As always, PLEASE mind the CONTENT WARNINGS at the end1
Enjoy
Ripples
The blood comes easier than expected.
Three drops at each compass point, her palm split clean along the lifeline. The geometric sigil sprawls across her apartment floor in chalk and salt—shapes nested inside shapes, each line composed of runes that spiral inward to the center. Angles that shouldn’t work but do, curves that bend reality at their edges.
She’s been drawing for days. Learning their shapes, their sounds, their meanings.
They come easily, maybe too easily. Her hand already curving the lines before her mind catches up.
She kneels just outside the northern point, blood pooling in her cupped palms. The book lies open beside her—stolen knowledge, passed through three intermediaries and a friend, who had handed over the texts with a look that said I know what this is about but asked nothing. Everyone knows about her baby.
No one knows about her husband.
The room’s been purified. No iron, only salt and dried herbs that smell like funeral homes. She’s memorized the invocation, practiced the pronunciation until her throat ached. Asmodeus. Prince of Revenge. Everything is ready for him—blood enough for a high-ranking demon, runes sharp and already humming. The final step: bleed on the invocation runes hidden in the design and speak his name, then wait.
She lets the blood drip on the invocation cluster. Words pull out of her without warning. Syllables that taste like pennies and ashes. The air thickens, pressure building behind her eyes. Her vision swims. Too much blood, given too fast. The edges of the sigil blur.
She opens her mouth to speak the name, three invocations.
“Asmodeus,” she begins.
Her tongue trips. The syllables scatter like dropped pearls on a bedroom carpet.
“Asmod—”
No. Wrong. Her mouth shapes around different syllables, words she didn’t choose.
“Baalberith.”
The whisper barely reaches the walls. But the sigil hears.
The geometry ignites with something cold, something that drinks light instead of giving it. The angles twist. Reality folds at the seams.
She pitches forward onto the hardwood, consciousness flowing out with her blood.
-
Cold. The floor against her cheek. Her pulse thuds in her ears. No blood pooling anymore—the cut’s sealed, skin knitted closed and already showing a thin white line.
She opens her eyes.
He’s sitting in a chair she doesn’t recognize. Inside the circle, technically trapped there by the runes she spent so much time on. But he looks comfortable, legs crossed, dark eyes fixed on her with amusement and a hint of hunger.
Beautiful. Dangerously so. Sharp cheekbones, skin that suggests Mediterranean ancestry except he’s far older than that. He wears fabric too heavy for the season—wool so dark it drinks the light, cut in a style she doesn’t recognize.
“You’re welcome, by the way” he says. “Can’t have you dying mid-contract. I’d be trapped here until your corpse rotted enough to break the circle.”
She pushes herself upright. The room tilts briefly, then steadies. “What—”
“Interesting.” He tilts his head. “You prepared all of this for Asmodeus. A rather elaborate revenge fantasy, he’s so fond of those. But you called me instead.” A slow smile. “Why would you do that, I wonder?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Oh, but you did.” He leans forward, elbows on his knees. “You called for me, Baalberith. You called for memory, instead of revenge…Not that you could have summoned him anyway—your soul already has its owner.”
She stares at the circle containing him. The runes should hold. She checked them seventeen times. “Who are you?”
“You don’t remember.” Not a question. His amusement deepens. “Of course you don’t. That was the deal.”
Something cold slides through her chest. “What deal?”
“Our deal. This deal.” He gestures lazily at the sigil. “Well. The previous one anyway. Eight years ago? It was a smaller circle then, a different apartment. But the same desperation.” His eyes never leave hers. “You called me then, too. When your father hit your mother for the last time.”
No. She would remember—
“You begged me to take it away. The image of his hands. Her face. The sounds she made. All that horror, all that pain.” He chuckles. “And I took it. All of it. You woke up the next morning thinking she’d died in an accident.”
Her throat closes. “That’s not—”
“Your soul was marked then, beholden to me. The price for forgetting.” He stands, moving with liquid grace that shouldn’t be possible. “So this is fascinating, truly. You’ve summoned me again. And again you need to make the pain stop. But tell me—did it help? Forgetting?”
She can’t find words. “I don’t—”
“You don’t remember. Yes, we’ve established that.” He steps toward the circle’s edge. “Why do you think you are here again. On a floor, bleeding in despair?” His gaze softens fractionally. “The baby. Your husband. I can see it on your shoulders, the weight of what you know and can’t un-know.”
Tears burn her eyes. She blinks them back.
“He—”
“So.” He stops at the circle’s boundary. The runes glow more intensely this close to him. “You have options now.”
She forces words through the tightness. “What options?”
“Option one.” He holds up a finger. “I take this memory as well. Your daughter, your husband, your guilt, this moment right now. Tomorrow you’ll wake up and none of this will have happened. No summoning, no blood, no deal.”
She stares at him. “And option two?”
“I give you back everything.” His expression shifts—something darker, expectant. “Every memory I took. You’ll know what you’ve been living without. All of it. And bear the full weight of it.”
“Why would I—”
“Because otherwise we’ll find each other in this position again, and again, and again.” He says it quietly. “Trauma compounds. You’ll keep calling me every time something breaks. Forever blind to the pattern.”
She stares at him. At the containment circle. At her sealed palm where blood should still be dripping.
“What’s the price?”
“You already paid the big one.” He smiles without humor. “Your soul is mine. Hell has a claim on you regardless. But if you choose to remember—if you take back everything I removed—you owe me. A service, to be determined.”
She thinks of what that might mean. What he might ask. “And if I choose to forget again?”
“Then you forget.” His eyes flick to her abdomen, brief and knowing. “And we will do this again all to soon.”
She thinks of the baby. Elena. Her laugh, the smell of her hair, the way her tiny fingers would grip. The husband everyone praises for being strong. The father she doesn’t remember killing her mother.
The cycle. Over and over. Never learning because she can’t remember.
“I want them back.” Her voice breaks. “All of it. I want to remember. Please”
His smile changes. “Always so polite. I was hoping you’d say that.”
The memories drown her without warning. One moment she is there and the next—
Father’s hands, thick and brutal, wrapped around her mother’s throat. Her own screaming, young and useless. Discarded. Forgotten. The months of research, the ritual afterward, her first time drawing sigils with shaking hands. The relief when he took it all away.
Years of false peace. Meeting her husband. Thinking she understood love.
The baby. Six months old. Perfect.
His hands again—different hands, same brutality. Life discarded again. Useless again. The way he grieved, the performance of it.
This ritual. This moment. Him.
She gasps. All of it at once. Eight years compressed into seconds.
“There.” His voice comes much closer than before. “Now you see.”
She looks up through tears. He’s walked out of the circle. Standing right in front of her. The containment runes glow uselessly behind him, unbroken.
“That’s not—you can’t—”
“The rules are flexible when you own the summoner.” He crouches, bringing them eye level. Reaches out. His fingers touch her chin, tilting her face up. Heat spreads through her skin where he touches.
“You’re mine,” he says quietly.
His thumb brushes her jaw. She doesn’t pull away.
“And when you get home,” he continues, voice dropping lower, “you’ll find a surprise waiting for you. Free of charge.”
She knows.
“We’ll see each other soon.” He stands, fingers trailing away from her skin. “Very soon.”
He vanishes without ritual release. The invocation runes still stark on the floor. She thinks erasing them will make no difference.
She sits in the silence. The candles still burn. The sigil hums, untouched.
Tears are falling before she realizes she is crying. Soft at the beginning, then harder. Father, mother, baby, husband, demon, choice, damnation, shame.
Relief.
She lies back on the hardwood, wracked by sobs, and lets herself cry. Her child, dead. Her mother, dead. Her soul, sold.
Her husband will die tonight.
-
Somewhere in the city, Baalberith walks free. Unbound.
He’ll see her soon.
She’s looking forward to it.
-
This piece was written as a prompt response to Bradley Ramsey’s Flash Fiction February
Day 3: Create a ritual in any genre you like, write a story about its effects and consequences. The story must include the exact steps to perform the ritual.2
If you would like to join in for future prompts check it out HERE
© 2025 E.M.V. - writing as Morgan A. Drake. All rights reserved.Content Warning: This story contains depictions of a blood ritual and deals with themes of infanticide and domestic violence resulting in death. While violent acts occur off-page, the narrative includes detailed discussion of a mother’s grief following her infant daughter’s murder and references to prior spousal murder. The story explores trauma, memory manipulation, loss of agency through demonic bargaining, and features a protagonist in emotional extremis. The tone is psychologically intense throughout, with themes of maternal grief, cyclical trauma, and morally complex choices under duress. Reader discretion is strongly advised.
Ritual Steps: The summoning depicted in this story follows this world demonology protocol—nested geometric shapes composed of rank-specific containment runes, blood offerings at cardinal points, and a final blood sacrifice on a set of invocation runes hidden in the design, while speaking the demon's name trice. The entity manifests within the circle and remains bound until the summoner physically destroys/smudges/erases the invocation runes. In this case, however, the demon already holds claim to the summoner's soul, conventional binding rules no longer apply.
Bad ass.