Rituals & Grimoires

By Cassandra L. Thompson

A seer's dance descends through mist and time…

 

Within this grimoire rests a collection of magical tales, most Gothic. Full of witches, ghosts, and spellcasters both ancient and new, these stories will thrill and haunt you like the very creatures they summon. Whether you love magic, mayhem, or something in between, these tales will cast their spell on you and hold your mind captive, well after the book has closed. Featuring stories by Eric Avedissian, Stefanie Contreras, Evan Davis, Colin Harker, Nicola Kapron, A.R.C. Mitra, Teagan Olivia Sturmer, and R. Thursday, with poetry by Melanie Whitlock.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Quill & Crow Publishing House
• Release date: Mar 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781958228395

Book preview

Rituals & Grimoires

RITUALS & GRIMOIRES

Gothic Tales of Dark Magic and Wizardry

Edited by

CASSANDRA L. THOMPSON

and

DAMON BARRET ROE

Quill & Crow Publishing House

Rituals & Grimoires: Gothic Tales of Dark Magic and Wizardry

Edited by Cassandra L. Thompson, Damon Barret Roe

published by Quill & Crow Publishing House

This anthology contains stories of fiction. All incidents, dialogue, and characters are either products of the authors’ imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2023 by Cassandra L. Thompson. Eric Avedissian, Stephanie Contreras, Evan A Davis, Colin Harker, Nicola Kapron, A.R.C. Mitra, Teagan Olivia Sturmer, and R. Thursday. All spells and poetry by Melanie Whitlock.

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Quill & Crow Publishing House, Ohio. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Cover Design by Damon Barret Roe

Interior Design by Cassandra L. Thompson

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN (ebook): 978-1-958228-39-5

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-958228-41-8

Publisher’s Website: www.quillandcrowpublishinghouse.com

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

ALEISTER CROWLEY

CONTENTS

Foreword

A Spell for Protection

1. Liber // Mortis

R. Thursday

A Spell for Strength

2. The Wych Elm Women

Teagan Olivia Sturmer

A Spell for Clarity

3. Speaking to Shades

Evan A Davis

A Spell for Your Familiar

4. The Warlock and the Crow

Stefanie Contreras

A Spell for Truth

5. A Spider in the Place of the Heart

A.R.C. Mitra

A Spell for Clairvoyance

6. The Black Cloak

Eric Avedissian

A Spell for Grief

7. Madness and Mercy

Nicola Kapron

A Spell for Binding Memories

8. The Seventh Coming of John Galeneth

Colin Harker

Thank You for Reading

Acknowledgments

Author Biographies

Discover More

Trigger Warning Index

FOREWORD

Ah, witchcraft.

Few things capture our minds quite like stories of magic, evil spirits, and the occult. While we’ve played with magical themes in the past—from our magazine, The Crow’s Quill, to various stories across anthologies—we’d never dedicated an entire book to the theme. The idea for Rituals & Grimoires came about from wanting a collection of magical stories, but told in a different way. A darker way. 

The tales in our grimoire transcend traditional magical tales and take readers in a far more sinister direction. Though this particular collection took a bit longer to compile than our other publications, we believe it stands as another amazing Quill & Crow anthology. 

We hope you will enjoy these deliciously dark tales, as well as the spells that begin each chapter, as graciously provided by our resident witch and administrative member, Melanie Whitlock. Until next time. 

Dreadfully Yours, 

Cassandra L. Thompson

A SPELL FOR PROTECTION

MELANIE WHITLOCK

Divine limitations

Cast forth,

Favored fallen

Impaled upon others' ideals.

The forest floor bleeds

False integrities.

Blindly, they follow,

Unable to see the wood for the trees,

Whilst I bare

The branch’s mark.

1

LIBER // MORTIS

R. THURSDAY

He had few toys and even fewer books, which made the page a treasure, even though Silas couldn’t read it. It was too large to fit in any book he’d ever seen, bigger than his head, covered in lovely curling letters and sharply angled shapes. He liked to sit and stare at it, assigning each shape a life story, a personality, until he found himself imagining them constantly.

When he worked in his father’s fields, he gouged the shapes into the earth with his hoe, a hieroglyphic marginalia parallel to his potato rows. His father was too busy to comment, and his brothers didn’t mind.

There was no rain for some time, and nothing disturbed the crude calligraphy. No one noticed the way the ant tunnels crumbled, or the worms shriveled up. It was weeks before they saw the spuds had sprouted literal eyes rolling wildly in starchy sockets. They sent for a wizard. The boy knew it was his page and recognized too late the arcane power of what looked like scratched doodles. He slipped out of the house at dusk, hoping to erase his innocent sin, but the setting sun filled each carved crevice with amber light. He was in awe, which is to say it was beautiful, and he was terrified.

You were so close, you had traveled as quickly as your horse could carry you, left as soon as the message arrived.

Silas reached out a shaking hand, whether to wipe away the glyph or drench his fingers in the honey-hued magic, even he didn’t know. The last of the day’s light sputtered, but the field still glowed, and the glow spread over his arm, like all the twisted, ruined roots below were now ghosts, calling to him.

You were racing, your horse panting froth, but you saw the glow, saw the figure coated with a gravity-defying ichor. You were so close, you felt the heat as the field burst into flames of green and red, as the potatoes grew mouths filled with rows of baby teeth just so they could scream. The boy did not scream, the glow had gone into his mouth, coated his throat. You were near enough to see him burn from the inside out.

Mages are fools. I disdain them with a persistent, burning irritation reserved for the creator by their creation. If there is one defining feature of practitioners of the arcane, it is a baffling inability to consider the consequences of their choices. See: centuries of crafting magical books and never bothering to wonder about the burden of sentience the process infuses into—let’s be realistic—a pulped and dried corpse of plant and animal.

I am a stitched-together ghost, a zombie of long-forgotten trees, the collected trophies from serial slaughter of lambs, cows, and more than one would-be claimant. I am a wraith painted with melted mushrooms, ground-up stone, massacred beetles, and stolen blood. But of course, I am also more than my materials, my animating soul visible and insidious; what I am is codex-bound but altogether unchained. I slide through eyes and possess the (usually) willing mind, a demon of ideas, and am carried anywhere the reader roams. This is one reason wizards and their ilk are so jealous of us grimoires: they can’t stand the thought of us free, out of their sphere of control.

Like all small gods, mages reserve their deepest, truest love for power.

You are looking for a man. This is wrong.

You are looking for a book. This is also wrong, in that you are looking for a very specific book. You have been looking for this book for a very long time. It myelinates your thoughts, constant and oily—sometimes you long to remove your brain and scrub it raw, to install a hair-shirt wallpaper to the inside of your skull.

But for now, you look for the man. The man does not have the book. No one has the book, not all of it, making it one of the great Lost Tomes, scattered to unknown quarters. The man has a folio of leaves, and an interest in wealth. You didn’t ask where he acquired them, though he was clearly itching to relay some sordid tale that would justify adding an exorbitant bonus to his asking price. You hope he’s telling the truth and doesn’t interpret your readiness to pay as an invitation to jump you, take the money, and flee. You’ve gone so long without needing to kill an unscrupulous peddler. It would be a shame to break your streak now.

I am born simple: raw-edged pages, sheep gut-stitched, protected by poorly tanned hide that feels closer kin to wood than the paper it houses. He makes me from sharp-angled letters, simple diagrams, and frustrated loneliness. I was a long gestation, and when I am completed, he smiles, though he doesn’t know I can tell. He thinks I’m only a flirtation between ink and bark. He doesn’t realize I am alive.

Aside from that lack of awareness, he is clever, much more than he is wise. And again, he is so lonely. Each day, he climbs the steps to this tower, his footfalls heavy, almost petulant, as if convincing his body this is the direction it must go. He often pauses in the doorway, his eyes taking in a room cluttered yet vacant. I came from his mind, so I know it well, know that he is imagining a figure perusing the less blessed books, imagining reading and discussing them together. He has even optimistically furnished the tower with a pair of overstuffed chairs, but most days, he avoids looking at them and sits at the desk that served as my midwife. He reads, scribbles notes, and eats little, yet feeds me often, pages of scrawled equations, philosophical wonderings, experimental observations. I am a glutton by proxy.

We conjure together, he consults me a dozen times about phrases and proportions he knows by heart. We weave nets of shadow to capture spirits made of air and salt and lies. I remind him of the choreography of stars, and he warns the nearby farmers of coming storms. He makes lists of nearby plants and manifests entirely new ones through science and sorcery. But we are alone, and I am not enough to help him forget, though I know he hoped I might be.

When she arrives, she recognizes my reality instantly, and is careful not to spread my pages though he invites her gaze. He’s a proud parent—or craftsman, or desperate artist—but she knows the intimacy between the reader and the read: in opening me, she would open herself. Only an exposed mind is a receptive one, and I gather she exposes very little without purpose.

They discuss the magical and the mundane for hours, voices rising and falling like breath, and then it is only breath rising and falling, and then it is them, and the dark, and finally, a peace.

I want to warn him about the way shadows always fall across her eyes no matter the sun’s position or the brightness of candles, or how even the moss and beetles flinch from her curious fingertips, but I can only share wisdom requested. He can’t know less than me, even swooned, and I wonder if it is self-extermination through affection. I wonder if all wizards eventually only wish for an end and someone to hold them through it.

And so, he pulls secrets from the earth, but can’t keep them to himself, and he drew down the moon, but shared her light too freely, and soon, he is dead, and I am taken, not for the last time, I think, though I am no book of prophecy. I feel the loss of a mind that held me, a torch extinguished, and while I am altogether myself, I am less. I don’t know how much more of himself he could have shared with only me, perhaps I’m as complete as he could offer. I’ll never know.

Irha is a thief, better than most. She knows this because she has both her hands and most of her teeth. She knows this because the stabbing aches of hunger only plague her occasionally, and she doesn’t need to supplement her felonious income with other, even less safe activities. And she knows the reason she’s a good thief is because she chooses wisely. She recognizes the difference between the marks too lost in their thoughts to notice her slim, sly fingers slipping their purses out, and those who moved with a predator’s coiled alertness. Those too destitute to make stealing worthwhile, and those too dangerous to try. Her instincts are almost always solid.

Somehow though, the man in front of her was a mystery. He dressed simply but was too clean to belong to that part of town. He looked around, attentive, yet he didn’t move in any threatening way. His short cloak could have concealed a weapon, but his satchel was constantly pulling the cloth back and she never glimpsed even a shimmer of steel. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling this wasn’t someone to trifle with.

She glanced around. There was no better target begging to be made a bit lighter in the pocket, and she was intrigued. She moved carefully along the road, not creeping—nothing cried ‘pickpocket’ more than creeping—but taking her time sauntering down the packed dirt that was the town’s main road, always keeping him in the corner of her eye. She wasn’t really shocked when he turned towards the scholar’s quarters, but it was a challenge for her to look natural heading towards the scribes, booksellers, and lawyers. From her greasy—but, she could say with some pride, bug-free—hair to the wafer-thin soles of her shoes, she most definitely did not fit in. Luckily, it was night, and most people, even the learned, were busy and didn’t spend much attention on some slip of a girl.

The man seemed to be in no rush, and more than once, she half-froze, waiting for him to spin and loudly demand to know what she was doing. She ran a few potential excuses through her head, but most of them were pretty flimsy.

Past the more reputable shops was a row of warehouses, mostly—like any thief worth their criminal record knew—empty. Still, the man moved confidently past the shuttered doors until he came to one with low light glowing through a window. Irha watched him tap the door with an ungloved knuckle. The door opened just wide enough to let him through, and he didn’t glance around before disappearing into the gloom.

She knew she should leave, there were other places to stalk and that was the kind of place that probably paid its lawfolk enough they might actually investigate reports of a dockside waif loitering around the fancy paper goods.

But Irha had good instincts. Sure, the area looked posher, but that didn’t make it safer, and this fool was going to get himself dumped in the harbor, and wouldn’t that cause more problems for her and hers later? She eyed the building, the way its walls were high but pocked with soft spots a clever girl could sink fingers and toes into, could use to pull herself to the roof with only the barest scraping sounds.

A few minutes later, the ache in her hands and shoulders was rewarded by the discovery of a narrow sill under the round window, stretching across the front of the warehouse, and just narrow enough to crouch on. The moon was shining but on the opposite side, leaving Irha a shadow against a shadow sky. She peered in as close as she could without allowing the inner lights to illuminate her.

The man stooped over a table, his back to her and other figures in the room. The majority of lanterns were arrayed around whatever it was he was studying. There were three other men: a short, slender man Irha was fairly certain she had seen around the docks, and two stocky fellows that any wharf child would recognize as hired muscle. Their faces were in profile, the flickering lantern throwing stripes of wavering darkness across them. If the man was at all aware of the way the three of them looked at him—and his heavy satchel—with hungry malice, it didn’t show in the relaxed set of his shoulders.

The two thugs flanked him and pulled pitted machetes from the loose folds of their pants. Irha resisted the urge to cry out and warn him, even as part of her confidently asserted this was the obvious outcome for one so foolish. On his right, the mercenary raised his blade…and froze.

The stranger’s shadow—darker than the others—undulated, slithers along the ground, stretching and growing and reaching.

And then many things happened all at once. The henchman with the raised blade shouted and brought it down in a panic. The stranger side-stepped. The heavy metal crashed into the table, sending the lanterns crashing to the floor, pitching the room into a deeper obscurity.

It was hard for Irha to differentiate movement among the shadows—especially the ones that seemed independent of any source—but she heard the yelling, and then the cries of pain, the agonized pleas, and the horrid silence at the end. She scrambled down the face of the warehouse, praying to the