#paperwork valkyries is always the name of my band

[stephcranford]

[Carnival of Kindness] A Kindness of Ravens

[Original fiction, 4500 words. PM me for content notes if you need them.]

The worst part is, you know this is your own fault.

You’d known for years that you have to read the whole spell to make sure that there aren’t ingredients that aren’t mentioned in the list at the top, but you always made the same mistake, and sometimes it came back to bite you in the ass. This time, you didn’t notice that in order to summon a raven--or any corvid--you needed an actual raven feather.

But where on earth would you get a raven feather at 9pm on a Friday? You did a half-hearted Google search, and then an even more half-hearted (quarter-hearted?) search of the birding websites to see if there was a place where everyone knew that ravens flocked and, well, nah. And was it worth traipsing around in the dark, in a park, on a lark, with a spark--you shake your head--looking for a black feather and hoping that it was the right kind of black feather?

No, you decide, but you already knew it just wasn’t. There are places online where you can order raven feathers, obviously, and you might be able to go to the zoo or something, but it’s not going to happen tonight, if you need a raven feather.

Your hands start trembling at that, because you’d planned on summoning a raven tonight, under the full moon at midnight, just like the spell says. It’s been on your calendar and you gathered together everything in the list of ingredients. Most of the herbs are dried, and they’ll keep, but it was on your calendar and if you don’t do the spell tonight, you’ll have to delete it off your calendar, and when is the next time that a full moon will happen on a Friday night when you have three days in a row off, and what if the herbs don’t actually keep, because some of them were difficult to get, and…

A spiral, that’s what that was. You shut your eyes and blank your mind forcibly and repeatedly until you start to calm. Sort of. Not as calm as you’d like, but calm enough. You can’t solve the problem of not having a raven feather, which means it goes in a very particular mental box, one you’ve constructed to keep unsolvable problems, even though you know it’ll only hold for so long. You then go down the list: what next? What can you fix? What is something you can do?

You look at your calendar for another full moon on a Friday night. Four months from now, it’s on a Thursday, and you might be able to get a Friday off instead of a Monday, especially if you ask this far in advance. But the Monday after is your boss’s birthday, so probably not. But you can ask. You make a note for yourself to ask, and then you shut your calendar--it’s paper, but you also keep an identical digital version.

What else can you do? If you were cooking, you’d check for a substitute. Spells aren’t entirely unlike cooking, but you’ve never tried to substitute something yet, and what if it goes wrong? The spell is fairly simple, though, and if it goes wrong--what then? Probably you just won’t summon a raven.

You check Google for spell substitutions, but this isn’t the kind of information that would be found through a quick search. You aren’t surprised when you find nothing. You go over to your spellbooks, all three of them, and check the indices. Only two of the books even have indices, and you aren’t sure how accurate they are, but you look anyway. Nothing.

Frustrated, you flip through the third book, looking for a table of contents or some sort of organization. It’s not the book you’re using for this spell, and it’s not a book you use very often as the font is difficult for you to read, but it does have chapter headings. One of them jumps out at you: Basics. Maybe it’ll have something about substitutions in there.

And it does. Magic is largely a result of intent and symbolism, which is why a single hair can represent an entire person, and so on. In theory, the use of a picture or other representation of an item should do as well, although if one cares deeply about the specifics, this method is not recommended.

Do you care about the specifics? You care that it’s a raven and not another type of bird, but that’s why you specify the type of feather. You don’t care specifically which raven you call, since the spell has fuchsia flowers in it to ensure that whichever one is called will be willing. So in theory, a picture or other representation should work.

You have many pictures of ravens and their feathers saved to your computer, but when you try to print them, you discover your printer is out of ink. That can’t be right. You frown, but then you remember you ran out while printing those flyers for a coworker. That was right before you ran out of meds and nothing got done for a few days, and you obviously didn’t remember after that. Which, of course, you think grimly, is one reason you’re even doing this spell in the first place; a familiar can help with things like that. You try printing in color, to see if that cartridge has any dregs left in it, but it’s also empty. Your hands are starting to shake again. You know there are twenty-four-hour stores that carry your printer ink, but the idea of leaving the house to go to one--No.

You don’t have to leave, you reassure yourself. You don’t have to go anywhere. Besides, printing isn’t the only way to make a picture. You can draw one.

You don’t have any black colored pencils, but you have a bunch of Sharpies--or, well, you did, but your therapist made you leave them with her this last week so you could see if you could go a week without drawing on your arms. (There are faint pen marks on the inside of one wrist, but that’s been your only slip.) So you’re down to ballpoint pens, or . . .

You’re searching through the drawer of your desk, and you find something in there that isn’t actually a writing implement. After the initial rush of wrongness, you look at it and realize it’s pencil eyeliner. It’s not a brand you use, so probably your ex left it there the last time she was over. You pull off the cap and draw a line on the back of your hand. It hasn’t dried out, and it’s a good consistency to write with. It’s also got a particular sheen to it that reminds you very much of a bird’s feather.

Could you draw a raven feather with this? You may as well try; if not, all you’ve lost is a few minutes.

Using a photograph on your laptop as reference, you sketch out the basic shape with a pencil on a blank piece of paper and then start filling it in with the eyeliner. This is a raven’s feather. This is a raven’s feather. You know enough about spellcasting to state your intentions clearly in your mind.

The end result is pretty good, you think. You cut it out and set it with the rest of the items for the calling, and wait until midnight.

***

It works. Or, at least, the ingredients disappear the way they’re supposed to when a casting goes correctly, and you feel the “pop” in your ears that usually means that something happened. Nothing happens right away, though, and you sit down with a book to wait.

You want to stay up until something does happen, but you know that’s a bad idea; you’ll regret it for the next week or so and even more when you tell your therapist why. You took your night-time dose of the brain meds a few minutes after midnight, which is when you always take them, but now, a couple hours later, you also take the allergy pills and the sleep aid that you take at bedtime. You hesitate over adding the optional pain pill. Your joints ache, especially your left wrist and your right knee, but you can’t tell if it’s bad enough to keep you from sleeping. However, the pain pill plus the sleep aid would mean you’d be sleeping until about noon tomorrow, so you set the pain-pill bottle down. The sleep aid should keep you asleep regardless.

You fall asleep in your bed, the window coverings drawn, as they usually are. Your sleep is not untroubled, because the sleep aids always give you vivid dreams, but you never remember them when you wake up, just the vague, unsettled feeling that they give you. But there’s a reason you have a routine. You get up, pull on jeans and a t-shirt and some of your jewelry--two rings, one bracelet, one necklace--and then stop in the doorway.

Someone is knocking at your door.

That doesn’t happen, especially at nine in the morning on a Saturday. Should you answer the door?

While your brain is showing you the panoply of scenarios that might occur if you open the door, a thought shoots its way to the top: what if it’s the raven? You dismiss it immediately, because ravens don’t knock on doors, at least not like that, but you can’t entirely shake off the curiosity. You look in the mirror, and while your hair’s a mess and you definitely look like you just woke up, you’re presentable enough to answer the door. If it turns out to be a door-to-door salesperson, you tell yourself, you can just close the door and lock it.

It’s not a door-to-door salesperson. It’s a person with a long braid trailing over one shoulder and wide, bright-green eyes rimmed with artfully-applied eyeliner. You spend a moment appreciating the skill involved, how it turns up at the end in perfect flicks even though it clearly isn’t liquid eyeliner and is smudged perfectly evenly, until you realize that you probably should say something.

“Hi,” you say, your voice still a little scratchy and a lot lower than you wish it was.

“Hi,” the person at the door says. “I’m Raven.”

“Er, what?” you say, which isn’t what you want to say, but you couldn’t really stop yourself from asking.

“Raven. She and her pronouns,” she adds casually, and you’re happy for that.

“Casey, they/them,” you reply, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when someone introduces themself. You’re pretty sure you know why she added the pronouns; you’re nothing if not visibly queer, from undercut to rainbow flag pinned to the hip pocket of your black jeans to the stylized “NB” necklace you’re wearing. “Do we know each other?” It isn’t really what you want to ask, but you know that asking, What are you doing here? is generally rude.

“Not yet,” she says, “but you summoned me.”

“I did?” you say--and then it hits you. Raven. Her name is Raven. You didn’t summon a raven, you summoned a Raven. “I didn’t mean to?” you say.

“Oh,” she says with a couple of blinks.

“I was trying to summon a bird.”

“Oh,” she says again. She droops a little around the edges, but only for a second or so. “I’m sorry to have bothered you, then, especially this early on a weekend. Have a nice day!” She turns and takes one step down off your porch--

--but no further. You can see the muscles in her neck and shoulders, revealed by her hair being swept over her shoulder and her wide-necked tunic, clenching and twitching as if she’s trying to move farther, but she clearly can’t. Finally, after thirty seconds of strain, she turns back around. “It appears I can’t leave,” she says. Her voice is light, the naturally-high pitch made higher by her recent effort, but she keeps her tone even. You envy her control; you don’t even sound the way you want to most days.

But she’s said something, that she can’t leave, and you don’t know how to respond to that. You nod slowly, trying to buy yourself time to think, but this isn’t a situation you have a pattern for, and now you’re off script and you don’t know what to do.

Think, you say to yourself, your mental tone clearly berating, even though you know that your therapist is disappointed any time you engage in negative self-talk when you are in a new situation. If she can’t leave, where does she go?

In. She should come inside. “Would you like to come inside?” you ask, a temporary spike of happiness going through you at knowing what to do. However, it’s almost immediately countered by a spike of anxiety about letting someone, anyone new, into your house, and a second, not-unrelated spike of anxiety about the current state of your living room and kitchen and whether or not you have any food to offer or anything to drink or any clean glasses and whether or not she has any food allergies--or any allergies--that will be affected by your house and--

“I’d love to,” she says, and while the sound of her voice isn’t enough to stop the anxiety, it’s at least enough to cut off the spiral before it gets any worse.

The couch is, at least, mostly free of debris; there’s a blanket crumpled in one corner and the throw pillows aren’t in any sort of order, but that’s it. The end table has an untidy stack of books on it and the floor hasn’t been swept, nor the rug vacuumed, in who knows how long, but it’s not as bad as it could be. Raven doesn’t seem to notice the clutter and dust; she’s distracted by the painting over the fireplace, and then the photograph above the sofa, and then the mural in the dining room visible through the archway.

“Are you an artist?” she asks.

You shake your head no. “I work at a bookstore,” you say, and her gaze slides to the pile of books. It’s not why you have books around, but it’s as good an excuse as any. “My ex-girlfriend Elena was the artist. She did the mural on the wall.”

Was that too much information? You have no idea, but Raven doesn’t appear to be uncomfortable. “It’s gorgeous,” she says. “I love the colors.”

“I do, too,” you say. It’s why you have never considered painting it over, even when you were as mad at Elena as you could be.

She gestures to the couch. “May I sit?”

“Sure,” you say, trying to match her level of casualness. “Would you like something to drink?” You can wash a cup real fast, if you need to.

“Water would be great,” she says.

Water. You have water. You probably don’t have ice, since you don’t tend to put it in drinks due to it just being too cold for your mouth, but you can just not offer her ice. “I can do water.”

You don’t even have to wash a glass; the dishwasher is full and clean. You don’t have a filter pitcher or anything, but the tap water tastes okay here, and you fill the cup with the coldest water that will come out of the tap.

As you’re handing it to her, though, there’s another knock on the door. You’re confused. Should you answer it? Clearly, but you already have a guest, and who on earth could it be?

It’s a new person, short spiky hair, ripped black jeans, eyeliner smudges from yesterday beneath brown eyes. “Hi,” they say. “I’m Raven.”

Raven-the-first comes up behind you, making enough noise that you hear her, and chuckles. “How many Ravens did you summon?” she asks.

You answer her, even though your mind is whirling with a thousand questions. “Only the one,” you say. “At least, that’s what I thought.”

The new Raven eyes you and the first Raven and says, “Well, I’ll just go, then.” They try to leave, and of course it doesn’t work and you end up inviting the second Raven inside.

This Raven uses he and him pronouns, it turns out, and Raven the first is able to engage him in conversation while you go hide in the bathroom for a couple minutes.

Should you call your therapist about this? You have your phone in your hand and your therapist’s name on the screen, but you hesitate. She’s told you that you can call her at any time, and you’ve called her at weird enough times to know that she really means it, but you’d have to explain the situation and that might be worse than trying to power through on your own. If all else fails, your house is two stories, and you can go upstairs.

You count breaths for a few minutes and run your hands under warm water until they don’t feel so cold anymore, and then you go back into the living room.

There are now three people other than you in the living room. “Hi,” says the third one. “I’m Raven.”

You’re still boggling when there’s another knock at the door.

***

By noon, the stream of new people has halted, but there are twenty-five Ravens in your house. That’s about twenty more people than have ever been in your house at one time, and about ten or fifteen more than is actually comfortable for the people here. There are four sitting on the couch, two in the chair; all four chairs from the dining room set have been hauled into the living room, and that still leaves fifteen people sitting on the floor, the coffee table, and the dining room table itself.

You’re sitting on the stairway, which is close enough to the living room that you can pretend you’re being sociable, but there’s still a physical separation. Everyone is speaking, asking questions, wondering why they’re here, and you have no answers for them.

It’s a diverse group of individuals, ranging in age from eighteen or so to somewhat over sixty, as far as you can tell. The group skews about two-thirds female or femme and one-third masculine, but you’ve long since lost track of everyone’s pronouns. You know there are a few people here who aren’t really named Raven, as well; there are a couple people with last names like ‘Ravenel’ and ‘Ravenwood’ and one who is a young man in his early 20s who is a Baltimore Ravens fan, complete with jersey and the remnants of eye black on his face. Overall, though, you seem to have summoned a couple dozen Ravens.

You would laugh if you had it in you to do that.

The first Raven is going around the room, chatting with people; you didn’t ask her to do that and you aren’t sure what she’s saying, but you’re glad that someone is talking to everyone so you don’t have to. She comes over and sits next to you, an appropriate distance away, and says, “Can you tell me what you did to summon all of us?”

You think about trying to speak, but you’re pretty sure it won’t work, so you hold up a hand so she’ll wait. You go upstairs and get the book and bring it downstairs to show her. Her eyes light up, and she takes the book from you carefully. “Ritual magic,” she breathes, and reads through the entire spell. “And this is exactly what you did?”

You nod, and then shake your head. This you can’t explain just by handing her a book, but your throat is still tight, so you pick up your phone, open a text window, and type for a moment.

I didn’t have a raven feather so I substituted a picture of a raven feather.

“A picture? Like a photograph, or something you printed?”

I drew it. You take the phone back after showing her, and add, With eyeliner.

She chuckles. “Good idea. What brand?”

You tell her, and she laughs outright this time. “That’s the brand I’m wearing.”

“What brand?” one of the other Ravens asks, a slender person with long dark hair in a ponytail and a kilt. You can’t remember their pronouns and wish you’d thought to find nametags for everyone, but then again you hope everyone will leave before you need to know that.

“That’s the brand I use!” Raven-in-a-kilt says after being told.

The brand of eyeliner spreads through the room, and it turns out about eight of them use the same brand. It also turns out that all twenty-five of the Ravens are wearing eyeliner in some way, shape, or form. You’d laugh if it wasn’t disturbing your life right at this minute. You used an eyeliner feather to summon a raven, and instead you got twenty-five Ravens wearing eyeliner.

Of course, this doesn’t get you much closer to getting them out of your house. No one can leave, and you’re about to retreat upstairs when the first Raven asks you quietly, “Why did you summon a raven again?”

Ravens are familiars, you type.

“So you needed help?”

You shrug. It isn’t help you wanted, but someone to talk to while you were doing ritual magic. A little help remembering things, perhaps, but not an assistant. Maybe a partner? Putting it into words isn’t going well for you, so you just say, Something like that.

“But you can’t possibly need twenty-five peoples’ worth of help.”

You need zero peoples’ worth of help, so you shake your head no.

“Then . . . maybe tell the magic that?”

It doesn’t work that way, but you nod. The problem is, of course, you can only do ritual magic, and it doesn’t retain any sort of connection to you after the ritual is complete--that’s what the popping really is, the magic becoming independent of you. So you can’t speak to the magic. You’ll have to do a second ritual, although it’ll be one with less power since it can’t possibly be the right time of day and you can’t possibly have the right ingredients.

You go upstairs to the second bedroom, where you keep all your books and whatnot, and sit in the middle of the chalk circle. It’s not even worth looking up a real ritual in a book, but you get out a knife, dull-bladed but meticulously kept, and draw the circle and speak the words for unbinding. They’re not above a whisper, but you manage to force them out.

It doesn’t work. It doesn’t fail because you did anything wrong, but it fails because that’s not how you have to end the spell. You really have no idea why that’s true, but you know it’s true nonetheless. You have to figure out what the first ritual needed to let all the Ravens go.

You go back downstairs, and Raven the First apparently reads it off your face. “Didn’t work, huh?”

You shake your head no. “Needs something else,” you say, barely audible, and pull your phone out in case you need to speak anymore.

“What do you need?” she asks.

You shrug. Peace and quiet, you type.

“That I expected,” she says gently. “Anything else?”

“I, uh, could use a bathroom,” says the Raven in a kilt.

“It’s through the kitchen,” says the football Raven. “Sorry, buddy,” he says to you. “I had to go.”

You shrug--this whole thing is an invasion, but you’ll deal with it.

Kilt-Raven rushes off to the bathroom, and something in your ears pops. Was it that simple? You turn to First Raven, but she’s already nodding. “Does anyone else need anything?” she asks, raising her voice enough to be heard over the crowd noise.

Wise asses say the usual answers: a million dollars, a pony, a hot boyfriend. But one says, “I need a bass player,” and conversation stops.

“A bass player?”

“Yeah. My band’s holding auditions at two pm, and I have to get out of here before then.”

“Are you in the Paperwork Valkyries?” another Raven says. You think that one is the Ravenwood, and you’re a little jealous of their last name.

“Yeah,” says the original speaker.

“I was thinking about auditioning, but I got scared,” Ravenwood says.

“You should come anyway, if we can get out of here.”

Pop! “Oh,” says the Paperwork Valkyrie Raven. “I think we can leave.”

You think they can, too.

By twos and threes and even one memorable group of five, the Ravens find each other. Someone needs a roommate; the football Raven needs a date to his sister’s wedding. Ripped-jeans Raven needs a new car, and the Ravenel needs the five hundred dollars he can get from his old clunker.

The best part of this whole situation is that you don’t even have to do anything. You’re a catalyst; everything is moving faster because of the spell you did, but your part is done.

At the end, everyone’s gone except the first Raven, and she’s looking at you. “What do you need?” you ask her. Every time a person left your house you gained a little of your voice back, and you sound almost normal.

“I think,” she says, “I need you.”

She can’t possibly mean that, and you start to tell her, but she holds up a hand. “I think you need an apprentice, and I need a teacher.”

An apprentice? You’d never thought--but you aren’t--she can’t--

“Someone to talk to while you do rituals, right? Someone to share magic with. I can’t perch on the back of your couch, but I can be here, and you can teach me.”

The idea of teaching someone is terrifying and somehow appealing. You would be able to figure out what to say in advance, which always helps. She has already proven that she’s happy to accommodate you in ways that some of your friends--your actual friends from work and high school and even the people you know over the internet--forget or aren’t willing to do. It would be structure, and you like structure. Some people, and you’ve never really been able to determine if you’re one of those people, for a list of reasons, learn very well by teaching other people.

And, you realize, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to spend more time with her.

“Besides,” she says, and pulls a black feather out of her pocket. A raven feather. She had a raven feather in her pocket this whole time.

Of course she did.

You laugh, and she joins in. “I’ll consider it,” you say, and the spell pops in your ears one final time.

“I guess I’ll be going now,” she says and starts to stand. “Unless--?”

“Come back tomorrow?” you say. You definitely need some time alone now; you’re starting to itch, especially the insides of your wrists. “Maybe lunch?”

Raven smiles, her lipstick and eyeliner still as perfect as they were when you opened the door to see her hours ago. “Sure,” she says.