I close my eyes and focus on my breath. Not my breathing; specifically on each breath, how the crisp clean forest air flows in through my nose, down, deep into my lungs, back up, and slowly back out to escape into nature. It helps with spiraling anxiety just fine, it should also help with terminal adrenaline overload from getting in a fight. Not just being near a fight, no, being an active participant in a fight, and— I breathe in, pulling my diaphragm down to maximize consistency and capacity like I was taught in the one season of elementary school honor choir I did before they realized my memory was too horrible for me to learn the lyrics, I hold for one… two… three… four… I relax my diaphragm and let it push the bottom of my lungs back up to breathe out slowly.

Hilariously, my parents say that honor choir was a mixed blessing. It taught me to control my speaking volume to some degree, which I’d apparently had trouble with in kindergarten, but it also taught me that I could speak loud enough to rattle windows and disturb people in adjoining rooms if I exerted myself. Personally, I call both of those good things. Being able to out-shout ninety-nine out of a hundred people is surprisingly useful even in so-called polite society.

I do my best to ignore the extremely distinctive sounds of Agnes executing zombies.

I need to find something more engaging to think about than focusing on my breath.

The spell. How do I turn it off? Is it even still running? I’m not going to risk opening my eyes to check, not until I get an all-clear of some kind. I can theorize anyway. Hypotheses: it stops when I stop concentrating on it, it stops when I stop making my fingers drag in the mana, it’s on a timer, it stops when I make some particular gesture or movement. Can I falsify any of those?

Concentration is ill-defined and I was mostly stealing terminology from Dungeons and Dragons without knowing what it’d actually look like. Would “concentrating on the spell” mean that I’m looking at it? Periodically mentally reaffirming that it should continue? Either way, regardless of the definition, I am almost certain that my attention strayed at some point during that fight and I’d be shocked if I counted as having been “concentrating on the spell” the whole time. I’m willing to call that falsified.

Timer? The fight only took… it can’t have taken more than sixty seconds judging by how many steps I took and how many sentences Bob spoke to me. I’m not going to try to nail it down further, I’m already glad I was able to review it in that level of detail without losing it again. And then another chunk of time for cleanup. But then what would a timer be set for? At this relatively low duration it’d make sense to make it last a nice round number of seconds like 60 or 64 or 100 or 128, but that’s assuming that it’s measuring in seconds and I still don’t know how they measure time around here. Heather estimated our travel time in hours but there’s no guarantee that her hour is anything like what I’d expect, and I haven’t heard any shorter periods named. So I guess a timer is also plausible, but lower-probability because I’d expect it to be in seconds or minutes and it’d be weird to make it last two minutes instead of one minute or something.

It could easily have been a hand gesture. I think that I did move my hand when I was heading over to collapse on the ground, but I don’t remember what I ended up doing with it. I also wasn’t paying attention to whether the spell was still up or not when I sat down.

I think that my best guess is that it stuck on to whatever phenomenon I use to cast spells that makes my fingers feel like they’re dragging through liquid mana. I think that might have instinctively kept holding it after the spell happened?

I wiggle a finger and find that I’m still holding the effect, in fact. Fascinating!

…Okay. I’ve successfully distracted myself. I’ve spent some time thinking about something else so I’m at substantially lower risk of spiraling. I forgot for a few minutes that I was just in a fight. I’m still twitchy, but adrenaline has a biological half-life in the realm of two minutes and a similar duration of effect so that should wear off soon enough too. I’ve gotten into similar territory when I got really into an intense video game, and it’s always worn off within a few minutes of me noticing that I’m too twitchy to aim and my fingers and toes are cold from peripheral vasoconstriction.

I’ll open my eyes to check whether the spell is still going. I’ll keep focusing on that. If I’m lucky that’ll give me a chance to acclimate to the situation around me.

I hold my hand out, taking it away from where I had wrapped my arms around my knees to huddle against the tree, and I open my eyes.

The spell is still up!

I experimentally make a fist and find that the display not only remains but goes straight through solid objects, projecting out the back of my hand. I open my hand back up and the spell continues to follow my fingertip, which makes me curious about its tracking latency. I wave my hand around and don’t see it lagging, but that could just be because the background is too patchy so it’d be hard to see any lag that is there. Reverse camouflage, in a way. I carefully pay no attention to whether I see any dots on my radar.

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Eventually I tire of that and decided to test one of my other hypotheses, so I carefully and consciously release the sense that I’m “casting a spell”, the thing that makes me feel like I can touch mana. The cone instantly blinks out. So it probably is attached to that somehow! It could still have been on a timer that just happened to run out at exactly that time, but that’s relatively unlikely.

This has a couple implications.

First, and most usefully, I now know that it’s a safe and effective way to communicate with a spell. Given that I can flip it on and off I could probably even use it to jury-rig a janky brain-computer interface so I can control complex multimode spells without having to redevelop speech recognition or something.

I’m going to have to reinvent Morse Code, won’t I. At least it’s easy enough, just sort a list of latin characters by frequency and go down it assigning shorter sequences to more frequent characters. Maybe I’ll use a prefix-free encoding so I don’t have to depend on timing information to distinguish on longer pauses to differentiate the spaces between letters from the spaces inside a letter! That’d be neat.

Second, since I’d be surprised if the finger-dragging thing had separate “casting a spell” and “anchoring a spell effect” modes, I’d bet that I’m still shaping mana-flows as long as I hold Find Spellcraft. On the one hand this means I have to be careful not to accidentally build a dangerous spell effect while I’m waving Find Spellcraft around. On the other hand it might let me intentionally cast a second spell without turning the first one off. Running Firestream and Find Spellcraft at the same time would be pretty sweet, especially if I can find a way to add a targeting reticle to Find Spellcraft’s display.

New to-do items: Figure out how to control the mana-dragging effect per finger rather than all at once. Figure out how to attach Find Spellcraft to fingers other than my index finger.

…Learn to do the mana-dragging thing with things other than my fingers so I can attach Find Spellcraft to my nose so it’s always pointing where I’m looking?

I let myself look outward.

There aren’t many zombie bits left. Apparently Ji and Agnes have already started gathering them up and destroying them like they did in the office building this morning. Liv is sitting on the ground next to me, just looking at the forest. I’m sure she’s actually keeping watch over the entire party with her absurd perception stat, but her body language is already doing a surprising amount to calm me down. I notice I’ve stopped shaking, even.

“Okay,” I say, barely choking the word out. “Okay. I’m fine,” I keep going, voice strengthening by the word.

“You are,” Liv says supportively. “You did a great job. Get some training under your belt and a few good spells and you’ll be a terror.”

“I don’t think I’m going to enjoy that training,” I say, trying to laugh and not quite managing it. “Boot camp back home would’ve destroyed the state of mind and learned behaviors that make me good at what I do. Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s why you have so much trouble finding people to run this grimoire’s Gift,” I theorize. “Maybe I should quit now.”

“I think you’re more resilient than you might give yourself credit for,” Liv says. “Besides, Gifts mean that beating individuality out of recruits would be pointless and impossible. You’ll probably be doing field exercises interspersed with therapy.”

“Honestly, I probably could have benefited from talking to a therapist even before I Visited,” I admit. I sigh. This isn’t what I want to be dwelling on right now. “…Do you mind if we talk about something else?”

“Of course!” Liv smiles at me.

I try to smile back. I’m not sure if I succeed.

“You’ll be happy to know that nobody died, I think,” she says. “Nobody on our side was even notably injured, just bruises.” That’s actually fairly impressive, though I suppose that that’s why we brought so many people. A fair fight is the last thing you want. “Axelos took a nasty fall when I killed the Caulfield Night Snatcher while he was riding it, then Ewald tagged him with a sleep spell. Bob says he’s fine and will go straight into custody when we return to Stonehill.”

“I suppose that Bob and Ewald will be keeping him under until then,” I guess.

The rest of the party shows up at this point. Ji’s sleeve is torn. Heather, Katell, and Yann all have noticeably depleted quivers. Anna’s looking a bit singed around the edges. Everyone is covered in some level of zombie debris. I look down and realize that I have some of the same. I really hope that it comes out; I liked this outfit. It’s comfy and it has more pockets than literally anything I’ve seen anyone wearing in this world.

I also realize that the dirty sack Agnes has slung over her shoulder is the world’s most stereotypical rogue necromancer. Axelos is dressed in a set of black robes with bone ornaments that I’m sure was extremely stylish before he got thrown off a giant monster going at top speed. I have no idea he got around without immediately getting reported to the local police.

“We don’t know enough about his Gift to de-power or restrain him, so yes,” Liv confirms. “Speaking of transportation, we’re done cleaning up. Think you’re ready to start heading back to Caulfield?”

“Hm,” I grunt. “Let’s find out.”

I lever myself off the ground and find that, despite some residual shakiness and a sort of overwhelmed weariness, I’m perfectly capable of standing. I wander in circles for a few moments, brushing through the thin, weedy plants that cover this little part of the forest floor. I also grab my waterskin and take a drink, putting out a hand to lean on the bundle of thin sticks that erupt from the tree’s coppiced stump.

“Yeah,” I say, feeling greatly refreshed, “I think I’m good.”