Sleep Journal - 190114 - Fairge Anma

[kimurho]

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Sleep Journal
14 January 2019

I headed for the library after leaving my classmates. I like libraries. Oases of quiet and calm. Fortresses of knowledge buttressed with the wisdom of ages.

Or the folly of sages.

I've always had to go over new information immediately to set it properly in my mind. While my memory is fresh, I can expand the notes I made in the moment. I can remember exactly what my preceptor said and how it was said. I can find the gaps still remaining in my understanding, and figure out how to find the answers.

I've always done this, as long as I can remember, even back before, when I lived in the village and the only books available were those to be found in the priest's house and Granny's own leabhar dubhair; the book wherein she kept a record of all her charms, and cures, and potions, the passage of the years and the seasons of weather. Back then, I would take my copy of Granny's lessoning out to the forest, sit under the oak tree where the roots made a bench, and I would make notes down the margins of the leabhar dubhair I was creating, copying words from her original, filling in details of what she said or did that were not written down in her book. It was quiet there, under the oak, and I could think.

Remembering now back on those days, I think that sometimes I must felt Brigid's presence, even then, guiding me. She was the Lady of Cill Dara, the priestess of the Church of the Oaks.

Of course, it wasn't so pleasant out in the forest in winter and I couldn't go when the weather was foul.

That was the one thing I liked about ... after. His library. I had never seen so many books. Whenever I had the chance, I went in there. I had my book; he considered it primitive and beneath his notice. He didn't think that I could understand the higher magics that his library contained. Like how gates in the World open. And how to hide magical workings.

There was much he did not see about me in those years before I escaped him.

One of the problems of living here in the World is understanding. My understanding of this my new World.

Naturally, as soon as I stepped forth through the Gate, I had cast a spell to enable to slip into place. To understand the language and the pinnings of language, the customs and mores of the time and place wherein I found myself. The spell gave me an identity and the cards I needed to pass. Sarah Farris.

When I had time, I did a little discrete research to find who I was. The Sarah Farris of this World would have been about my age, had she lived, but she died while still an infant and was buried in a quiet grave.

As time passed, the spell wore away; experience and usage replaced the working. Sometimes, though, I find my understanding is not as perfect as I would like it to be. Somebody says something ... uses a word or phrase that I know well from my previous life, but I find that what they truly mean is something quite different.

Take the words Ghost, Spirit, and Haunt, for example.

Craig ... Dr. Stevenson uses them interchangeably, as though they mean the essentially the same thing.

Back home, there are distinct differences.

A ghost is the shade of someone who had died. There are a few of what he called replay ghosts, both traumatic and stone-record; there are some battlefields that it's more than a person's sanity is worth to wander about at full dark or on the anniversary of the battle and I've seen for myself the shade of a woman falling off the pinnacle of a rock. Her screams of terror are quite real but she fades out of sight before she reaches the bottom.

They say that if someone were to stand where she falls, her hands will reach out toward them and pull them down with her. I never checked the veracity of that story.

The greater majority of hauntings back home (not haunts) are what he called the classic ghost. Souls who have come back to relate some message, or who have been cursed to remain earthbound for one reason or another. A murdered soldier wanting someone to find his body so he could be buried on holy ground, for example, or a mother returning to watch over her children.

And then there was the time that Yeoman Walther was thinking of marrying his eldest daughter to Hansen Miller in return for a concession on the grazing rights of the water meadow. The proposed bridegroom was only a few years younger than the yeoman and he'd recently lost his second bride a few months back. Yeoman Walther's wife was solidly opposed and she let him know that in no uncertain terms, loud enough for his nearest neighbour over the rise could hear her arguments. But it was his old granny coming back and sitting at his bedside for three nights running that convinced him to refuse the contract.

As it turned out, the miller's wife wasn't dead at all - he'd sold her to the Gentry to use as nursemaid.

Back where I grew up, a spirit was what someone here might call a supernatural being. Sometimes corporeal, sometimes non-corporeal. Hobs, tree-men, trolls, water-wraiths, those are all spirits. So are goblins, boggarts, bogies, and Gentry. Some spirits are malicious, some are just plain folk.

A haunt, on the otherhand, is always malicious. And dangerous. Always non-corporeal, although they can manifest and do physical harm if it please them. Some of them are capable of possessing the living and using their forms to create mischief. Others are more like leeches, sucking the life out of their victims.

As for what Craig termed "Animal Ghosts", those I would call those spirits.

Most are bogies - as distinct from boggarts which is a subspecies of hobmen. Bogies are malicious and deliberately frightening shape-shifters. Some can only change in size. Others can transform into different animals or even take human form. These latter are the worst; they are invariably the ones that crave man-flesh and physical form. They forget their own nature in the glory of corporeality. The former, for the most part, take sustenance on the emotion of fear and panic.

Granny thought that bogies were a distant relative to genii loci; spirits of place, local gods and deities. Nature spirits, attached to trees and rocks, rivers and fields, mountains and seas. While most local deities are usually benevolent, blessing their worshippers and followers and granting wishes to the best of their ability, they can have their dark side. They are jealous and petty and quick to take offense where none is intended.

Some of these local deities in the past were worshipped with dark rites and blood sacrifices. Granny speculated that these dark spirits grew so dark because of the pain and fear on which they were fed, and they acquired a distinct preference for such emotions. No longer worshipped as gods, no longer fed at the altars of men, these spirits seek to take what is not given.

Granny thought that the demons against whom the priest warned us were such-like gods who had gained a taste for blood and pain and fear. Gods who had lost their worshippers and even the very memory of them was lost - except as monsters and demons.

The "Ghosts of the Living" category bothered me. The Crisis Apparition sounded a lot like a sending to me. I know that there are some spells that can send a mage's spirit ... or soul, opinions differ there ... to appear before another person and so speak to that person, but those were in the chained books which I could not open. I do understand, however, that there is danger inherent to the one sending. The body is left behind, unconcious and un-tenanted. Unprotected. Any foul wight might move in.

And only the person to whom the apparition is sent can see or hear the sending.

Far safer to use crystal. It doesn't have to be a ball; any reflective surface will work. The problem is sound. Sending an image is easy. Very similar to a visual glamour or illusion. Sending voice requires higher magics.

Having taken several physical science courses here at University, I wonder if the problem has to do with the speed of sound versus the speed of light. I freely confess, I did not understand the mathemagics required for the voice transmission spells I found when I was looking through his library for something ... anything ... to help me get safely away.

Most people just relied on a messenger service, because of the difficulty of the magics involved. Unless the distance is too great. Or the need too urgent.

Dopplegangers, now, those are scary. It bothered me to think about them being in the World even if they were a pale, weak thing compared to the ones back home.

Craig had said that some people thought Crisis Apparitions and Dopplegangers were telepathic sendings or communications. I wondered how a person could do research into something like that. By their very nature, it would be impossible to set up a controlled test of either. The greater communications in the World, the personal phones, the television and radios ... I wondered how much of a difference it would make, back home, if mind to mind communication was possible. How news would spread, almost instantaneously.

But, naturally, it would be the mages who would control the spells, who would control the communications. I had a flash of how they ... how he might use such a skill. No way out. No peace. No freedom. No escape. No ... I couldn't breathe.

I couldn't breathe.

Black panic descended.

When I became aware again, I was on my knees, in the center of a circle of protection. The signs and sigils were burnt into the carpet.

My body ached. My muscles were sore ... as if I'd been running up the moors for miles without rest. I felt .. I felt beaten. Lost. And so very very tired.

The brownie was standing in the shadow of the table, watching me. He looked more solid than he had the last time I've seen him.

I looked too long, with too much awareness. His eyes widened as he realized I saw.

I remembered suddenly that boggarts are brownies which have fed on fear and distrust and hatred. The thought of what mischief and damage a boggart might make in a library was too terrible to consider. I had to do something to prevent that transformation.

I climbed to my feet, slowly, awkwardly, keeping my eyes on the brownie so he couldn't disappear on me. Stepping out of the circle, I back toward where I'd left my backpack. I had some bread and cheese inside. It wasn't easy pulling it out without moving my eyes from the brownie or even blinking. One such as he could be gone in a blink of the eye. I found what I sought and offered it to the him, only averting my eyes after he took the food. When I looked again, he was gone.

I hoped it would be enough.

I tried to clean up the mess I'd made. I couldn't remove the lines entirely, but they were faded by the time I was done.

Then I went over to the table where my books and papers still rested. That was when I found that I had written the Spell of Protection over and over again. I don't know how many times. Luckily, I hadn't written on any page containing class notes, so all I had to do was tear the spoiled sheets out and drop them in the trash.

I looked again at my notes. I had one small bit to finish up.

Poltergeists.

The last category in the lecture. The last thing Craig ... Dr. Stevenson had talked about.

I couldn't do it.

I couldn't face doing anything else. Any more work on this subject.

I had to ...

I had to get out. To feel the freshening air on my face. Feel the breeze.

I had to move. To know that I still could.

I collected up my books and my papers, and I left.