Asmodeus: sorry pouncy but do I really have to be the one to say that you have no FUCKEN idea what you’re talking about

Asmodeus: literally none
PouncySilverkitten: o rly?
Failstaff: ?
ViciousCirce: . . .

Asmodeus: you think this is a male god you are dealing with ie you writ large. wrong. OLU is a godDESS. a lady god. this is NOT about PROTOCOLS

Asmodeus: I believe in Our Lady Underground and I believe that she will help us not because it is in her interest to do so or because she wants to eat your fucking foot or whatever but because she is KIND. pouncy u twat

Asmodeus: this is not a transaction bitches this is about mercy. this is about forgiveness. this is about divine grace. if Our Lady comes, that is what will save us.

Long silence. Dead air. The next message was time-stamped a full two minutes later.

PouncySilverkitten: so how about it VC. r you in or r you out or what r u?

[ViciousCirce has left this thread]

They did it in the Library. It was the only room big enough. They’d had to pack up all the books and stack them in the Long Study and elsewhere—the halls were overflowing with them—and dismantle those beautiful floating shelves. The walls were bare, the way they would have been when this was a farmhouse. The windows were flung open to the cold, quiet late-autumn air. The early evening sky was an unnaturally amazing blue, almost a royal blue.

It was all arranged very precisely according to ex-Saint Amadour’s Phoenician invocation, down to the letter. The floor was a maze of chalk runes and patterns. Gummidgy would take the role of mistress of ceremonies and high priestess. Any of them could have handled the technicalities, but it had to be a woman, and of the women, dour, towering Gummidgy was the player deemed least likely to crack up at a crucial moment. She wore a simple flowing white gown. So did everybody else. Gummidgy also wore a crown of mistletoe.

So your basic Golden Bough deal, Julia thought. Fucking mistletoe. She never saw what all the fuss was about. Sure, it’s pretty enough, but at the end of the day it’s still a botanical parasite that strangles its host.

All the old furniture had been exiled from the room. In its place there was only a thick yew table, constructed to exacting specifications, and a huge hewn stone altar that would have cracked the floor if they hadn’t braced it up from below and put some structural spells on the brace. The entire place had been purified in half a dozen ways, as had they—they’d fasted, and then drunk some nasty teas that made their pee change color and smell weird, and burned herbs in clay pots.