Role Playing Fan Fiction ❯ Conjure It At Your Own Risk ❯ A Little Backstory ( Chapter 1 )

Conjure It At Your Own Risk

[Dresden Files][Skyrim][The Culture]

AN: Rewrite, lighter tone, emphasize glitches and comedy aspects of Skyrim. It just works.

My name is Margaret Angelica Dresden. My mother was Susan Rodriguez, though I did not know this for many years and only met her rarely. Until I was nine, I believed my last name was Mendoza.

The only family I had known raised me in a tiny village in Guatemala. We raised and harvested cocoa pods and sold the beans to a wholesaler for our income. I got to help, but it was mostly mama and papa that tended the trees. The rest of our food was the usual squash, tomatoes, potatoes, eggs from our chickens, and beans. The spices grown in mother’s herb garden gave the five of us a healthy life, and it was a time of joy for me. I was poor and dirty, and I considered a guinea pig a big lunch, but I was sufficiently safe from strangers in town or missing persons. Sometimes my Auntie, as they called her, would visit. Auntie was American, and it was some years before I learned she was my Mother, that my family was sheltering me on her behalf.

All is not well in Guatemala, nor any part of Central or South America. The violence and corruption these countries are famed for was not merely mortal cruelty, but often tied to monsters in the night. The Blood Drinkers who vanished people and left survivors dazed and addicted to their bite, thralls. Mother only visited when there’d been disappearances, and after her welcome but brief visit the disappearances and funerals stopped. Mother was in hiding, in the rebel underground, fighting these monsters of the night. To keep me safe she had to keep away.

Years went by. One night men from some place people were afraid of came into our home. They transformed after a short time, turning into monsters, like enormous slavering bats. They killed mama and papa and Pepe and Juanita and Quincero. Killed them and drank their blood and tore their bodies apart. They made me watch. And they spared my life, which was no mercy.

It is not wrong to say that I am deeply harmed by seeing this. I was transported by plane to Mexico, then  chained inside main Mayan Temple pyramid called Chichen Itza. They made me watch, chained to the sacrificial table while man and woman had their heart torn out and their blood consumed over and over again, their bodies thrown down the steps outside… it was horrible.

And then Father came, a wizard of terrible power, fought the monsters of night, and slew my mother a moment after she lost her soul to the curse lurking in her blood. A curse that turned her body from my Mother into a batlike monster, at the cost of her soul.

My mother was a monster, and father killed her on the sacrificial altar stones at the center of the fully empowered ritual. In my Sight, after a week of human sacrifices were made before me, damaging my soul, straining my sanity. This action slew every Red Court Vampire in the world, all at once. From youngest to oldest, their blood exploding and evaporating their shells into ash. It was horrible.

Father held me then, wounded, weeping at the loss of Mother and I waited for my feelings to return in some semblance of humanity. Waited, numb and filthy and cold, waited to be me again. I was only nine. I would never be a child again.

Father’s birthday is Halloween, also known as Samhain. It is the second new-year of the fairy folk, and I now know that fairies are real. Even the little tiny ones like in Disney movies. I can see them. Being at the epicenter of that spell, with father’s blood, and mother being a dhampir, him a starborn… and so am I. I was born on Beltaine, May first. While the communists tried to claim it as their own, it is the OTHER fairy new year, six months after Halloween. Likewise any magical child born on that day is Starborn, and has the ability to injure, even destroy demons, angels, gods, and Outsiders. Father has power over them. So do I. My power awakened and I am a wizard like my father before me. And all this before I even hit puberty. This is going to wreak havoc on my temper. I think it is possible I may become sarcastic.

Father died a few days later. They didn’t find his body. Something about currents in Lake Michigan. I am skeptical. I did not know this word at age nine, but I learned it in a dictionary and that is the precise word I mean. Skeptical.

More time passed while I lived with the Carpenters. One of them is named Harry, for my father, and he is a Harry Carpenter. I speak Spanish as my first language but the Carpenters have been teaching me English, and I work hard to lose my accent. We live in Chicago, which is NOT a nice place. It is a large city constructed on a sinking river delta next to a lake formed by glaciers melting more than 18 thousand years ago. Every few decades they build a new street over the old one and people move their entrance to the next floor and wall off their old ground floor into basement, sealing it off, forgetting about it. This makes for exactly the sort of hidey holes monsters love. Chicago has a monster infested underground, and the Vampires are gone, so new monsters are fighting for territory, some kind of elder wild fairies, and now the lawful kind but something more primal, nasty, evil.

Chicago above ground is a hub of transportation and commerce, a shipping port for some of the goods out of the Midwest. The ships that work their way up the St. Lawrence River in Canada and into the canals into the Great Lakes eventually arrive at Chicago, where they can offload goods and take on more. This means that Chicago has port city problems, something Charity has tried to explain to me.

Charity has noticed I am somewhat more intelligent than her own children, though I am not the only mage in the house. There are three. Father’s apprentice Molly Carpenter is a mage, the eldest child, though she is 28 years old. Molly was at the battle that rescued me. She got injured there and still walks with a limp. She isn’t here very often, and only shows up weakened and sick or wounded. The two children who also possess magic are afraid to tell their mother, since she was a Witch once and gave it up to marry Mister Carpenter, who is a Godly Man. The kind that Good Christian Girls want to marry so they go to Church. Mister Carpenter is actually a carpenter. And a licensed contractor in the State of Illinois. He was badly hurt a few years ago in a deadly adventure fighting demons from hell or fallen angels. Or both. It was pretty bad, apparently. He has been forced to retire, and the house is guarded by angels, which I can see when I open my sight. Seeing them helped banish the dark evil of Mexico from my mind and went a long way to helping me relax at their house. There are a bunch of them around, watching the property. Standing guard. They see me, seeing them.

I go to school. I am ten now. I have skipped two grades and am only required to take one ESL class. My English is good. I am going to graduate from elementary school in a month and a half. My magic has destroyed over twenty five computers, and forced serious repairs on another thirty. I am also responsible for wrecking probably over a hundred cellular phones. The smart ones are very fussy, and do not take the magic field from a mage like me very well. Michael Carpenter explained this to me once, that Harry, my father, did this same thing too, and that only old and simple things work properly around him, and told me stories of all the things that broke or shorted out. Even battery powered stuff like portable saws were at risk. We have to change lightbulbs every week, on average. And I still haven’t hit puberty, which Molly said would be even worse.

“So many emotions,” she warned.

“I hope so,” I answered honestly. Being numb like this isn’t any fun. How do you counsel a wizard? I pray a lot, and Father Forthill does his best to provide peace of mind. Peace of mind is a phrase he likes a lot. I can see the pity in his eyes. I think when I am older I may find that look to be irritating.

“That’s what happens in Puberty. You grow all sorts of directions, notice things you never noticed before, feel new things, and get mad all the time,” Molly explained, resting her leg and sipping from a mug of hot cocoa.

I am pretty excited to go to Junior High, though hopefully I won’t have too much trouble. Two of the Carpenter children will be there with me. This is a good thing. They have their own guardian angels keeping them safe from trouble. The school ghost was banished. The ghoul that lived in the alley suffered a fatal accident thanks to Molly and her increasing skill with combat magic.

I do not like her teacher. It is that woman, Leahnansidhe, pronounced Laya-non-shee. She is a powerful fairy, nearly as powerful as a queen. Ancient, somewhat like a vampire, exchanging blood and life force for creativity. I have seen that she is actually a timelord, like Doctor Who. It is her trick, and why she is so allergic to cold iron. The nucleus of iron is stable and thus blocks time magic from working. Any contamination prevents it. This is why fairy blood isn’t red. They can’t have hemoglobin and still work time magic.

My sight is fascinating. I have seen things that others have not. I think Molly is being misled by this Leah, by father’s godmother. Because I can see angels, I am a good Catholic girl. I know that God exists. I don’t have to wonder. When I am at church I can see the angels within, bathe in the holy light, and purify myself of the taint of darkness which remains as a child of a dhampir. My starborn power is another thing. I wish Father would return. The others say he is dead, but there is an old saying in movies. If you can’t find the body, he isn’t dead. There may be something to that.

Another years passes.

I now read at the high school level. I am still too young for emotional surges associated with puberty. I am glad of this. The Carpenter teenagers are certainly catty. I wonder if I will be like that someday, or if my current state of clarity from both trauma and the certainty of divinity in our world just makes me calmer than most children. I have perspective I can verity with my Sight. I can see angels. Even as I write this in my diary I have trouble having the right words to describe then sensation properly. I have proof, and thus my faith is unshakeable. I wonder if Father ever felt this epiphany. My sight activating also meant that I soulgaze people sometimes. I got a funny reaction from some of them. Some shake off some terror, some mention a men’s chorus singing in a foreign language they don’t know, and a few merely nod their heads as if I am precisely what they expected. I asked Mister Carpenter about this, and he said it was okay to call him Michael when we were alone. So I asked Michael.

“Did Father understand the nature of his gift?” I asked.

“Maggie, your father was a conflicted man. He cared a great deal about doing the right thing, but sometimes that meant he sacrificed so much of himself he become resentful and… sarcastic about his fate. He felt like his trials of life were mocking him, rather than see the good in life, and the good he did.”

“And mother? I know you knew her,” I reminded him. I’d seen pictures in their photo album.

“Your mother was an ambitious woman. She loved investigative reporting, and her interests often aligned with your father’s, putting them together in several dangerous cases. They fought werewolves together, including a nearly immortal cursed being called a Loup Garou, a French werewolf demon nearly immune to damage and uncontrollably vicious, a curse passed down through bloodlines. I still wonder if perhaps Harry’s special nature gave him the critical power to actually kill it.” Michael looked thoughtful, considering memories.

“Did my parents love each other?” I asked him.

“With all their hearts. Harry tore himself apart with guilt, trying to find a way to save your mother from the blood curse lurking in her. He spent half a decade and most of his time trying to find a way to cure her. He turned down work, become a reclusive madman in his basement. It wasn’t a good time for him. Father Forthill and I both tried to get him to come out of there and socialize with people because no one in history has been able to overcome the curse. And in the end, betrayal by her allies pushed her over the edge, and from the ashes of defeat victory was seized by her own sacrifice, to save you.”

“I can see the angels, Michael. I know that God is real. Why didn’t Father understand this? Why didn’t he understand how powerful that knowledge really is? That Faith is actually justified, and having the gift to see its proof?” I stated carefully in my precise English.

“Most can only see with their hearts, and for them that is enough. God wills that is enough,” Michael reminded me. 

I thought about this awhile and decided I would simply take in the yard, the mowed lawn, the Denarian glaring at us from across the street, the angels daring its mortal bearer disguised as a travelling salesman to step foot in the yard. Choice matters. Staying here, doing nothing but sitting, is defense enough.