Grey Realmheart 2, 2

he ground shattered beneath my feet, dropping me to one knee in a pool of burning sludge. Dozens of black iron spikes interlocked over the pool to create a sharp-edged dome, pinning me into the poison that I could already feel sapping my strength as it attacked my nervous system. The spikes tightened, forcing me down farther into the ooze. My lungs seized, and I felt my heart stutter.

The iron dome lit up with blue-black light, and hundreds of bolts of electricity began to crash back and forth between it and the pool of sludge. My body locked up. My mind went numb from the shock as the ooze continued to eat away at my armor. When I reached for God Step, I couldn’t sense it. I couldn’t feel anything at all past the pain of mana attacking every nerve in my entire body.

"Now, while he’s pinned! Valeska, report to the High Sovereign, inform him—"

My ears popped and stars burst behind my closed eyes and my muscles began to spasm as I pushed back at the spikes, but to little effect. I lost all sense of Richmal’s words, only knew that the Wraiths were shouting at one another. Although I couldn’t understand what they said, the desperation in their voices was clear.

Blue-black particles of deviant lightning mana flashed and popped as they impacted the amethyst motes that made up my aetheric barrier. Dark green mana sizzled and burrowed into the aether before evaporating. Gray-brown deviant earth mana cracked and broke against the purple barrier.

Through a gap in the spikes, I saw Regis, or what was left of him. My companion had been reduced to little more than a wisp of aether trapped within a cage of Ulrike’s mana. I could feel him, but just barely, burning, his consciousness receding with each passing moment as more and more of his aetheric essence was exhausted just to keep his feeble form.

I reached for him, tried to pull him to me with the force of my will alone, but he wasn’t reacting, couldn’t escape the spell burning him away to nothing.

Time seemed to slow, almost like when I’d been able to use Static Void, before. Suddenly, I could feel the weight of all that mana clashing with my aether, see the way the particles bent and rippled and jumped as one, the shapes of the individual spells, how they were formed, their purpose, the metaphysical stitching that held them together.

The mana wove together in a shape formed by the will of the caster, while the aether both contained the mana and determined its natural behavior, but also moved to accommodate the mana’s passing, the two forces fitting together like light and shadow. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before.

My hand quivered as I reached into the turmoil. All along it, the interplay of metaphorical light and darkness—mana and aether—shifted and moved, always together, simultaneously in coordination and opposition. And, in between them, a kind of curtain separating light and shadow.

My fingers twitched. The curtain shifted. Aether wrapped around mana and moved it aside.

The interlocking spikes pinning me down released, floating out in the air around me. They trembled, uncertain, Ifiok’s will pushing them to one purpose, but the flow of aether repelling them, redefining what mana was allowed to do.

A web of electricity jumped from spike to spike, crackling threateningly, tendrils reaching out toward me, deflecting, and being reabsorbed into the whole, unable to strike farther than what they aether allowed.

The pool of acid parted, separating, pulling away from me.

As I slowly stood, my legs shook with the effort of enforcing my will on the aether, and through the aether, the mana. My enemies surrounded me, but gone was the physical force of their confidence and their brash expressions.

Instead, I saw wide red eyes amid gray faces turned pale with fear.