She’d cleared a space for herself within the root cellar.

Discerning all the scribbled entries she’d made with her wrong hand was a chore, particularly in flickering candlelight, but she spoke the impossible words and executed the gestures the Master had taught her. Then, with gloved hands, she plucked her box garden barren and ground toxic petal, berry and bud into a rich dust. She removed her gloves to prick her index finger, and then fed just enough blood to transform the powder into a paste.

All around her Circle, the darkness thickened, as if a crowd was gathering to bear witness and their shadows were stretching across Berthe’s sacred space.

Then it came time for her to perform the final tasks, the ones she’d witnessed being done by others when travelling astrally with the Master, but she herself could never bring herself to do. Until now.

With unsteady hands she unfastened and removed her nightdress. The cellar’s dirt floor felt clammy against her flesh as she stretched out before the charred pulpit.

She could sense him now, standing in the blackness just beyond the candleflame’s reach. He was watching her, possibly encouraging her, or assessing her true worth. Would she see this through?

Perhaps to spite the Master, Berthe felt for the pouch and tugged its drawstring. The blacksmith’s nail felt cold and heavy when it landed on her belly. She warmed it by rubbing it between her thumb and forefinger, then took up the mortar and pestle. She smeared the tip of the nail with the poisonous unguent before forcing it between her legs. Wincing, tears streaming down the sides of her reclined head, Berthe plunged the nail into her cleft until its poisoned tip punctured her maidenhead. The unguent seeped into her bloodstream, swam through her circulatory system until it found her heart and loosened her soul from this nest. As this process unfurled, the darkness rimming her Circle was banished by a strange milky light. The Master was now elsewhere, if he had ever truly been in the cellar at all.

Pain and toxicity freed Berthe from her body. She revelled in the dizzying spin of her liberated shade. Frantic as a Saint-Vitus Dance, her fleshless self scaled plane after plane.

The agony of gradual poisoning spore Berthe into a new level of existence.

Her psyche left her body twitching down there in the filth and the shadows. She was free, expanding outward, in every which way. She was moving across the night-time meadows and farms. The leaves of the trees looked like ivory carvings that gleamed in the blackness. Everything appeared softer, more malleable. Berthe had no direction in her flight, she was simply drinking in this fresh liberation.

But no form of existence can be eternally without boundaries, and after a time Berthe began to feel her fleshless self being tugged, like a hooked fish. Had her chain of empathy really been yet another form of tether?