The Inculid didn’t attack that night. The scouts didn’t report any sign of Carvers, nor any other activity out of the Labyrinth’s entrance.

I continued to brood in my cozy room, ‘listening’ intently to the droning thrum in the Flow emitted by the Inculids. Their imperceptible threads continued to weave their way through and around the town. It was disconcerting, but now that I knew what to look for, I started to sense my own threads weaving through the currents, which itself brought me more control over my own abilities.

The volunteers had made incredible progress after Count Orleander imposed his version of efficiency on them. The entire north side of town had been turned into the most inconvenient spiked obstacle course I’d ever seen. It wouldn’t kill the Carvers unless they flung themselves right into it, but it would prove to be such a hinderance that they’d be easy pickings for the fighters. In theory anyway.

Orleander might be a spendthrift, flaunting his wealth to all at every turn, but I couldn’t deny his eye for business. And it was a business decision, if applied to war instead, and an interesting concept I’d have to pursue another time.

A rank smell wrenched me out of my ruminations, and I realized it was me. I groaned, unwilling to leave my comfortable position next to the fire, but stripped out of my armor anyway and placed it aside.

My old clothes only held themselves together by sparse threads, beaten and abused beyond measure by travel and the ravages of my armor. There had been a time in my life where I wouldn’t have been caught dead in anything less than what Orleander wore, but I had long forsaken such things. I left the room to track down one of the Baron’s staff to direct me to the baths.

As I followed the directions, I encountered several others along the way. Everyone I encountered looked half asleep, practically stumbling around with half lidded eyes, dead on their feet. Not that I couldn’t relate, the only things that kept me on my feet were a few shots of alcohol and a newfound anxiety.

I dragged my smelly carcass into a room embedded into the ground floor made entirely of river stones. Once again, the Baron’s taste in amenities turned out to be rustic, but I wasn’t about to complain. Somebody had prepared kindling and wood for a fire under a stone basin large enough to fit two of me, filled with clean water.

Flint and steel sat to the side, so I grabbed them and a few breaths later I had the fire crackling to life. While I waited for the basin to heat up, I stripped out of my sad excuse for clothing and threw them in the hallway. Nearby sat a stool with a bucket of water and a scrub brush, so I set to my body with a vengeance, scrubbing away the filth of the last couple of days, and some days worth of road dust before that.

I slipped into the hot warm water and let the sensation of weightlessness lull me into a comfortable half sleep. The deep thrum at the edge of my perception provided another sensation that threatened to put me fully to sleep, but I managed to ignore it. Sinking further, almost into a state of meditation, I started nodding my head and tapping the side of the bath. As it drew me deeper, a sense of familiarity crept into the edges of my mind.

I startled awake, trying to remember what I was tapping my finger too. I strained my sense of the Flow as hard as I could, trying to bring the thrum fully into my perception. I sensed it then, the rhythm. Even deeper than the thrum, an underlying cadence struck a slow beat that swelled and shrank as a counterpoint to the drone.

I wracked my brain, trying to think where I’d heard such a thing before. There were as many ways to use magic as there were people, but this had the particular feel of something ritualistic. I’d only ever encountered a few people who used rituals effectively, so I mentally sorted through them and compared the feel to the rhythm. It only took me a few minutes for the sensation to make a connection with an almost forgotten memory. Far to the east lived isolated tribes of forest people.

They practiced an ancient tradition of shamanism. Their collective intent, willpower, and their personal power which they called ‘the spark’, focused by elaborate rituals, produced incredible changes in the Flow around them.

I doubt they’d realized it, but they’d taught me many things about magic just by being allowed to observe. Their collective willpower was enormous and capable of massive effects in the environment. The tradeoff was that it took the collective effort of all of them, and a lot of time, to produce those kinds of results.

With this new information from memory to compare to the feeling emanating from the Flow, it was obvious that the Inculid were working a ritual of some sort. I paled at the realization. With no frame of reference, I had no idea what it was meant to accomplish, meaning it could be anything. I could feel the scale, even when we’d first arrived looking back, I just hadn’t known it, meaning it was active even before I arrived.

One thing was certain, the mind he’d felt on the controlling end of the thread connected to that Carver was alien, incomprehensible. Trying to understand their motivations was an exercise in futility, it was better to act based on what I knew was happening and I knew they had already started attacking us.

I rose from the bath, reached through the Flow into my cubby, rummaging around for a decent set of clothes. I pulled out padded robes meant to be worn under amor and dressed, then made my way back to my cozy lair.

Sleep seemed like a good idea, but I realized that dawn was only a few hours away, so I opted to take a walk instead. Along the way, my thoughts reached back to old memories of the shamans I had encountered long ago.

One thing popped to the forefront of my memory. Their power made any single magician look like toddlers playing at being big boys, but for all that power their rituals were easy to disrupt, if you could figure out where the weak spots were.

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I arrived at the entrance courtyard, spotting Kan’on back in his now customary position on the other side and stopped to consider what I knew and what I could do against the attack, for I didn’t doubt for a second that they were attacking, even now.

“I think I’m ready, Dash.”

Kan’on’s voice caught me off guard. I thought he’d been deep in meditation, ruminating on his own pretty boy looks and cultivating his fashion sense, but it wouldn’t be the first time Kan’on surprised me.

“Ready for what?”

“Ready to try to burn you again.”

I took a second to examine him through the Flow, then shook my head.

“You’re not ready.”

“How can you tell if I don’t try?”

“The closer you come to being where you need to be, the more I can feel you in the Flow, which is a separate problem we’ll have to address by the way. What I feel is that you’re approaching the cusp, but it is an infinite approach that you’ll never overcome, without a trigger. Just meditating on it probably won’t be enough. Who knows though, I didn’t expect you to come this far so fast so maybe you’ll defy my expectations there too, but I doubt it.”

“Let me at least try, if only to prove it to myself.”

“No need, defend yourself. Sharpen your will and fend me off. If you can’t defend against this then you still have no chance at burning me with a rune.”

Having said that, I gave him a second to gather himself. Seeing his readiness, I slammed my intent and willpower into the currents connecting him to me, overwhelming the Flow. I used same trick I’d used on Clyde to rob him of his ability to command his body.

Kan’on put up a good fight, proving how far he’d come along. His willpower pushed at my own, but it wasn’t sharp enough. It wasn’t decisive. The willpower he needed to cultivate needed to be a sharp, swift blade instead of a swelling wave, because in combat that lag between intent and willpower was long enough to get him killed.

He slumped, boneless, as he lost control of his body but still fought back bitterly. Inevitably, I replaced his will with my own and he lost the ability to fight at all as his head thunked down into the dirt. I let him go and he groaned as he tried to sit up.

“Kan’on, what’s the point of making you break a finger?”

“Depths take you,” Kan’on managed to get out between groans.

“Incorrect. Your willpower needs to be like the crack of a whip; sharp, swift, and targeted. You also need to coordinate your intent and your will, it’s not enough to be good at one or the other. If your will has no intent behind it, then you’re just flailing it into the depths aimlessly.”

Ignoring the groaning protests coming from Kan’on, I let myself sink into my meditations. I let the Inculid thrum wash over me. The rhythmic cadence of the ritual permeated every single current within the Flow I could sense. All of them. I couldn’t even imagine the sheer power necessary for such a feat at such a distance.

I reached out to the thrum, trying to sense the intent hidden within, but my best efforts yielded nothing. I could tell that it was of a singular purpose, but that purpose eluded me. I touched the Flow with my willpower, trying to replicate the rhythm. Repeatedly imbuing the currents with my willpower didn’t produce any noticeably similar results. They failed to echo out and resonate in the current, like the Inculids did.

I attempted various version of that strategy, with similar failures. Instead of continuing down that path, I changed my approached, doing something that I didn’t want to but seemed like an appropriate path. I retracted my senses from pulling in specific currents and pushed my awareness away from in a nebulous cloud, into all currents touching me, all at once.

The sensation staggered my perception, like trying to see everywhere all at once while at the same time trying to juggle and do arithmetic. The interplay between all the currents, both to and from me, connected to everything in my surroundings and beyond, divided my senses in so many directions that I nearly lost my sense of self within the Flow, a dangerous proposition.

The harder I fought to gain stability, the harder it became to control my thoughts and the information blooding my mind. Frustrated, I let go of any sense of control and allowed my consciousness to float above and around them, letting it turn into a malleable mass that rose and fell, pushed and pulled in sync with the currents. At first a strong sense of vertigo almost knocked me out of the Flow, but the more I let go the more, the details drifted away and my mind settled into the cloud that drifted away in the currents.

Mind floating in a diffuse cloud, I tried to gather enough of myself together to think. At its core, all magic was the same. It was all about intent and willpower. Willpower to impose yourself onto the world, and intent to create change. There were tricks you could do with just one or the other, but the best tricks always used both together. Balance.

I started by pulsing just one, then the other out into all the currents, not trying to do anything in particular, just trying to sense the effect my presence in the Flow as a cloud had. I tried various combinations, examining the feedback and adjusting until I felt something new. I focused on that feeling and refined it, until I finally hit on some kind of resonance.

I started pulsing my intent, telling the Flow that I just wanted to be, to exist, out into the currents. I established a steady, slow rhythm and let the currents damp out my presence after a short time, then pulsed my willpower in time with my intent, and I hit the resonance. My presence burst out of me into the Flow resonating into every current, extending far beyond my own ability to sense.

My rhythm of intent and willpower continued to pound out into the Flow, but after a few minutes I realized that the Inculid’s efforts remained unchanged. I let my nebulous consciousness continue to puzzle over the problem, before something obvious occurred to me; I had imbued it with intent to just exist, and that’s exactly what happened. Something else was needed, otherwise no change would take place.

Cautiously, so as not to disturb my fragile mental balance, I fed a little bit of my personal power along with spark of intent into the rhythm; burn everything. Power exploded out of me, ripping through the currents, spreading like I’d lit a wildfire, and like a wildfire it consumed, tearing apart everything that wasn’t a natural part of the Flow, including the thrum.

The pulse knocked me out of my mental equilibrium, and I snapped into awareness. No, not just awareness, awakeness. I felt awake, more awake than I’d felt all day and night, as if my mind had been artificially smothered.

“What in the depths?” Next to me, Kan’on lurched up into a sitting position. “What the shit just happened. It felt like everything around me shredded away… ahhh my head.” He gripped his head in his hands, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hands.

My grin at discovering something new and amazing turned feral, showing my teeth as I realized that I could wreck whatever the Inculid were trying to do.

“I figured out what the damned bugs are up to. They’re trying to smother us, trying to make us go to sleep. And it’s working.”

I’d be taken by the deep gods before I’d allow them to make me do anything I didn’t damn well want to. I looked back into the Flow and could sense the thrum creeping back into the sphere of my awareness. Now that I knew I could shred their efforts into confetti, I could fight them.

Now it was just a matter of practice. And as the Count liked to say, efficiency.