[centre][h2]Morgana Faith[/h2][/centre]

Well, things seemed to be going about as smoothly as usual for their investigation team.

This was supposed to just be a little bit of clean up, taking care of a loose end that was only tangentially related to their mission. Xaviron had tracked the Roggenwolf to a garden in the middle of the city and he and Madeleine were going to occupy the spirit while she prepared a way to send it back home; simple, easy, no problem. So of course, when the sound of gunfire reached her ears she wasn’t surprised in the slightest.

Hopefully there weren’t any Abominable artefacts involved this time.

Morgana rolled her eyes and turned to walk away from the entrance to the garden; perhaps she would wait in the hopefully bullet proof car Madeleine had taken from the OMR while the demon and the elf dealt with whoever was trying to kill them. She continued her work on the ritual circle to banish the spirit as she did so, scribbling intricate and arcane runes onto thin air in what must have been a familiar sight to people by now; as she did so she used her free hand to draw a series of smaller circles which flared and buzzed momentarily before disappearing, a slight shimmer washing over her coat and skirt with each one. The basic wards layered over her clothing did provide some protection from impacts but they weren’t [i]strictly[/i] designed to stop bullets; a few extra precautions wouldn’t go amiss.

With that done, she returned her full attention to the ritual she was preparing. It wasn’t exactly what Madeleine had asked for, but the demon hadn’t given her any time to explain what approach she would prefer to use; so long as the end result worked in their favour she was sure it wouldn’t be an issue. Under normal circumstances a spirit could not exist on their material plane for long; the world they lived in was one of laws and rules and such was anathema to the spirits’ nature as conceptual beings, so much so that without some kind of anchor or link to keep them here they would soon exhaust themselves and return to where they came from. For something like the Roggenwolf, from what little Xaviron had told them, that anchor was usually a corn field; they were tied to it, they would live so long as the corn remained and come harvest time, as the corn was reaped and threshed they would either be forced to leave this plane of existence or be killed when the last head of grain was cut. Sometimes the farmers would save them instead, either leaving a single head behind or creating a doll out of corn for the Roggenwolf to inhabit until the next field was planted.

Spirits were conceptual beings after all and that cut both ways. Sometimes killing a spirit would have disastrous consequences on the thing they were a concept [i]of[/i].

This spirit had been summoned however, which was a different thing entirely. A summoned spirit was tied not to a place or a thing or a time, but to a person. Not as an anchor, though possession was yet another possible way for spirits to remain on this plane, but via a link; one forged by the summoner through the summoning ritual. Under those circumstances, banishing the spirit was as simple as the summoner deciding to end the link or waiting for the covenant between the summoner and the spirit to reach its end. Forcibly banishing a spirit summoned by someone else involved incapacitating the summoner, severing the link between the two or wresting control of the covenant from them; all tricky prospects, depending on the strength of the summoner and spirit in question.

But therein lay the complication; [i]this[/i] spirit’s summoner was already dead and hadn’t even been a practitioner to begin with. It had no link to this world, no covenant had been made, there was nothing to sever. The only thing keeping the Roggenwolf here was the strength of the initial summoning ritual, which shouldn’t have been much, except for the fact that blood had been used and blood, particularly the sacrifice it represented, was a powerful thing. Morgana didn’t know how much blood had been given to summon this thing nor how long it had been running around for, so she couldn’t estimate how much power the thing possessed. The one thing she was grateful for was that they knew for certain he hadn’t died due to blood loss from making the circle; it was one thing to bleed for a ritual to come to life, it was another thing entirely to [i]die[/i] for it.

That would have been extremely bad.

As it was, things were more difficult this way but she was not without options. There was no anchor to destroy, no link to sever, but the fact remained that a spirit was not [i]supposed to be[/i] on this plane and the laws of this world would make sure it left eventually; every spirit could be banished somehow, it was simply a fact. Her options then were to either exhaust the remaining energy granted to it by the summoning blood ritual, something she could accomplish by binding and then draining the energy from the spirit in what was sure to be a taxing experience for the both of them, or she could attempt to link the spirit to herself instead, taking the place of the original summoner and thereby gaining the ability to banish the spirit without little to no fuss whatsoever.

She was going to attempt the latter option.

Just as soon as all the shooting was over with.