There are ten vials lined up in a row on the table in Sungmin’s  workroom, all filled with delineated layers of red sand, dried bay leaves, caraway, and myrrh. Sungmin carefully squeezes a milliliter of diluted panine into each one. The drop hisses when it hits the myrrh.

“Right. If you would light them, Eunhyuk.”

Eunhyuk steps forward with a long taper. He dips the burning tip of the taper into the vials until it catches the myrrh on fire.

Sungmin stoppers the vials with corks, leaving the flames burning inside the glass. The hiss of the bay leaves is audible through the thick glass as the fire burns through the layers of ingredients. The fire slowly flickers into blue, then extinguishes as it hits the sand at the base. Blue smoke ruffles up against the glass.

Sungmin and Eunhyuk place the vials on the ground surrounding a circular parchment map of the world. It’s incredibly intricate, with every city in every country delicately marked down. It spans most of the workroom’s floorspace, and is especially enchanted for tracking spells with sewn-in sigils adorning its edge.

Sungmin draws a blue chalk circle and extra red sigils around the map and the vials while Eunhyuk goes over the incantation they scribbled down on his notepad a few hours ago. It’s been crossed out and reworded a few times, but Sungmin thinks the version they have now will work well if it works at all.

Sungmin steps back and absentmindedly rubs chalk off his hands. He looks at Eunhyuk, who seems a bit jittery. “Ready?” Sungmin asks.

Eunhyuk looks back, eyes wide. “I don’t know,” he says a little wildly.

Well, they have been up all night getting to this point. Sungmin should know better than to pull all-nighters. And Eunhyuk doesn’t seem the type to stay up late, either.

Sungmin puts out his hand. “Would you like it if I read the incantation, Eunhyuk? It would be no bother, if you weren’t sure.”

Eunhyuk blushes in embarrassment, but he hands over his notepad and says, “Yes, sorry, I can’t think straight and I don’t know if I would remember it properly. I have a, what do you call it, a sleep deprivation headache?”

“Completely understandable,” Sungmin says consolingly. “And it’s no trouble at all.”

Sungmin takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. The incantation scribbled on the notepad is burned onto his eyelids, and from only one glance. He must be way past the point of exhaustion. Still, he can do one little incantation.

Sungmin forces open his eyes and stands up straight.

“Ostende mihi, O rubrum harena. Haec omnia ostendunt me magicis vestigia. Lorem quid invenias ostendere mundi map. Ostende mihi!”

The corks pop out of all ten vials, and the blue smoke and red sand issue out twined together in a double helix.

Sungmin and Eunhyuk watch, awestruck. Without taking his eyes off of the sight, Eunhyuk asks, “The spell is actually taking the physical form of DNA. Am I really seeing this or am I hallucinating from lack of sleep?”

“I could ask you the same question,” Sungmin says, staring. Whatever he was expecting, this spell is far more effective and elegant than he could have imagined.

The helixes splash down on the map and circle around it like snakes, covering every square centimeter of parchment. It’s searching, Sungmin realizes, just like he had asked it to. He wonders what will happen when it finds something.

He doesn’t have to wait long.

The helixes sweep upwards off of the map, leaving behind tiny piles of purple sand. They float back into their bottles, and the corks lift up off the floor to close them again.

Sungmin and Eunhyuk stare.

“Did the spell just... clean up after itself?” asks Eunhyuk.

“Yes, it did,” answers Sungmin faintly. “Almost as if...”

“...It was sentient,” finishes Eunhyuk.

“I don’t think the spell itself is sentient,” says Sungmin thoughtfully. “I think it’s the sand. I think the panine we put into the sand activated its previously unconscious magical sentience.”

Eunhyuk’s eye bulge out of his head.

“All conjecture, of course,” adds Sungmin hastily. “This is a fallible theory based purely on observation.”

Hyuk looks no less awed than before.

“Well,” Sungmin says past a yawn. “Let’s write all that down in our lab report later. For now, let’s just record all of the locations it gave us on the map, and then we can finally sleep.”

“All right,” Eunhyuk agrees, with a yawn of his own.

They stick marking pins into the twenty-eight sand mounds on the map, and then scribble down the coordinates. There. Done for now.

Sungmin smiles into his pillow as he falls asleep not ten minutes after sending Eunhyuk home.

He’s so close to finding Wookie. It won’t be long now.

-

Kyuhyun grins as Jessica goes over every last detail of her new ivory comb over the phone to her new girlfriend. He’s sitting at his desk, half-listening to her with his door open as he reads and signs form after form on departmental budget approvals. He’s also a bit distracted from that blasted scratching sound coming from the ceiling again, but he stops hearing it after a while.

He signs off the last one with a flourish. Good. All of the work he needed to finish before he sees Sungmin is now done.

Kyuhyun checks his pocket watch. He has half an hour until his summons. He flips it closed, pausing when it glints in the light from outside. Sungmin gave this to him, and nowhere in his carefully written contract had he even mentioned its return. Sungmin must have given this to him as a gift.

Kyuhyun hasn’t received a gift in... a long time.

He runs the pad of his thumb over the intricate carving of a lily on its gold face. It’s beautiful.

He frowns. Wait. Aren’t you supposed to give a gift in return?

He’s in Jessica’s office in a flash. Thank hell she’s ended her phone call already.

“Jessica. I need to get him a gift.”

Jessica turns toward him. “Boss?”

“Sungmin. I need to get Sungmin a gift.”

She blinks. “What? The magician?”

“I have no idea what to get him,” he says seriously. “He gave me this pocket watch. Now I need to think of something in return.”

She frowns. “Why? Aren’t you supposed to give gifts and not expect anything in return? Otherwise, what’s the point?”

He huffs a breath out of his nose. “It’s a human practice, Jessica. They trade gifts. It’s just something they do.”

She shrugs. “How do you know that? Could be made up.”

He rolls his eyes. “I have thousands of years of experience in the human world, I think I’d know if it was real or not. Just, come on, Jessica, help me come up with something.”

She stares at him for a second.

“Where is Marco Kyuhyun and what have you done with him?” She asks.

He glares.

She laughs. “Fine, fine. What does he like?”

“Uh...” He tries to think of the times that Sungmin looked the happiest. “...Magic?”

“He’s a magician, Kyu, of course he likes magic,” she says like she’s talking to a hundred year old demon-child.

“Yes, but,” he says, a little frustrated. “Just doing magic makes him happier. And studying new ways of doing magic. And talking about magical theoretical. Just, anything at all to do with magic.”

She looks contemplative. “Would he be interested in demon magic?”

“Absolutely,” he says firmly.

“So, make him something.”

His forehead furrows. “What should I make?”

“Well, that depends. If you want it to make you look good, just make something flashy and memorable. If you want him to actually use it, make it something practical. And, oh, I don’t know... What would you even get for a human?”

He pauses for a moment, turning the words over in his head.

Kyuhyun nods. “I’ll think of something.”

He strides back into his office and lights a cigarette. He smokes and stares out his window in deep thought.

-

Sungmin wakes up with light shining in his eyes. He groans and rolls over to look at the clock.

Then he really wakes up.

“Eleven?” he splutters. “Oh god, I only have an hour!” And he only really got about four hours of sleep in total. Wonderful.

He hurries into the shower, brushes his teeth, throws on some vaguely clean clothes, and rushes down to start on the Sigillum Dei chalk circle. He scribbles down it in a different spot than usual because of the massive map that’s still lying on his workroom floor.

Sungmin finishes just around the right time. He checks the time – done with five minutes to spare.

He rushes back to his bedroom to grab the journal and scribbles in ‘Good morning Kyuhyun! Is it all right to summon you on time today?’ as he scurries back to the workroom. Two minutes left. Perfect.

Of course, master, appears on the next line in