niels, but it was a good sort of helpless. This…

“Okay,” Talise breathed. She took Ulysses’ hand.

Ulysses stood in the room. His hand gripped hers more firmly. “They will also be safe,” he uttered as the room vanished.

They appeared in a street. Indigo, Dacey’s dad, her mom, someone she didn’t know all lie in a pentagon motionless. Their eyes screamed.

Talise pulled away from Ulysses. “What’s going on?”

Ulysses sighed as a bird crumbled a spell above her.

***

There were screams. 

It was the first sign she was alive, awake, anywhere.

The wind blew, cold against Talise. She was naked. She couldn’t remember going to sleep, or waking up, or anything.

She was just there, in the middle of the road, the full moon shining bright above her.

Encompassed in screams above her, beside her, below her, and beside her again. Five different screams, five different places. A pentagon. Talise was unable to move. Unable to look. Then there was silence.

Ulysses kneeled beside Talise. Her eyes, wide open, watched as his blood spattered face covered her view of the full moon.

He pulled a syringe out of his pocket. It had no needle, just the little tube full of shimmery silver liquid. He used his thumb to pull Talise’s mouth open and he drizzled the liquid into her mouth.

Ulysses tossed the syringe to the side and sat back on the asphalt.

“I don’t pretend to know what you feel,” Ulysses said. “But I would like to talk with you.”

As he spoke, Talise’s lips unhinged from their prison. Her heart throbbed in her chest, so hard her eyes had tears. 

Or maybe it was the blood. She didn’t know anymore.

Talise moved her jaw and cleared her throat. “Why?”

“Because.” Ulysses looked to the sky. “You are at the heart of this and I want to be sure I’m doing the right thing.”

Generally, murder isn’t the right thing, Talise thought.

Ulysses sighed. He ran his hands through his grey-blonde stubble and looked at her. “What made you choose Niels Poulsen?”

“Um.” What did it matter? No. Talise remembered what everyone had promised: she would be okay. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. This was it…this was the last few moments of whatever was about to happen. She’d trained for this. She could do it.

If she believed in herself.

“Because no one else completes me like he does,” Talise answered. “I trust him with everything.”

“What does your heir think of him?” Ulysses asked.

“He loves him?” Tears filled Talise’s eyes. They stung. She couldn’t blink them away – they were still frozen in the paralysis-spell. Only her mouth worked the right way.

With each new tear, her world blurred more

“Everything will be fine,” Talise said aloud.

Ulysses smile careened toward his ears. “It will be. They will have you back soon, I promise that. Do you feel your parents are in a stable place?”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I want to help; your family, your children, your kingdom. Darkness is moving. You are not yet equipped to stop it.”

“How is this helpful?”

“When I was young, my mother killed me. I had the best afternoon of my life in Death realm. It taught me to see that there was more to the universe than my own short vision. What you perceive as suffering, now, might look entirely different in retrospect.”

“That’s not an answer!” Talise belted out.

Ulysses studied her. He got to his knees and began assembling things. Metal things clanked out of Talise’s vision. She couldn’t move her head, she couldn’t move anything but her lips.

“Do you have any questions?” Ulysses asked.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Imagine that you gambled with dice. You’re familiar with dice?”

“Nope,” Talise lied sarcastically.

Ulysses looked at her, confused. The mask turned to a laugh. “Of course you do.” He picked up a shiny scalpel. “A gambling man would pick a number and hope that it was correct. He might cheat and weight the cube so that it always lands on the same side. What I am doing here, tonight, with you, is not weighting the dice. I’m calling every possibility forward, so that I can find one where it lands on the number I want, and I’m shifting the realities, to win.”

Talise wanted to burn. He’d stolen her magic. She was just a shell, for his spell.

“What’s wrong with this reality?”

“It’s going to die,” he said. He wiped a tear from his face. “Now, then.”

Ulysses raised the scalpel into the air

“Please!” Talise begged, her self shattering. She couldn’t do this.

She couldn’t move.

Ulysses dug the blade through Talise’s bare stomach. Despite not being able to move it, the pain was there, all of it. She couldn’t pull away, or flinch.

“You’re lucky I’m in control,” Ulysses said. He pulled away. “You’ve done something to your body to amplify the spell?” His brow furrowed. “Why, if you disagree?”

“Because. Things.”

Because she’d trusted Konrad, and she’d trusted Spence, and she’d trusted everyone.

Because no one told her this was coming.

“I wish I had thought of that answer when you asked me why I was doing this,” Ulysses mused. He moved back down, and the pain burned brighter.

He began to sing as he worked.

Part of Talise moved, despite the paralysis spell.

Ulysses moved faster, each cut burned brighter. When Talise couldn’t breathe anymore, when her body was shuddering and heaving, Ulysses stopped.

“Don’t forget that you’re loved.” Ulysses reached into her, the same song repeated once again. And again, until there was nothing left.

Robin, little friend
Spring is here again
Robin of the blue eggs

Grow your wings in spring
Ride the summer winds
Current of the blue sky

Robin in the fall
Hear winter’s call
Winter of the blue ice

Robin, little friend
Won’t you be my friend?
Spring is here again

<- Episode 251 |

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Thank you for reading War of the Wicca Part One.

This story will be continued one day, once the pieces of the spell have been aligned.