Chapter 1
Some people go their whole lives without facing a single real tribulation. However, for Thaddeus Bauer, life was fraught with trials and misfortunes. As it goes, he wasn’t born to a family of wealth or happiness. His mother is a former Mother Superior who left the order to be a nurse. His father is a drunk ex military man who became a Solicitor when he was discharged. He didn’t have an easy childhood. His mother seemed to hold many resentments, toward him, his father, everyone? Who knows. His father used PTSD to excuse everything the poor excuse for a man had ever done wrong, the drinking, abuse, money problems. By the time Thaddeus was 20 he’d fully learned to keep his cards close to the vest. If his parents knew anything about who he really was, he would never hear or feel the end of it. All of his life growing up, if he spoke out it was immediate retribution, be it objects flying at him from his mother, or fists flying at him from his father. Eventually as he grew, so did his animosity towards his parents leading to a point where he decided to take drastic actions.
From the time he was 16 he had been trying to understand why his parents hated him so much, or why it seemed like he was never good enough for them to treat him right. He even went out of his way to read about broken homes and psychology and other areas of interest that might inform him of their motives. Eventually though, as most people do, he learned that unless they outright told him, everything was simply supposition and he would never truly understand. He would forever just spin his wheels trying to find something he would never find. This did not sit well with him, and according to every book he read, all he could do is learn to cope with the past and grow or heal from it so that he wouldn’t perpetuate the cycle.
It was at this point that he began looking up ways to cope with parental abuse, and how to heal from said experiences. In his search there was one reoccurring theme, therapy. There were several web sites that suggested individual therapy, but to him it didn’t make sense how someone who has never experienced the things he’s been through would ever be able to help him. Besides its not like his parents would ever pay for that. Then there were the groups. Most of them he knew he would never be able to attend because it required going to the actual place and his parents practically stalked him. However there were a few that specified they were online chat only sites. He might be able to pull that off. Right now he knew of only two places he could safely get online, one of which he was allowed to go to regularly but was monitored by the teachers so that wasn’t an option. His friends house was the other. The only respite from the madness that was his home.
Over the course of many years, he spent any time he could on these sites talking to anyone who would listen, and getting advice from anyone willing to give it. One of these times, he spoke to a girl that lived in America and had an abusive mom who never let her leave the house and poisoned her. During that conversation she described how hard it was for her to ever truly feel safe until she ran away and managed to get away from her mom completely. It was while she was telling him about her last few days before freedom that he started to understand that the only way to be free and feel safe was to leave. She talked about how she was now able to do anything she wanted and how, though she had a lot to work on, she had never felt safer before than she did living in that rooming house. It wasn’t much but it was hers, and she was already on her way to getting her own apartment. Now he had an idea of what he had to do.
Recently though, Thaddeus had learned that his mother and father had hatched a plan to have him legally declared incompetent so that he would never be able to leave or have a life of his own. It was like they knew he was going to run away or move out. One morning while his friend waited for him at the door so they could walk to school together, Chris overheard their conversation and told Thaddeus all about it. How they planned to go to the courts in a month, how they had hired a Solicitor and what the creep had said, and what they planned to do when they had full rights over him. This, of course, infuriated Thaddeus. He was not “incompetent” or in any way inept so he did not understand why it was that they would want to push so hard for that. That is, until his friend put the final nail in the preverbal coffin, and informed him that to do so would give his parents access to programs and funds for the mentally or physically dependent, and allow them to control every aspect of his life no matter how old he got or what he wanted. He would be trapped forever. Never able to make a decision for himself, get a job, fall in love or be free of them. It was then that he began to research ways to get out of his parents grasp without any money, job or means to do so.
One night, he snuck out to go to Chris’s house because once again his father was having a drunken episode. While there, he found a website that at first seemed like all the others, but just as he was about to click out of the page something caught his eye. A small notation on the side of the page that read “Or you could try something you know won’t work.” Odd that someone would put something like that on a page. “Why would anyone try something they know wont work?” He mumbled to himself absently. Despite that he clicked on it because he had a sense that if he clicked away now he would never find it again. When he clicked the link he was shocked by what popped up on his screen.
The first thing he saw was “Ritual For A New Life” written in the chiller font at the top of the page. Below that was a picture of some kind of circle in a circle with symbols and a triangle in the middle. Below that was a strange paragraph describing the process in which you are supposed to preform the ritual. The ritual starts off with lighting seven candles for each of the elements that make up life: Water, Fire, Earth, Air, Spirit, Light, and Dark. Then you have to burn pine needles and dried fern leaves in an incense bowl for wisdom, protection, transformative journey and self discovery. Then you chant the “sacred words” to activate the spell and begin your new life. Little did he know it was entirely real and would have a profound impact on his future.
