((Authors Note: Sorry for the pace breaker. This chapter has been on my mind for a while. I think it suits a variety of branches, but this particular branch might enjoy the use of this lore, so I decided to post it here.))
"Kin ts'íiboltik, ku ti' k'a'ana'an ts'a permiso utia'al u biilankiltej le ídolo"
The articulation was difficult, but for the first time in weeks, he felt as though he had the time to carefully pronounce each letter.
In plain english, he simply said 'I wish, you had no authority to use the idol.'
The tired woman sat on the ground before him, exhausted. Twisted black hair drooped around her face. She wore the earthy colorful styles of Latin America, but her face was pale, long, and with rosy red lips. She was, Dame Trude, a disciple of Baba Yaga, if she were to be believed. And Jack did believe her. The woman had been in pursuit of him for the better part of a year, and been his rival in searching for the idol for far longer than that. She wore shadows like cloaks, and twisted men's minds around her finger. When she spoke, serpents slithered from her mouth, sometimes literally. She called monsters the way the Ancestral Scandinavians called sheep, bright, high, and beautiful tones echoing through the mountains.
Jack Merlin's life had been in constant danger from the moment he took up the quest for Chimalmat's idol. But the quest was finally over. Despite trading hands multiples times, even being lost to Trude, Jack finally secured the idol for himself, and spent the better part of the year, slowly disentangling it's power from it's profane rituals, and binding it instead to plain language. Unfortunately, it still required Mayan, which Jack was still a new student off, but soon its power would be available to plain English, without the need for lengthy translations.
The idol grew hot in his hand, and Trude was silent. An odd, almost anticlimactic end for the epic struggle between them.
"This is not over Jack Merlin. Not quite over at all." She rose to her feet, and raised her hands, and began chanting. First in low guttural tones, but quickly they grew high and bright.
Jack drew his pistol, and leveled it at her head, yet, faltered. The fight was over. His many charms and trinkets would keep him safe from whatever spells she cast. And his wish would keep the idol from her wretched hands until the end of time. She wasn't evil. Not entirely. In her own home she had been a healer, a channeler, an exorcist. He even enjoyed her company once, long ago.
She opened her mouth, and a shadow sprung forth, an inky face was formed in the shadow, like the eyeless salamander of some deep cave. It probed around for only a moment, before plunging towards Jack... No... the stone? The shadow wrapped around and around the squat chimeric idol, obscuring its figure until it seemed nothing more than a simple black stone, smooth and polished.
"If I have been denied permission, then no one shall have it, until it is given back to me."
She sighed, suddenly tired, and looked from the pistol Jack had sense lowered, to his eyes. Cooley she stated "I will not be denied, Jack Merlin, it was your eternal folly to come between me and my prize." She smirked. "Find me, when you seek relief." She stepped back, and fell into the shadows. Jack was too tired to tell if the effect were supernatural, or merely the natural phenomenon of the moonless night. He looked at the idol, now swathed in black obsidian, and walked away.
Over the coming weeks, he'd attempted multiple times to crack the stone encasing, but was entirely unsuccessful. Blow torches, sledgehammers, hydraulic presses. Nothing had even made a dent in the shell, and fear of destroying the more brittle artifact within prevented him from using even more extreme methods. Still, it didn't seem to affect the power of the stone, and in less than a month he could make a plain English wish, and have his intentions translated well enough into the world by the power of Chimalmat's idol, that still rest within. In fact, the power of the idol seemed to make no distinction between the idol, and the black stone that wrapped around it, as he had made multiple wishes, both in English, and Mayan, to have the covering removed, to no avail.
Only... The more he used the stone, the more he found himself driven to make... Unusual wishes. At least, they seemed unusual in the late night reflections of his day. While he was making them, while he was awake, they seemed perfectly reasonable. They seemed natural. And perhaps they were natural. It was the exaggerations of his curious desires. The distortion and amplification of his bodies lusts. His wishes had started to reflect on himself in strange ways, and he found his mind begin to return to the night of his victory. Was it really a victory? Had he denied Dame Trude the power forever... Or had he made some grievous error in translation?
"Find me when you seek relief."
The words echoed in his mind, yet... the stone never affected him too direly during the decades that followed. He never made a wish he couldn't quite fix, and never did anything too drastic. At least not until he felt it time to leave the old stone as an heirloom to his grandson.
