The ground shifts below me abruptly, and I send an instinctive and wordless message to Lathani. We roll away just in time to avoid me getting a spear of earth in my gut. However, with me now on top of Lathani, I’m fully exposed to Kalanthia’s rage and barely dodge her strike. I probably only manage even that because she’s pulling her blows so as not to accidentally go through me and into Lathani below.
I’m on borrowed time – I dodge Kalanthia’s strikes by a hair’s breadth, but it’s only a matter of time before I take just a fraction of a second too long. Especially since every step is potentially treacherous with the earth falling away beneath my feet or forming a spike just where I want to land.
I didn’t Dominate your cub! She Bonded me! I shriek mentally, not having the breath to say it out loud. I mean, it’s not completely true, but my vague hopes come true as the unexpected statement makes Kalanthia stop trying to kill me for a moment.
What is this new lie? she asks, poised to pounce once more, but for now not actually doing so. I take a moment to breathe – a very brief moment.
“I Bonded her, yes, but only as a very temporary situation,” I say, returning to speech using my mouth rather than my brain. I might have got more used to mental speech, but it’s still not my preferred option. “This Bond came later, and I did not at all instigate it.”
For the first time since this conversation began, Kalanthia looks a little uncertain. Perhaps she felt the sincerity of my statement or caught a little of the memory behind the words?
Then why do I feel a fully intact chain between you and my cub. I can sense that you are the holder of her chains, so don’t try to deceive me with lies about her chaining you.
“That’s not what I meant,” I quickly say. I sigh. “Look, Kalanthia, please can we just have a pause here. Let us explain a bit. You know that we’re not going anywhere. What harm would it cause for you just to listen for a moment?”
Apparently that was the wrong thing to say as her aura spikes once more, almost feeling like knives are pricking at my skin, poised to pierce me like a magician’s assistant in the famous box of swords trick. Only, unlike the magician’s assistant, I don’t have a false floor to escape through.
Listening to you is how my cub became chained to you in the first place!
She leaps at me, her mouth open and teeth bared.
Reacting more on instinct than anything else, I summon fire to my fingertips, the element eager to come to life, to burn. My own flesh sizzles a little in the heat, my divided concentration unable to pay sufficient attention to make sure that it doesn’t. I ignore the pain, directing the gout of fire to singe Kalanthia’s whiskers and lips; no more.
It’s a struggle to stop it from burning anything else, but I’m determined to not hurt anyone except for my target, and even then, only as much as she forces me to. I do have to intensify the fire, though, pouring in my own mana to force it to burn more hotly – Kalanthia is apparently not going to be deterred by a simple singing of her whiskers, but she does back off when the heat threatens to do a lot more than that.
While she retreats a moment, I know it’s not for long. I see her through the billowing fire, a silhouette prowling and waiting for my guard to drop. At least she hasn’t tried to attack any of my other Bound – that would have been a good way of distracting me and forcing me to defend them. But perhaps there’s some innate sense of justice in her which says that I and I alone am her target. I’m certainly not going to complain.
But this isn’t tenable. My fire will burn through my mana in time, especially with as much as I’m having to pour into it to keep it burning hotly with no other source of fuel. Then what do I do?
It’s not only the fire which is burning hot; tempers are also far too high. Kalanthia is too enveloped by emotion to look at this at all logically. She’s not listening to me; she’s not listening to Lathani. At this point, I don’t even really consider any of my other Bound intervening as we discussed – at best she’d dismiss them as biased; at worst, she would turn her rage on them. We’d known she was going to be angry, but had thought she’d be more reasonable than she turned out to be, more willing to at least hear me out.
What if I…? The new idea comes to mind like an assassin, creeping in the darkness of my mind to suddenly appear when I least expect it. No, she’s far too strong! I reject it. Yet it still nags at me. I only need a few moments. Maybe this is a way of getting through to her. It’s possible, but…what if this enrages her even more? Honestly, the latter is probably more likely than the former, but do I have a choice?
I don’t want to even properly attempt to kill Lathani’s mother. If I had the time to prepare, I might be able to by this point, using all my Bound and my Bound’s talents wisely. Without that time to prepare, it’s a lot less likely. But I don’t want to do it nonetheless. Not only would Lathani probably never forgive me for it, but…I would probably never forgive myself for it either.
The problem is that she’s trying to kill me which leaves me with few real options. I can’t retreat either – she’s far faster than me or my Bound as a group. So what does that leave me with?
Abruptly, I cut the mana flow to the fire, its billow guttering out. I meet Kalanthia’s eyes.
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“Dominate,” I whisper, and brace myself.
It’s a good thing I knew this was going to be difficult because I’m almost blown out of the Battle of Wills in the first instant. It’s only by applying the full strength of my Will that we remain in the space, clinging on by my metaphorical fingertips.
You dare?! Kalanthia roars, a blurred shape at the far end of the space. Judging by how little detail I can see, I’m only a few inches from being booted out of the space completely.
The pressure against me is incredible, a fireman’s hose of water aimed straight at me, a deluge of spring waters falling over a waterfall and trying to pound me to the depths of the pool beneath. I actually crouch down to the ground, hoping that presenting a smaller target area might affect even metaphysical pressure.
Oddly enough, it does seem to help. Enough to allow me to cling on. For now – I sense that even a soul battle like this uses some form of stamina. Just like with the crocodile, I know that the soulspace around me will fracture long before I make any real sort of progress. The difference here is that ‘progress’ to me in this case counts as just managing to stay put, not actually moving forward at all.
“I’m not trying to Dominate you!” I call back at Kalanthia, doing my best to shove my sincerity at her. Normally I wouldn’t be able to communicate in that way until I’m at least a third of the way towards my opponent, but this isn’t by any means a normal situation. I’m hoping that her own telepathy will be able to do the legwork here.
Then why have you brought me here? she demands, not sounding in any way appeased.
“I just want to talk!” I call back to her, once more trying my best to emanate honesty.
We must be in your battleground with chains clinking ominously around me to talk? she asks somewhat sarcastically, but I’m relieved to hear less actual ire in her voice. Plus, her poetic words indicate that she’s a little less angry than she was. Good.
Honestly, that’s what I was banking on. I knew that it was probably the biggest gamble I’ve ever taken, but a previous improvement to my Dominate Skill was that my opponents would be calmed and pacified while in my space – as long as I remain calm and peaceful myself. With Kalanthia’s temper so high, this was the only thing I could think to do.
Of course, if she’d immediately thrown me out of the space like the salamander did all those weeks ago, I’d have been completely done for. But I was hoping that with my significantly greater Willpower now, I’d at least be able to stand my ground.
As it is, I perhaps underestimated just how great the difference between our Willpowers still is, but I was never intending on actually trying to win this. If I can calm her down enough to not want to immediately kill me when I inevitably get cast out of the space, that will be enough for me.
“You weren’t willing to talk outside my ‘battleground’, so yes,” I point out to her, trying to draw on meditation. I need a calm head here so if I can even get into a state of Light Meditation, that would improve things. Plus, I’ve proved before that I can still use magic even while paralysed physically from failing a Dominate; if I can regenerate enough mana, I might be able to cover myself with a blanket of fire while I’m completely physically vulnerable. Perhaps that might stop her. Then again, she has Earth-Shaping at her command, so probably not.
Your words are clearly poison, hissing in my cub’s ear, Kalanthia says, hissing herself, but less angry than she had been.
“And we keep trying to tell you that that’s not how it happened.” I say firmly. “Did you send Lathani after my party?” I ask. I’m ninety-nine percent sure that I know the answer to that, but it’s worth establishing foundations here.
What? Kalanthia asks, seemingly pulled up short. That, too, was something I was aiming for – just like I changed the physical battleground to here, I need to change the battleground of our words too. Letting her be the predator and me the prey even verbally isn’t going to work: I need to take control of the discussion if we’re going to make any headway.
“Lathani followed me. I didn’t ask her to, in fact I specifically told her not to – you were there for that. Did you send her?” Once more, I push my sincerity at her, figuring that it can only help. It had occurred to me that she might think I had said one thing in front of her and then encouraged Lathani to follow in some other way.
No, I didn’t, Kalanthia replies strongly. I interpreted your words and thoughts to indicate a significantly dangerous foe and did my best to discourage her from following.
“Then how did she slip out to follow us?”
Even I must sleep, Markus Wolfe, Kalanthia tells me, bridling a bit at my unspoken accusation. In the quiet of my own mind, I smile: she used my name. I thought her to be slumbering too.
“I understand that,” I say, sending soothing feelings at Kalanthia almost unconsciously, despite my surprise that Lathani was able to move quietly enough to slip past her eminently-aware mother. “But then why did you not come to find her?”
The pressure against me lessens a little. Not enough to allow me to take even one small step forwards, but enough that losing a finger’s hold might not spell the end of my stay here. Losing two probably still would, but a little leeway is more than I had before.
By the time I woke, she was out of my Earth-sense range, Kalanthia says, a little grumpily.
“Could you not have followed her tracks?”
I’m not a rocas, she snaps back at me. I cannot just follow a scent on the breeze. And I have been teaching Lathani to hide her presence in as many ways as possible, she finishes, sounding even more grumpy, as if she didn’t want to admit it. Could that be another effect of this space? Encouraging honesty even when my opponent isn’t keen to give it?
I shake the thought away – for when I’m not facing dismemberment from an angry mother. It takes a second for ‘rocas’ to click, but based on her reference to ‘scent on the breeze’ I have to guess that she’s talking about Fenrir.
Evidently, the powerful nundas don’t have particularly good tracking abilities. Or Lathani has a particularly strong anti-tracking talent.
“She’s that good at stealth?” I can’t help but ask.
She’s far more talented at it than I expected, Kalanthia admits, a little pride in her voice. Then the anger returns. And now you will expect to use it, to use her.
“That wasn’t what I was thinking,” I object immediately, though now she’s mentioned it…. “So Lathani slipped out below your notice, escaped your earth sense range, and your tracking abilities. Is that right?” Kalanthia doesn’t reply and I feel a sense of impatience from the blurred shape in the distance. “Didn’t you think she might have followed us?”