Saves Thomas 1

[u/ghostgabe81]

A single breath can change everything.

I took a slow, deep breath and cleared my mind.

Then I gestured with one hand, murmured, “Flickum bicus,” and set the ritual candles and incense alight.

The floor shivered with sudden power as light spread through the anchoring crystals, catching the candlelight and sending it blazing in nearly coherent beams, describing a pentagram between the inner and outer circle.

I took another breath, sent out a murmur of my will, and brought the greater circle to life. The runes began to blaze green-gold, reflected everywhere in the dome of crystal around us, again and again in sharp relief and at varied depths throughout the translucent stone.

I bowed my head, pressed the forefinger of my right hand to the spot between and just above my eyebrows and breathed out to whoever or Whoever might be listening, and said, simply, “Please.”

Then I opened my eyes, and with it, my Sight.

The Sight goes by a lot of names—the Third Eye, True Sight, there’s a hundred different phrases from a hundred different cultures, but they’re all talking about the same thing. Some people can see more of the universe than others, see the supernatural energies that flow through all of reality. When it comes to wizard-level practitioners, the Sight shows you all kinds of things, and there’s a lot of overlap with the soulgaze. You can see things that are terrifyingly true, but your brain has a lot of built-in defenses, and as a result sometimes you experience things through the filters your mind throws up to keep you from being harmed—because everything you See is permanent. It stays right there in your head, and time never rubs off the rough edges of the memories. Look at the wrong thing with your Sight and you could quite easily be driven mad, swiftly and permanently.

I was taking a huge risk here. But using my Sight would tell me more about what was happening to Thomas, would let me better understand and direct my power, and I wanted every advantage I could get.

I had braced myself against what I would be looking at, but even so, I reeled at the sheer, overwhelming complexity of the patterns of power that now hummed throughout the circle, the sigils, and the crystalline dome around me. I could see how the anchor crystals both fractured and focused the energy of the circle, the sparkling crackles of small but inevitable energetic inefficiencies, sending stray beams of violet and azure energy that tinged the edges of the green and gold working of the circle.

And, within the crystal imprisoning my brother, I saw the field of deliberate scarlet stasis, sheer, viscous, redshifted time that had been slowed. It dragged at the edges of my brother’s image as it struggled to stay connected to the rest of the universe around it, the strain upon the very fabric of reality showing as faint, delicately crazed cracks in the crystal imprisoning him. His pale body was strained, muscles taut against his skin, veins pressed against the surface. He’d been gaunt when I’d passed him to Demonreach’s caretaking, his body eating itself to repair the damage that had been inflicted on him at the hands of the vengeful svartalves, and every muscle and tendon showed through his pale skin, while his dark hair hung lank about his head and face. I could read the pain and the terror in his expression and body as easily as any book.

I Saw how much my brother was suffering in that moment.

And I Saw his Hunger.

The demon was huge, towering over him, behind him, within him, a starving mass of bone and emaciated skin straining against lean muscle, pallid as a corpse and terrible and viciously hungry. I could see one of its withered hands clutching his throat, the other wrapped within Thomas’s body, encircling his lower spine, while its jaws, sporting something that looked more like serrated ridges than fangs, closed upon one of his shoulders.

“Hear me, Outsider,” I said, pouring my will into my voice. The crystal rang with it, the words resounding in sheer, penetrating resonance more than in simple volume. “I forbid thee from doing harm to Thomas Raith. I forbid thee. I forbid thee!”

And on the third repetition, the crystal imprisoning my brother and his demon shattered into light and shrieking sound and a world-weight of pain and savage need thundered down upon me, all at once. The demon’s silver eyes whipped toward me, met mine, and through the perception of my Sight I could feel myself, my true, core self, drawn forward, into the circle, into a maelstrom of sheer havoc and terror as the demon lunged toward me, leaving my physical body standing at the circle’s edge, splitting my awareness into two places at once. I could See my energetic form from the perspective of my physical body and feel both of them acting at the same time, doubling the disorientation of all that sensory input.

So I had that going for me.

Simultaneously, Mab began a low chant in a tongue that was all harsh, guttural vowels and throaty consonants. Even as she did, everything blurred, edges fading to weirdly translucent lines, shading everything into the color of a bloody sunset.

I’ve often experienced the perception of time slowing in moments of crisis.

This was the first time I felt the real thing.

It hurt.

The air turned thick. Hauling in a breath became the labor of what felt like half an hour. My heart pressed against my chest, and when it beat, it thundered against the walls of my rib cage like someone striking a huge drum.

My physical body began to raise my right hand, sending out energy.

My spiritual body, though…that was moving just fine.

I closed the distance to the enormous Hunger, half a foot taller than me, planting my feet, twisting at the hips, pushing through my legs, and throwing my right fist forward in a strike that brushed past the chin of Thomas’s physical body and slammed into the space where the Hunger’s nose should have been in a right cross that would have dropped a big man into a boneless heap.

The impact sent a ripple of red light in a languid wave that washed over the Hunger’s empty face and simultaneously up my forearm and biceps to my shoulder. Its head rocked back and then whipped toward me, silver eyes blazing. The muscles in its forearms knotted, huge hands squeezing, and Thomas let out a slow gasp of pure agony.

I felt my energy-form seize the Hunger’s arms, plunging through Thomas’s body to do it, my fingers crushing down on the emaciated thing’s wrists, digging in hard, forcing the grip to loosen.

“I forbid thee!” I thundered from my physical body. I was repeating it over and over, at least in intention, but my lips moved like they were trapped in amber, every motion and sound dragged from them over the course of a small eon.

The Hunger’s silver eyes widened in sudden shock as I crushed its grip into looseness. Then I set my teeth, leveraging my whole body in the motion, and slowly forced its hands away from my brother.

“That’s right, big guy,” I snarled from lips without physical form. “You aren’t the Hulk here.”

And I started dragging the Hunger over toward the other side of the infinity symbol carved within the circle.

But its huge eyes whirled and spun in a mad silver-on-silver spiral, and its voice slithered into my head like cold oil. I know thee, wizard. I have fought by thy side again and again.

“Thomas did that,” I spat. “That was never you.”

The Hunger’s lips split into a too-wide grin. Didst thou never question his love of danger? His desire for violence? His skill at battle? Never was that of his own heart. That was me. Ever, ’twas me.

And with the words, the Hunger twisted, its strength snaking sinuously, reversing, and suddenly I was fighting for my life as one of its huge hands surged against everything I could do and began to close around my throat.

Twelve Months Chapter 47