Johannes stands. As straight as he has so far, though he still looks like all his weight is on one leg. He's facing out the window overlooking his shadow Jacob's Bell, not at Sadde.

"When I claimed this demesne, I named it a place where rules and conventions have no hold. I said it was to be a sanctuary for those who wish to return to older times. As part of a different tradition, an older tradition, a tradition from those older times, a practitioner is going to awaken. Not as it is done now, but as it was done of old. You will know her as Sadde Woods." This time there actually is a gong.

He smiles at Sadde while saying her name, then leaves the room while she still has clothes on.

Ooh, ominous. She likes.

She strips and sits cross-legged in the middle of the chalk circles. She starts reading from the text, maybe butchering the pronunciation a bit but trying to do her best. She speaks slowly and calmly, partly to reduce the occurrence of said mistakes, and partly to seem confident and self-assured. She gets her stride, and her sentences become a chant, the mistakes less frequent and then nonexistent.

The circles start shifting in and out of her field of vision. Just when she reaches the end of the transliterated text, the circle containing the bowl containing the dagger slides in front of her and stops.

...what now?

Well... the meaning is obvious. "Death," she intones.

As soon as she says the word the dagger is replaced with the silver skull. Either the bowls moved some more or it just transformed. It's hard to tell.

She thinks about it. A skull, the symbol of death, made of silver, made to last. "Permanence."

It wobbles and flattens and turns into THE COIN.

"Ingenuity," she says immediately.

The rose.

"Nature."

And the page from her book.

The room has disappeared, leaving only darkness, only the lines and the bowls and herself, the circles around her more like a descending spiral into space that didn't exist than circles themselves. She smiles sadly at the page.

"This book doesn't really mean anything to me. The story's silly and it makes no sense, I haven't even read it through. But my Mum gave it to me. She left me a message, telling me to be good. That was a long time ago, I don't even remember how old I was, and it's not important. But this is mine, and more important it's me. I'm going to be good. And that doesn't mean behaving. That doesn't mean being a good girl and doing as I'm told, walking in other people's footsteps, being normal and nice. I'm going to be good. This power? I'm seizing it. I will try to make the world a better place, this is my mission. I don't know yet how, or what I'll do, but if I'm not trying to better the world, if I'm not working towards learning more and bettering myself and changing things, for me and for others... I might as well be dead. This is me, and it's who I am. I'm the person who will try."

The bowl containing the page slides back to its corner of the circle that is now a spiral. The darkness doesn't disappear, but the scroll has more text than the last time she blinked. The dagger finds itself on her right, and the squirrel on the left.

She makes a face, but grabs the squirrel in one hand, the dagger in the other, and resumes reading, knowing by instinct what she's saying even if she can't speak the language. "My word is bound and binding. I ask you respect it as such. My actions are my own, but have an equal amount of weight. So I pledge." She doesn't immediately kill the squirrel, though. Instead, she says, in English: "This is a sacrifice, representing the sacrifices I will make, and the sacrifices that have been made. Let them have meaning. Let them have weight. Let them bring less sacrifices, let all the people and peoples suffer less. This sacrifice is one step closer to the end of sacrifices." Then she kills it and returns it to the circle.

The body and blood vanish. The circles swirl around her. They're supposed to be just chalk on the floor, but at the moment it's more like she isn't falling despite the total absence of ground. The white lines start highlighting some objects and leaving others untouched, but it settles into something analogous to the room she was in before the ritual.

She looks around. Analogous to the room? What does the ritual say she has to do now?

That was it. Candles blew themselves out, the smell of incense is a regular smell now, and the bowls have tipped over. The room just looks like the same place but different. She might have to learn to turn her new Sight off.

Her—oh, right. She pays more attention and—

It's breathtaking. Angles, numbers, and geometry, at the edge of awareness. They don't overlay her vision, she can't actually see any numbers, but she knows they're there. There are connections, not everything to everything else, but everything to something else, a sense of order. Not quite like a giant spider's web, because it's more... immaterial than that. Simultaneously more and less fluid than that, the way everything looks like it belongs, the way she can almost tell what will happen if she pulls a string here or another one there. It looks the way doing mathematics feels.

And she has to not use that all the time? She looks for her clothes, finds them, and starts putting them back on. Now how does she turn this off...?

"I'm done," she calls to Johannes.

He and his rat reenter. Since she's still using practitioner-vision, she can see that Johannes has a strong connection to this demesne, and Janus has tenuous ones to everything. He's a shimmering mass of threads in every direction, thin enough that they'd be exaggerated by being called spiderweb, and they overlap in the rat shape at the center. Johannes himself looks comparatively ordinary. His right arm, right leg, and right eye all stand out from the rest of him in a way that will probably mean something once she sees similar characteristics attached to more things.

He sees Sadde wide-eyed and wobbling. "I take it it worked?"

"Yes it worked! What did you say were the problems with keeping the Sight active all the time, again? And what's up with your right arm, leg, and eye?"

"I could say my demesne cost an arm and a leg, but I'd be understating it. I did say the contests could be high stakes. The replacements are magic and therefore more visible to practitioners.

What you're seeing right now is the spirit world, not the real world. The differences are usually small, and almost everything is in the same place in each. If not, some plausible coincidence in the material world will correct the discrepancy. If you leave it on too long, you can wind up with more connection and presence in the spirit world than here, and fade from this one. Also you might bump your shin on a coffee table. Sometimes people do move things in the spirit world but not the material one."

"Well that'd be terribly counterproductive. Is there a way for me to tell how much is safe? And how do I turn it off?"

"Turning it on and off is a primitive action. I can't really explain how. Try to refocus your eyes, it's kind of like that for some people. Stare off into the distance or at something too close to your face to see. It'll get easier when you've done it a few times.

As long as you're using regular vision more than this, you won't be at much risk of the worst effects. It would have to be pretty extreme to cause problems on its own. If it ever gets harder to switch back, that's a warning sign. And you should use it less if you've been relying on things like glamour and blood expenditure that decrease your presence in this world for other reasons."

Okay, let's see... She looks into the distance, but no, that doesn't work... Then her hand, really close to her eyes, but nope, doesn't work either. She closes her eyes.

Then closes her eyes again.

Then opens them.

"Okay, that did it. Glamour?"

"A form of disguise. Faerie are almost made entirely of glamour; it's speculated that they might have started as practitioners underneath. Glamour can alter your appearance, including voice and height and even connections, and it works well as long as you and everyone else play along. The flip side is that it gets weaker with every inconsistency that anyone notices or alleges.

Using the Sight with glamour is usually perfectly harmless. But if you've been overusing either, it'd be like making sure this world doesn't see you as Sadde Woods and then half stepping into another world...it could be hard for Sadde Woods to get back."