Books And Spells 3

Even more books and spells for becoming a wizard with. First post here, second post here.

Book Of Spheres. An exposition on the true nature of comets. Compiled in New Spain in 1694 by the Hieronymite nun Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Phoenix of America, shortly before all her books were confiscated by the church.

Borrows heavily from an unpublished work by the Ottoman astronomer Taqi al-Din, whose Istanbul observatory was burnt to the ground by furious Muslim clerics in 1580. Guided the Jesuit missionary Eusebio Kino on his expedition to make contact with the alien city underneath Mount Shasta in 1705. Describes the civilisation of Tyche, a gas giant in the Oort Cloud, known as Yuggoth to the insectoid inhabitants of its moons.

• Parallax Wave. Shunts living creatures into the ethereal dimension. They can be seen but not touched. Lasts ten minutes divided by the number of creatures you use it on. Repeated use lures astral anglerfish, makes subjects feel like their physical bodies are shells of lumpy clay.

• Ice Ray. Shoots freezing beam from pointed finger. Chills flesh and objects to -232°C in seconds. Limbs blacken and snap off. Dramatic, but probably no more useful than a gun. Consumes caster body heat. Turns lips blue. Makes you dream of bathing in Pluto’s nitrogen lakes.

• Spread Plague. Makes the caster’s diseases 10x more contagious. You become a typhoid Mary – able to infect anyone with a touch, a stern look, a shared cup, a brief moment spent occupying the same room. Provides you with no protection of any kind from these diseases. Lasts a day.

Yonaguni Scripture. Lemurian religious treatise etched in ten-foot-tall glyphs on the side of an underwater stone ziggurat, haunted by hammerheads, off the coast of an island near Taiwan.

Translated from Naacal around 1500 by Sanai Isoba, fisherwoman and noro priestess, whose octopus cult was eventually stamped out by Ryukyuan prime minister Shō Shōken in 1669. Gives coordinates for R’lyeh, the impossible city at Point Nemo in the Pacific Ocean, and its antipodal duplicate in the deserts of western Kazakhstan.

• Speak With Fish. Requires the caster to hold a pearl under their tongue. Sardines overwhelm you with thousands of tinny voices. Sharks are sarcastic, nosy, rarely want to eat you right away. Koi dispense wisdom, goldfish easily forget. Does not allow you to breathe underwater.

• Hero’s Deed. Must be cast on a willing subject. Next action they take is 100% guaranteed to succeed, as long as they do it with a pure heart and good intentions. Everything they do for the next year after that is 100% guaranteed to fail, often dismally. Subject must know and accept this.

• Preserve Flame. Makes a specific fire unquenchable by any means, even submersion in water, as long as the caster concentrates their will on it. Fire still needs fuel, just not oxygen or heat. Requires Sanity checks every fifteen minutes to maintain. Makes you incredibly hungry.

Aklo Catalogue. Incomplete list of magical books in the Crimson Hexagon of the Library of Babel – an extradimensional space containing all possible texts, tended by monks who each possess a single gigantic bloodshot eye.

Translated into Arabic, from the original Aklo, by a 14th-century Malinese griot of the Kouyate line. Found in the basement of a goldsmith’s house in Timbuktu, badly water-damaged. Provides little more than authors and titles – a surprising amount of occult knowledge can still be gleaned from this.

The Library can be entered from the Atlas Mountains, and a certain doorway underneath the Illuminated Block of Buenos Aires that opens only to the blind.

Small clans of Aklo speakers – humanity’s original language, before the Zeta Reticulans reshaped our consciousness by planting self-replicating linguistic seed crystals in our supersaturated primate brains – can still be found on the pampas and around the Mediterranean. If they learn any other language they’re cut off from the hive mind.

• Speak With Sand. The desert has a long memory. Remembers anything that passes over or through it – how fast they were going, how their weight was distributed. Recalls sandstorms fondly. Dislikes having holes dug in it. Gets confused about time – speaks of ancient events as if they happened yesterday.

• Aphasiate. Causes the target to temporarily forget how language works. Can be focused to block the use of specific words – lasts longer if it’s narrowly defined. A single obscure word can be stolen for good. Also prohibits reading, writing, sign language – directly affects the brain.

• Crystal Prison. Imprisons target in a crystal. Caster must provide own crystal. Crystal must be at least palm-sized – prisoner’s body will shrink down. More symmetrical crystals, and harder materials, hold prisoner for longer. Only one prisoner per crystal. If crystal is broken, prisoner will escape.

Dixit Algorizmi. Bad Latin translation by Adelard of Bath of a treatise on sacred numbers by the Persian polymath Muhammad al-Khwarizmi. Contains a method for exploring fractals by commanding djinns to manipulate coloured dust, and a hymn of praise to the recursive deity Mlandoth – found among the spirals of the Mandelbrot set, written in beautiful Arabic calligraphy.

• Logic Circle. Draw a circle on the ground exactly 79.8 cm wide. Nobody in this circle can be insane or lie. They tell the full truth, accurately, in pedantic detail. They can’t handle evasions, aggressively puncture polite fictions, criticise your looks. Over time the experience of super-sanity will take its toll.

• Duplicate. Makes an exact copy of an object – non-organic, palm-sized or smaller. Each sunrise one of the two objects has a 50% chance of dissolving into slime. Works by combining two nearly-identical parallel dimensions – may subtly modify small historical details, create doppelgangers.

• Night Duel. Creates a pocket dimension in an enemy’s dreams where you and them live out entire lives from cradle to grave, in a setting of your choosing. First one to die in the dream dies in real life. You know this instinctively from birth and dedicate your dream existence to destroying each other.

Poorfellow’s Almanack. Published every December since 1765 by Nathanial Ames of the Old Village Cemetery in Dedham, Massachusetts. Printed in blood. Bound in human skin – the most recent edition made from Sacco and Vanzetti.

Popular among the old Boston Brahmin families, who spend most of their lives impatiently waiting to become ghouls when they die. Contains pre-written obituaries, astronomical charts, lists of major festivals from which lone travellers might profitably be abducted. Appendix in the back with useful cantrips for the coming year.

• Skull Cage. Binds a passing lemure to a human skull. Must be the soul of a petty criminal who nobody loved – thousands of them around. Blue flames in the eyes. Inclined to wisecrack. Can fly. Knows dark secrets, sometimes. Gets little bits of the skull’s memories mixed up with its own. You can’t have more than one.

• Haruspicate. Divine the future by cutting open an animal and reading signs in its entrails. The smarter the animal, the better a prediction you get. A dead ox can vaguely tell you if the week ahead will be good or bad – a dead human can provide the answer to a single yes-or-no question.

• Bone Point. Walk up to someone wearing emu-feather shoes and point a sharpened bone needle directly at them from a foot away. They’ll be dead within a year unless they can kill you first. They instinctively know this. Only works if they see your face. The emu-feather shoes are tough to run in or remove.