She laid down on the couch and carefully shut her eyes, all while thinking of a beautiful sunrise cresting over a flowery field. Juliana desperately tried to ignore the horde of skeletons that had joined the zombies trampling over the hills.
The Invitation
A hot fire burned away the cold October air. It crackled and warmed the young instructor’s office. The professor sat in her chair, calmly reading through a thin book as the red flames scorched the walls of her fireplace.
Zoe Baxter sighed and snapped her book shut. She tossed it into a pile of similar books and grabbed the next book on her stack. It slipped from her tired fingers and clattered to the floor. Zoe didn’t bother to pick it up. If the pile of worthless books was any indication, it wouldn’t help anyway. She moved on to the next book in the stack.
There were no records to be found of any books, tomes, or grimoires titled Exanimis de Mortuum.
It didn’t help that Eva’s description had been so vague. There were apparently no words on the cover, just a pentagram with a man inside it. Its effects were to shield souls from Death. Randolph Carter had recognized it almost instantly from the cover alone.
Randolph Carter suffered some sort of injury while finding the cover of the grimoire. He promptly vanished presumably to find a way to heal himself. That’s what Eva said, in any case. Zoe hadn’t seen the man since their first meeting over a month ago now. Eva said that her only instructions were for the book to be destroyed.
And therein lay the heart of her current problem.
The book was proving impossible to damage.
Zoe thought there might have been a hint or directions for its disposal, but she couldn’t find a reference to it anywhere. There was no word on any alternate names it might go by and Zoe couldn’t even ask because of Carter’s disappearance.
She had tried the standard methods for eliminating dangerous objects, but none worked. The disguised cover, Resplendent Mysteriis, had long since been destroyed. It was the bulk of the black pages that refused any attempts at destruction.
Eva made her impatience clear. She only got more nervous as time elapsed. The phases of the moon bothered her as did the upcoming Halloween. They passed the day of the new moon without incident, but even Zoe was apprehensive about Halloween.
If she couldn’t find a way to destroy the book by the thirty-first, she was very seriously considering handing it over to Eva.
The girl was strongly convinced that she could destroy the book where Zoe had failed. She said that it was her who destroyed the phylactery they stole earlier in the year. That Eva refused to speak of what methods she would use and refused to allow Zoe to watch both lent credence to her claims as well as disturbed Zoe.
There was little doubt that Randolph Carter used magics more obscure than proper thaumaturgy. Those obscure magics generally fell into one of two categories: light and dark. If the man was a practitioner of light magic then Zoe would eat kiviak for a month straight.
Zoe tossed another book on the pile. None of them were helping and the few left unread in the stack likely wouldn’t either. She stood up and paced around her small office.
Other help could be called in, of course. Several groups were known to fight this sort of thing. Any of them would cause a big stir about the whole situation that the academy simply didn’t need right now. She was lucky that none of the three students involved in this mess raised a fuss about it.
Of course, Shalise didn’t have anyone to raise a fuss to. Not that the girl knew of anyway. Juliana wouldn’t dare tell her mother more than she already had. Genoa had had several words for Zoe about her daughter’s activities over the summer and none of those words were very kind.
Eva not only had no one to tell but also was the primary maker of trouble.
A chime rang through the office. Zoe stopped pacing with a sigh. The students would arrive soon and she hardly got sleep the night before. She definitely made no progress with the book.
She glared at the book that was sitting deep in her roaring fireplace. It happily soaked up the flames without suffering a single singe. Zoe flicked her dagger, extinguishing the flames, and dropped the book back to between. At least there it should be safe from theft and mostly immutable.
Through the one-way wall, Zoe could see her classroom already filling with students. Her three sat together with Wayne’s two and the Coggins twins. The seven seemed good friends, at least while they were in class. It might be a good idea to encourage it out of class. That might also encourage the others to get involved with the more sordid goings on.
