“Pentru a gerded a dugudess. Pentru a Scyrii kao buve.” Dani repeated the invocation, chanting over a 6 tone scale. Her full firm pale arms rose to the sky as her tone rose and she drew them back down to her rising and falling chest. Her raven black hair was swept back over her bare sturdy shoulders. On a few repetitions, as she began to exhale and inhale the words and her body began to sway, her hands cupped her breasts, or did their best too, her flesh overflowed her gentle caress. I think she thought I didn’t notice.

I shouldn’t have. I was bringing incense before our altar and lighting it as it came to rest in the bowls I had waiting for them. I clipped a spread of frankincense, ground it down in a green crystalline bowl and set it ablaze. I repeated the process, making requests of the spirits that guided us and dedicating our coming sacrifice to them, with jasmine and honey and pine and amber and sandalwood. Then I raised our grimoire from its lectern, a weighty volume covered in treated birch bark resting on a sturdy dark wood with rosy purpleheart veins. It was open to the invocation Dani, Danica, my girlfriend of 6 years, was repeating. I studied the words and the neumes then carried the book over above the burning jewel bowls of incense and inhaled deeply before beginning to chant in a discordant unison with Danica. 

I walked over, holding the text a loft and brought it down to hand it to her, our eyes locking for a moment and our lips smiling with hungry delight as we chant. As I handed her the book I continued her motions, raising my hands to the sky and drawing the powers of the universe onto myself. I could feel something shivering and shuddering around me as I did. 

Dani strode confidently, her sheer billowing robes swishing with her divine hips, to the altar, took her own inhalation of incense then deposited the book back on its lectern. She brushed by me again as she circled the room back towards the wall opposite our altar and gathered up the mewing mountain lion from the floor. 

It took a lot for me to stay focussed on our invocation in that moment. The cat wasn’t dead, it was only in a hazy drugged state and not entirely unconscious. It had taken a lot to capture it. The beast had been preying on humans the next state over for several weeks and through our spell work, Dani’s physical prowess, and careful tracking we’d managed to tranquilize it, cage it and keep it sedated for the past week taking our ability to take it as a sign that we could go forward with this.

So I was shaking with nerves as Dani heaved the massive beast up in her arms and I could hear a quiet subdued whine laced with a hint of that terrifying mountain lion scream. I had my back turned, as the ritual dictated, but I heard her lower the big cat onto the altar. She plunged one last dose of drugs into its system. A refined and enchanted dose that made this whole situation incredibly deadly if anything should go wrong. I heard the large feline head thunk down on the altar behind me and Dani’s padding feet cross the room to where our ceremonial knife sat by its cleansing water. I heard the splash of water as she washed and readied the knife. She changed her chants at this point, I did not. 

Her bare feet tread across the cool stone. Then I heard it, the sound I knew was coming, but feared most, the cougar’s breathing began to hasten, it was still immobile by the deafening silence of the room, but the breathing meant it was waking. Then I heard two sounds in tandem, the first was the devil’s cry of an angry wildcat ready to kill and the second on its tail, before the cat’s cry could echo, of a blade piercing through tough skin and strong muscle in through the heart of the mighty predator. It was followed by the sound of the creatures skin tearing and a desperate aching cry as the mountain lion panted and gave up its last. Danica spoke a few more phrases in the jumbled mess of our sacred language as she carved the cat up. I heard her blade working swiftly to skin the cat, it clinked a bit as she cut out it’s teeth, she worked as I chanted with my back turned for nearly and hour, burning the appropriate pieces, which was most of it. Then she gathered up the final pieces for the ritual, set them on the the altar, and padded back across the room to the knife’s basin and stand. She washed the knife and her arms then turned back. I heard her robe fall weightless to the ground as she walked before the altar, baring her whole being. She tore the last piece of meat in three parts with her teeth. One piece she set aside on the altar, one she lowered into a final fire, saying the right incantation, and the final she gulped down nearly whole before saying the closing words of the ritual. 

She turned back towards the room and began to walk a circle, beyond my wildest hope her padding feet sounded a little bit more forceful with each step. She returned to the altar, as I stood, hands up raised in silence. She quenched the flames in each bowl and set them back in their place. Her feet splashed a little as she moved about at the altar. She walked to the right hand side and closed our spellbook. Then she began to make her way towards me, slowly sauntering.

As she walked the world began to rise up around me, I don’t mean that as some symbol of hope, but as a description of my perspective. The three paned wall of window that looked out on our garden before me grew taller, the top most pane rushing above my head, the second, and then the bar marking off the third went from eye level to something far beyond my reach, to something high beyond my world as the seals in our stonework began to rise around me. As I shrunk this shadow loomed over me, blocking out the light and growing closer with each earthshaking step. 

Suddenly the air smelled so strongly of iron I could taste it. And before I could make sense of it a flood of red blood washed around me. Then the shadow stopped as two massive walls of pale flesh landed on either side of me, rising at least twice my height. 

“You may turn now, Kaleb.” Her voice thundered above and all around me and as I turned to look up and the towering might of my beautiful, powerful, naked girlfriend she finished, “The ritual is complete.”