Beaumont TX, 5 weeks after the apocalypse.

It took two weeks to push through to my apartment. We encounter a few other bands of survivors. But none do we connect with in a way that makes either side want to partner up.

My apartment seems like an alien place. Like something from a different world. A relic from a distant time. There's nothing I even feel the least bit attached to anymore, besides The Slab. The rest is just meaningless consumer crap from a life that was equally devoid of meaning. I look at my music posters and wonder if I'll ever be able to listen the the music of that old world again. I grab a flash drive with my backups since one thing I learned from the military was never to depend entirely on network access. Then I pack the drive, The Slab, my reference books, my notes from studying the runes, and my old machete into a rolling suitcase. With a last look back, I leave my past behind.

We take a different route back, clearing the neighborhoods of zombies as we go. Our tents go unused as it is easier and more secure to live off the land. Each night we clear a grocery store as it grows dark, barricade ourselves inside, and feast on canned chili or stew, fruit, and green beans. I eat a small bag of chips, some of the others like those weird snack cakes that never spoil but I'm not a fan myself.

We've learned that there's a limit to how much essence we each of us can draw in during a day. So we form a circle meditating at intervals, circulating the essence we've collected between us all so we can all fill to capacity. Then in the evening we dissolve the essence into our qi and feel it charge the qi flowing through our dantians. We've tried dissolving the essence twice a day but it doesn't seem to help us take more. The more essence we gain, the stronger and faster we become, the less it hurts when we get hit, the sharper our minds feel. But none of us feel anywhere close to being able to take on the spider boss.

It's different than it was at first though. We all feel increasingly full. We can push a bit more in but more and more leaks away each day. None of us are quite sure what that means. We've found that talking about our fights makes the essence circulating through us feel more real, more solid. So we raid the stores for booze, light some candles and make a party of it. It seems like boasting and reminiscing about our fights makes them more real in our minds, and that makes the essence more powerful. At first we tried to be factual and make it more of an after-action-report, but we all quickly gain the sense that magic is less about facts than it is about attitude. At the same time, getting too far away from reality seems to untether the story from that essence, which also weakens the impact. There's a happy medium of telling a true story and exaggerating the details for a more visceral feeling that works best. And so our story-telling becomes boistrous and bragadacious without devolving into fabrication.

The storytelling and revelry bring us closer as a group too. As the stories wind down, Roberts and Johnson disappear and Anat and Ellie do too sometimes. Sometimes the two go off together, but usually it's with Stefan or Cas, or sometimes one of them goes off with Roberts and Johnson. I guess Anat and I thuroughly plumbed that kind of thing out back when we dated. And looking back on our interactions since we met, I think Ellie decided I belonged to Anat and Anat was the alpha so she wasn't going to risk crossing her and wrote me off early on. It's fine, people are complicated. Simpler to go over my notes on the runes in the candle light. If I can figure out how to enchant our armor and weapons it will dramatically enhance our power.

The evening before we return to our base, all of us feel that we've gained no additional essence. Once we dissolve the essence into our qi, it dissipates like water boiling away into steam. Whatever destination the course of our essence gathering was headed for, it seems we've reached it. All of us feel much more powerful than we did almost two months ago when the world ended. But we all sense there is much more ahead, if only we can figure out how to grasp it.

When we get back, I store The Slab with the hidden stockpile of other metal. Then, talking over the essence problem with Anat, who says she's been thinking about trying to compact the essence we've gained to make room for more, but senses that it isn't just about making room, but transforming the essence by compressing it. I immediately think of my visualization where I drive my qi into a tiny, intense point before unleashing it in an attack, and tell Anat. She says that visualisation won't work for her but has her own visualization to do the same thing and she'll try that. We agree to compare notes after we are done.

I find a quiet corner to sit, crossing my legs in a relaxed half lotus and folding my hands - yang right fist cupped by open yin left palm like a shaolin salute, but wrapping my right fist around my left thumb feels more balanced. I've practiced the universal energy visualization so much it springs immediately to mind. I expand my awareness, visualizing my consciousness expanding to encompass the whole universe, like connecting to The Force tying everything together. Maybe if what Anat says about the cosmic unconscious is true, maybe there really is such a thing. Shit I got distracted by my own mind's bullshit, let's try this again.

I center, relaxing, feeling my self shrink down to nothing, feeling the universal cosmic power and the flows of elemental energies, order, and chaos pulsing around me. Then I feel my self come into focus, the elements swirling around me, spiraling into me. I feel every nerve and muscle fiber vibrating, then searing icy order and furiously burning chaos blast into me, transfixing me.

The whole world seems to disappear and I hang in the blackness of space, impaled between focused blasts of law and entropy, as the vortex of elemental power swirls around me ripping at my mind and soul. I inhale deeply, powerfully drawing the energies into my dantian. I exhale forcefully pushing the energies into the essence swirling in my aura, supercharging it. Again and again until the energies swirl together into pure silvery power, equal parts order and chaos, and earth, air, fire, and water. It's good but not what I need yet. I can feel that I need more. I use my breath and will to pump more and more cosmic power into my aura, into the swirling essence I captured from my foes, shared with my allies. Soon my aura is a roiling sphere of power and my will can harness no more.

I reach my arms out, palms up. Then I scoop upward with my hands, gathering the top part of the sphere and pulling it together. I pull it down to the level of my head as I breathe in, then push it down to the level of my heart with a powerful exhalation, then inhale as I gather the now slightly compressed essence in my hands and charge my will, pushing it down to to the level of my belly with another exhalation, nearly yelling with the intensity as the powerful energies roar through me. I take another deep, gathering breath and push the energy-charged essence into my dantian as I push my palms together compressing the power, not between them exactly, but into my center.

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Then I reach out again, palms down this time, scooping down low and visualizing my arms gathering the energies from the lower part of the sphere that had swirled around me. Strangely, it feels most natural to bring the energy I scoop in with my hands and will up to my heart with the first cycle of breaths. Then I push it down, into my dantian with breath after breath. The amount of mental and physical effort it takes is surprising. I scoop again, this time reaching to the front and embracing the essence in front of me before drawing in and compressing it breath after breath. Then I reach back with both hands, pulling the energy forward and compressing it. I turn right making a great circle with my hands on the right before pulling the power in and pressing it into my dantian. Then I turn left and do the same. With each compression, my dantian spins faster, like a spinning ballerina pulling in her arms in a pirouette. The faster it spins, I feel exponentially greater energy contained within it, and sense that my dantian is becoming the kind of power source martial arts legends speak of.

The six gathering cycles finished, I feel like I've been jogging for twenty minutes. But I've only scooped up perhaps half the energy, and the remaining energy continues swirling and pulsing, spreading into a new sphere that is more diffuse so my efforts to gather it will be less effective. Still I sense I must continue. I repeat the cycle again and feel like I've been running hard while doing some kind of complex math, but I've probably only gathered three quarters of the power. I sense when I stop it will end the ritual and what I have will solidify and the rest will dissipate. I have to push myself. I go through another cycle and feel like I've had my worst day of work while sick with the flu; seven eiths of the power has been compressed into my dantian. But so much still remains, so I push myself to do another cycle. By the end, I just want to cry myself to sleep, but I know I can do more. I need to be strong. My friends need my strength. Anat needs my strength. I remember crawling out of the kill zone of the ambush after the IED, bloodied by rocks, dazed by the concussion. Only in this memory it isn't Sarge calling out to me under fire, but Anat standing over me, demanding I give every last quantum of will. I can do this. Another arduous cycle of gathering above, below, front, back and to the sides, compressing in between, and I've gathered all I can, compressed it as much as possible.

I open my eyes and a figure stands in front of me, just an opaque black two dimensional shape. But the outline changes as it turns slightly showing that it isn't flat, but rather that it absorbs all light that hits it so it shows no surface detail. But even without detail it's a shape I recognize. It's me. I sense that this thing is the reflection of all my doubt, pain, and feelings of inadequacy. All my self-loathing and fear I'll become just like my old man someday.

"Do you believe that that you…" the word is pronounced like it is bitter "...are worthy…" mocking now "...to grasp power?" The last word is pronounced with scorn, as if power was something I could never grasp. And I know I'm to fight it. Should I get a weapon? No, I am unarmed, and so is it. It faces me with what I bring with me. Better to not escalate this to a lethal fight by taking up a weapon.

I stand, as more of an act of will than a physical movement. I'm so tired. But my warrior instincts push me forward, past the fatigue. This may not be an immediate test of my ability to survive, but to survive in this world I have to pass it. It throws a jab and I slap it to the outside with the back of my lead hand while stepping away from its cross. Then I throw a jab-cross combo and it ducks behind its guard taking the blows on its arms. It throws a jab cross in return but it's a fake and it dives in low to tackle my knees. I drop my lead hand fast enough to get an underhook as I half sprawl but without time or space to get as low as I should have. Still, it was too close to really take my legs out from under me. I manage to smash elbows into its head and neck from above until it backs away. I follow up with a push to its face with my lead hand to distract it, then a cross that probably at least bruises my knuckles but rocks its head back. I shoot for its knees and it is too staggered to sprawl in defense so I catch its knees with my hands. I drive my shoulder into its guts as I step forward, pushing its center of gravity out from over its base. It tries to twist away as it falls, but I use its momentum to spin it down to the ground, scrambling on top of it. It raises its hands but I trap them down with my own hands before mending my arms and landing elbows with my whole weight behind them to its face. Moments later it vanishes.

I force myself up onto my knees. Inside my dantian the tightly-compressed energy spins at frenetic speed but I feel like it needs to be compressed again. I press my hands together but in my mind the energy in my dantian already feels rock-hard. Yet I sense it needs to be compressed more. I press inward with my palms to help me visualizat that psychic pressure, crunching my body forward hard, tightening my abs until it almost feels like they are cramping, doing everything I can to direct my will toward pressing my dantian harder, driving that core tighter. I imagine the implosion of a nuclear core compressing the center of a weapon into a critical mass, then lasers in the old inertial fusion experiments blasting a fusion fuel pellet inward. And I feel my dantian compress, growing ever harder but also hotter until it ignites.

A psychic shockwave rips through my body, setting every nerve and muscle fiber on fire, burning icy psychic fire. I feel in its wake the spinning maelstroms of my seven chakras, the burning lines of almost two dozen meridians in my arms, legs, and body, and the cloud-like body hugging field of my aura. I sense that these will be my tools as I move forward.

I go to find Anat. As I walk, words nag at my consciousness. Not words, but concepts or ideas. They are alien concepts, from a universe of magic and might. But they are concepts that demand to be given words in human language. I feel that they are concepts that define my nature, archetypes that describe what I am. What I'm meant to become. My mind sorts through words, looking for matches. I sense that it's complicated because my concepts are to some degree in contradiction to each other. Finally my mind settles on two words that fit: Bulwark and Harbinger.

I'm pondering those words as I come upon Anat. She is sitting, not meditating but deep in though. Even without trying to sense her, she radiates an aura of power that assaults my mind and my psychic senses. Her power connects with the words in my mind, it redefines them in a way that I have difficulty understanding.

Anat looks up at me, still half lost in thought.

"Did you get words too?" I ask. "A class? Or maybe an archetype?"

"I got… I think it is two words, but there is a third word, a third concept that describes the combination. Not, I thnk, because it is common, but I think because it is rare and prized. One concept is something like Battlemage. The other is Witch. But that particular synergy of powers is something more complex, the closest I can come is Battle-Witch."

As she speaks, I get a greater sense of my own place. A better understanding of how my own archetypes apply. I'm her bulwark. I'm her harbinger. I've never been the sort for prophecy, but I get an overwhelming sense that she has some role in the coming age. And it is my purpose to support her in achieving it.