Tragedy is back

Tragedy said nothing for several minutes, she was trying to remember who Djana the dark was, she couldn't remember having ever heard of her, but she didn't like to ask because she thought Nohna had probably told her during lessons and would be disappointed that Tragedy didn't remember. Tragedy had a notoriously poor memory and it caused her a lot of embarrassment and she had developed ingenious ways of faking her way through situations like this, but finally she had to ask, "Okay Nohna. Who is Djana the Dark? I'm sure she must be someone very important and very evil and I suppose you are about to tell me that I have set in motion the end of the world or something. Hmmph!! And my parents always said I would never amount to anything."

"Huh? What?" Asked Nohna who had drifted off into her own reveries, "Oh no Tragedy, no, no. Nothing like that! Djana is a pain in the ass, that's for sure, but she isn't all that important."

"Says you!" snarled Joy from the corner.

"Oh shut up, Twit!" snapped Nohna.

Tragedy screwed up her face very unattractively and stared very rudely at Nohna. It was a facial expression equivalent of being flipped off. She was tired and getting grumpy and she just wanted to be told what was happening without having to drag it out of Nohna.

"Oh Tragedy! Out with it, what is it that you want to know?" Nohna was getting crabby too, she was overwhelmed by the thought of everything that she was going to have to do in order to get ready.

"Well, excuse me if I can't understand your vague mutterings. I could start reading your mind if you're too lazy to talk. Do you want me to start reading your mind? Because that's what I'll have to do if you aren't more clear. You'll leave me no other choice." Trinity had jumped up and was angrily glaring at Nohna. She knew very well that if she read Nohna's mind that it would give Nohna a splitting headache and that Nohna wouldn't want her to.

Joy started to giggle. "Oh, will you shut up!" screeched Tragedy and she flung a piece of bread at Joy which hit her in the forehead leaving a big glob of butter. Tragedy had gotten to a point where she no longer thought of this thing as her sister or she wouldn't have done that.

Nohna started to snicker and Tragedy paused stunned, then yelled in mock anger, "Shut up! Or I'll throw my stew on you!" Nohna friskily tossed an apple through the air and bounced it off of Joy's head. Nohna and Tragedy both began laughing hysterically and it might have turned into a food fight if Brian had not arrived home at just that moment, sending all of the straw in the roof fluttering. Gasping for breath, tears rolling down their faces, Tragedy and Nohna went staggering out to greet him leaving Joy to sulk.

"Okay, Tragedy. I'm all yours. Tell me what it is that you want to know." Nohna said after they had settled down. They had explained to Brian why they were laughing and he feigned to be too sophisticated to find such antics funny; but he looked through the window for them and told them that the butter was still stuck onto Joy's forehead, that she hadn't wiped it off yet . Not only that, but there was a piece of apple on top of her head and Joy looked really stupid trying to be fierce with an apple fragment on top of her head. This sent them into fresh hysterics at which Brian pretended to be displeased.

Eventually, Nohna was able to settle down and tell Tragedy who Djana was. Djana, it seemed, had been a well-loved wizard who had sent herself into oblivion doing unapproved spellwork and had never been able to find her way back. Tragedy had opened up the way for her to come back by performing her glamour-off. Djana had been the only wizard ever, until Tragedy to earn the fealty of all 4 kingdoms of elementals.

"Djana had been much loved for her kindness but her spell work was atrocious. She couldn't cast a spell to save her life! Everything that she did turned out wrong somehow. And she came from a long line of powerful magicians, that was what made it so hard to understand.. No-one knew quite what to make of it, she seemed to have no magical aptitude whatsoever. People actually ran when they thought she might begin to cast a spell. For her spells never turned out the way they were meant to, but for some reason could not be set right, that was the only thing that was strong about them is that they could not be fixed. You will see several magicians tomorrow who were victims of her ineptitude. Her spells were very silly...try not to laugh!"

"Eventually, they had no choice but to ban her from doing magic. So, when the elementals came forth to offer their allegiance everyone was shocked and didn't know what to make of it. There were many long discussions about this as this was an unheard of thing and needed to be made sense of."

"I'm afraid that some people were rather hard on poor Djana, jealous of course. For everyone was a better magician than her and yet she was the one who received this honor. Some cruel things were said. Some of these things got back to her. And Djana was very sensitive and she took these things hard and she was helped in this by someone who was not good for her."

"Djana had a cousin, Emele was her name and she was one of the best magicians of our time. And Emele was enchanted by Djana. Djana was everything that she wasn't. Djana was a beautiful girl, Emele was plain; well not simply plain...ugly would be it. But Emele was smart... she was so smart! She felt that this should make up for her plainness. But Djana always had all of the attention though because of her beauty and it really wasn't right. This made Emele become cynical and bitter."

"Because Emele had more talent than all of us. Only thing is, she was so mean. Oh was she mean, and she became even meaner! Everyone was afraid of her, except for Djana, she was always kind to Djana. But when Djana was honored by the elementals this finally caused Emele to come loose. She began to hate Djana as well as love her, maybe she had already hated her."

"Her love became strange, with hidden knives inside it. She began to toy with Djana, to become sadistic. She was the one who made sure that Djana knew what people were saying about her. She did her best to make Djana feel that everyone was laughing at her and that no-one respected her. Djana began to spend all of her time with Emele, to avoid other people who she only felt uncomfortable around."

"Then she offered to help Djana, to teach her to do magic properly. She was able to invoke an amulet to protect her from the ill-effects of Djana's spells so that she wouldn't end up with an arm growing out of her forehead or something ridiculous like that, though that would certainly have been an improvement on her looks. No-one knows what her intentions were, whether she intended to help Djana or if she was operating out of revenge. She knew that Djana was forbidden to use magic. Though Emele would have been chastised for her part in it, Djana was the one who would recieve the punishment."

"As Emele was so talented, she actually began to help Djana. Djana actually became able to do some rudimentary spells without mishap. Then came the spell that wax the end of them both. At least the end of them as they had been known."

"Which spell was that?" Tragedy wanted to know.

"A Glamour-off," replied Nohna.

"Just kidding!" Nohna chuckled in response to Tragedy's horrified gasp. "I'll get to that in a minute dear!"

"None of Djana's mishaps had ever really hurt anyone, they were actually quite funny as long as you weren't the recipient. Perhaps this lulled them into a false sense of security. For a beckoning is a spell that is normally easy to perform, only due to Djana's 'problem' the potential for mishap was there. As you know, one needs to use precautions in dealing with the dead."

A beckoning as Tragedy knew, was a spell in which the spirit of one who was dead could be beckoned and then made to answer questions. The power of the spirit beckoned was dependent upon the stregnth of the magician casting the spell. A beckoning is quite fun, for the living as well as the dead. "

On the night of a full moon, Djana, Emele and Persepha went deep into the woods to perform the beckoning."

"Who is Persepha anyway?" asked Tragedy.

"Persepha is Djana's lover," replied Nohna.

"Djana had a female lover?" asked Tragedy, intrigued.

"Okay, actually her name was Persepho until Djana accidentally changed him into a woman when one of her spells went awry. They began calling him Persepha in order to avoid awkward questions."

"Oh, I see," replied Trinity bemused.

"Of course, this would explain why she is so bitter and slightly insane, plus....I think she has a crush on you!" chuckled Nohna wryly.

Trinity, Part III

Magic is a wild thing, not something to be controlled but only channelled. Those who think that they can control it are mistaken and will eventually pay for that mistake, as Trinity did.

To perform magic properly requires vast knowledge and is not possible for one person to know all there is. To be a true sorceress, ones quest for knowledge can never end. It is necessary to understand the world you live in in order to manipulate it. It is also important to understand that you don't know all there is to know, not even close.

Trinity had never been afraid to look at things, she peered into what most people ran away from. She thought about death, she thought about pain, she thought about hate and loneliness and fear. She tried to understand the mind of the killer as well as the victim. The things she saw scared her, they made her sad. Sometimes she would cry inconsolably. This, her teacher had told her, was the thing that would set her apart from the rest, could make her great rather than average. It was good that her teacher encouraged her in this for no-one else did.

Joia had never liked looking at darkness, she thought that it made you sick of spirit. She tried to focus on the beauty and light and good that was around her. And when she became involved with Justo, her talent for this was put to the test! In order to see the good in her marriage and in her life, she had to lie to herself. And the more things progressed, the more lies she had to tell until finally her life was constructed on a fragile tower of untruths. The energy she exerted to maintain these illusions was prodigious. Her thinking became rigid, to see one lie would mean seeing them all and seeing them all would mean that she would have to change. She would have to find her life and herself again, underneath all of the lies and she was afraid. Mostly afraid that maybe what she thought of as herself actually consisted of nothing.

A glamour-off, as you may have guessed, is a spell in which a person is forced to see the truth under the things that they lie to themselves about. It is one of the most powerful spells and Trinity shouldn't have used it. The truth can be hard and painful and can wound deeply, especially the heart of one who cannot bear it.

Trinity had used great power when performing her spell, but no finesse. The spell caused Joia to see not only the things she had avoided seeing about Justo and herself, that was only a small part of all she had been lying to herself about. She saw all other things as well.

Joia was quiet on the way home from the confrontation with Trinity. When she and Justo arrived at their house she simply collapsed into a chair and spoke no more. Justo called to her but she did not answer, it was as though she couldn't see him. And she couldn't, all she could see were the visions in front of her eyes. The visions came fast, wave after wave crashing into her so that she could hardly catch her breath, she sat with tears streaming down her face.

The things she saw were so ugly to her, if hurt her to see them. She saw that her marriage was a sham, just as Trinity had wanted her to, oh but that was the least and most insignificant thing that she saw.

The world unravelled sickenly before her eyes. She was going deeper and deeper into it, past the surface and inside. She saw the spinning orbs that make up matter and the cold empty spaces between. She saw earth and sky, the wood and the stone, the dark and the light and how they weren't really anything separate and how everything blended into everything else, how everything traded pieces of itself. She saw how people conspire to create reality and how what we call life and and law and truth are all just consensual illusions.

She saw that flesh is but dust and that death is hidden in life. She saw the futility of all the lives ever lived, and how all who had gone before were forgotten as though they never existed. She thought she could see the hopeful faces of millions of people who once thought like her, that their lives had meant something and how now even their names were not remembered. She thought of time and how it had run over everything and everyone since the beginning of the world, crushing them in its relentless forward motion and how meaningless it all was.

She sunk to her knees and saw in front of her eyes, as though seeing a vision, all of these things until the earth became a mass graveyard with uncountable corpses underneath inside of it, mixing with the earth and becoming it. She felt that nothing meant anything and that it was all different than anyone knew. She laid on the floor and moaned and shook, with her hands against her head as though she was trying to hold it together.

Justo grew frightened, she would not respond, neither to roughness or softness. He had no choice but to send for Trinity. By the time Trinity arrived, Joia had seen something she needed to see and was waking up.

She glanced around inscrubly and turned and walked out the door. She told Justo goodbye and that was the last thing that she said for a very long time. And Trinity had quite a time setting this right.