A friend and I were out late, talking in her car. Conversation drifted in a more spiritual direction, and just as I was about to warn her that this very thing tends to happen if I'm not careful, she fell quiet and started having a panic attack. I helped her through it, slowly becoming more vigilant of something suspect in the area. Earlier in the night, I had felt attacks against my wards, and the subsequent drain on my stamina from having to keep a strong attack at bay. So now, in the car, I felt that we were in for a long night. She began to see a light that I couldn't, possibly because of angle or possibly something else, and got an intense urge to flee. She was the driver, so I urged her to follow that instinct and get us out. The reach of this entity stretched quite a distance from where I later learned was its home, so we had to drive around a lot while I struggled to focus and find this entity. All the while, we experienced strange events like the windows fogging and unfogging suddenly, and a deep chill around the car that was not reported by local weather. By the time we got back to my home, I had a lock on where it was, and a very vague sense of what I was dealing with.
What I was dealing with was a Deceiver. It portrayed itself as nothing more than a hungry Accuser, manifesting in cold and darkness and trying to harass us into doing what it wanted. However, when I had a chance to interact with it more directly, my senses found this to be a potent sphere of Causality centered around the real creature. It used the deep power of the communing essence to steer sensation, emotion, and thought, to malign action and disrupt control. It did all of this by "telling" us a different version of itself than was real. Once my friend had driven home, I performed a new binding art I've been practicing. For simplicity, I'll refer to it as Leaves of White, and explain it in more depth below. When I had raised the Leaves to the height I felt was needed, I sent out lashes of pain and intent to coerce the being into approaching the Leaves. Once there, it struggled fiercely, and I had only a short time to get a more proper sense of its attributes. What I have described as "Deceiver" can more accurately be called a Nature Spirit of Cold Hearth. Like the dingo, this spirit was once a community spirit of a warmer hearth, and had gone feral with the darkening of its home.
I drew this nature spirit down the Leaves, collapsed the binding on top of it, and sealed it into the earth beneath my feet as a temporary measure. Having no time to go and retrieve my physical implement, and risk dividing my focus, I instead turned my hand toward home and called the essence of my sword. With it in hand, I established dominance over the sealed spirit, informed it that its harassment had come to an end, and promised it a swift exit. I plunged the flaming sword into the seal, and gave up the captured being's essence to Kaea. The immense earthing power would see the nature spirit dispersed to the corners of the world, to feed the birth of new spirits and reincarnations. This done, I texted my friend of the deed and went to bed, hoping I would not be late to work in the morning. Sometimes, you just have to put spiritual matters in front of more temporal things.
The Leaves of White - This binding relies on expert use of two essences: the resistant power of the Physical, and the background resonance of Causality. Envisioning a point high overhead, you assign your focus to that point and open communion there. By this, I mean willing the vibrations of the Causal Plane to emerge from the envisioned point. The mental picture I use for this is similar to the Stargate from the SG-1 TV show, if anyone knows what I mean. You can envision Causality however works for you. With that signal in place, use it to call Physical Essence up from the ground. My Leaves are something like crystal, something like swords, and something like lightning. When the Physical Essence has left the material ground and ascended to your Causal point, you have created a single "Leaf." Do this as many times as you need to create more of them. I used two as a sort of "goalpost" to bind the nature spirit, and I've used as many as ten in a recent experiment to lift the oppressive air of the town where I live. The Leaves do very little as a direct action, but you can use them to bolster your own will and your own power. Where you may be used to focusing that power through the lens of a small person (no more than a few feet or meters tall), and relying on your strength as a frail living creature, the presence of even a single Leaf will make you feel like a giant, able to direct your magic as if you tower over the landscape around you.
