“Nice.” I was a total klutz, so this could actually come in handy. I might never crack another iPhone screen again.
“The key is starting and ending the knot in the same place. That’s what holds the spell together,” Daniel said.
“Wait. Do we literally draw the spell? Like with a pencil or something?”
“Nope. It’s mostly mental. You trace a knot with your fingertip wherever you want to spell applied.”
Okay. This was getting ten times harder. “If you’re not using a pencil, how do you know where the knot starts and ends?”
“That takes practice. It’s best to envision a point and start there. Then you just have to remember to go back to that point when you end. Don’t worry. We have plenty of glasses to work with, so we can do some trial and error. By the time you’ve gone through the box, you should have that knot down.”
“Got it.”
He started me off by tracing the paper with a finger over and over. It seemed like a waste of his time to stand there watching me, but every time I messed up, he corrected me. It was harder to stay on the lines than I expected.
Once I made a successful knot twenty times in a row, Daniel said we could move on to the first glass. “Remember to make sure you’re incorporating your will into the knot. You have to believe—you have to know—that the glass isn’t going to break.”
That seemed a little counterintuitive. How was I supposed to know it was going to work if I’d never done it before?
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered to myself as I picked up the first glass. It was a tall one with a slightly squared shape.
Don’t break. Don’t break. Don’t break. I thought to myself as I traced the knot onto the glass with my fingertip. When I was done I placed the glass on the table.
“What now?”
He reached into a cabinet and dug out a large plastic bucket, a hammer, and two pairs of goggles. “Now, we try to break it.” He handed me a pair of goggles, and I popped them on.
I placed the glass in the bucket and lightly tapped it with the hammer.
The glass didn’t just shatter—it turned to dust. It completely disintegrated as soon as the hammer touched it.
“Whoa!” Daniel said. “You barely tapped it. I’ve never seen a knot backfire like that.”