The Dog ate my Spell

I unpacked my bag, removing all the items including the spell bag I had just made. I put everything away placing the spell bag by my computer. I was pretty tired so I dragged myself to bed, thinking that I would put the bag in a new location in the morning. For now, it would be fine by the computer, it was on the table after all. In fact it would be the very first thing that I saw in the morning so it would be first on the morning agenda. I fall asleep exhausted.

Next morning is great, I make coffee, sit down to work answering emails, pulling tarot cards, and plotting magic. I went about my day as usual and then I saw it, some strange mess on the floor. It was part fabric, part plant material and all slobber. At first I had no idea what it was, it was a disgusting mess on the floor. It was icky, chewed up sticks, slobber, string, green plant material. I thought the cat puked something up, as I began to investigate closer I realized that if this was one of the cats (who are mostly evil by the way) that evil little beast would have a very bad tummy ache. The more I investigated the better I understood this was not one of the cats, though later I would understand it was their fault.

So there I was my face close to the ground, examining this disgusting mess and it hits me… it’s the spell bag, the dog ate my spell. So I said lots of swear words to myself and cleaned it up. I was surprised that he ate it, though I suppose I shouldn’t be. I thought about how he must have done it. Did he grab it from the table? I mean he could have, but that isn’t something he has ever done before. The worst he had done was partially chew a stuffed Eevee which I got to sew back together in emergency Pokémon surgery, because as you can imagine the Eevee getting chewed on was a life and death situation. To be fair to the dog, the plush Pokémon was on the floor.

So it wasn’t the dog that stole the spell, how did it get from the computer to the other side of the house? The cat, and there was only one that was notorious for this behavior, the one and only Kitty Soft Paws. She has a habit of stalking me when I am working, she circles around the computer in an endless effort to find comfort on my lap. She starts on my left and creeps onto my lap where she usually decides she isn’t comfortable and slides out under my right arm, circling around the back of the computer and back down to my lap on the left side. It is an endless game of circulation with me often interrupting her cycle by plopping her on the floor, in which case the cycle starts again but slower. She thinks if she moves in slowly inch by inch I won’t notice, she thinks this because it is generally true. However sometimes I am particularly irritated with her and won’t have it, or I will not be at the computer at all and lock her out of the art room when I am painting. This is when she seeks revenge, knocking all the small objects around my computer onto the floor, pens, note pads, head phones, even the computer mouse. It is only her that does it, and since it is her supposed claimed realm, it went right off the table and to the floor with everything else. I am sure she was angry because I hadn’t been at the computer in 3 or 4 days. So that meant no lap sitting and no occasional kisses. So Kitty Soft Paws, knocked it to the floor, the perfect place for a sweet pup to pick it up and devour it.

After investigating and deciding how it all went down I focused on the fact that the dog had eaten my spell. What did that mean magically or in the spirit realms? At first I thought it was obvious the spirits rejected my spell and that was that. After a while though my mind turned to the fact that he was a Black Dog. Phantom Black Dogs have a vast history and folklore for being seen around haunted bodies of water and other liminal places. These stories have been traced all the way back to 1127c.e. if not before. They are also seen as vicious and evil in the eyes of many often being associated with the Cwn Annwn or Hell Hounds. This pup, isn’t quite a pup anymore. He is getting to that age where he is almost full adult dog. In the past I had joked about turning him into magical protector or watch dog, and then I realized that he had eaten the spell, a protection charm. Was his ingesting of the bag a way of taking that role on? Had he now moved from mundane pup to magical guardian? Time will tell!

Not all of my animals are magical, some of them are just mundane evil and simultaneously adorable cats that ask for food and greedily take it because they know I will always feed them. Others have taken on more magical roles, sometimes defying physics, the rule of 9 lives, and other strange phenomena. Some of my cats are greedy little fur balls, others are strangely magical but I wasn’t sure which way the dog would go. Truth be told I didn’t even know if I liked dogs before this one came home with us. I was always a cat person but I adore this pup. So was this a mundane act by a mundane dog? Or did it have something magical attached? Was it connected to the dog or was the dog just the catalyst for the destruction of the spell? The one thing I do know is that I need to re-work my protection magic and the dog ate my spell…

More about Annwyn here