Tellus separae
Just like the last symbol on the amulet, she wasn’t familiar with any of the spellwords they’d used. It seemed, once again, that there were parts of her own magic, her own culture, that had been hidden from her.
So, feeling frustrated yet again, she decided to take a break from that and work on the mission from Cole for a bit, just in case he came around asking questions.
She’d promised Cole they would start to experiment with different runes that might work for Imbuing her Gift into anobject, so she was flipping through a book on runes to see if any stood out to her as potentially being compatible with hervisanis.
It wasn’t long until she found one that she thought might work. It was one of the same runes used to control the water in the aqueducts, and was repeatedly referred to as theimperiumrune, so she went to look it up in the rune dictionary. The dictionary contained helpful information about each recorded rune, including common uses, as well as which other runes it was incompatible with. Casually, she flipped to theimperiumrune’s entry, which read:
Imperium rune
Common uses: to control or direct certain elements (i.e. water, heat, air)
Antithetical to: diabolus rune
Ena froze. That last rune mentioned.Diabolus.Wasn’t that one of the spellwords she’d heard in her vision?
Frantically, she flipped through the rune dictionary looking for the entry on thediabolusrune. The entry read:
Diabolus rune
Common Uses: to create chaos, disruption, and disorder of elements (water, heat, air, etc.)
Antithetical to: imperium rune, tellus rune
To cause chaos, disruption, and disorder? That was unexpected. Wiccan magic was usually rooted in Gaia’s balance, drawing on the natural elements. Causing chaos, disruption, and disorder was Iblis’s will—his domain.
But that was definitely one of the words they’d used, which meant…was it possible that the binding spell drew on Iblis’s chaos magic? And if they were drawing on his magic, then…
The witches must have been channeling Iblis’s will to complete it.
Ena stared at the page, her eyes blank.
It made so much sense now—why the spell had feltwrongfrom the moment she’d seen it. Why it had never felt like Gaia’s will at all. And even though she knew now that channeling Iblis’s will was notalwaysa bad thing, in this case, it had thrown the entire magical order into chaos and had had significant negative consequences for everyone.
But also…the fact that this spellword came from a daemonic rune name meant that, again, the witches had borrowed from daemonic magical traditions to create the spellwords, just as they had with the amulet’s symbols.
Was it possible the other words came from daemonic magic too?
Ena flipped frantically through the rune dictionary, looking for rune names similar to the other spellwords, and she found them each in turn:
Vocarus rune
Common Uses: to summon a mind channel with whomever touches the object, allowing the Power of the mind Imbued within to influence them.
Antithetical to: fugus rune
Separus rune
Common Uses: to sever an Imbued object’s connection to the source Power, effectively removing its Imbued abilities.
Antithetical to: restoras rune
Tellus rune
Common Uses: to create equilibrium within an object Imbued with multiple Powers, balancing them and allowing them to coexist in equal measure.
Antithetical to: diabolus rune
