I picked this up again in an attempt to get it finished before the New Year. I think there's maybe another 800-1000 words left to go (for reference, tonight's entry is about 600), so here's hoping I can finish it up before the weekend! I have a lot planned for 2018, and I don't want this to fall by the wayside for that long...
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The other thing I found beneath the earth was the little nest where my daughter had tended to Bluebeak. She had made it hay, flower down, and leaves. And the bird- Triple Faced Goddess be praised- he had added to the mix his own feathers, curling and dancing beneath my breath.
I scooped the entire thing into my hand, laughing at my good fortune, but careful not to let it fly away. At last I had something I could track! I tucked the bundle carefully into one of my pouches, pulled out a old brass key, and spoke the word that would take me back to my own cottage.
I spent the next week planning how best to follow them. I didn’t have enough power to track them constantly- I must do it intermittently. And I needed greater speed than my two feet would give me- perhaps more speed than the four feet of a horse would give me. And I’d need to go over mountains and seas, as well. If only I could fly, like the swallow…
Witches can fly, of course, so long as we have a vessel large enough to bear our form. Brooms are particularly popular, because the most skilled among us can imbue each individual piece of straw with a flight spell,allowing the tool to be used again and again without the need to respell it. But then, brooms are really only good for short flights- I would not want to sit on one for the thousands of miles my child might be traveling.
What I needed was a carriage of some sort, something I could sit in comfortably as I flew, something that would even have enough room to carry supplies, so that I wouldn’t have to descend more than necessary.
That thought started me down the road of writing out what supplies I might need, which led me to check my Index for what sorts of things I had in my storage room. And as I ran my finger down the list, considering what might be useful in what ways, it occured me that what I needed wasn’t a carriage at all. What I needed was a way to travel without moving. I could summon anything in this book to my hand and it would simply... be there. It didn’t come rolling across the dirt, or swimming across the water, or flying through the air: it simply appeared, as though dropped through a portal in the aether.
I needed a portal spell for myself. A reverse-summoning, as it were. A spell of sending.
It shouldn’t take much power, in the grand scheme of things- it didn’t have to be continuously cast, like the spell of Greater Understanding. I should be able to charge it with a single moose- no, I’d better go with two bears, in light of last winter’s activities- and I could certainly build up enough magic to power it, as long as I didn’t cast any other spells for a month or so.
The days and weeks sped past as I worked the mental problem of how to Send myself to where my daughter was. In the end I decided that once a tracking spell showed Bluebird settled in one place for longer than a fortnight (I restricted myself to checking that infrequently), I would scry him- and once I had an image of where he was residing, I’d turn the mirror into a portal, and step through. I’d be trapped there once I did so, but that was no matter- I could always make my way home, with Elisa, in a more conventional manner.
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