Midnight Blues (Episode)

**Midnight Blues** is the series premiere of the show with the same name. It is the first episode of Season 1.

## Summary

Two magicians, Eteshi and Matteo, begin their official submissions to the Archives, detailing their magical work. Attempting to introduce Matteo to ritual magic, the two investigate a news article concerning a series of suspicious suicides across the North of Auckland. Prepared for a screwed-up internet trend or a grimoire fragment gone astray, an investigation of the latest death and her suicide note set them on the trail of something much darker.

## Plot

Eteshi and Matteo find themselves under the Waiwera Bridge, looking up at it. They start setting up a Ritual to check on the girl's death and determine why and how she fell, and what went wrong. They work the ritual and the bridge turns into ancient stone, towering over the river. However, at the same time, blood forms a ritual circle on the ground where the girl fell. The two inspect it but don't recognise it, and agree to investigate more.

## Theodore Draft

It was starting to get dark by the time we parked the car in a little gravel patch off the road and stepped outside.  The road was relatively quiet, although occasional cars flew by us – locals, mostly, I judged, given the speed they were taking the blind corner leading up to our vehicle. I stretched my legs out and watched a hawk as it hovered across the tree-covered hill rising off to our right.  Behind us the sun was setting, and the clouds peeking over the hills to our West were red and gold against the sky.  I could smell salt on the air, in amongst the dust of the road and a tinge of mangrove mud, and the breeze from the East, though blocked by a turn of the hill, was cool against my bare skin.  I stepped round to the back of the car and popped the boot, pulling a heavy duffel bag onto my shoulder and tossing a thermos at Matteo as he climbed out the other side of the car.  He caught it easily, then turned to look around and take in the scenery as well.

“Got everything?”, I asked, my voice sounding surprisingly loud in the quiet evening.  He raised his bag and the thermos in mute response, then the two of us stepped around the car, locked it, and stepped across the road. The gravel gave way almost instantly to mud, proving once more my theory that no matter how long it’s been since the last rain, or how hot the day is, you can always find mud in New Zealand.  I slipped my sandals off and walked barefoot through the grass, Matteo slightly behind me and we wandered through the hip-high yellow grass that covered the field.  Even with all that, it only took a minute to reach the site.  I almost tripped on the low-hanging blue-and-white police tape strung between a pair of waratahs, and the smile I’d had since stepping out of the car slipped off.  No matter how nice the evening, it’s hard to stay positive standing over a place where someone has died.

Matteo paused beside me.

“How many have there been here again?”, he asked quietly.

“Four in the last six months”, I replied somewhat absently, eyes darting around the site.

“And you think it might be something to do with our side of things”, he said.  I darted a look at him and nodded slightly, pleased to see he was doing the same information-gathering exercise I was – eyes darting around the site, looking for anything out of the ordinary.  I raised my hand and tilted it back and forth.

“Maybe, maybe not.  It’s a bit weird, but these things tend to pick up momentum from what I understand – one person jumps, and then anyone else thinking about it has an example to follow.  All the same, worth a look.”  I glanced over at him and raised an eyebrow, gesturing with my free hand toward the line.

“Shall we?”

We both stepped over the tape, dropped the bags down, and fanned out, searching the ground.  We hadn’t come here tonight to play detective – we were going to do magic, and it’s generally a really bad idea to work up a spell in a place you don’t know.  There wasn’t much to see – the ground was a little churned up by what I assumed had been police vehicles, but otherwise it was just another patch of reeds and mud in the shadow of the Waiwera Viaduct.  Nonetheless, we scoured the entire area, combing the ground for anything that significant, anything with enough residual power to interfere with our working.  Only when a thorough search turned up nothing but two broken bottles and an old hubcap was I ready to begin.

“You remember the process for this?”, I asked Matteo as I walked back to the bags.  He nodded.

“Yup.  First Ascension from the Book of Blue and White, then the Gate of the Eyeless from *Hellenikos*. We ready?”  I nodded, and he went over to the bag and pulled out a pair of battered hardcover books, hand-bound in featureless cloth.  He flipped the cover open on one of them, checked the title, then tossed it to me.  I opened it to find *Hellenikos* printed across a white sheet of copier paper.  I flipped through it until I found the right page, then stepped over to Matteo and picked up the Thermos I had given him, getting a whiff of petroleum as I did.  I checked the cap was on tight, then walked into the rough centre of the cordoned-off area and placed it down.  I cleared the area of flammable material, then opened the book and began the preliminary invocation for the Gate of the Eyeless.

Timing this working was tricky.  Matteo was a quick learner, but he hadn’t done a ritual of this scale before, and we hadn’t had time for the proper preparation.  Normally, for a spell like the Gate of the Eyeless, you perform a week or so of daily minor rituals, building a battery of power to release at the right moment – since we’d only heard about this site from a news article two days ago, and had only agreed to check it out yesterday, we were having to improvise.  The First Ascension could provide the necessary power as a stand-in, but it wouldn’t hang around, and Matteo would have to jump straight into the Gate to carry it through.  That meant I was acting as assistant tonight, and I’d have to be sharp with the timing. Hence the preparation.

I finished the first invocation just as Matteo began the first of the two Calls in for the First Ascension.  Working fast, I twisted the lid of the Thermos and began to walk in a spiral, pouring the enchanted oil behind me as I worked a preparatory spell, building a framework for the release of Matteo’s magic.  By the time I finished he was almost halfway through the second Call, and his eyes were staring off at something I couldn’t see.  I knew what he was looking at – a great bell, swinging to an invisible rope, gaining speed for a chime.  I waited until he was two words from the end, the passed the lighter and *Hellenikos* into his hands and took the Book of Blue and White out of them. He glanced down and almost stumbled, but caught himself on the last word, shouting it out over the sudden gust of wind that blue in – he sparked the lighter and leaned down as he began the Eyeless spell, touching the flame to the oil and flinching back as the spiral burst immediately into flame.  I heard, as though from somewhere far off, the ring of an enormous bell, and the flame turned blue with power.

I stepped up next to him and began to chant as well, giving the counterpoint to his invocation.  Our voices grew until we were shouting, and I heard a resonance as the roaring fire seemed to sing out a third part, different and yet aligned with our chant.  Strange patterns and lines began to appear in the flame, and as we approached the last word I raised my hand in front of us, counting down on my fingers.  *Three, two, one*, then clapped one hand over his eyes and the other over mine and we shouted the last words of the spell, the fire crackling in answer.  I heard the bell once more, this time twisted as though in an echo: the flash of the spell’s light was visible even though my hand and eyelids.  When we opened our eyes again, the world was transformed.

Where before there had been a bridge of concrete and steel, there now stood an enormous stone bridge arching across the river.  The land around was covered in forest, and great stone cliffs stretched up to the points where the bridge touched the banks.  The river had become liquid silver, but it reflected nothing at all, and the sky above was lit a cold grey.  We were seeing the world of spirits, and even having done the ritual many times before, it still took my breath away.  It was not any of this, however, that caused Matteo and I to step sharply back. Across the side of the bridge and all across the ground underneath, there was an enormous spray of red liquid – blood, I was certain, although impossibly crimson for the real world. And on the ground in front of us, formed from twisting rivulets of red shot through with black, was an enormous circle from the bridge to the riverbank.  The shapes inside were ritual symbols, though of a type I didn’t recognise; at the edge of the circle burned seven equidistant flames of sickly grey light. Around the circle whisps of smoke crawled, almost black against the grey earth, one of them brushed against me and I pulled my leg back, but not before I heard the echo inside my head of an echoing, never ending scream.  The sound cut off as I pulled away, but I shivered in the warm air and felt a touch of sickness in my stomach.  Matteo broke the silence first.

“What the fuck is that?”, he asked, voice uncertain and more than a little horrified.  I swallowed down the bile.

“Confirmation” I said. He looked at my and raised an eyebrow questioningly.

“This is definitely something on our side of the street”, I said grimly.  Then, placing the book I held gently down on my bag, I forced down my revulsion, and stepped across the twisting smoke to examine the circle more closely.