Persie Merlin and the Witch Hunters - Bella Forrest Page 0,98
truth”; The Dragon’s Kiss, which I’d seen variations of in other Grimoires—a nasty spell that created a black flame which burned more powerfully than any ordinary fire; Memoria Aeterna, meaning “Eternal Memory”; and one simply named Euphoria, which either related to a spell for happiness or a sort of conduit spell to make reaching a state of Euphoria much easier.
Halfway down the index list, a title jumped out at me: In Essentia Transformatio, “The Essence of Transformation.” I didn’t know if it was exactly what I was looking for, but it piqued my interest with its forthright confidence. Perhaps, if Victoria had written of ways to transform things, I could use that to create an antidote that would de-transform Reid.
I flipped to the corresponding page only to find it blank. The stinging scent of modified quicksilver singed my nostrils, letting me know that this page had been magically erased. An error from Victoria’s past that she didn’t want immortalized forever in her Grimoire, or something too powerful to remain on paper. Unfortunately, she couldn’t hide her mistake from me. Carefully, I pressed my palms to the blank page and fed my reading ability down my arms and into my fingertips, pinkish tendrils of Chaos slithering across the thick vellum to urge the erased letters back into being. This would only be temporary, the letters disappearing again as soon as I was done reading. Victoria would never be the wiser to what I’d done.
I smiled as the words appeared, but the smile rapidly faded as I read the spell she had tried to forget. It was a curse that blended the essence of one being into another, inflicting the effects by way of an extraction of the essence from whichever being you chose to use—monster, magical, spirit, etc. In the margins, I noticed small scribbles, like afterthoughts: only works on humans. Effects on magicals unpredictable. At present, side effects unknown. Needs further observation. My stomach tightened with fear, my mind unable to believe that Victoria Jules, whom I admired and respected, had ever written such a curse. This kind of magic wasn’t strictly forbidden, as people tended not to mess with the natural order to this extent, and there were very few magicals with the sort of power to pull this off, anyway, but it should have been completely prohibited. It sickened me to see it, and to view her notations, which suggested that she had actually attempted to experiment with this curse at some point in her life. I mean, we all had things in our past that we would rather forget, but this… I couldn’t fathom it.
Trying to gather my thoughts, I focused on how this might relate to the Fear Dearg issue. It wasn’t explicitly the same, and I couldn’t see any mention of it having a contagious element, but it certainly rang a few bells. And it could certainly be used to work on an anti-curse for Reid’s problem, given the similar nature of the spell.
What did she hope to achieve with this? Curiosity got the better of me, urging me to flip through the pages before and after this particular aberration. Most of the spells surrounding it were to do with payback or punishment of some kind, and I could feel the anger and bitterness that the curses had been written with. And, while the anger was fairly potent in the erased transformation curse, it was no more potent than any of the others—in fact, the level of resentment that powered through to me was slightly less than on the curse intended to break a betrayer’s heart, for example. Still, when Victoria had written it, she had clearly intended to use it as a form of punishment against someone who had hurt her very much. But who? And what state was that poor soul in now? I dreaded to think.
Unless… I’d encountered that poor soul, and his name was Reid Darcy. The notion lodged in my mind, chilling me further. But it didn’t make sense. Why would she have done something like this to Reid? I forced the thought to the back of my head, making a note to get to the bottom of it later. After all, asking her outright would be extremely unhelpful, and more likely to put a blockade on our plan. No, I would do my digging after Reid had been aided, for the sake of those who stood to get infected if I did not.