Subject: Second Circles ch. 5: Ordeals Explained
Author: Delta Juliette
Posted on: 2018-04-14 15:54:00 UTC

It took Julia three hours to cross the forest. The trees were old and tall, rejoicing in the light without blotting it out and leaving the ground darkened. There weren’t trails here, there weren’t stumps, there weren’t any signs of logging- for all Julia knew, she was the first human to walk this grove.

Sometimes she just had to stop to take it all in- the long, spreading limbs were perfectly proportioned, each tree a sculpture rather than the bristly confusion of the firs she was used to. The grove was quiet, still, only the faint stirring of branches by breeze far above. It didn’t seem to be a place particularly in need of animals, or people.

At the bottom of the grove was a stream, so perfectly clear it was almost invisible over the speckled rocks that made its bed. Julia crossed at a wide spot, a shallow spot, an inch of rushing water wetting the sides of her boots and nothing more.

And then she was climbing, the land slowly steepening as she approached the immense bulk of the volcano. The great trees became lessened, reduced by the altitude, until they were a size Julia was more familiar with- slim trunks, twisted branches, and then she pushed her way through the last two and realized she was there.

Above the treeline stood a single maple, perhaps twenty feet tall, and above it loomed the sharp peak of the volcano. It was not reduced by the climb up its flank, as some mountains were- the peak was closer and taller and more threatening than it had been from a distance.

It reminded Julia of Mount Saint Helens, the beautiful mountain that had blown up seven years before her birth. That- she stopped to think about it. Had that been an Ordeal too? It seemed possible- a mountain of beauty twisted into horror, hurling itself sideways into ruin. If that had been an Ordeal it had been a failure.

Julia put down her backpack on a convenient rock and sat, digging out her Manual.

“I don’t suppose you have a chapter on applied vulcanology?” she asked, thumbing through the index.

The book didn’t answer. Julia hadn’t expected it to.

The first problem, she knew, was the question of time. Saint Helens had steamed and smoked for months before the final blast, as the plaque at the visitor’s center had explained. The mountain she was standing on now could be the same- months or minutes from erupting, and her none the wiser.

The future was a topic that had seen multiple chapters of the Manual dedicated to it. Seeing it was a complicated affair, confounded by chance and choice and a dozen other things that tended to make it an indistinct and unclear mess. Many of those factors didn’t apply here, fortunately, and Julia flipped to the relevant pages to try to work out how to ask for what she needed.

After an hour’s scribbling, five more yellow pages of graph paper covered in writing, she had something that seemed workable. If nobody did anything, the spell asked, what did her convenient sitting rock’s near future look like? What would it see?

“Where do you see yourself in five years?” Julia asked the stone, and then snickered and started to read the spell.

The magic took effect slowly, a thickening of the air, a quieting of the breeze as she finished reading. It almost felt like a dream- snow was falling, fat gray flakes- but it wasn’t snow. It was ash, and as Julia turned to look away from the mountain she beheld horror.

Through the haze of falling ash, the forest was a ruin. Landslides had poured down the mountain, felling the great trees like toothpicks, and fires roared where the land hadn’t reached. Ash smothered the stream bed, blackened the sky- even in the silence, in the stillness of the dream, lightning reached down from the ash cloud into the forest to spark another fire, miles away.

This is tomorrow, she knew, in the way knowledge just sometimes appeared with a dream. This is tomorrow if you do nothing, young witch.

And then the vision was gone and Julia was gasping for breath, collapsing to sit on the stone once more, red trees and blue sky blurring as tears filled her eyes.

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