Chapter 9: The Awakening

“Okay, that was surprising,” said Jana, still catching her breath.

“Look, I super appreciate you stopping by. Really. We’re cool now. Thanks.”

I mustered a forced, grateful smile and turned to go back inside, but something she’d said pulled me back.

“What’s surprising?”

“Your attitude. Look, I get that you want to return to your role-playing game. That’s all you had to say. But you’re so damn avoidant!”

Her words, laden with frustration, struck me hard.

“Avoidant because I didn’t want to be rude.”

“Dragging me out of your place isn’t rude?”

“If you knew what I wanted to do, why didn’t you say your piece and leave?”

Jana recoiled a bit. “I guess it’s because once I got here, I thought it would be nice to get to know you, and for a second, I thought you felt the same about me.”

Her words caused me to gulp automatically.

“And it’s not just that. I was trying to figure out the best way to bring up what I saw in and after Mrs. Nelson-Perkins’s class.”

So that’s the class we have together. But if we share that class, Jana saw Rules of the Black Arts for Advanced Users. Becca must’ve sent her to get the book! But she’s clearly uncomfortable… did she see evil Mrs. Nelson-Perkins, too?

“What did you see?” I scoured her gaze, hoping she’d witnessed the uncanny the way I had.

“Dane Shaw was talking to Mrs. Nelson-Perkins and laughing just before you entered the class.”

“I knew it. The Nameless One was colluding with Mrs. Nelson-Perkins.”

“Nameless One? Are you talking about Dane?”

I nodded. Too many thoughts were racing through my mind at that moment to reply.

“Wait, did you say after class, too?”

Jana’s body language shifted inward. I would have called it timid, but that couldn’t be right for someone as brazen as her.

“When the class finished, I decided to visit the dean to tell him. But after I saw you…”

She saw me at the deans. Maybe she saw those weirdos.

“Did you see those students in the white masks? Open-mouthed symbol? Um, they were singing.”

She blinked. “No.”

Her response seethed with confusion. I started to probe deeper, but she blurted out, “I just saw… you running away from Dane with tears in your eyes.”

I stood mortified. This woman had seen my shame, and before I could even react to her revelation, she hammered the nail into her damning assessment of me.

“Like I said, avoidant,”

This time, the shank of her words was delivered with soft, caring undertones, but it didn’t make the jab any less painful.

Jana is not a honeypot. She’s here to murder my ego.

“I thought you were going to rush him, but you…kept running. Are you that afraid of him?”

I had no words.

The discomfort I felt when talking to Nate returned with a vengeance. It twisted in my stomach. Neither Jana nor Nate understood. The Nameless One wasn’t my bully; he was my nemesis.

“I get it, Billy. Being an influencer and getting naked for my art, I get hate all the time. But I don’t hesitate to bust heads if my boundaries are crossed. If you don’t stand up to—what did you call him? The Nameless One?—the bullying’s only going to get worse.”

This woman had no idea of The Nameless One or our history.

I could tell from her body language that she was genuinely concerned, maybe because of her personal experience with bullying. But she was going down the wrong path.

“Jana, I appreciate your concern, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“All right, maybe I don’t. Do you at least want me to tell the dean? I thought I should talk to you about it first.”

“Do what you want.”

And with that, I left her standing and returned inside. When I shut the door, I glanced at my watch. That blindside conversation cost me! Fifteen, not five, minutes had passed. Weird Nikki never reneged on the specifics of a deal. Game night was officially toast.

This day stinks!

The space seemed unusually calm. I swore my crew would be pasted to the door, spying, but no one was in sight. I sullenly ambled back to the TV area, beat up by my negative thoughts.

The hottest girl on campus thinks I’m gutless.

For some reason, it troubled me. I generally never gave a damn about people’s opinions, but I did with Jana, whether I wanted to or not. What made it worse, I didn’t even know her.

Did someone shut off the TV?

Odd. On game night, Jammer usually played till the witching hour.

Where is everyone?

I plodded into the role-playing area, depression knocking at my brain. Surprisingly, all the usual suspects were huddled around the table, leaning in and looking at something. From the joyous sound of their chatter, they seemed enamored with it.

Myles looked my way. He was the only one who noticed me. “Billy’s back.” The declaration startled Gene. When he turned to face me, guilt seeped from his expression.

Over his shoulder, lying wide open on the tabletop, sat the object of everyone’s conversation: Rules of the Black Arts for Advanced Users.

Fortunately, Nate was the last to get in a word before I lost my—”Sh#%t! This book is dope.”

“What the hell, Gene?! I trusted you.” Venom clung to every word I yelled. My anger rocked everyone. Most of them were surprised and genuinely confused by my behavior.

But Gene knew.

He and I were both private people. I would never have betrayed his trust.

Even more disappointing was Gene’s desperate attempt to shift blame. “Weird Nikki said your book was next level,” he spilled, sheepish. “We didn’t think a peek would hurt. You said you were going to show it to us.”

“And I also told them not to take it out,” Weird Nikki snapped.

“Billy, I think that book is part of the Bramwell-Gates Legend.”

“Sure it is, Gene. Give me my book.” Sarcasm and anger pulled my strings like a marionette; without thinking, I pushed Gene aside and pulled Rules of the Black Arts for Advanced Users off the table.

A loud screech followed my thoughtless move.

The metal clasp of the book clawed into The Lords of Omni glass tabletop, leaving behind a ten-inch scratch. The group released a collective gasp. But I had fallen so deeply into my madness that I didn’t care about the damage or their shock.

“This day sucks, and you all suck!”

I tucked Rules of the Black Arts for Advanced Users under my armpit and burst out of the building. I needed to get away from those fools.

There was no denying that the day had thrashed me. The toll of confrontation, confusion, and betrayal left me seething. Yet, the feeling powered my trek past my building and into the darkness of the woods.

More than anything, I wanted to sit by the calming waters of the nearby lake. But unsurprisingly, the day still had displeasure to give. The underbrush had thickened, forcing me to trudge toward my promised solitude.

Tension cinched my breath. My steps, labored.

One hand swatted away overgrowth while the other tightly clenched Rules of the Black Arts for Advanced Users against my chest.

When I broke into the clearing, I involuntarily voiced my irritation. “Gawd.”

After catching my breath, I made my way to what I’d dubbed the sitting stones. I soaked in the stillness and immediately knew why I’d fought so hard to get there. The moonlight wove a beautiful shimmer across the lake that blended into the surrounding mist; its unity made this humble landscape feel mystical.

I set the book on the crest of the smaller sitting stone, climbed up, and sat down. As I leaned back against the larger sitting stone, my anger softened. Then, like a passenger of my own thoughts, I sat and listened while silence bowed to guilt and anxiety.

I started the day with an unusual flare of enthusiasm, which buckled fast, beginning with Jana’s ass. So many bizarre things had happened, the spinning wheel of my mind couldn’t stop on one.

“No. No. No,” I said quietly to myself.

I had spent the whole day repeating and retelling the day’s events. I was not about to do it again. It was time to stop.

For the next ten minutes, I let my mind wander, drifting past every swirling notion that vied to attach itself to me. Instead, I focused on the stone’s coldness beneath my palm, the clean scent of the night air, the sounds surrounding me, and the feel of my book’s leather-wrapped binding.

I lightly ran my finger across the surface for several seconds, then picked it up, placed it on my lap, and re-read the title, breaking the shadowed quiet.

“Rules of the Black Arts for Advanced Users.”

The latches on the book’s side flapped, unfastened by my so-called friends’ snooping. In my first quiet moment of the day, I happily flipped open the cover. A faintly sweet, musty smell wafted into the air, light, not unpleasant, and buttered with a hint of vanilla.

Although the moonlight provided some scant light, it wasn’t enough to see the pages. I took out my cell and tapped on the light app.

Before I advanced, I decided not to leaf through the pages as I had done earlier. Instead, I wanted to take my time and read for a little while. Maybe that would help me understand my sudden irrational behavior to protect it.

Before today, I had never seen this book. It seemed like it magically appeared in my bookbag, but even I’m not cheesy enough to believe that. Someone had put it there. But who or why no longer mattered. Contrary to my initial efforts to give it away, I now claimed full ownership.

Ready, I positioned the light from my cell over the book. On the inside cover was an etched dedication. It read, To my family, I WOULDN’T be here if it weren’t for you. Directly underneath the cursive statement was a symbol, maybe a family crest or totem.

Oddly, the book included no publication details, author, or preface pages. Instead, the written material began with a one-page INTRODUCTION.

In summary, the “Introduction” stated that readers needed to alter their will and perception to reawaken magical thinking. It revealed that authentic Black arts reconnected humans with their lost tools to create instantly from the Void.

A passage stood out to me, so I read it aloud: “‘All souls are advanced users capable of unlearning the abnormal perception, which is the reality that we experience.’”

The main narrative of the paragraph claimed that the book’s teachings would enhance the reader’s perception of the ethereal plane called The Awakening, allowing them to use their knowledge to manipulate the real world.

What the hell? Why is the author not referring to The Lords of Omni game like the traditional guidebooks? Instead, they’re presenting the material as if it were real.

Despite my need to tie this book to The Lords of Omni, I quieted my urges to flip ahead.

Maybe this is a GM’s guidebook, not a players’ guidebook. GM guides are typically more creative to help the GM with world-building.

A ten-page table of contents came after the introduction, listing headers such as “Reconstructing Belief” and “Understanding Auracofts.” Now that one I recognized from The Lords of Omni—Auracofts were typically small personal objects, akin to something like a wand, which allowed magic players to focus and manifest their spellcrafting.

Okay, excellent. This book is tied to my role-playing game. Whew. I can’t lie. Mrs. Nelson-Perkins’s allegation that I had a devil book got to me. No way in hell would I read an actual book about black magic.

I continued: “Planes of Existence,” “The Awakening,” “Organizations, Races, and Entities,” “Gods of Your World”…

It was so much to take in—hundreds of listed sections.

The two pages following the table of contents puzzled me.

First, the page on the left-hand side clearly stated that it was a key to symbols. But there was just a single hand-brushed illustration of a circle shown, which was particularly funky because I knew the book was chock-full of symbols. So, as a key, this page failed its only function.

Next, on the right-hand side, was the page with the ominous warning and mysterious envelope that led to me closing the book in Mr. Shulenmeyers’s office.

This time, I viewed the page with a little more levity. In a deep, gravelly voice, I read the words out loud to emphasize the dramatic effect of the text. “‘READER BEWARE—you have gazed upon the sacred marking; now, to access the book’s truths, you must break the seal, open the envelope, and read the card.’”

After I finished reading, I narrowed my eyes and re-read the passage. Something was off.