#and i know it's actually garlic flowers not garlic cloves that are vampire-away

[whispersfromwanderers]

Some of my Favourite Herbs and Their Uses (Part I) - Deborah Blake (The Eclectic Witch's Book of Shadows)

Apples: Blossoms, fruit, and wood. Primarily used for love and healing magic, the wood makes a nice wand and the cider is a great "ale" for cakes and ale at the end of a ritual, especially one that takes place in autumn. Apples are particularly witchy because if you slice one crosswise, you will see the shape of a pentacle inside. For simple love magick, try baking an apple pie and adding cinnamon, which is associated with passion.

Basil: Leaves. Used for love, protection, prosperity, and (theoretically) exorcism. (I don’t have any experience with that last one, but you could certainly use it to try banishing negative emotions). Easily used in cooking, like my recipe for prosperity pesto, which I make with walnuts (fertility) instead of pine nuts. As a dried herb, basil also works well when added to sachets or magickal mixes.

Calendula: Flowers. Also known as marigold. Often used by herbalists for its healing properties but is also grown by many folks as an ornamental. In magick, it can be used for healing, love, and to boost physical abilities. I like to use dried flowers in healing sachets, although I also grow them in my garden just because they're pretty.

Catnip: Leaves, flowers. Love, happiness, beauty, sleep, calm, and connection with cats. While more often associated with felines than with humans, catnip (which is a member of the prolific mint family) has healing qualities for people as well. Magickally, you can use it in sachets for sleep, calm, and love, but be prepared to share them with your cats if you have any. It's also useful in cat magick, especially to find a familiar.

Chamomile: Flowers. Peace, sleep, love, prosperity, protection. This is one of my favorite herbs to use in sleep or calming sachets. It is also a traditional healing tea that can be used for either of those purposes, so you can bless and consecrate some chamomile on the night of a full moon and then drink it when you need it.

Cinnamon: Bark. Prosperity, success, passion, love, lust, healing, protection, power, psychic ability, spirituality. Who would have thought that the simple cinnamon in your cupboard would have so many magickal uses? Cinnamon is especially useful in love and prosperity mixtures and can easily be added to food. Actually a spice that comes from the inner bark of an evergreen tree, cinnamon is usually found in its powdered form, but I like to use cinnamon sticks in charm bags, magickal mixes, and even as a miniature wand to stir the Yule wassail.

Dill: Leaves, flowers, and seeds. Love, protection, prosperity. Magickal prosperity pickles? Sure, why not? Dill is a tall plant that is used for both its delicate-looking thin green leaves and then, later in the season, the flowering heads filled with seeds that are used to flavor pickles and other foods. It is easy to grow and can be used fresh or dried. For a boost of prosperity, I toss the fresh herb in my salads in early summer and add it to various magickal mixes later in the year in its dried form. 

Eucalyptus: Leaves. Healing and protection. Eucalyptus is a powerful healing herb, whether you are using dried leaves or essential oil. It has a strong, pungent odor and can be quite powerful, so it is best to use it in small amounts. The oil can be added to healing mixtures or the leaves placed in sachets or poppets intended for healing use. 

Garlic: Bulb. Healing, protection. As anyone who has ever eaten it knows, garlic is a strong-smelling herb that will chase away prospective dates and possibly vampires. But in magickal work, its protective properties will definitely work for your benefit. You can use whole cloves in protection sachets or powdered dry garlic in spell mixtures. (I don’t suggest putting those under your pillow, though.) It is also used for healing and can be added to food if you are doing kitchen witchery. Magickal chicken soup for a cold? You bet! Just remember to focus on its healing potential as you use it. 

Geranium: Flowers, leaves. Love, healing, protection. Geraniums are a pretty and easy-to-grow plant that comes in a range of colors, red and pink being the most common. The plants themselves can act as protection for the home, and the flowers can be picked and added to sachets or other magickal preparations. Rose geranium in particular has very pleasantly scented leaves and makes a lovely essential oil. (Note that geranium essential oil and rose geranium essential oil will have different scents; they are both useful for love and protection work, but rose geranium in particular is known for its calming and healing properties.) 

Ginger: Root. Power, energy, prosperity, success, love (especially the passionate type). Ginger is a fiery herb that lends its heat and power to any spell you use it in. It can be used in the powdered form in magickal mixtures, or pieces of the whole root can be sliced and added to food or charm bags. 

Lavender: Flowers. Love, sleep, happiness, purification, healing, peace. Lavender is a beautiful and strongly scented flower with many magickal uses. If you have a garden, it is lovely to cut fresh flowers and place them on your altar. For most, however, the dried version will have to do. My group often follows the traditional practice of tossing lavender into the Midsummer bonfire as a sacrifice to the Goddess. I also use the herb in sachets for healing and peace and tuck one under my pillow to help me sleep. It makes wonderful incense, and the essential oil is easy to use in magick baths or sprays. 

Lemon: Juice, peel. Purification, cleansing, love, energy. All the citruses (specifically lemon, orange, and grapefruit) have similar magickal properties, but lemon in particular is good for any purification or cleansing work. Add a few drops to your mop water for a magickal boost to your housework, especially if you are doing spring cleaning. The dried peel can be added to sachets and charm bags for love or purification, and the essential oil is perfect for room sprays that are intended to purify your space and boost your energy. 

Lemon Balm: Leaves. Healing, happiness, calm, love. Lemon balm is a member of the mint family and will grow prolifically in a garden. It is known for its ability to attract bees and is sacred to Artemis and Diana. Lemon balm can be made into a magickal tea to boost the mood or calm a troubled spirit, and the leaves or essential oil are particularly helpful in spell mixtures to deal with sleep, anxiety, or depression. 

Mugwort: Leaves. Psychic powers, protection, divination, dreaming, and astral projection. Mugwort’s most common use is in a dream sachet, which, when tucked under one’s pillow, is said to aid in prophetic dreaming. It is also used in incense and drunk in teas to boost the user’s power of divination. While not as dangerous as the hallucinogenic herbs employed by earlier witches, some people can find mugwort overwhelming, and it should be used with caution if you have no previous experience with it. 

Parsley: Leaves. Protection and purification. Parsley isn’t considered to be one of the more powerful magickal herbs, but I like it because it is so easy to add to foods if you are doing kitchen witchery. If you are already making a dish with the magickal intent of protection or purification, why not toss in a little parsley for a magickal boost?

...

[imjustthemechanic]

Natalie Jones and the Golden Ship

Part 1/? - A Meeting at the Palace Part 2/? - Curry Talk Part 3/? - Princess Sitamun Part 4/? - Not At Rest Part 5/? - Dead Men Tell no Tales Part 6/? - Sitamun Rises Again Part 7/? - The Curse of Madame Desrosiers Part 8/? - Sabotage at Guedelon Part 9/? - A Miracle Part 10/? - Desrosiers’ Elixir Part 11/? - Athens in October Part 12/? - The Man in Black Part 13/? - Mr. Neustadt Part 14/? - The Other Side of the Story Part 15/? - A Favour Part 16/? - A Knock on the Window Part 17/? - Sir Stephen and Buckeye Part 18/? - Books of Alchemy Part 19/? - The Answers Part 20/? - A Gift Left Behind Part 21/? - Santorini Part 22/? - What the Doves Found Part 23/? - A Thief in the Night Part 24/? - Healing Part 25/? - Newton’s Code Part 26/? - Montenegro Part 27/? - The Lost Relic Part 28/? - The Homunculinus Part 29/? - The End is Near Part 30/? - The Face of Evil Part 31/? - The Morning After Part 32/? - Next Stop Part 33/? - A Sighting in Messina Part 34/? - Taormina Part 35/? - Burning Part 36/? - Recovery

Nat comes to, and her friends are there for her.

Nat woke up in a bed, with Sir Stephen looking down at her.

“How long was I out?” she asked, and looked around.  Most of the walls were painted white, although the one behind the head of the bed was yellow, and the floor was hardwood.  Gold curtains covered a pair of French doors that led out onto a little balcony.  Above the bed were two stylized paintings of baskets of flowers, in inoffensive colours. This was a hotel room.  “Whose room is this?”

“The room is Madame Desrosiers’,” Sir Stephen replied.  “We didn’t think she’d be returning to it.  And you have been sleeping perhaps an hour.”

Nat sat up a little.  Sir Stephen was wearing a heather gray t-shirt now, but the burns he’d sustained were peeking out above the collar and below the sleeve.  These looked much improved, more like scar tissue than blistered skin – all trace would be gone by this time tomorrow.

She held up her burned hand.  It didn’t hurt anymore, and when she examined it, it looked completely whole.  Even her fingernails were back.  The only sign that anything odd had happened was a ragged tan line around her wrist, where the new pale skin met the part that had been out in the Mediterranean sun all week.  She flexed the fingers.  They were a little stiff, and prickled as if she’d been sitting on them and the circulation was only just coming back, but there was nothing apparently wrong with them.

“Where are Newton and Desrosiers, then?” asked Nat.

“They escaped into the hills while we were seeing to you,” said Sir Stephen. “Sam, Clint, and Sharon have gone to search for them.  All three are well-armed.  Your father and Jim wanted to stay here with you, and Sharon made me stay, too, in case the alchemists returned to finish what they began.”  He turned to the doorway.

Allen must have heard her voice, because he was on his way into the room. He set his coffee cup down on the bedside table, sat down on the bed, and gave Nat a hug.  Nothing was said, he just sat there clutching her so tight, it almost made her ribs creak.

When he finally sat up again, with tears in his eyes, he took her restored hand in both of hers.  She squeezed his fingers.  When she’d been hurt in the past, the only people who took an interest were the doctors, cold and clinical, repairing her so she could be of further use.  Now here was Allen, whose own world would have ended if she’d been hurt.  It was a warm, safe feeling, at the same time as it seemed like a tremendous responsibility.

“I’m okay, Dad,” she said.

“I know.”  He brushed her cheek.  “Thank heavens.”

Jim was now standing in the doorway, although he was hanging back to give Nat and Allen a bit of space.  Natasha wiped her own eyes – where had those tears come from – and smiled at him. “Thanks,” she said.

“Don’t mention it.”  Jim held up a hand.

“No,” said Natasha.  “That was five days of your life.”

“Maybe not that much,” Jim said.  “We used some on the bird.”

“Still,” Nat insisted.  “Thank you.”

He smiled softly.  “You’re welcome.”

The others returned after midnight, empty-handed and disappointed.  There were hundreds of little towns and farms on the slopes of Mount Etna, some of them now being evacuated ahead of what was looking more and more like a potentially serious eruption.  The police had refused to let them go as high as they would have liked, and they’d eventually had to admit that they didn’t have a hope of finding Desrosiers and Newton.  Then on their way back to Taormina, they’d gotten stuck in traffic, crawling along for hours as everybody tried to go the same way on roads that had not been well-maintained.

“Did you at least get Laura her pistachios?” Natasha asked.

“Yes, I did!” said Clint proudly.  He put two bags of them on the table, and then took out a cluster of rather more mysterious objects, held together on raffia like a bunch of fish on a string. “Also this ceramic garlic.  They had it at a place here in town.  There were all kinds of ceramic fruits and vegetables, but I thought the garlic was coolest.”

“What’s she gonna do with ceramic garlic?” asked Jim.

“I don’t know, I just thought it was neat,” Clint confessed with a shrug.  The cloves, which were hollow, rang softly against one another as they twisted on the raffia.

“Maybe it’ll keep away ceramic vampires,” Nat suggested.

“You must be feeling better,” Sharon observed.

Nat flexed her hand again.  It was no wonder, she thought, that Clint kept rubbing at his side.  It was a weird feeling, knowing she’d been injured but not having any evidence of it.  It was as if the new skin itched but on the inside, where she couldn’t scratch it. She wondered if Jim felt that over his whole body.

“The ferries are jammed with people evacuating,” Sharon said with a yawn. “So we can’t go back to the mainland until tomorrow at the earliest.  According to the radio, scientists keep saying the volcano won’t erupt violently, but it’s hard to believe that when the government is working so hard at pulling people out.”

“That’s probably exactly the way the alchemists like it,” Nat said, lying back on the pillows again.  She had expected to be exhausted, as if being healed by the elixir ought to be hard work, but she felt fine.  “They want to work in privacy, so emptying all the surrounding towns is perfect for them. Especially if they’re going to create the stone in or around the volcanic crater.”

“Desrosiers said that was stupid,” Clint reminded her.

“I don’t think we can believe a word Desrosiers says about anything, including that,” Nat replied.

“Great,” Clint grumbled.

“Maybe you can get Laura one of those necklaces made of the lava stones,” Sharon suggested.

The others all seemed to be tired, and one by one they retired to sleep on the sofa, in the chairs, even on the floor of the hotel room, leaving the bed for Natasha.  It would have been a pretty useless gesture anyway, as Nat was used to sleeping in uncomfortable places, but there was also the fact that she wasn’t tired.  It was as if the elixir had come with a shot of energy drink.  She managed to doze a little, and then woke up with a warm breeze on her face.

Everybody else was asleep – except for one figure, who was standing out on the balcony with the doors open.  Nat wasn’t surprised to see that it was Jim.

The windows on this side of the building faced towards the volcano.  With the street so narrow and other buildings all around them, the peak of Etna was not visible from the balcony, but the rising column of steam was lit ruby red from below, flickering as the lava bubbled, crusted, cooled, and then welled up again.  Nat got up and crossed to the window to stand next to Jim.

“Quite a show, huh?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he murmured.

“Another thing you’re grateful you got to see?” Nat asked.

“Maybe,” he said.  “Volcanoes are neat… it would be cool to get up there sometime when it’s not actually erupting.  To get a look at the craters and rock formations.”

“You know those things exist,” Nat mused.  “How do you know it?”

“I have no idea,” Jim admitted, shaking his head slowly.

“What do you know about the philosopher’s stone?” asked Nat.

Jim had to think about it a minute.  “I couldn’t read that stuff he wrote out in his journals… I wonder if that’s because he can’t easily read the code, either.  Maybe I only know the stuff he knows without thinking about it.  But I know that the stone uses nuclear reactions to rearrange matter, copying a template.  It’s sort of like the cells I’m made of.  They use the DNA they’re given to rearrange themselves.  That seems to be the basis of alchemy: learning what nature’s templates are and how to copy them and create something new.”  

“So he needs gold if he wants to make more gold,” said Natasha.  The standard joke, as presented in half a dozen Terry Pratchett books was that alchemists could turn gold into less gold.  “And a feather from the holy spirit to make himself a god.”

“You don’t think that’s gonna work, do you?” Jim asked.  He was clearly unsure himself, but then he had reason to be concerned about what Newton was capable of, if anyone did.

“No,” Nat replied firmly.  “Mostly because I don’t think their sacred feather is a real relic.  A feather just wouldn’t last that long.  I’ve seen human hair that was only five hundred years old, and it was all bleached and basically just turned to dust the moment it was touched.  Since the pigeons are dark, I suspect it’s from a seagull.  That means all Newton will accomplish with it is turning himself into a bird, or maybe a whole flock of them, or just a weird mass of keratin.” It depended on how much detail the philosopher’s stone could replicate something in.

“Sorry,” she added a moment later.  “You don’t want to hear things like that, do you?”

“Not really.”  He reached for her hand, then hesitated.  “You don’t think… since those cells have no DNA in them and don’t necessarily know which body they belong to, if we touch, will we stick together?”

Nat shrugged and touched his fingers with her right hand.  It felt normal.  “Looks like no.”

They stayed there a few minutes longer, watching the smoke glow red and orange. It would flicker and die and then start up again, over and over as the lava simmered below.  It was the kind of thing people usually only saw on television or in National Geographic magazine. Knowing it was only a hundred miles away was exhilarating.

Then it stopped.

Because of the long cycle of flickering, it took a moment for Natasha to realize that it wasn’t going to start up again.  The mist around the peak was still present, lit from below by the lights of the towns and the traffic, but the glow of the volcano itself had died out.

“I guess it’s done for tonight,” said Nat.

“Yeah,” said Jim.  “Looks like even the volcano wants me to go to bed.”

Nat knew how to put him to sleep now.  “Come with me,” she said, squeezing his fingers.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because I want you to,” she said.

“You don’t need me,” Jim said.  “You’ve got your friends and your father here.  They’ll look after you.”  He was reminding her that they were permanent and he was not – and that she had real human relationships and he could not, and he didn’t want her to sleep with him out of pity.

“Yeah, but right now I want you,” she said.  Jim needed to feel wanted.  So, honestly, did Nat sometimes.

“You sure?” he asked.

“Very sure,” she said.

“All right.”  He stroked her cheek with his thumb, and she smiled at him as he leaned down to let their foreheads touch.  “They’re all gonna see us when they wake up.”

“They can say whatever they want,” Nat replied.  If anybody wanted to judge them, she would let them know exactly what she thought of that.