summons Uriel

I took the least terrifying one. I closed my eyes, steadied my breathing, and began to picture a room in my mind. My now-ruined improved summoning circle was in the floor. Candles were lit at five equidistant points around it. The air smelled of sandalwood incense and burned wax. It took a few minutes to picture it all, in perfect detail, and to hold it in my mind, as rock solid to my imagination as the actual room the construct was replacing.
That took considerable energy and discipline.
Magic doesn't require props to function. That's a conceit that has been widely propitiated by the wizarding community over the centuries. It helped prove to frightened villagers, inquisitions, and whoever else might be worried that a person was clearly not a wizard. Otherwise he'd have all kinds of wizardly implements necessary to his craft.
Magic doesn't require the props, but magic is wrought by people, and people need them. Each prop has a symbolic as well as a practical reason for being a part of any spell. Simple stuff, lighting candles and the like, could be accomplished neatly in the mind, eventually becoming a task as easy and thoughtless as tying one's shoe.
Once you got into the complicated stuff, though, you had an enormous number of things to keep track of in your mind, envisioning flows of energy, their manipulation, and so on. If you have the real props, they serve as a sort of mnemonic device: You attach a certain image to the prop, in your head, and every time you see or touch that prop, the image is packaged along with it. Simple.
Except that I didn't have any props.
I was winging the whole thing. Pure imagination. Pure concentration.
Pure arrogance, really. But I was at a lower rock bottom than normal.
In my thoughts I lit the candles, walking slowly around the circle in a clockwise fashion - or deosil, as the fairy tales, Celtic songs, and certain strains of Wicca refer to it - gradually powering up the energy it required to operate. I realized that I had forgotten to make the floor out of anything specific, in my head, and the notional floor space, from horizon to horizon, suddenly became the linoleum from my first ratty Chicago apartment. Hideous stuff, green lines on a grey background, but simple to envision.
I imagined performing the spell without ever moving my body, envisioned every last detail, everything from the way the floor dug unpleasantly into my knees as I began to the slight clumsiness in the fingers of my left hand, which always seemed to be a little twitchy whenever I got nervous.
I closed the circle. I gathered the power. And then, when all was prepared, when I held absolutely everything in my imagination so vividly that it seemed more real than the room around me, I slid Power into my voice and called quietly, "Uriel, come forth."
For a second, I couldn't tell whether the soft white light had appeared only in my head or if it was actually in the room. Then I realized that it stabbed at my eyes painfully. It was real.
I kept the spell going in my head, easier now that it was a tableau. I just had to keep my concentration focused.
I squinted into the light and saw a tall young man there. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and a farmer's duck coat. His blond hair fell over his eyes, but they were blue and bright and guileless as he looked around the room. He stuck his hands into his coat pockets and nodded slowly. "I was wondering when I'd get this call."
"You know what's happening, then?" I asked.
"Yes, yes," he answered, with perhaps the slightest bit of impatience in his tone. He turned his gaze to me and frowned abruptly. He leaned forward slightly, peering at me.
I carefully fortified and maintained the image of the restraining magical circle in my imagination. When an entity was called forth, the circle was the only thing protecting the caller from its wrath.
"Please, Dresden," the archangel Uriel said. "It's a very nice circle, but you can't honestly think that it's any kind of obstacle to me."
"I like to play it safe," I said.


Changes Chapter 29, Page 279-281