Honestly, that was my insecurity talking. Not getting any response the first time drew out my doubts, but she’s thrown more than enough creepy crawlies my way since I met her. I’m still used to the material world and used to only believing things that are proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. I think it speaks to the power of the godforms that I’m beginning to really believe in them.
Week two, Doombringer.
After last week, I decided I would increase the frequency to three evocations per week instead of one. This way if I didn’t get through the first time I could go home, reassess, and try again after fixing any problems. I drove into the mountains down a sketchy snow-covered road to a location where I was confident I’d be left alone. I set up my altar on a convenient stump with an even more convenient notch to hold the clipboard with the sigil, as seen in the photo I posted earlier. Little things like that, good signs.
I could feel the “presence” almost as soon as I pulled out the sigil and began setting up. It watched me patiently through the evocation, almost like “Yes, yes, I know what you’re going to say…” I sat down and tried to look into the phone screen, but it was reflecting the sky instead of being dark like before. I was able to get a few images (paint splatter, scorpion, deer, and a bug with quickly beating wings, like a dragonfly) but they were coming directly into my mind, not from the screen, so I set it down.
I heard a drumbeat somewhere in the back of my mind and got a whiff of marijuana. Remembering what the book said about how you have to go to his place, he doesn’t come to you, I imagined walking into a forest somewhere. The feeling that had come from the sigil got stronger and clarified into the shape of a person, and he started by asking me a bunch of questions: “Have you done this before?” Barely. “How do you know this is real?” I don’t. It was very like talking to my tulpa.
Most of the conversation was unclear. We would trade a couple lines of dialogue and then he would be silent except for watching me with this particularly piercing look. On the second day he said something about there being more conversation going on than I was aware of; that’s probably what this was. I asked if he could help me improve, and he said yes, but (how to word this) only if I am willing to go with it despite being unsure of whether or not it’s real. I’ll cut out some of the dialogue because this write up is long enough as it is.
The strongest impression I got from him was when I asked about the first time I did weed a while back, overdosed and got knocked on my ass. Before I could finish the sentence he gave me a big ol’ grin and I could feel his delight and amusement at the thought. So apparently he did witness the whole thing, which I’d worried about because I kind of made a fool of myself trying to contact Ellis in that state. This absolved some of my fears that I’d made a bad first impression.
I “woke up” spontaneously after about twenty minutes, which is how it went for the rest of the week. Before I left he invited me to come back if I wanted to.
On this first day I couldn’t get the pipe to light correctly and I got about half a puff. To be honest, I’ve only ever eaten the stuff, never smoked. I figured out the trick for it by the second day and then coughed my poor virgin lungs out in the middle of the evocation, which I’m sure he thought was funny. In any case, I hardly counted as high during the ritual itself.
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The second day was like the first. The presence was strongest in front of me, emanating from the sigil, but in my mind’s eye he was walking around again. Wanting to make sure I wasn’t imagining something that wasn’t really happening, I asked, “How much of this is imaginary?” To which he replied, “All of it.” Right, we went over that last time. He invited me into some sort of tent or yurt – a shelter with walls made of cloth, anyway. It was warm inside and smoky, I think, but I didn’t smell pot or anything similar, and he wasn’t smoking now like he did the whole time yesterday. Maybe he was just cooking, who knows.
(On reflection, he could have been poking fun at my initial picture of him living in a squat in the jungle).
I tried the scrabble tiles and got nothing particularly meaningful. It might be too concrete a technique for this purpose.
At one point I mentioned that he didn’t seem particularly violent in these interactions, despite his name and reputation. He said that he doesn’t need to be. I could take that to mean that he doesn’t need to use physical force or coercion, as he can wreak his form of havoc without it. Or he could just mean that right at the moment, with me, he didn’t need to be violent.
At some point he asked if I wanted to help them, and I said I did, but I didn’t know how. “We’ll teach you,” he said.
Around ten minutes in based on my voice recording, I started to see a lot of vivid images on the back of my eyelids. A feather distorted around a black circle, like the light was bending. A black widow, someone lying in bed, a red lamp, and an eye. A bridge seen from ground level with big arching supports. A sort of sagging X shape. Leaves in water. A white bird dipping its feet in the water as it flies. A moth or butterfly. The sagging X shape again, and now I saw it more clearly as a pair of crossed
sabres. Colored static like on a TV screen. A rose. Tree branches. A pattern like you might see on pottery or cloth. Then an eye again, female, and I was kind of started because the eye turned deep red, and then for a moment my whole field of vision was red. Something with lines radiating out. A woman with a crown and royal white robes, which immediately turned into a shrouded ghost, like one of the ringwraiths as seen in the movies when a character is wearing the One Ring. These images were more intense than before, and through all of it Doombringer was sitting or crouching next to me, evidently showing me all this. He touched me on the arm or shoulder a couple times, which felt interesting; basically the feeling from the sigil intensified and localized. Another eye, this one blue, but mostly I kept seeing the red one. I could feel it (her) looking at me and I was locked into staring back. I saw myself reflected in it upside down, and the impact of that didn't hit me until a moment after.
After that I saw imagery of trees alongside a road, which reminded me of a park near where I live. The next series of images seemed to be showing a particular path through the park. It turned left into the trees near a stream and then the imagery shifted to a black dot with lines radiating from it to smaller black dots, each of which was surrounded in a sort of neon green fuzz, like squinting at a green Christmas light. Then the smaller ones blew up and sent lines out to form other nodes. The end picture was of a few big black dots reminiscent of chaos stars with each line connecting to several smaller dots surrounded in green, which were also interconnected. Again, I didn’t immediately realize what I was looking at until I heard myself describing it. It’s the linking network, of course. This is my best representation of it. The main difference is that my picture is two dimensional, whereas what I saw had more nodes in the background and was more "dynamic" looking:
I went home and ordered some burgers for me and my family, which came out to $33.33. I paid in exact change, and that evening I went by the park and left a tag next to the path in the area indicated.
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The third day was cloudy and colder than the last two, and it snowed lightly during the ritual. I was too deep in trance for it to bother me. I remembered the bit from the day before about most conversations being subliminal, so I mostly stayed quiet, looked into the sigil and his projected image, and let these conversations happen.
My mental image of him had clarified by now. Proportionally long arms and legs, yellow eyes with black in them somewhere, possibly ringed in black as well as the pupil. Clothes and hair vary between shades of grey and sometimes black and white. Age seems to shift, anything from an older child to middle age, and always with a margin of error of at least twenty years; I haven’t seen him as an old man. Overall, pretty much as described in Sigillum. At one point I stopped seeing him as human so much as a force or object, and referred to him as “it” for a while.
There were few verbal exchanges. I asked sort of off-handedly whether I could tell people I summon demons now. “Do I count as a demon? … Yeah, probably.” Before leaving I asked if he had any advice for the rest of the marathon. He said distinctly, “Be brave”. Which either means something scary is coming or just that I’ll do better the less timid I am. He said that he could “look after me”, and I just had to agree to it, which I did. So I may have a more permanent connection with him now.
At the end I felt like I should make some kind of closing statement, but I hadn’t prepared one. “Make something up,” he said. So I said, “The gate is open. Yothna equiya saca indras!” and hit the chime again. This being the last line from a supposed “death spell” I pulled out of the ether once as an angsty teenager and subsequently used to make an ant squirm telepathically. I have no idea what it means, if anything, but he seemed satisfied.