PROVENDER: Three Rites of Death

Mowry

 

After the sun fell down the view was nonexistent. Black mountains, black sky, black clouds, black stars. I was exhausted after the plane and the shuttle and the endless forest service roads giving way to private gravel driveways. All I wanted to do was sleep. But the festivities had already begun and I didn't want anyone narcing to my boss that I had skipped out on the first training. Better to merge with the crowd and slip away once I'd been counted present. 

 

The venue was a handsome alpine lodge, mutilated with modern decor that gave it the feel of a hotel conference room. The facilitators wore slippery yellow robes like raincoats. They smiled like you do when someone takes too long in front of you in line. One shoved a table and folded the area rug back in place with a foot. It had been misaligned. The other listened at the door. It was performative because we could all hear it.

 

bam bam bam bambambam bam bam bambambam bam bam

 

I couldn't tell if the heavy wooden element at chest level was a handle or a bar to hold the door shut from the outside. He pulled on it and it opened without a sound.

 

It took me a second to understand what I was looking at. Bodies packed so tight they couldn't possibly move but moving nonetheless. Thrashing and stomping. Carried forward and being carried in turn. A swirling dark pattern to fill the windowless and almost unlit space. The whirling ant mill implied an eye of the storm at the center but promised annihilation to anyone who tried to swim through the mass and reach it.

  

There was a little light from somewhere. There must have been or I couldn't see it. There was enough that I recognized someone in the crowd. I remembered her from the ride up, the only person in the van who listened attentively to the concierge's excited lecture. Something about a dolmen beneath the lodge, preserved in its original condition in a high ceilinged chamber beneath the original structure and still enclosed today a century later. She had gone up ahead of me and now she flashed before my gaze. Bruised face slick with drool, bedroom eyes half lidded. She snapped away into the human current and I was back on my uncle's farm. Watching him slam the emergency stop a moment after the farmhand disappeared beneath the grain. Like it could reverse the arc. Bear the man up out of the silo. Un-collapse his lungs.

I turned to yell at the raincoats. To do something. Pull the fire alarm. Call a time out. Like hell was I going in there.

I didn’t see who shoved me.

HERE’S A LULLABY TO CLOSE YOUR EYES

COST: N/A
RITUAL ACTION: Kill someone without damaging their skin. Cut open their back and peel the skin and muscle away from the spine to form wings. Suspend the body off the ground.
EFFECT: Until the “angel” loses its wings to decay, nobody under its gaze can die in their sleep. Blades snap, cancer goes into remission, death spells bounce off.

WHO WOULD DO THIS?

The ritual was discovered by John the Revelator, a serial killer afraid of dying in his sleep. This was back when the Sleepers were still a force to be reckoned with but by the time they realized his ritual actually worked it was in all the newspapers. Today the spell is primarily used by evil mages to avoid lethal supernatural effects whose arrival can be precisely timed. Poisonous magick elixirs, remote cast death curses and the like.

TNI “artifactory” Where’s My Bottle never killed anyone personally (and never hesitated to remind you) but knew how to repackage the dangling corpses into Christmas ornaments that could be carried on the person. These little angels always have a fragment of hair or bone inside. They don’t rot but their celluloid wings are flammable.

 

Coma

 

DANSE MACABRE
COST: N/A
RITUAL ACTION: Cut the heart out of a live animal and crush it, still beating, in your closed fist. Lead a group of people in a dance. It doesn’t need to be a big group, you could do it with one other person. But it’s better with a crowd.
EFFECT: For every person who gets injured in the dance, the ritual caster gets a minor charge. Every person who dies grants them a significant charge. Common ways to get injured in an ecstatic dance are exhaustion and breaking the legs or feet. The most common cause of death is falling and being trampled or suffocated by the crowd. Staging injuries grants the caster no charges, you can’t hold a dance in an active steel mill or throw grenades into the crowd.
 

WHO WOULD DO THIS?

Electrician Bobby Smiles does the sound for illegal raves in poorly lit, poorly ventilated abandoned buildings. Drugs and heat exhaustion do the rest. He's a little creepy looking, fat with too many teeth in a too-wide mouth. But he does a complex and demanding job that requires technical skills and asks for nothing in return, which makes him worth his weight in gold.
 

Movement Medicine consultant Edwina “Ed” Christ runs very expensive ecstatic dance retreats for billion dollar companies, always set in remote locations with no cell phones or cameras. Getting away with it once is easy. Everyone signs waivers beforehand and the company covers it up after. What's less clear is how she keeps getting work. Maybe she gives someone a cut of the charges.

 

THE IMMORTAL SCIENCE
COST: N/A
RITUAL ACTION: Kill an enemy of the workers and peasants. Eat their heart and liver. Remove their genitals and immerse them in liquor. Drink the liquor.
EFFECT: The caster’s age decreases by one year. Symptoms of ageing like gray hair, skin wrinkles and joint pain are similarly reversed. This can undo one year of dementia, arthritis and the early stages of cancer. The spell can be cast as many times as the caster is willing to kill.

 

WHO WOULD DO THIS?

Mo Zan led a militia in rural Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution, but you wouldn’t know she was 75 just looking at her. She discovered the ritual by accident after eating her math teacher during a struggle session and has been trying to stay young ever since. There were some hard years but it’s easier now with the depopulation of the countryside. Grandpa’s neighbors have all moved to the city and his kids only visit once a year.

 

A copy of the Party's secret 1981 investigation into the Guangxi incident saved American communist cabal Cannibalism Of Our Own Style from irrelevance. Their underground war against the Ordo Corpulentis went nowhere until they learned the ritual, now they're a credible threat and their message couldn't be simpler. Eat the rich, live forever.