The following morning, after confessing her frustration to her brother, Laurel rose from her bed before first light, draped on a heavy robe, and quickly padded on bare feet to a subterranean room of the palace. The entrance was hidden from common view, and no one else, aside from Linstahl, knew of its existence. The original builders were long dead, and the knowledge passed with them. Linstahl never entered the basement. Laurel used it to privately enact the rituals she knew for contacting being from other worlds, some of them powerful beings.
She snapped her fingers as she entered the room causing one candle then other to light of its own volition and so on until the room was illuminated as she desired. The candles were lit in a certain order, she moved in a particular manner that resembled a complicated dance, and she spilled her own blood before standing within a particular pattern painted upon the floor. None of the ritual was necessary, but she did not know that. The whole process had grown over Cycles trial and error and piecing together bits of information from various sources. The blood was necessary for what she wanted that day, or more accurately who she wanted. A shimmering cloud of shadow appeared within the larger design she was facing. “Show yourself !”
The cloud coalesced and formed into a man or something like a man, for it was a full three strides in height, towering over the woman by a stride. The man never showed his true form, which was not a man at all. Anyone with the skill or talent to summon one of his kind was not going to be intimidated by a look, any look. He stood with his arms folded across his chest, completely unclothed and uncaring. “As you command.”
