[prp] witching amateur hour (eve + jer)

[azuredreams]

"Aleksy's very knowledgeable." Jeremiah's eyes scanned the page, reading what was within. "This was likely-" he stopped, mid-sentence as his head swum a little once he put his hand on the page. With a shake of his head, he tried to clear his mind.

The sensation was familiar and one he did not want to have.

"This was likely," started Jeremiah again, "notes for the schema he was creating." The book was slid back. "What are you wanting to ultimately achieve? By studying this."

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

Eve took the book back with a concerned look towards her friend. Part of her intuition told her that it might be stress from balancing his job with otherworldly business, but something wasn't sitting right with that interpretation.

"I'd thought it was... extra field notes, or something like that, but there is far too much in here for it to be just supplementary information," she began to answer, closing the book and giving the cover a hard stare. "I'm only just starting to get an idea of how I could put this information to use... and I don't need to make something as ambitious as Renard's schema to do so, not at all." Thank goodness was underlined quite clearly there. If that had been Eve's goal, it would likely take her months or years past what they had to work with.

"But given our general situation, it seemed to me like someone around here should learn some time magic."

azuredreams

 

[azuredreams]

Jeremiah was still light headed, gears turning in his mind as he looked at the book. It felt familiar and that sensation was familiar as well. Was it-

His eyes flicked to Eve's face, studying her and then nodding. "It would certainly be useful if one could do something like that. I mean, there had to be a time element to all of this - most likely to the schema - given that we've been trapped in cycles over and over again."

A smile was given, one that said he did agree.

"I suppose I should ask then: were you disrupting time?" HIs fingers flicked towards what she had done; things that were held in mid-air. "Or something else?"

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

"Renard had a lot of temporal concepts woven into his schema, all because he wanted to go back in time and eliminate HIV before it could become an epidemic here," Eve began. "His theory about the cycles involve the time aspect of his magic being unaccounted for when he was caged." She shrugged a little humbly as she had another drink of tea: his guess was probably better than anything she could provide.

"The circle here denotes an area in which time doesn't pass at all," she continued. "I want to say a concept like this must have a wide variety of potential applications, but that might be reaching."

Then she perked up and smiled a bit, clearly having thought of something, and looked back up at Jeremiah. "I bet I could turn it into a drink coaster."

azuredreams

 

[azuredreams]

Jeremiah nodded, his expression thoughtful. It made sense to him what she said about Renard's theory. If they had not accounted for it in the creation of the Sigil, of the cage, then it would act out in ways they did not expect.

His gaze flicked down to Eve's work as she explained it. He was chuckling as she mentioned the drink coaster. "I suppose you could always make sure whatever is on it is the perfect temperature? Though that is likely too simple of a use for something with so much potential."

Again his gaze flicked to Renard's book. The familiar gnawed at his mind.

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

"Did something interesting catch your eye, Chief?" asked Eve, warming up to the most playful mood she'd shown in weeks. She slid the notebook back over to Jeremiah's part of the table. "Go ahead and flip through it all you like." With a small laugh, she added, "There's at least one pie recipe in there."

azuredrams

 

[azuredreams]

"It's a grimoire in a way, isn't it?" Jeremiah inquired quietly, lips twitching at being called Chief by Eve. She was given a playful look. "It's just very familiar to me and it-"

The book was taken back, his fingers turning through pages and scanning things here and there. "You remember when I was having those seizures? How I kept seeing things?"

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

Eve hadn't entertained the idea this could be a grimoire, but... it was hard to describe the book using any other term. The personal narrative woven into it only underlined that possibility, and the only thing that cast doubt on it was how it had been handed over to her so casually. In the end, it made Renard even more aggravatingly mysterious to her.

When Jeremiah brought up the seizures, she nodded in recollection. "Has that experience made the book familiar to you?"

That was a little foreboding.

azuredreams

 

[azuredreams]

"There was always a book. Right there, on the back of my eyelids, and never left." His fingers ran over the page before he closed it.

"I believe, after a discussion with a ghost," his lips twitched, "that what I saw are the clues to what was used in the creation of the original Sigil. They would've used Renard's grimoire as a personal object that was tied to him in the same vein that they used the ring Liam gave to his fiancee Vivien."

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

"Why would you have been shown that?" asked Eve, puzzled.

azuredreams

 

[azuredreams]

"It was the price of my friendship with Sunny Shore," said Jeremiah plainly. The deal he had made with Ezra before he was Ezra. Months ago he might have gotten a look about it, perhaps hurt visible in his eyes to those that knew him. Now it was simply fact even if he still, sometimes, regretted it.

Things might have gone differently if he had not but dwelling on what ifs was a bad idea.

"I was shown the pieces of The Enemy." As at the time they had thought The Enemy had made horcruxes. They weren't exactly wrong now. "Except that the pieces, in this case, are all the things they used in the process of creating the Sigil. I still have dreams about them every now and then." No seizures thankfully.

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

"It walks," Eve offered, in reference to the posters that had littered the streets last year. "So was the Enemy just the old sigil this whole time? That's a little anticlimactic."

azuredreams

 

[azuredreams]

"More like the Sigil is what binds the Enemy, keeps it separated truly from its power and keeps us caged. So asking for the pieces of it meant I was shown what caged Renard and Liam." He was quiet a moment. "... or that is the conclusion I have reached."

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

"Your guess is probably better than mine," Eve replied. "Speaking of Renard again, there seems to be a third one we haven't accounted for." She turned her gaze to the book again, it obviously being one of the reasons for this idea. "Or, the way he entered this life is different from how we did somehow."

azuredreams

 

[azuredreams]

"A third?" asked Jeremiah, eyebrows raised in confusion. "Beyond the one he took the place of?"

cibarium