A Piece of History: Against the Grain

        He sighed heavily and flipped the page, pausing a moment to rub wearily at his eyes. It had been…how long now? The death mage vaguely recalled having dealt with a summoner years before, and remembering the woman’s detatched expression and vague replies to questions, Jonas now knew why he’d avoided the whole issue himself. The ritual was painfully exact and complex enough to make the cuneform he’d struggled to learn seem childishly simple.
        Jonas Foster sat at his kitchen table, a chair he’d become painfully familiar with in the last month, with the heavy tome open before him. A cup of coffee sat, icy by now, nearby, and the ashtray was overflowing with cigarette butts. He looked at the page again, scrawled with intricate symbols and tiny scrawls in a copperplate so cramped it looked like scratching, and let another heavy sigh slip from his mouth.

        It wasn’t that he’d never done a summoning before. Every mage could do it, could develop the power of will and experience to manage…but to do this…to summon a… Jonas’s spine still tingled when he thought of what he was preparing to attempt. His dark eyes flickered down to the tattered page before him, and vividly in his mind’s eye was the expression on Spider’s face when she’d handed the book to him.

         "Are you sure this is what you need?" The Goth seemed hesitant as she drew the heavy volume off of a high, black oak shelf. "It’s…well, let’s just say the man I bought it  from was a bit…"
          "Weird?" Jonas supplied, offering his hand to balance her as Spider clunked down the short wooden ladder.
          "…eccentric," she finished, brushing a bit of the inevitable dust from the book’s spine.
          "If it has what I need, I don’t give a damn where or who you got it from," he said, almost snappishly as he stood with outstretched hand.
           Spider looked at his open palm, and then at the book in her arms, and stepped back. "Why don’t we check it first? Make sure this is the right one before you scamper off with it?"
            Jonas smothered the snort at the idea of him ‘scampering’ anywhere, but nodded and followed her towards the long front counter. It wouldn’t do, wouldn’t do at all to get the book home and discover that the single spell he needed was nowhere to be found. A summoning couldn’t be improvised, and to do so was inviting…trouble.
            "I don’t remember everything that was in here," she was saying as she opened the book carefully, feeling the onionskin pages to ensure they wouldn’t rip at her light touch. "I just remember him saying something about infernal minions, leaving the book on the counter, taking the one he wanted in exchange and leaving in a hurry." Spider frowned, reading one page intently.
             "Infernal? Let me see it," the death mage said, reaching out and pulling the book across the counter, his dark eyes scanning the cramped pages swiftly.
             Spider watched him for a long moment, and swallowed once before taking a deep breath and reaching out to touch his hand lightly. "Jonas?"
             He frowned blackly, looking at her with impatience gleaming in his eyes. "What? I’m trying to read here."
            "You’re not…" She paused, and then took another breath, angling for a  different approach. "You’re not  thinking about doing anything…foolish…are you? I  mean… I know that what happened was…horrible for everyone, but you can’t bla-"
             "Can’t what? Blame myself? Who says I’m blaming myself for letting her go somewhere that obviously wasn’t safe? For letting some random group of people rape her to death? For letting them tear her wings off of her back? For watching as she died in my arms? Nope, I don’t blame myself at all. It must be Bertram’s fault. No, no…it has to be Andrew, right? He wanted her to go, too. Maybe I should call Brad and Kyle and find out if they sent her off? Oh, even better. It had to be your fault for telling me what she was in the first place, right? I mean, if I hadn’t known, there wouldn’t have been any of this, right?"
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman; color: rgb(192, 192, 192);”>             Spider’s face whitened to ghostlike pallor under her careful dusting of white powder, and her russet eyes gleamed with sharp, sudden tears. She didn’t speak during his angry flood of bitter words, nor did she meet his gaze. Instead, the Goth looked at her black fingernails and swallowed softly, her burgundy lips trembling. Jonas watched her, his jaw tightening, and then snatched the book up, fishing in his back pocket for his wallet.
             "How much?" His voice was harsh, and he did nothing to soften the tone as he pulled out one of his credit cards. When Spider just waved him away, leaning back from the counter, the death mage snarled. "You know, when you have the experience to stand in judgement on me, I’ll be sure to let you know. Until then, keep your damn mouth shut." He didn’t stay to see the hurt in her russet eyes, didn’t think about the irony of accusing her of doing exactly what he himself had done for so long, but stomped to the door and let himself out into the night.

        Jonas looked at the book once more, and frowned thoughtfully, tracing the symbol with the tip of his finger. The memory of Spider’s eyes still bothered him, somewhere in the back of his mind, but… He had purpose now. There was a goal, and Jonas Foster always worked best when there was a goal. The morality of that goal… Ah, there was the rub.

        It wasn’t that Jonas had any moral objection to demons. They simply -were-. He’d read the various mythologies, stories, theories about demons when he was younger, seeking as much knowledge as possible. It was reasonable to believe that, while most demons were creatures bent on inexplicable evil, there would be others that had simpler, more immediate desires. This Richard creature seemed to be one of them. One of the quirks Jonas had picked up over the years was a vague sense of a person’s motivations. It was clouded at times, (…not knowing she sought only good…not realizing she was pure good, if such a thing could exist in this world…) but for the most part, the death mage could sense what a person’s general motivation was. Richard, a name Jonas found too commonplace to be believable, had those immediate desires uppermost in his mind. While the death mage didn’t trust him, for only fools trust demons, he understood the idea of quid pro quo.
        It was perhaps the idea that he was actively struggling against his very nature. Jonas Foster was, simply, a death mage. Everything he had seen and learned all lead to the idea that death was the strongest part of life. For everything to live, something else must die. Everything ate, therefore everything killed. Death lead to the next cycle, and therefore, was utterly natural. While Jonas had caused more than his fair share of death, he’d never done so carelessly. If a shot had missed, a target escaped…then it was meant to be. The death mage never guaranteed results, but when they came, they were perfect. Now, after years of seeking death, understanding the Wheel, looking for patterns to the cessation of life…Jonas Foster was trying to reverse it. He was actively hunting for a way to persuade Death itself to return what it had claimed.
        Really, it felt like he was rubbing his fur the wrong way. To his mind, it was an upstream swim against a powerful current, and every time he thought about it, Jonas felt weary. It was easier to focus on a task, rather than the psychology and morality behind it. Easier to block thoughts of right and wrong and instead struggle onward in the pursuit of what he wanted. It was odd, had he paused to focus his scattered mind in that direction, that for the first time in his life, he was passionate about obtaining something. Perhaps poetic irony that what he was passionate to obtain was in strict opposition to everything he’d believed his entire life. To reverse death… to seek life…all for the sake of one woman. He, who had seen no worth in any single life, now bent his head to the confusing page with a dedication he’d once given to his understanding of death. That now might serve him. After all, to understand how the Wheel turned in one inexorable direction was to know how to reverse it.

        At least, that was the hope Jonas clung to.