The figure on the TV draws a knife across their palm, blood welling up to drip onto the altar. “I swear,” they say, and I roll my eyes and look away.
“That’s a terrible place to cut yourself,” I complain to my partner. “There’s so many tendons.”
“You always say this,” she says. “Every time someone cuts their hand in a movie.”
“It happens so often!” I grouse, looking back at the screen. “And now he’s, what, gonna swordfight? You can’t swordfight, buddy! You probably can’t even make a fist. And you know it’s going to scar, you can’t keep that still, you’re an adventurer.”
“I kind of thought that was the point.” She says. “It’s supposed to be a sacrifice, right? So they get a big scar on their hand to remind them of it.”
“They get a limited range of flexibility if they’re not careful. See how useful their fancy finger-twirling magic is if they can’t hold a wand. Bunch of Stephen Stranges out here.” I settle back to frown at the screen.
“I think Stephen Strange does pretty good magic,” my partner points out, amused, and I scoff as I lean against her. “How are you supposed to know you gave up anything, if nothing changes?”
The thought stuck with me as the day of my oath approached. The law of equivalent exchange is so baked into my worldview that I no longer remember whether I gathered it from science, a misremembered bit of Frazer, or the Elric brothers themselves. I believe that magical act, or at least any magic that I attempt, requires an exchange of some sort. That can be energy, items, attention- but the power has to come from somewhere. Oaths are major magical actions and I knew this one, specifically, would need a pretty intense exchange.
In another essay, this is where I would talk about the oath. It’s hard to discuss a spell without the specifics, all of the preparations and carefully-planned language that make it powerful enough to change the world. It’s even harder to talk about happiness without lapsing into details, waxing poetic about the whys and the wherefores of my delight. But with this oath – not as payment but as a side effect I chose to carry – comes a weight of secrecy. There are details that are not mine to tell, not yet.
Suffice it to say that it’s been the major magical action of the last six months, for me. I’ve piled meditation on top of divination on top of late nights staring at the ceiling. It has been impossible and exciting and too far away and coming much too fast. I have written and rewritten the wording, worried at the plans, read everything I can get my hands on that seems even a little similar. I have obsessed about it the way I obsess about foreign travel, both unbelievable things so longed for that they very seldom feel real until they’re happening. Terrifying, yes, but moreover too good to be true.
If it worked – if the oath was accepted – surely it would be one of the best things to ever happen to me. How could I pay for that?
Golf finger rings recovered from the royal cemetery of Ur, Iraq 2550-2450 BCE Photographed at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. [Mary Harrsch, Wikimedia Commons, CC 2.0]
After a while the answer seemed obvious. I’d give myself.
When I was younger, directionless and not at all convinced of the likelihood that I’d make it to middle age, giving myself to the gods seemed like the obvious course of action. It was never a formal oath, just an offer made in a friend’s basement while helping with their chores. “If you give me a chance at making this work,” I muttered in the general direction of Loki, “you can do what you want with me.” It seemed like a fair trade, at the time. As I understood it then, the gods tend to have plans that track toward the greater good. If I could be helpful, at least it would give me some direction to move in, with my life.
This oath, made so carefully and with so much forethought, seemed much weightier, and the research I was doing was fairly clear on what would happen if it went badly. There were plenty of tales about people attempting something similar and losing their self control, their sanity, even their lives. On my darker days, when I believed them without reservation, those specters loomed large. I tried to guard against them in the oath itself, tried to shore them up with escape clauses and provisos. The document I was drafting in grew bloated with ‘please don’t’ and ‘leave me this at least’.
I started to get an ache in my hand, on the finger I’d chosen for my oathring. It felt like the hollow of something missing, a place that’s used to weight and substance waiting to be filled up again. I knew myself well enough to know that no list of fears was going to keep me from making the oath itself.
“I’m just worried about it,” I told my other partner. “What does it even mean to give myself? What am I giving, really? What does it mean metaphysically?”
Ze frowned at me, quizzical. “Hold on. You don’t think that if you offer yourself… Luke. You can’t give yourself away.”
“Pretty sure I can,” I said, tapping the blinking cursor halfway through the oath. “It’s in the wording. I’m-”
“No,” ze interrupted. “I mean. Even if you give yourself away, you still have you. Nobody can take your… Your self determination? Your free will?” Ze grinned. “You can give yourself away a thousand times and still be yours. That’s sort of the point.”
I stared at zir, and turned it over in my head. “I – huh.”
“If you don’t trust the people you’re oathing to,” ze said. “Before you make any promises, I think you at least have to trust yourself.”
A collection of padlocks [meineresterampe, Pixabay]
The idea percolated for weeks, filtering down through my practice. The bad days, filled with worry, came less often. There was still a sense of building anticipation – but it bided its time, waiting as I worked through the implications. If I am, irrevocably, my own master, then what is there to worry about? If consent is mine to give or withdraw, then what risk do I run by giving it?
The document that held my oath shrank as I sliced away clauses and provisos, closing doors behind me, making it harder to wriggle my way out. I would give nothing I would regret – so I gave everything, whole-hearted and indulgent, and never more sure of myself. “I am yours as I am my own,” I wrote. “I lose nothing by this. I do this so that we may both gain something.”
In the end, it didn’t even feel like a sacrifice. There were offerings of course, on the day of: plates filled with sweets and rolls, tall glasses of buttermilk, whiskey so good I very seldom buy it for myself. There was even blood, drawn with a sterile lancet and worked out of my finger with as much care as a medical procedure. But when the words were read it hardly felt like a change. There was no billowing smoke, no wild lights, nothing to mark that the moment I had been building up to for months had, finally, come and gone.
“I love you,” I said into the circle, filled up with joy, and the moment stretched longer. No rip in space, no sudden revelation- just the quiet continuance of my life, with a little more ease in it, a little more steadiness in my tread. “I’m so happy I’m yours.”
The ring sat bright on my finger, gold in the candlelight, and refused to resolve into a scar.
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