The Crafts: Wixes, Spells, and the Weaponized Placebo Effect

-deeeeeeeep breath- Awright, here we go.

Spoiler: Most likely a ass hallucination part 2: shit gets weirder and Laz maybe has a psychotic break

That was a typo but I'm leaving it because it made me smile. Anyway, continuing on:

There had been a couple people at school before the first incident that felt Weird. I especially have a habit of getting Feelings from people, and often they're either Crafty or have Crafty problems. At the time, however, I was still working through the worst of my damage and was cripplingly shy when it came to people I didn't already know. The nature of these Feelings also made it harder to approach people because what do you say? And even though I had a good track record with being right about them I always waited for them to approach me because I was still in the craft closet on account of public knowledge of parents being wixen was what screwed kindergarten me over to start. So I had an eye on both when they were near in case they decided to approach me, but I wouldn't initiate interaction if I could help it. One of these people had a very hostile air to them when it came to <> and I (we shared a class with him) and my Feeling was not a particularly nice one. <> also felt threatened by him, and was in fact the first to bring it up.

There was some discussion of if either of them were also "invited" but nothing came of it. Also all three of us who went to the trees were feeling very drained spiritually and Coy and <>'s wards started needing a lot more maintenance all of a sudden.

A week after the initial incident there was a school dance, and Coy and <> were heavily pressured by their parents to be Normal Teens and attend, and if they have to suffer everyone has to suffer so we all went. Most of it was unremarkable and unrelated, but we ended up stepping outside when I had my obligatory Too Many People anxiety attack. It was after dark and I decided to focus on the sky while I calmed down. Remember when I mentioned how one can draw a triangle from any collection of 3+ points? Directly overhead I saw three stars forming a triangle with the same proportions as the trees, with the brightest in the same place as the largest tree. I pointed up and asked if anyone else saw something weird, and iirc Coy's reaction was "You have got to be shitting me." Aside from none of us being able to see the moon on a very clear night and not near the new moon, the rest of the night was uneventful wrt Weird Shit.

The next month is mostly quiet aside from the hostile Feeling from the one boy persisting, and that Coy, <>, and I were even more tired and drained. I had completely lost focus, I couldn't meditate, not even to visit my Safe Warm Place, and even playing around with my cards left me mentally exhausted. The others were similar but not extreme- whether my depression was interfering or exacerbating I don't know (it did start literally the day after we visited the trees). <>'s wards were getting messed up and I was regularly helping to shore them up, which wasn't helping either of us energywise. There were plans to bring Bro and ex-<> to the trees but they were put off.

The month after that is when things got interesting. From the start of it I started having very vivid and usually unsettling dreams often enough I dug out the dream journal I hadn't touched in over a year to record them. The first two recorded happened in a row: the first was mostly a stress dream/light nightmare about my bullying/abuse experience rehappening, but it branched off organically from there to <> and I being disgustingly pale talking some things out. The first interesting thing was the general "flavor" of the dream, the... don't know how to describe it. Some of my dreams have a... quality I can recognize in other dreams that may not share the same themes, setting, tone, emotions. This one felt the same as the one the next night in that way despite only a few similar themes. The other is that during the pale jam <> and I were doing the thing where you use words for the linework of a drawing. Except this was a very intricate drawing of a large tree superficially resembling the largest in the Triangle, and even though I can usually read in dreams we were writing unfamiliar words in an unfamiliar alphabet. Not just dream language scribbles, but with the "just knowing" that happens in dreams that we were writing something meant to be unknown- either something only we knew/could understand or something that even we couldn't.

The next is another school dream featuring <> and a mostly unrelated friend I will call Bloo, who wasn't Crafty but had a wix relative, and experienced a sudden and unexpected energy/emotional crash coinciding with the initial incident (and our exhaustion + my depression spiral). The main of it starts with us standing outside the classrooms at the very back of the school during class, but not talking. It's almost mournful. The skinniest scarecrow of an emaciated boy I've ever seen walks by. He's sickly pale, almost corpselike, and generally looks like he dragged himself to school straight from the hospital and really needs to go back. This is a young man who looks like he ought to be on his deathbed. (Looking at the rest of the physical description, and remembering what I can of the dream itself, he strongly resembles a figure that's shown up in several dreams in the years since. Huh.) As he passes I can't tell if it's <> or me he glances at, but he says "thank you" with absolute sincerity. Neither <> or I know what he's talking about, and neither of us recognize him. I conclude the incident was creepy. <> says it wasn't as creepy as Bloo in fourth period. Bloo is hiding behind a door to our left. <> is reminded she needs to check Bloo's stones and starts looking through her bag but I tell her I have them and pull out my bag of stones. <> is shocked and concerned when she sees it and hisses that I can't have weapons here.

It cuts to later. Bloo is hiding under a truck in the school parking lot, curled up hugging her knees. <> and I keep trying to get her to come out but she won't, she's crying so hard it's hard to understand her but it's easy to tell she's scared, she's terrified. I wake up before we can learn of what, and before we can get her out.

Most of the others are disconnected and just generally dark and unsettling and gradually turned into a fresh nightmare every night, but I didn't mark any of them as relevant for a while. And the next two I did need the context first.

I'd recently lost a personally significant piece of jewelry. One of my gifts from mom when I turned 13 was a small gold heart pendant with rubies lining the right side. Aside from the fact it was Very Nice and I wasn't getting many gifts from mom when I got it because she was on-again-off-again homeless and perpetually broke as fuck (she later admitted it was given to her in place of monetary payment from someone she was dealing to) but mom being mom she probably worked some protective juju into it. Even though it had been over a year since I got it I'd just started wearing it out, since gold isn't really my metal of choice. The cord I was wearing it on broke in class one day so I put the pendant in my pencil pouch. Instead of putting it on a new cord I decided to keep it there because I could see it every time I went for a pencil and have happy thoughts about my mom. And I did see it every time I opened the pouch, for several weeks. Until I didn't. The chances of me having lost it: very slim. Pencils are one of my Tools so I looked after them almost religiously. If my pouch had spilled or something I'd know. The chances of it being stolen: even slimmer. First, no-one knew it was there beyond that first day when the cord broke. Second, I am and was extremely territorial. I'd survived some ten years of bullying and had my share of people messing with my shit whenever I looked away. And I came to the obvious solution: don't look away. The pencil pouch only came out when I needed it and went straight back in once I had what I needed. My backpack was never out of sight at school or on the bus and even my friends couldn't touch it without permission. It was something of a meme: touch Laz's belongings and she (didn't know I was nb at the time) will add your hand to them. It was one of the first boundaries I really developed and the thought of someone violating it without my knowledge is and was genuinely distressing. So I was understandably upset about the necklace. Tore my entire backpack apart, asked my teachers if they saw it, fretted about it for weeks before I finally stamped it down and just... hoped I'd find it eventually while feeling very guilty because it was Important.

One night, when I was on the verge of falling asleep, I saw very clearly my necklace hanging from a twig high up in a tree. It was so vivid I sat up and wrote it down so I would remember even though it meant doing the Insomnia Toss-Turn Dance all over again. That was the first relevant entry since the one with Bloo. A few days later was the next, following the Second Tree Visit:

I mentioned that we had planned to bring Bro and ex-<> to the trees to get their impression. Bro was having family issues, but on winter solstice (I didn't realize at the time but just now while looking at the dates. Huh x2. It was the last day of school before break so I was probably more concerned with that) <> managed to get ex-<> and I over at her place at the same time. Between this and the above, you can probably see where this is going. We decided to go to the trees. Ex-<>'s impression was that it was mournful and felt close to death (he smelled rot. We couldn't) but not hostile. He did not amend the last part even after a few steps later he crossed into the triangle when he jumped back and said it felt like he'd been stung on the leg. While he was hopping around like an idiot I walked in as well (<> stayed outside of it because of last time's badfeels) and, without really thinking about it, looked up.

There are a few moments here that I don't remember. As I said, I remember looking up. I recognized the leaves and twigs from my not-quite dream, but didn't see my necklace. I felt very light and lightheaded, very floaty. Like a cloud more than being underwater. The world got very small: there was me, the leaves overhead, and only a vague impression of space around us. I don't really remember what I was thinking about but I know it felt like it lasted for at least a minute but probably longer. According to <> and ex-<> it wasn't but a second: I looked up and pretty much immediately swooned. I just know I went from lost in that weird feeling to ex-<> propping me up and both of them asking if I was alright. I was still lightheaded but now more dizzy and more like I was going to faint.

<> felt drawn to one of the outer trees and when we approached (after I could reliably walk on my own) there was a... sort of hum from below. Not like an earthquake, it's California, we know earthquakes. More like a very subtle droning. That day <> and I had found a rock on the blacktop at school. We picked it up because it was a little odd, different from the pebbles we usually get on asphalt. It was a little bigger than my thumbnail, very flat with a bit of curve, and dark with orangey-brown striations. I'd joked that it looked kind of like a little piece of raw tiger's eye and <> thought it was neat so she stuck it in her pocket. At the tree she found a little oval impression, I wouldn't even call it a hole, and the rock juuust fit so it wouldn't fall. And the feeling stopped. And the voices started. Not the voices <>, Coy, and I heard the first time. This time it was several voices talking at once, but not in a language any of us could understand or even recognize and definitely not as loud or clear. Not a whisper, but like a loud scene on TV with the volume turned waaaaay down. <> removed the rock and the voices stopped (not all at once, a very short taper off that kept it from feeling sudden). We decided against proper scientific procedure of getting repeatable results and decided it was a good time to leave. After we went home ex-<> called <> to tell her he had what resembled a black widow bite on the leg that felt stung earlier. Ex-<> is a known bullshit artist but he risked his smother's wrath (very notable) to send a text with a picture (not on their phone plan at the time). I heard about this several weeks later, when school started back up, but <> still had the text.

At some point that night I wrote an entry in the dream journal. I vaguely remember doing so, and the page is dated. I do not remember the intent or process of writing, I just have the awareness that it was a thing I did. Most of the page is covered in what the page of notes says resembles the language <> and I were writing the tree in, in the first dream. The rest, and my already godawful handwriting is worse than usual and the whole thing is smudged to hell from shitty mechanical pencil and several hands going over it so it's very hard to tell, appears to be what's best described as "translator's notes." Some of the dream-words are indicated in whole or part with different attempts at combining or conjugating words, sometimes rearranging them or adding articles. (Ex: one word, with some variation of what I'm going to call accent marks, I'd apparently decided at one point was 'here stands (implied "a"?)' later has the notes: 'Imperative structure- Stand before...? No rest of sentence describes intangible. Root is godword no help "witness?" no subject not once, ongoing. "Gaze upon?" (implied "a" again)'

It is straight-up crazytalk attempting to translate even crazier crazytalk. I do not remember writing this, just that it was, in fact, a thing I wrote. And despite even worse quality than usual the handwriting is very definitely mine. I put a paper after the page so I wouldn't have to look at it and ignored it until I got back to school where I handed it off to the others to sort out. I thought that, at least for the space of the night I wrote it, I completely fucking lost it. Rode the crazytrain into wtfville. Had a complete but thankfully temporary break from reality. I am still not convinced it has anything to do with the rest except timing. I really didn't want anything to do with it. My friends came to the conclusion it was probably a prayer or devotional poem to a moon god[diminutive: -ling? Demi-?] associated with snakes and poison. If the necklace in the tree not-dream weren't on the other side I would have ripped it out. Even coming back to now I'm hugely unsettled and really want to stop thinking about it.

So. Break time! After one more escalation things start to calm down on my end. <> gets the month of nightmares next, then the anti-climax.

 

@IvyLB If you put it over your wrist pulse, one hand hand typically takes in energy (left?) and the other sends it out (right?) Generally I put things over my heart to charge them. They absorb a lot of radiant body heat/energy and you can't get a better pulse than your heart :)

(Grain of salt and all, I'm new, but my focus stone seems to like charging that way. Seems to get even warmer than my body temp)

 

Thats an awesome way to charge! Ive never heard that, but its pretty nice for personal things like that. I tend to leave it on my altar or a windowsill where it can collect sunlight or moonlight, whichever is appropriate, and base it on time--so for ex this one, id probably leave it from full moon to full moon, or better yet from dawn to dusk on the summer solstice. Time plays a big part in my work. But i might try doing it your way--that sounds very convenient and a hell of a lot quicker.

 

Alright, totally freaked out right now. I got out my salt and stuff bc my pendulum's being weird (waving noncommittally when I say show me yes/no) so I figured it needed to cleanse and recharge, and since I got it at the beach, figured some sand nearby wouldn't harm anything.

My sand bottle just broke. Like. It had a hairline fracture, has for all the time I've moved it and owned it. On one side. But this cracked in half. like down the middle. Not especially witchy or magicy, but freaky. I think I might have done something wrong.

 

@Lazarae if you could extend the noise of an [o_o] emote that would go here.

@Les: Welp, that's a thing. Maybe leave off it for a few days?

 

@Starcrossedsky Yeaaaaah. I have a feeling it's to do with something taking offense to my use of a moon charged water to cleanse myself. It was an old bottle of it that I charged on my birthday, and I was sort of like well if I leave it in this box where I've stored my bottles it's gonna leak.

Made a note, don't use moon water for cleansing self. also gonna let my pendulum rest for a while.

 

So you used a charged thing for a non-ritual purpose? Thats generally inadvisable i think.

 

@Lissiel Yeaaaaah, def not my smartest move tbh. I'm still working through books and info and just sometimes do things with a random feeling. At least the bottle broke on something easy to clean up and I was able deposit the sand back into my big storage bucket.

 

Eh, you never know; they're still physical things, and i am not in favor of any kind of hard and fast rule with this sort of thing, but yeah as a general rule of thumb its usually better not to. Im glad it was pretty straightforward and not a big pain to clean up though.

Fwiw, if i had charged water (or any extra spell components really) that i needed to be rid of, id drop it at a crossroads, the busier the better. Or burn or bury what couldnt be scattered. What do the rest of y'all do with that sort of thing?

 

I'd disagree? Especially with simpler charged items like moonwater - just using it for a cleanse doesn't seem to me like it would inherently cause a problem.

Now, mind, if you ascribe any particular meaning/power to the moon that could mess up your stuff, then moonwater would carry those same properties. But on the whole, I don't see it as a problem? Possibly this is the result of my personal practice which is extremely ritual-light but.

 

I guess it depends on what she(?) means by cleanse--if we're talking 'spiritually or magically purify' then yeah should be fine, but if it was just to normally like...wash your hands or something, then thats what could potentially be not-great imo. Ymmv though, for sure.

 

She works! She or They, I really don't mind. and it was mainly used along with salt and stuff to make me feel more intune? with myself idk it was a spur of the moment thing since my art has been taking up my life and I haven't had the chance to get back to the crafts.

 

Huh, well in that case it should have been fine, id think, so idk.

 

I think the entire thing is SHRUG
but bc I just have a sense that that was bc I did something someone did not like and that was the only thing I hadn't done before, ergo, I'm just gonna avoid that in the future.

 

Btw, heather is pretty tough. The critical parts; acidic soil, decent drainage, not too dry.

 

Anything that needs extra drainage tip for potted plants:

Don't trust that the drainage holes in the bottom of the pot will be enough. Fill the bottom 1/4 of the pot with cheap gravel, plunk the plant onto the gravel, then fill the pot with soil. I lost so many plants to over-soggy bottoms before I figured that out.

 

Which on that note I should really repot my lemon tree to something drainier and sandier.

 

thank youuuuuuu it's very sweet of you to give me tips <3

 

@Lazarae
Wow.
(i think that sums it up, and you're not even done yet)

On an unrelated note... I keep feeling like I'd like to have someone else who knows about this stuff like... give me their impressions of me and suchlike. I tend to assume I'm about as sensitive to psychic phenomena as a brick, and it would be interesting to know if someone else agrees, and what they think are my associations, and suchlike. But part of me also thinks this is probably just me... well, let's just say that I have some identity issues. I am very afraid that my interest in all this stuff is just me latching on to something that Might Give Me An Identity, and if I got someone else to read me or whatever then I'd be unduly swayed by what they said.
There's also the problem of finding someone in the local area, which, while apparently haunted to kingdom come, is very light on wixy stuff.
I don't even bloody know.
Also I really need to do that house cleanse that's been in my head for ages the next time everyone else is out.

 

Ithink its less a who you are thing than a what you do thing. More like being an artist than being a redhead or something. Yeah, some people are better than others at witchy stuff, but i think most people have at least a little aptitude and if you're doing it then there you go. If that makes sense?