At midnight, when the day is neither behind nor ahead, tie yourself to the thing you mean to leave. A tether is only a promise you can choose to break.
This is not the slow loosening of many knots, nor the patient untying of a burden strand by strand. It is one binding and one blade, the clean severance that says a thing is finished, and finished all at once. What you cut at the turning of the night does not grow back before morning.
The Working
- At midnight, tie one end of a length of grey thread around your wrist and the other around a dark stone, leaving the cord no longer than your forearm.
- Set a small bell and a pinch of salt within reach, and sit with the stone in your lap.
- Name aloud, once and plainly, the bond you carry, and feel its weight travel down the thread into the stone.
- Sit in silence until the cord feels heavy, as though the stone has grown to the size of what you named.
- Ring the bell once, and on its dying note cut the thread clean through with a blade, close to the stone.
- Scatter the salt over the severed cord, wrap the stone away from you, and at dawn leave it at a crossroads or beneath running water.
- Wear the wrist-thread until it falls away on its own, then burn it.
The Incantation
Bound I was, and bound no more,
the bell has rung the hour clean.
What the thread held, the blade divides;
what the stone takes, it keeps.
I cut the tether, I keep my hand,
and give the rest to the dark.
The stone falls silent in its wrapping and the wrist remembers nothing. A thing severed at midnight has all the night to travel away from you.