Dragon warlock a slice o.., p.12
Dragon Warlock: A Slice of Life Harem LitRPG, page 12
“Well, then there’s only one thing left for us to do,” I told her, “we need to go get our girl back. And we need to go get her back right now.”
Lucie nodded. “I am already one step ahead of you. That is the very reason I taught you a Summoning Spell.”
“But Briza already told me that it wouldn’t be as simple as that,” I said. “She said that — because of Baal’s curse on her, because of the complexity of his dark enchantment — a simple Summoning Spell wouldn’t be enough to extract her from the grimoire.”
“True,” Lucie nodded, “that is very true. But we have a secret weapon.”
“What secret weapon?”
The dragon-girl’s face lit up with a big jagged smile. “You,” she beamed.
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“How so?”
She picked up that tiny leather pouch of hers from the kitchen table again — her Bag Of Holding — and rooted around inside it with her hand.
This ought to be good, I thought.
This ought to be classic.
Then she pulled out a tiny black book and held it out to me in her clawed hand rather proudly. It was bound in black dragon-scales much like The Hellacious Screed had been bound in red ones.
Although this book was much smaller than The Screed and more … earthy.
More well-worn and dusty. And it smelled of mulch and fresh flowers. It smelled of honeysuckle and roses.
Which made sense, of course.
“This is The Gaias Grimoire,” Lucie told me, “and it is where Briza is imprisoned.”
I took the little black book from her and flipped it open to a random page. Then I squinted down at the text, trying my best to read it. It was handwritten in cursive, small print in black ink on tattered white pages.
“That’s definitely not English,” I said.
“No,” Lucie nodded, “no, it is not. The Gaias Grimoire is not written in The Common Tongue. Nor is it written in The Forked Tongue either. So I have had no luck trying to read it.”
I cocked my head. “Wait a minute, the common language in Ourobor is English?”
“That’s right,” the dragon-girl confirmed.
“Not some other language of your own invention? Or even German or something like that?”
“No,” she said, “English.”
“And so you can speak English and The Forked Tongue, but that’s it?”
“Well, I know a few words in German too,” Lucie smirked up at me, “but only the very important ones. Arschloch. Fotze. Schwanz.”
I furrowed my brow. “I don’t know any of those. Are those magic words?”
Lucie laughed then. Something that I had just said had made her laugh, but I wasn’t quite sure what. “Forget it,” she told me, “I can teach you those words later, if you really want to learn them. Let’s just stay focused on getting Briza back for now. Otherwise, we could end up distracting ourselves for days with such words.”
“Okay,” I said, “okay,” totally suspecting that she had made some kind of a lewd joke or something. For example, I knew that “arsch” meant “ass” in German, so yeah she had probably just said something scandalizingly kinky or sexual. But we’d come back to those words later. I’ll definitely remember those words for later, for sure.
Right now though, I peered down at the black cursive text in The Gaias Grimoire again and tried to decipher its inky loops and squiggles. Or, at least, guess at what language it was written in.
Coptic maybe, I thought.
Or … or Aramaic.
The more I peered at it, the more familiar it became. Which was a good sign. That was a very good sign indeed. It meant that I had actually seen this language somewhere before and that it wasn’t all totally Greek to me.
And then I remembered. I remembered where I had seen it. This wasn’t Coptic or Aramaic at all, but … Enochian.
This was an Enochian Text written in the so-called Language Of The Angels. I had read all about it in Alan Moore’s The Secret History Of John Dee, which was my favorite book to kick back and read when we didn’t have any customers in Old Ogilvy’s shop.
Moore had explained in quite copious detail, as was his way, how John Dee had first discovered this secret language. And also how he had spent the better part of his life trying to decipher and transcribe it.
You see, Dee was said to have trafficked with angels.
Or demons.
Or both. Probably friggin’ both, actually. Although mainstream history seemed to have a problem admitting that in their books about Dee, whereas Alan Moore did not.
He was an incredibly influential historical figure: John Dee was.
An English mathematician and astrologer, teacher, occultist, and alchemist. Not to mention the court astronomer and a key advisor to Queen Elizabeth The First. It was no secret that Dee had the Queen’s ear on many important matters.
And he was a wizard.
An out-and-out real-world wizard.
Which the Queen herself and many others in her court totally knew and totally accepted. That’s what always really blew my mind when reading and re-reading Moore’s fantastic book, this total acceptance of his wizardry by the court.
This was only a few hundred years ago in human history, you see. The latter half of the 1500s, to be exact. And here was the Queen Of England herself accepting a wizard’s sage advice on important foreign policy decisions.
Fucking wild.
And even more wild than that was this little fact. It was John Dee who had suggested to the Queen to send ships across the Atlantic, to establish an English colony on a great and fertile land mass that had been discovered there. An unspoiled piece of the world that was ripe for the taking.
If The Crown sent some of its fastest ships, posthaste.
If The Crown set up a colony.
For all intents and purposes, this was the actual historically-accepted story of how the great British Empire began — and, out of that, how America itself was founded as well — with the wizard John Dee whispering into Queen Elizabeth’s virgin ear.
So fucking wild.
But who had told Dee about this unspoiled piece of land? Who had suggested to him the idea to set up an English colony there?
You guessed it …
The angels.
And the demons.
They had told John Dee all that and more in that strange Enochian language of theirs, which he had spent the better part of his life deciphering and transcribing.
I shit you not.
So truth be told, once I realized it, I wasn’t all that surprised to find out that The Gaias Grimoire — this little black book that imprisoned a gorgeous Earth Dragon and all her … unspoiled fertility, so to speak — was written in The Enochian Tongue.
And lucky for me, Moore had included a few examples of that language in his secret history. Examples of John Dee’s painstaking transcription of Enochian into English. I just hoped that I could remember enough of those examples to figure out some of what was written here.
Enough to free Briza, at least.
Hopefully enough to do at least that.
Chapter Fifteen
AARON WEIR
“Again, I’m impressed,” Lucie said to me, “very, very impressed indeed.”
I had just told her the whole damn story. All about John Dee and Alan Moore’s book about him and how Dee had been a trusted advisor to Queen Elizabeth The First and in contact with angels and demons to boot. And how these so-called angels and demons had taught him The Enochian Tongue. And how that had had a profound impact on the whole history of the world.
“Careful,” I told the dragon-girl, “if you keep saying how impressed you are with me, I just might start to get the impression that you actually might like me or something.”
“Pah,” she snorted, back to her old snarky self again, “just because I just gave you a mind-bendingly good blowjob just now doesn’t mean that I’m head-over-heels in love with you, Earther. You may have a great cock, but it’ll take more than that to win my black heart.”
“Don’t tempt me,” I said.
And she actually blushed a little when I said that.
Which was a rare thing for Lucifera Freeborn. A very rare thing indeed: blushing like that. And so I took it to mean that she actually did want me to pursue her. She actually did want me to try and woo her and win her heart, not just force her to be my sex slave or thrall.
“I have an idea,” I said to her then, “but you might not like it.”
The dragon-girl looked up at me with those auburn-colored eyes of hers. “What?” she asked, blushing an even deeper shade of red.
“It’s naughty,” I told her.
“Go on.”
“And it could very well get us into a whole heap of trouble.”
“I’m starting to really like the sound of this,” Lucie admitted and she snuggled up close to me to hear the rest of my plan.
I had The Gaias Grimoire open in my hand and had been studying a short passage in it that was just at the start of the book. It seemed to serve as a kind of preface or key or something. And I had scanned through this passage of text multiple times trying to get a handle on it before telling the whole story about John Dee to Lucie. I wanted to see how much of the Enochian language I really understood from my memory of Moore’s examples in his secret history before telling her my plan.
And I actually was able to understand at least a part of this preface.
It seemed to be a short explanation of how to best use the magic book itself. Or how best not to use the book, I wasn’t totally sure. However, I was confident enough in my Enochian that I thought I had figured out a way to enter the grimoire prison and find Briza based on what was written here.
Banishment, it said in Enochian.
The only way into The Gaias Grimoire was to be banished there. By The Demon Lord Baal Scheherazade, for example. Which is what he had done to Briza. The Demom Lord had banished her there.
But it’s not like that asshat had the monopoly on those kinds of spells.
After all, I also had a Banishing Spell listed in my Soul Stats under my Spell-Craft Skill. So it was clear that I could do that kind of magic too, not just poncy Demon Lords.
My Banishing Spell was still
When I had wanted to extinguish that Halo Of Light spell, the one that conjured that tiny ball of glowing white light around the tip of my wand, I had spoken the magic word that activated that spell backwards.
It was a little trick that I knew from the VR game.
But it had worked the same here in Ourobor as it had in the sim. And so I reasoned that maybe it wouldn’t be so different with the Banishing Spell.
I had just learned via Lucie’s incredible freakin’ hummer what the proper spell-words were in The Forked Tongue in order to summon someone. So what if I spoke those words backwards? What if I cast the spell in reverse? Then surely they should have the opposite effect, right?
They should work to banish someone, not summon them.
Or two someones, as they case may be.
Me and Lucie.
The Summoning Spell chanted in reverse should banish us both right into The Gaias Grimoire. And, once inside, we could then find Briza and figure out how the hell to get her out of there.
Pretty clever, Beaver Cleaver.
This was some real warlock shit.
I grabbed hold of Lucie’s hand right then and asked her, “Do you trust me?”
“I trust you,” she said.
“I’m going to banish us into the grimoire,” I told her, “and we’re going to get Briza back right now.”
“And just how do you plan on doing that?”
“Easy,” I said, “I’m going to cast the Summoning Spell that you just so lovingly taught me, but in reverse.”
She batted her long black eyelashes for a second or two, mulling the idea over. “Interesting premise,” the dragon-girl murmured, “simple. Maybe so simple that it might actually work.”
“It’ll work,” I told her confidently.
“Maybe,” she muttered out of the corner of her mouth, “probably. But maybe I should stay behind just in case— ”
I cut her off. “I thought you wanted to be naughty with me?” I said. “Go exploring, get in trouble.”
“I do, but … ”
“Think of it like a date,” I told her.
And when I said that word — date — the red-headed dragon-girl’s whole body tensed up. “A date?”
“Yeah, the coolest first date that you’ve ever been on.”
“Okay,” she grinned, “okay: that’s a deal.”
“Deal?” I asked.
“Deal,” she confirmed.
Immediately upon hearing her say those words, I raised my dragon-bone wand and began chanting the Summoning Spell in reverse. And believe me, it was a total mouthful to get through. Not only was the spell in The Forked Tongue, but it was freakin’ backwards to boot. It sounded like I was speaking through a mouth full of creamed corn. I sounded like that menacing little dwarf from The Red Room in Twin Peaks.
But it worked.
It totally freakin’ worked.
The second that I finished speaking the spell-words, the two of us were whisked away down a funnel of churning light. A gyring, spiring circle of flames taking us down, down, down in its leafy way.
Autumn.
Mulch.
And honeysuckle.
The overwhelming smell of wood-smoke. The smell of wood-fire ovens and dried leaves burning in the chill autumn air.
And then we were there.
Deep down in The Gaias Grimoire, in a rank and fell place from which no life had ever sprung.
Chapter Sixteen
AARON WEIR
We stood in a long dark corridor.
Some kind of underground tunnel carved out of black stone and lit only by a few guttering torches. The torches were perched in rusty old sconces affixed along the slick walls of the tunnel at irregular intervals.
And fading out in the air before my eyes was this simple message scrawled in golden glowing letters:
Banishing Spell
I had done it.
I had frickin’ done it. It had worked, reciting the Summoning Spell backwards had totally worked. Not only had I activated that vital piece of magic in my Soul Stats, but by using that magic I had also totally banished us here … to this place.
