Seth Kane ∞ Adam Parrish (themagician) wrote in thereincarnates, @ 2017-10-26 00:07:00 |
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Entry tags: | seth kane |
Who: Seth Kane
What: Being the Magician is about making things magical.
Where: A dirt road somewhere outside Jackson, SC
When: Wednesday, October 25; evening
Warnings: None
If Cabeswater existed in the world at all Seth was too far away to feel it unfurling in his veins. That should have been a good thing; after the price that Adam had almost paid Seth should have been happy to not be sharing his body with a forest grown from the dreams of a boy and right into an agenda of its own. His hands and his eyes were his own. He was his own, at least in some ways. If there was anything about Adam's life that Seth should have wanted it was the fact that he'd gotten out the way that it had never seemed possible for Seth to get out. There were things that Adam had that Seth never did. A fancy school. A rich friend who made introductions to all the right people for him. When it came to the core of it though Adam was the one who'd gotten himself out. Seth should want that. After all, he had nothing to stay for.
A quiet, too-honest part of his brain whispered that it wasn't true. He had Aidan, his best and only friend. That same too-honest part acknowledged that Aidan was probably more important to Seth than Seth was to Aidan. After all, Aidan probably had plenty of other friends. All Seth had were cars that didn't belong to him and a collection of bruises his dad had given him earlier that night when hadn't marked someone's bill up just because they didn't know enough about cars to know they'd been overcharged.
The car that Seth had driven out of town wasn't his own. He'd fill the gas tank up just to where it had sat when it had been dropped off. The owner wasn't going to remember what their odometer had been on when they dropped it off but everyone remembered how much gas they had. Seth had done this before. He knew.
All that he'd brought with him was a map and a worn deck of cards. The cards had been the only legacy left for him in the Agency. The map was filled with scribbles, attempts to fill out the lines that Adam remembered from Gansey's maps enough to guess at where the nearest ley line would be. It wasn't the ley line that had run through Cabeswater. It wasn't even close to the same size if what Adam could remember about all of Gansey's theories was right. Neither of them was even sure whether it was there at all and if so where it might have been. There was no guarantee that anything that Seth had come out to do would work and if it did... if it did what was the point? There wasn't any quest. There wasn't any Cabeswater. There wasn't anybody counting on him.
It had taken until the end of October but there was finally a bite to the night air. Seth shivered in the thin t-shirt he'd been wearing while working in the shop. He should have stopped to put on something warmer before he'd left. He should have at least grabbed the flannel shirt that he'd been wearing when he got there that morning. Being so impulsive wasn't like him.
Stopping his car in the middle of a road because he'd thought he'd felt something wasn't like him either. He was making it up. He knew that he was making it up because there was no reason for Seth to think that he could just know where the line was without consulting his map. His eye was swollen and his ribs were sore and he could taste the coppery tang of blood in his mouth from his split lip. If there was one person that Seth didn't want to be that night it was himself. He stood in the car's headlights (that's hardcore, Parrish whispered through his mind) with Persephone's Tarot cards in his hand and told himself that he didn't care if this worked, he didn't care if he felt anything at all. The cards felt warm. Seth knew it was probably from the heat of his body but it seemed like it should have been a property of the cards themselves, like they hummed with power even without someone to read them.
Seth didn't know how to read them. Seth had never believed in things like ley lines and Tarot cards before Adam.
"What do you need?" Seth didn't know if it needed anything at all. It wasn't the line that had fed Cabeswater, clogged and needing someone to swipe a net through it to get rid of debris. It could have been that he was there for nothing at all except... it felt the same. It felt like there was something off about it. Like it was a trickle when it could have been at least a stream. Never the full river that the ley line Adam knew had been but... but. It wasn't like Seth knew what he was talking about. He wasn't magical. There was nothing special about him. He should have known better. He should have...
Use the cards, Adam suggested. It was what he'd brought them for.
Seth crouched in the headlights and fanned the oversized cards in one hand. He let the fingers over the other travel across them, dragging like he was going to feel something that was different than the rest. It was ridiculous. There was no way that it was going to work.
His fingers paused over one of them. He pulled it from the deck and laid it on the dirt. Eight of Wands. Seth didn't know what the Eight of Wands meant. It probably meant nothing at all. His fingers itched to grab for his phone but he didn't have a data plan on it. He couldn't look up the meaning online and Adam... Adam didn't remember either, or if he did he didn't tell him. Seth might as well just go home for all the good that he was going to do.
The smudgy, spidery lines looked almost like arrows flying through the air, on the card. Like the sticks were in motion. Going from one place to another. Movement. Travel. Air. Something started taking form in Seth's mind and he let instinct guide him as he took a few steps off the road and then a few more and a few more after that.
By the time he stopped the car's headlights were a distant lighthouse calling him home to the safety of the road more traveled. Seth did pull his phone out then and lit the screen (less than half battery and he should have charged it before he left but he hadn't, he hadn't) so he could point it at the ground.
There. A shadow on the ground. Small and thin but still something wrong. Seth knelt and took it and it was like a joint in the world that had been out of socket had popped back into place. Seth knew it. Seth could feel it. Seth was magical. No... Seth made things magical which was even better than that. It was like electricity through his body and nothing hurt anymore. He wanted to tell someone. He wanted to shout it from the rooftops that there was something special about Seth Kane that the rest of them would never feel. Most of all he wanted to call Aidan.
And tell him what? Seth hadn't even told Aidan that he was a reincarnate. Not because he thought that Aidan would have something against reincarnates. Everyone else in Seth's life would hate him for that but all Aidan would do was give him a hard time until he gave in and told him who. And with the who there came even more questions that Seth didn't want to think about long enough to answer. Most of all in the world he couldn't tell Aidan about what he'd done and what he was. Not until he was ready.
He hadn't felt cold at all on the trudge back to the car. Not until he thought about telling Aidan and everything came crashing down around him. He stopped to gather Persephone's cards and murmured an apology to them about leaving them on the ground so long before he slid back into the driver's seat of the car and tucked them back into the bag he'd started carrying them in so that they didn't scatter. It was only once he'd settled himself down and buckled himself back in that he actually looked at what he'd picked up off the ground. He would have laughed when he saw it if it hadn't felt like one of the staves on the card he'd drawn had impaled him right through the center of his chest.
A black feather. A raven feather.
Seth should have thrown it back out the window right there. It wouldn't have interfered with the ley line. Not at all. But... if he'd felt like he needed to pick it up then that meant that he was going to need it for something. That was the way that it worked. If he took something from a spot on the line then he was supposed to keep it because he was going to need it again. It didn't matter that the sight of that feather made him feel things that Seth wasn't comfortable feeling. He tucked it into the bag with the Tarot cards and tried to forget about it while he did a slow u-turn on the narrow road. He couldn't get it off his mind at all.
Something was beginning.