The Inculids didn’t attack that night. The scouts didn’t report any sign of Carvers, nor any other activity out of the Labyrinth 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 such a thing existed, I started to sense my own threads reaching out, which itself brought me more control over my own abilities.

The mix of townsfolk and man at arms volunteers had made incredible progress after Count Orleander imposed his sense of efficiency on them. The entire north side of town had been turned into the most inconvenient spikey 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 become 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 battle preparations, 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 excellent staff and drug direction to a bathing room out of him.

As I followed the directions the staff member gave me, I encountered several others along the way. Everyone I encountered looked half asleep, practically stumbling around with half lidded eyes, dead on their feet. Exhaustion appeared to be trying to take everybody. I could even feel it creeping up on me, into the back of my mind.

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 entirely too welcoming, but I wasn’t about to complain. Somebody had made preparations for a fire under a stone basin large enough to fit two of me, filled with clean water.

I found the flint and steel and stoked the fire 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 found myself tapping my finger.

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 and 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, and it only took me a second 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 the currents and the Flow just by being allowed to observe. Their collective willpower was enormous and capable of massive effects in the environment.

This thrum, the rhythm, the droning… the Inculids conducted a ritual within their collective mind that echoed out into the Flow. I paled at the realization. I had no idea what the ritual was meant to accomplish, if it was pointed at the town, or served some other purpose.

One thing was certain, the mind he’d felt on the controlling end of that 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 a set of padded robes meant to be worn under amor and dressed, then made my way back to my cozy lair.

I thought about trying to sleep, but realized that dawn was only a few hours away, so 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.

I arrived at the entrance courtyard, spotting Kan’on back in his now customary position at 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 get over his surprise and waited for him to prepare 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. He let the wave of my willpower split itself on the blade of his own, but inevitably he lacked the necessary skill to lock his own currents in place, so my wave of intent overwhelmed him. He fell over from his sitting position, thunking down into the dirt, padding his fall with his face. Just to rub it in, I let a small laugh escape.

He groaned and fought it, but ultimately, I had replaced his willpower with my own. I decided to take a page out of his book and picked out a spot of my own to sit down and meditate. Ignoring the groaning protests coming from Kan’on, I let myself sink into my meditations.

I let the 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 me nebulously, into all currents touching me, all at once.

The sensation staggered my perception like it always did. 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. Instead of fighting the forces of the currents, I 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 around me.

Reaching a measure of equilibrium, I tried to think about how I could replicate what the Inculids did. I almost knocked myself out of equilibrium by thinking too hard, so I let my mind drift over the details of what I wanted.

It was all about intent and willpower. Intent to drive the effect, willpower to impose your will into the wold. 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 around me, not trying to do anything in particular, just trying to sense the effect my presence in the flow in this way had. I tried various combinations, examining the feedback from the Flow, and adjusting my approach accordingly, until I finally hit on it.

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. I then pulsed my willpower in time with my intent, and I hit it, 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 hadn’t imbued it with my own power, my own spark as the shamans would call it.

Cautiously, so as not to disturb my fragile mental balance, I fed a spark of my own power into the rhythm I’d established. Power exploded out of me, ripping into the currents around me, spreading like I’d lit a wildfire, and like a wildfire it consumed everything in the currents, 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 the hell?” 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.

“Shit,” I said, then grinned ferally. I’d hit on a way to fight back, to do something. “I figured out what the deeps 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 deeps before I’d allow the damned bugs make me do anything. 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.

It was just a matter of efficiency.