The Secret Language of Stones Read Online Free Page B

beautiful and talented. Special. But at the same time I didn’t want people to think I was different and strange. I wanted to be normal like the other children at school. Not someone to be singled out and whispered about.
    When I was old enough, I searched my mother’s library of occult titles, researching various phenomena, searching for a description that fit what I did. A combination of psychometry and lithomancy came closest to matching my abilities. Psychometry is the ability to touch an object and learn about its past and the person who owned it. Lithomancy is the ability to tell the future by throwing thirteen stones, each assigned to an action, and reading the prophecy based on how they land. While similar, neither really fit me.
    But everything changed when I came to Paris and began to make talismans. Once I began combining stones with locks of hair and mementos from the dead, the noise I’d heard before became voices delivering messages.
    Anna was the one to explain what was happening to me.
    â€œYour talent is a variation on the art of lithomancy with a soupçon of psychometry. You can receive knowledge from stones. When you work on the watches, the materials you use are benign. They don’t belong to any particular soldier. It’s when you create the lockets, when you combine the soldier’s personal object with the crystal and add his loved one’s presence, that you ignite the magick.”
    Over the centuries, starting in ancient Egypt, mystics, priests, shamans, astrologers, doctors, and witches assigned properties to each earthly material. They knew all stones, including gems and crystals, are living things. Made up of water, earth, air, minerals, they are all related. Certain stones function better as conduits. Crystal, jet, white and blue and black diamonds, which are all coal based, and moonstones are the best conductors.
    Once dug up, stones need to be uncovered or split open, cut, polished, or sometimes heated for them to reveal their beauty and offer up their powers.
    Symbolically, they are reminders of the beauty within, of time, of life and death, of the permanence of the earth and the impermanence of those of us who inhabit it. These rocks will exist long after all the people who trod over them, who dug them up, who touched them, are gone.
    Their beauty is not just in their colors and shine, their luminosity and glitter. The energy the gems possess can be read like a book if you understand its language. The secret language of the stones. A language that I spoke—though often wished I did not.
    I poured the coffee and handed Madame Alouette a cup. “Would you like milk? Sugar?”
    She looked down into the steaming dark liquid as if the answer lay there.
    â€œNo, black is fine.” She took a sip and then sat quietly for a moment.
    I didn’t like to rush clients into talking. It often took a few minutes for women to begin the conversation they wished they didn’t need to have. But when the silence lasted too long, I gently prodded.
    â€œYou said a friend of yours came here to see me?”
    â€œYes, Colette Maboussine, do you remember?”
    â€œI do.” I remembered every one of the fifty-nine grieving women I’d worked with, but especially the first one. Of Madame Maboussine’s sons, one had been badly hurt in the war but survived; the other had been killed. The locket I made held his hair.
    â€œColette Maboussine told me how you helped her,” Madame Alouette repeated. “She said you made her a piece of jewelry. An amulet or a talisman? I’m not sure what the difference is.”
    â€œAn amulet possesses properties that can protect you against illnesses and accidents. Even evil spells. And anything can be an amulet, from a shark tooth to a scarab. A talisman is an amulet, but it can also help you create or orchestrate events or actions. Books I’ve read explain that talismans are enhanced with magick symbols that