The Siphon

Her eyes snapped open to stare into the darkness, her heart thundering in her chest, slamming against her sternum. Elyra sat up against the headboard of the bed, the sage colored satin sheets sliding off her torso and landing in a bundle on her lap. Her thin, pale hand rose and wiped the cool moisture from her forehead. A groan escaped her lips as she looked at the clock by her bed.

3:00 AM flashed in neon red.

“Here we go again,” Elyra muttered as she rose from her pine framed bed.

Her ivory skin prickled as she sensed the presence of someone—or something—else in the room with her. A deep-seated nausea settled in the pit of her abdomen and she fought to control her flipping stomach.

The room was hot and sticky, like a July night in the bayou where she’d grown up. She stepped over to the wide window overlooking a modest but bountiful herb garden and slung it open. The cool autumn breeze brushed her long hair back, away from her face. She took in the heavy scent of lavender and jasmine that permeated the air. It made the stifling humidity of her bedroom slightly more tolerable.

Nights like these took a toll on Elyra. She would awake from a dead sleep, unable to catch her breath and covered in a cold sweat, her heart fighting to burst from her chest. It wasn’t exactly a new thing. In her thirty-eight years, she had spent the last twenty of them in the same recurring cycle that ended with nights like these.

Readying herself, she turned her attention back to the bedroom and the unwelcome company it held. She could still feel the shadows shifting about on the edges of the room, but she couldn’t make them out through the darkness.

With eyes narrowed, she focused on a row of candles she kept on her desk and quietly whispered “Ignis.”

With a small, puttering burst of light, six pillar candles sparked to life and filled the room with a faint glow. The new light revealed what Elyra already knew was lurking in the shadows. The dark figures floated along the walls, rippling and coiling into themselves, rumbling thunderheads with nowhere to go. Elyra’s body stiffened without her permission.

Even though she had seen these creatures time and again, she still felt the same primordial fear every time she was in their presence. Forcing herself to bury her instincts, Elyra stepped over to the altar she had set up with care in a corner of her room. An impressive assortment of herbs and plants sat in pots on the top shelf of the mantle, joined with bottles and bowls of different oils and extracts- a baker’s rack of magical proportion.

“You’re earlier than usual,” she quipped. Her voice was tired, almost fragile, though she did her best to hide it.

“Pay,” the entity seethed, “Siphon…must…. pay….” The words were gravely and seemed to come from some dark depth of space.

They had haunted Elyra for years now, always returning when her blood binding weakened. Upon close inspection, one could almost make out the familiar faces swirling in the black smog. Sickening hissing, gurgling sounds came from the darkness. They were not demons, as humans might think. They were spirits- kind of. Mages call them Darklings. They were there in the way that smoke is-visible, but intangible. Able to choke the life from you, but physically impossible to fend off.

“I guess since you’re already here again, that means that this power cycle is coming to an end.” Elyra chuckled, but the sound was harsh and annoyed with no trace of amusement. “And so soon, too.” It was happening quicker every time. Here she was, the strongest Mage in existence, and yet she could feel her power waning, getting stretched thinner like a rubber band about to snap apart.

Another gurgling sound came from the shadows. “Siphon… come… pay…” They were edging closer to her, growing bolder.

“I think not.” She sighed. ‘Why do they always have to sound like evil cavemen?’ Elyra thought.

She grabbed a pestle and mortar and placed it on the base of the altar with a slight thud, the cold stone familiar in her hands. The usual remedy for these encounters was becoming less effective. She would have to find a new power source. Soon.

“You know I never let you stick around for long.” Elyra pointed out as the figures slithered closer, almost within reaching distance. A new wave of sickening heat bellowed from them. It was as if they were carrying the flames of Hell within their smoky bodies.

“Must… come…” the Darklings hissed. “Siphon pay…. come…”

Elyra’s hands moved quickly and efficiently, the routine etched into her muscles. Agrimony, anise, belladonna. Some monkshood and osha root. Brimstone, skullcap and valerian root. And finally, salt from the Dead Sea. Everything she would need for purification, protection, purging of spiritual entities, and, most importantly to Elyra, sleep.

As she did a final mental check of the ingredients, she kept an ever-watchful eye on the Darklings. The all too familiar faces swirled before her, changing into haunting memories with every breath. A chill ran up her spine and her hands began to tremble. She had done unspeakable things in the name of survival. Unspeakable. But necessary. She worked to grind the herbs into a chunky powder with unsteady hands, her mind reaching into the past.

***

Upon her eighteenth birthday, Elyra’s true Siphon nature reached its peak. All Mages knew the tales of Siphons from their childhood. They were the boogiemen of the Mage world, a scare tactic to ensure young Mages behaved—“You better be good, or a Siphon will sneak into your room at night and suck your power away!” Every clan taught their own version of the cautionary tale, but the basic information was always the same. A Siphon needed a power source in order to survive- magical blood to sustain a magical existence. They were the scourge of the Mage world, unable to conjure their own power and forced to drain it from others. It was a blasphemous existence, and though the occurrence of Siphons was exceedingly rare, those who were born were forced into a half-life, remaining frail and weak, rarely surviving into adulthood without magical blood. They were forced to abandon their true nature and accept an early death. But not Elyra.

“Hey Eli,” she called as she sauntered into his room. “Whatcha up to?”

His jade eyes flicked over to her from the copy of Archie Comics Digest that was clutched in his hands. He was always reading those old things. Their father had held onto every copy he had found when he was a kid, and then Eli took on the obsession. “Just doing what I do,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be studying or something?”

How typical. Eli had always been the golden child- the preferred twin. Straight A’s, perfect spell work, flawless potions, exemplary behavior- nothing dared to mar Eli’s record of excellence. Her parents were always so quick to compare the two of them. Why can’t you be more like Eli? Why can’t you do as you’re told like Eli? Why don’t you get good grades like Eli? Why can’t you blend into human society more like Eli? It was nauseating.

“Nah, you know me,” Elyra brushed off. “When in doubt, just wing it, right?” But Elyra hadn’t been winging it for quite some time. She’d been planning this moment for months. She checked the clock by his bed. Just past midnight. “I got your favorite.” She held up the bottle of cream soda she’d hidden behind her back. He loved the syrupy sweet beverage. Elyra hated it.

“Awesome, thanks.” Eli said, taking the bottle from her. She watched as he unscrewed the top and took three big gulps.

“Everyone else already in bed?” She asked.

He dropped his book onto his chest and stretched his arms out, pushing himself into the pillows of his bed. “Yeah, I think we’re the only night owls of the family. Mom said something about getting up early to go see one of the elders tomorrow. Something about the solstice festival.”

Elyra’s parents had, in fact, been meeting with the Mage elders for weeks now. Ever since her and Eli’s eighteenth birthday. They were making plans. Plans that wouldn’t benefit Elyra. Eli yawned and his eyes became visibly heavy.

“Feeling tired, brother?” Elyra chirped.

“Yeah,” his voice was thick and drowsy. “Think I’m gonna…”

He didn’t get the chance to finish. The sleeping drought she mixed in his soda had done its job. Elyra closed the door quietly and turned back to the room. She set to work. Once she tossed the threadbare area rug off to the side, she took the red chalk from her pocket and began sketching out a pentagram framed with foreign runes on the rough hardwood floor. Elyra scanned the altar in Eli’s room and grabbed five pillar candles to place at each point of the star. Now the hard part.

She went to Eli’s bed and grabbed his lean, muscled arm with both hands and pulled with her full weight. Even though they were twins, Eli was a lot bigger than Elyra, and heavier. His limp body fell to the floor with a thud and Elyra cursed under her breath. She waited a moment to hear any movement in the house. When no sound came, she began dragging him to the center of the pentagram. Once everything was in place, she sat by him, placing his head in her lap, athame ready in her hand.

Elyra knew the blood rites that were required for the Siphon to gain the power of another individual. She read every text she could find, far away from the watchful gaze of her family. She’d spent hours studying the incantation, preparing for this moment.

She made the cut quickly, in a rush to get it over with. A fine, distinct line across her brother’s neck appeared. The blood seeped up, slowly. She hadn’t gone deep enough, hadn’t used enough pressure. How thick was his neck anyway? She repeated the swiping motion, pushing the blade of her athame harder into Eli’s throat. The crimson liquid splattered against her hand and began to pool on the floor, spreading onto Elyra’s crossed legs. As the warm, thick blood was connecting with her skin, Elyra had begun reciting the ancient incantation quietly as not to wake anyone. The words felt foreign on her lips and her tongue worked clumsily to form the lines.

She slit her wrists quickly with the same athame she had used to snuff the life out of Eli. As she held her arms low into the pooling blood, she continued the spell. Eli’s blood began to bubble on the floor, quickly turning into tendrils of scarlet, wrapping around her hands, reaching into the gashes in her wrists. Elyra hissed in pain as her brother’s blood began to seep into her. It was a searing, unnatural feeling.

After Eli’s blood had been drained, the slits in Elyra’s wrists closed on their own. The new skin was fresh and pink, leaving no trace of the gory scenario that had just ensued. Her breath came fast, her heart racing with the rush of power that now filled her. She could feel it in every inch of her skin, every vein in her body. Her body shook in bewilderment and wonder. This was what she could have. Energy. Power. Life.

The silence of the house settled around her like a weighted blanket. Her childhood home had remained quiet, but she knew she wouldn’t be safe given what she had done- she’d planned on it. Her parents and the elders would exile her into a dream-state of nightmares for what she had done- a spellbound realm of mental and spiritual darkness with no escape. She knew she would have to run. Elyra went quickly to her room and grabbed her backpack, already packed and waiting, from her closet.

The stairs groaned as she crept to the first floor. She made her way to her parents’ bedroom, trying her best not to make a sound. She needed money, and her dad always had a stash for emergencies. Elyra was pretty sure this qualified as an emergency, for her at least. She stopped by their bed on her way to their closet. Standing over them, she was caught for a moment by a twisted thought. “Should I kill them?” She had wondered. Was this her chance for revenge for the isolated childhood they’d given her? The guarded conversations, the wary looks, the constant whispers when they thought she wasn’t paying attention. Payback for all the times she was never as perfect as Eli? “I was never good enough for them,” her mind continued, working through her tangled emotions. “I was never Eli. Well, look at me now, Mom. I’m the one calling the shots.”

Then and there she decided. Elyra would repeat the ritual she had used only moments before on the golden boy that now lay dead on his bedroom floor. Thankfully, her father had always been a heavy sleeper- evident by his congested snoring. Her mother on the other hand religiously complained of insomnia, which she remedied with potions and tonics. She seemed sound asleep, so Elyra proceeded. She drew a rough pentagram with one of her mother’s ruby red lipsticks- the kind she had never let Elyra use. The athame made quick work of them both, and Elyra dragged their bleeding corpses from their bed to the pentagram on the hardwood floor. She began the spell immediately, without hesitation. The dark magic took from her parents every ounce of blood, and with it, their power, just as it had done to their darling Eli. She took it in with greedy fervor.

When she had finished, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror of her mother’s vanity, illuminated by the full moon outside. She looked like a wild animal after the kill- heated and feral. Her heart stuttered as she focused on her reflection’s eyes. They had changed. The pupils nestled in her pale green irises had shifted into cat-like slits. The tell-tale mark of a Dark Mage. This was Elyra now. The sight did not give her a feeling of regret or sadness. All she could feel was blood drunk power.

A shuffling sound from above broke her reverie. The only other living person in the house was Elyra’s younger sister- sixteen-year-old Brigid. She must have been going to the bathroom, unaware of the horror show that was surrounding her. Brigid was all red hair and quick temper. She was a tenacious young Mage, and Elyra always had a soft spot for her. She was the only one in her family who treated Elyra like she was still a living person with feelings and emotions- a kindness that Elyra chose to repay.

She left her childhood home, taking with her only the bare necessities and the stash of money her father kept in a shoe box in his closet. She had left Brigid alive and alone, a continuation of her immediate family- the last Mage of the Cowen-McCauley line.

As Elyra grew older, she needed the power more. That was when she discovered what she had sentenced herself to. Without a renewable source of magical power, a repeated blood binding ritual, Elyra would wither away, growing weaker until there was nothing left of her. She had poured over every piece of literature she could find on Siphoning. None of them had mentioned that it was only a temporary fix. None of them had mentioned that she would need to keep killing.

She was twenty-four when she needed her next fix. That’s when she took her cousins, Marcus and Marcella. Elyra had found that the power she gained from them was diluted- just like the blood they had shared. But it would keep her alive for the time being.

Once she had begun repeating her hunting process, it became harder for her to find her relatives. Many had gone into hiding, hoping to evade Elyra’s grasp.

She always left a remnant, however, always someone to keep the bloodline going. That was imperative. Without viable options, Elyra would be unable to sustain her existence, and succumb to the Darkling’s repeated attacks. This was a matter of survival. Without the blood rites, Elyra would die- that was a certainty. Her sins would catch up to her and the Darklings would finally extract their vengeance, stripping her soul from her body, leaving the husk of what was once a powerful Siphon.

Elyra refused to let it come to that. She couldn’t let that happen, not to her.

***

Elyra’s eyes burned as the memories of what she had done time and again lingered in her mind. She remembered them all, but she remembered Eli the most. They never really got along, but he had been one half of a whole. She often wondered what he would look like now, as a fully matured Mage. Every now and then she caught herself missing his plethora of comics, the empty bottles of cream soda around the house, even his snooty, condescending voice telling her what to do and how to do it. She had hated him for so long, and yet she still missed her brother.

“Stop it,” she inwardly scolded herself. “It’s too late for a pity party, crying won’t bring any of them back.” She knew regret wouldn’t help her now. More gurgling and hissing came from the Darklings in the room, pulling her back to the more pressing matter at hand.

“Now, where were we?” Her voice came in a thick croak.

She picked up her athame, the same beautiful gilded dagger with the ruby encrusted hilt she had carried from her childhood home. Her teeth clenched, she dragged the blade across her palm with precise, practiced movements. The blood was warm and sticky as it pooled in her hand before she tipped it into the stone mortar. As she bound her hand roughly with a strip of cotton cloth, Elyra stared into the mortar for a moment, seeing her hazy reflection flecked with bits of ground herbs. This blood, the same blood of Eli, her parents, Marcus and Marcella, the same blood which held the power of her family lineage, was the reason for everything. What a monster she had become.

This was why the Darklings always came for her- recompense. Within their dark tentacles, the faces of all those she had Siphoned power from- the faces she had grown up with- twisted in rage and pain. She couldn’t think of that now. She picked up the pestle and used it to mix the blood into the herbs. Once the concoction was complete, Elyra closed her eyes, took a steadying breath and spoke evenly.

“Et terram a sanguine in flamma.” The Latin rolled off her tongue, familiar and comforting. Mages learned the mother tongue of the craft from infancy, some could even speak it better than they could English.

The thick, pasty mixture in the mortar bubbled, then sparked into flame, emitting a grey tinged purple smoke into the air. She breathed the smoke in deeply, embracing the thick, sweet scent. A wave of calm washed over her, but it would take a few moments for the spell to pull her into physical and mental exhaustion. Turning her attention to the Darklings, she held the smoking mortar out in their direction.

“No! Pay! Siphon… pay!” They coiled against each other, hissing and writhing. Murky faces twisted into anguish as the smoke wafted towards them. Elyra stepped forward, the smoke from the mortar pushing the Darklings farther back into a corner until they were finally pressed so close together that they began to fold into themselves and, within moments, disappeared into a wisp of black vapor, the faintest of screeches still lingering in the air.

Elyra walked back towards her bed with a sigh and sat the mortar down, still smoking, onto the bedside table. For now, the Darklings were gone, but her blood binding was becoming weaker by the day. Typically, this little ritual kept them at bay for weeks, sometimes a month, but lately, she couldn’t make it a week before they came for her. She would need to hunt for a new power source soon. There were several potential candidates for this cycle, but Elyra had her eye on one in particular. A very special one.

She walked over to her desk that was littered with files and photographs. Elyra’s eyes caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror that hung above the desk. She studied her reflection with distaste. Her hair, normally sleek and silver blonde, was now dull and rough. Her eyes were marred with lines and rimmed with purple-blue circles. Proof that her body was tired and wasting away. The toll of the last few weeks was obvious. Her skin was pale and thin, like tissue paper stretched over her cheeks, ready to tear. A frustrated huff pushed through her lips. The one feature that had remained unaltered was the cat-like pupils that stood out so starkly in her reflection.

She turned her attention from her frail appearance to the files strewn across her desk. She picked up one that laid in the center. A person’s entire life reduced to a handful of pages.

This was the file of a young girl, only 17. The first page showed a photograph of the subject. Bright red hair was tied back to expose a familiar, sharply angled face. She looked like her mother. This was Kendra McLoughlin, daughter of Brigid McLoughlin- Elyra’s niece. Granted, the young girl didn’t know of their familial connection, let alone Elyra’s existence- an unwise choice on her mother’s part. Elyra had made the decision to spare Brigid all those years ago, and hindsight paid off. A smile of sick satisfaction spread across Elyra’s face.

Kendra McLoughlin was a surprisingly powerful Natural Mage. She drew her power from the earth around her, always renewable- the very antithesis of a Siphon. This could be exactly the type of power that could break the cycle for Elyra. If she could somehow Siphon Kendra’s ability to recharge her power directly from the earth, she might not ever have to take a life again. One more death to end a chain of selfish murders.

“You’re the final piece, my dear,” Elyra said with a mournful tone. The girl was young, with so much potential. But she couldn’t let herself dwell on their familial status, it would only make her hesitate, and she couldn’t afford to hesitate.

Elyra dropped the file onto her desk and turned back to the bed with a yawn. She crawled onto the soft mattress and tried to make herself comfortable again, still uneasy from her visit from the Darklings. She pulled the sheets over her body, still too hot to allow the thick blankets to touch her. As she nestled into the pillows, she extinguished the candles in the room with a quick “Ignem extinguere” whispered beneath her breath.

The faint aroma of smoke from the snuffed candles lingered in the air as the darkness settled around her. Elyra willed her mind to drift. Kendra’s face was in the forefront of her consciousness as exhaustion crept upon her.

One final thought ran through Elyra’s mind before sleep embraced her.

Soon.