Grey Realmheart 2, 3

Richmal gasped and sucked in a deep, desperate breath, as if he’d been holding it the entire time. “Valeska! Go, now!” he barked, his voice raw.

Releasing aether from my core, I manipulated it around Ulrike’s spell, looking once again for the metaphorical curtain separating the two powers. It was just like in the keystone, when I’d practiced with Ellie. I had to let my mind refocus, shift my perspective. Three Steps had once told me something very similar as well, and even Kordri’s lessons had required that I experience the motion and interplay of our bodies differently.

Perhaps that’s what all knowledge boiled down to: new experiences that shifted one’s perspective slightly, revealing more of a world that was already there, but which we couldn’t see.

My breath caught and my mind stuttered, and I wrenched myself back into the moment. Dozens of poisonous slime-darts were hissing through the air at me.

My hand raised, too slowly, my mental fortitude drained and exhausted. The darts parted, their path shifting as they swarmed around me to either side, and I let out a breath simultaneously full of wonder and fatigue. I could feel where each particle of mana and aether interacted, how the aether took hold of the mana and redirected it to create a momentary sympathetic binding of the two forces.

But I was also shouldering the combined force of all that mana, trying to hold each of the individual spells separately in my mind, and, as the darts curved to avoid me, I was forced to release my hold over the spikes and lightning web the other Wraiths had used to pin me down.

The field of black spikes fired away wildly, nearly impaling Ifiok and crashing against Ulrike’s shield. The lightning, which she had continued to pour mana into until it burned to look at, condensed into a single bolt and struck the ground, exploding in a blinding flash.

The chamber quaked.