24 Sacrifice Anything

By midnight, the sun had obviously disappeared long ago, and Ted was as delirious from hunger as he was feom sleep deprivation. Of course, this was nothing compared to what the initiates had to be experiencing.

They seemed to be doing just fine when it came to trance-like concentration.

Ted had tasked them with making a mystical connection with the weather as they chanted. He did not know if anyone would actually get lucky and get something right about the fictional forecasts, but that would have been a pleasant surprise, considering that he had claimed that no one was an expert on their first try. Technically speaking, that was not exactly wrong. The elusive art of weather forecasts was only partially based on conventional science. The other parts were downright comparable to occultism.

Ted ordered a confused servant to bring him and Eknie some strong, black coffee. Of course, this meant that he would have to urinate sooner or later, and dehydration was already causing him muscle aches and a terrible, desert-like drought inside his mouth. He was not all right, but he had to pretend to be.

He had orchestrated this madness, therefore he had to bear it.

Eknie did seem to be faring a bit better. She took dainty sips of her cup, while Ted guzzled down the coffee like a thirsty horse, and he had never seen her twitch or even change her position in the chair. Perhaps it was some feminine resilience, something that Ted could never have. This made him angry. He liked things that had the potential to include him as well.

The ceremony felt so unbelievably long that Ted was sure that his brew had stopped working hours before the whole thing ended and that the recruits were running on sheer insanity, whipped into a feverish frenzy by the power of repetition. It did end, though, and soon the initiates, now as fully developed Fireflies, burned strands of their own hair with the help of sunlight and a magnifying glass and told Ted about their forecasts. The ones who got the most points would gain some upper level benefits in advance, since flexibility in giving them motivation was very important.

Ted was not as present and awake during the rest of the tedious ceremony as he probably should have been, but Eknie could cover for him, remember what he did not.

He yawned and went to bed, hoping to wake up after sunset, with none of that torture crawling through the curtains.

At this point, he could barely stand candlelight.

He woke up with his curtains mysteriously drawn aside and a terrifying force keeping him down. Someone was in the room, someone he could not see. Everything was bathing in bright sunlight.

A horrible thought crossed Ted's mind – that the sun itself was evil.

If things were indeed so, the whole world was doomed.

He tried to even out his breath, but not even his lungs obeyed him anymore, instead, his breathing took a mechanical rhythm that he had no control over. He felt the intrusion in his body and mind – someone was here, maybe that someone or something was even inside him in an insidious, spiritual way. He was not his own person anymore. The edges of his consciousness were nowhere to be found. Every sharp angle in the room, he felt them as pain, as if he had been nailed to exist all around his field of vision.

The panic attack was such a transcendental one that he did not know who he was anymore. Or what he was, for that matter. Everything was so sharp, like a migraine that enveloped his entire being.

Then that invisible something began to make him levitate.

This feeling of such a hostile force being in his body and all around him was so dreadful that he would have done anything to release himself from its grip. He would have killed Eknie. He would have killed a dog.

He feared what would happen if his body would hit the ceiling. For some reason, the further up he floated, the more terrified he got, and the jolt shook him, except that he shook internally without moving on his own at all.

The ceiling seemed like the last stop on the way to what was probably an infernal place, one to end everything that Ted was or thought he was.

He was willing to commit any sacrifice to spare himself from the fate of being absorbed by the bright, harsh light.

Then everything stopped. He fell back down onto his bed and his vision went black for a split second.

He thought he had died, but he had nothing to prove this with.

He opened his eyes to see a pleasantly dark room, but his heart just would not stop pounding in his chest.

He smoked three clove cigarettes back to back, sitting on the edge of his bed and using a teacup from a fancy set Eknie had gifted him as an ashtray.

He did not know what to make of this, except that he would probably have to please the solar deity somehow, immediately, with bloodshed.

He stretched his legs. The ball was still to be arranged. He had made his servants send out all the invitations with the magnificent art and everything. Ted had decided to use a solar theme. As much as he hated the sun nowadays, there was something about ghe imagery that captivated him.

Something was wrong. There was a trail of blood on the floor.

Ted looked around, but he saw nothing noteworthy. Perhaps he himself had taken some damage while possessed. At least he thought it counted as possession.

He checked his body for wounds or bruises and found none.

He looked around again, rather puzzled, and wiped the blood away. Maybe he did not want to know where it had come from. In any case, he could not be too proud to clean his own messes.

If it was even his own mess.

The servants could not find out what he was actually doing.