Cedar Sanderson is doing N'inktober, so I'm going to follow along and do what I've been trained to do by the Raconteur Press Postcard books: come up with a story to match her visual prompts. I can't guarantee that I'll have a complete story for every image, but I'm going to at least try to come up with a scene, a start, or an idea!
Coffee Failure
Hanska lifted his head, nose wrinkling in obvious distaste as he sniffed the air. The morning sun streaming in from the kitchen window splashed off his deep black fur like a wave crashing against the beach.
“Sora. What is that?”
I yawned and did my best to focus as I dumped coffee grounds into my French press. I wasn’t even used to having human guests for breakfast in my tiny studio apartment. When your great-grandmother’s old familiar shows up a few months after her funeral looking for a place to stay, though, you make room.
“Gluten-free organic vegan banana muffin made with almond flour and coconut oil. Do you want one?”
“Bleah!” The black fox recoiled, hackles rising, and stuck his tongue out in a surprisingly human gesture. “No thank you. That smells like what food eats. I don’t suppose you have any bacon?”
“Is that what Great Gran Beachey used to feed you?”
“Mmm.” Hanska licked his lips. “Thick sliced, fried up. Then she’d soak up the leavings with corn meal and buckwheat. It’s been ages since I had good scrapple.” He looked hopeful. “I don’t suppose…”
“We can get you something later. I am not bringing anything dead into this house. I had enough problems getting the qi in here right.”
Hanska cocked his head. “Geomancy? I thought Koliah said you were training as a diviner.”
Still sleepy, it took me a minute to realize he was talking about great-gran. Of course he’d call her by name - they’d been partners for the vast majority of her life. I tried to clear my thoughts as I poured water for the coffee.
“Well, kind of. ‘Fate calculator’ is a better term. It’s more magical statistics than anything. It’s a lot more titchy than actual divination, though, which is why I try to keep the energy here harmonized.”
“Huh. I’m curious. Why bother, if it’s more difficult?”
I stirred the coffee with an old butterknife. “Because I like keeping my head intact? With divination rituals, you end up calling on old things that think they’re gods. Or tapping into universal ley lines. Or trying to hold a magical model of the future in your skull. Any of which can result in possession, explosion, or straight-up insanity.” I shook my head. “Real divination is dangerous.”
“Tell me about it,” the fox muttered. When I shot him a glance he shook his head. “Never mind. Just… thinking about some of my recent troubles.”
“Good segue. Tell me about that. Last I saw you was at great-gran’s funeral.”
Hanska chuckled, mouth lolling open in a fox’s smile as I poured my coffee. “That was one for the books, wasn’t it? I think just about every major ethnic and religious group represented there.”
“You get that when an Amish witch marries a Sioux medicine man. That kind of opened the flood gates.”
That was only partially true. Magical practitioners were attracted to others with similar talents for a number of good reasons. My grandmother had married a Russian conjurer, and my mother had found love in the arms of a Li Chinese shaman. My family tree looked like Yggdrasil, with branches winding through time across six continents and a handful of major island chains.
“Quit trying to change the subject, though. Why are you here?”
Hanska coughed. “Well, I was passing through —”
I interrupted him with the look my mother had used on me many times through my teenage years. I didn’t have children of my own, so I wasn’t nearly as practiced as she had been, so I made up for it by pushing a tiny bit of qi into my gaze.
That was apparently enough to stop the fox in his tracks. “OK, fine. I need your help.” He kind of sunk down into a crouch, making a large, black, furry meatloaf on the hardwood floor. “Koliah thought highly of you. She said you were going to make a name for yourself as a diviner. I could use a little help in that area right now.”
I considered him sternly as I blew on my coffee and took a sip. “Can you afford my rates?”
He had the good grace to look chagrined. “Any chance of a family discount?”
“Ha! I kid. You’re family.” Taking on a familiar was much like an adoption. We all took it seriously. “Grandma spoke well of you, too. I’d be happy to help. Let me finish this so I can wake up and I’ll see what we can do. What exactly is the problem?”
Hanska stayed in his meatloaf, but lifted up his head. “All I know is nothing is working for me now. Cantrips fizzle. Spells conk out. Every incantation I’ve tried has gone wrong somehow.”
“When did this start?”
He turned his head, avoiding my eyes, but said nothing. I waited, sipping coffee, then finally put my cup down.
“Hanska? When did your magic start going wrong?”
He still didn’t look at me. “Last month. At first I thought it might just be me, but then I realized how the timing worked out.” He finally turned back, and his expression was carefully neutral. “It started 137 days after her funeral.”
The coffee did nothing to warm up the chill that ran down my spine. Arithmancy was not my forte, but I knew that number. Any practitioner worth their salt did. There are a few magic numbers that crop up everywhere. You can’t do any magic at all without tripping over three, seven, or twenty-three. One-hundred and thirty seven, though? That one was particularly potent. It even showed up in mundane physics.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I can count that high, even without rolling over.”
“Hmm.” I stood up and pushed my coffee cup aside, clearing out some working room on the table. “Show me. I’ll attach a diagnostic and we’ll see what’s going on.”
His ears perked up. “Right here? Now?”
“No time like the present. Let me see….” I took a scoop of coffee from my tin and poured it into my hand, pushing just a hint of qi as I did so. I wanted the most subtle connection to the ground coffee I could manage.
Hanska rose to his feet, watching with undisguised interest, but held his tongue. I took pity on him and explained.
“I’m going to try a bit of alomancy while you work a cantrip.”
He yipped. “Isn’t that real divination, though? I thought you said that was dangerous!”
“Yes and no. Divination is about seeing the future. This is more about seeing the now. It’s just a different form of observing something that already exists.” I rolled the coffee around in my hand a bit, getting a feel for it. “Alomancy traditionally calls for salt, since all living creatures have an innate affinity for that substance. In this case, though, I want to clearly distinguish between your magic and my own. I’ve had coffee; you haven’t. So this should do the trick nicely.”
“Isn’t that decaf?”
“Quiet, you. It’s the ritual that matters." I held my hand above the table. “OK. Let’s try something simple. Cool my coffee down for me. Go slow so I can get in on it.”
He stretched, shaking his head. “Right! OK. I’ve got this. Here we go.”
He focused on the cup and started to hum. As he went, his voice shifted and changed, making sounds that sounded almost like words. They probably were, in whatever language mythical foxes used.
I was more interested in the cadence of his vocalizations. Effective verbal magic is like music. There’s a pattern to it. For the most part, a trained practitioner can listen to a spell and get a good idea of what was happening. So just as Hanska reached the point where it sounded like he was completing the spell, I tipped my hand and let the coffee grounds fall to the table.
Typically, in a case like this, what you’re looking at is the way the grounds fall, and how they land. It’s a subtle skill, but one I’d spent some time mastering, since it was one of the least risky ways for me to gather data I needed for my calculations.
So I was a bit disappointed when the coffee fell to the table without so much as a twitch. Immediately after, Hanska coughed, startling me. He looked apologetic as he spread his mouth wide, making a wet lip-smacking noise.
“Sorry. Got something in my throat. Just like every other time. Did you see anything?”
“No.” I frowned. “The way the coffee fell? It was like there was nothing there. But I could feel your magic building. Let’s try again.”
I reached to brush up the coffee - waste not, want not - and it moved as I approached it, swirling and rising around my outstretched hand. Somewhere in the back of my head, a bit of my mind was panicking, trying to get my attention, but a preternatural calm washed over me, drowning out the worries.
I watched as the shifting stream of coffee stretched up, up, up over my head. Each grain of coffee grew in size as it rose, from the size of a bean to the size of a golf ball. A swirling, chaotic torrent of baseball-sized coffee chunks ripped through the ceiling of my apartment. I traced the coffee and swirling debris as it as it rose into the midnight blackness above us, obscuring dim stars that burned in unfamiliar constellations.
There was a pattern in the tumbling configuration of coffee and debris. I could almost see it. I became aware of a low, slow rumble of thunder nibbling at the edge of my consciousness. The sound of it sucked the heat from the air around me, leaving me shivering and cold. Behind me, I heard something shatter. I ignored it, focusing on the sound that seemed on the brink of becoming understandable. I could tell that it wanted something, but not quite what. Or who. Or was it both?
I was on the verge of comprehending both the patterns and the voice, ready to reach out and take both of them into me, when something unseen slammed into my chest like a white-hot ball.
I was flat on my back in my apartment, staring up at my completely-intact ceiling. Hanska was sitting on my chest, paws on my shoulder, lips curled back in a snarl. It took me a moment to realize that his expression wasn’t anger, but fear.
“Sora! SORA! Are you OK? SORA!”
“I’m… fine!” I managed to wheeze. “You’re heavy!”
“Sorry! Sorry!” He rolled off me, popping to his feet. “Sorry! You scared me! You went away, and then your aura went black! You wouldn’t move, and then your aura started growing and stretching, and I got scared!”
I sat up, shivering fro the memory of the cold. “You did good, Hanska. Thank you.”
He sidled up and leaned into me. His fur was coarse, but warm. I wrapped an arm around reflexively to keep my balance and to get closer to the heat of him.
“What was that?”
“That was a divination.” I shuddered. “Not mine. I was trying to hook on to your spell, but whatever that thing was? It was already there.”
“Already there? What do you mean?”
“Someone’s already got a damn hefty divination spell on you for some reason. They tried to use me as a conduit to get to you.” I shuddered, thinking about the implications.
“What? Why?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out.” As my shivering subsided, my anger rose. “I don’t take kindly to being used. And, like I said - you’re family. Whatever this is, we’ll figure it out.”