Cold Days (The Dresden Files #14) - Jim Butcher Page 0,136

but far more focused, more developed, as if thought had somehow crystallized into tangibility. My wrists and ankles wouldn’t move because Mother Winter’s will said that was how reality worked. It was like magic—but magic took a seed, a kernel of will and built up a framework of other energies around that seed. It took intense practice and focus to make that happen, but at the end of the day anyone’s will was only part of the spell, alloyed with other energy into something else.

What held me down now was pure, undiluted will—the same kind of will that I suspected had backed up events presaged by phrases like “Let there be light.” It was far more than human, beyond simple physical strength, and if I’d been the Incredible Hulk, I was pretty sure there was no way I’d have been able to tear myself free.

“Ahhh,” said Mother Winter, during one last stroke of the cleaver. “I like nice clean edges to my meat, manling. Time for dinner.”

And slow, limping steps came toward me.

Chapter

Thirty-two

A slow smile stretched my lips back from my teeth.

Mortals had the short end of the stick on almost any supernatural confrontation. Even most wizards, with their access to terrific forces, had to approach conflicts carefully—relatively few of us had the talents that lent themselves to brawling. But mortals had everyone else beat on exactly one thing: the freedom to choose. Free will.

It had taken me a while to begin to understand it, but it had eventually sunk into my thick skull. I couldn’t arm wrestle an ogre, even with the mantle. I couldn’t have won a magical duel with Mab or Titania—probably not even against Maeve or Lily. I couldn’t outrun one of the Sidhe.

But I could defy absolutely anyone.

I could lift my will against that of anything, and know that the fight might be lopsided, but never hopeless. And by thunder, I was not going to allow anyone’s will to stretch me out on the floor like a lamb for slaughter.

I stopped pressing at my bindings with my limbs and started using my mind instead. I didn’t try to push them away, or break them, or slip free of them. I simply willed them not to be. I envisioned what my limbs would feel like coming free, and focused on that reality, summoning up my total concentration on that goal, that ideal, that fact.

And then I crossed my fingers and reached into me, into the place where a covert archangel had granted me access to one of the primal forces of the universe, an energy called soulfire. I had no idea how it might interact with the Winter Knight’s mantle on an ongoing basis. I mean, it had worked out once before, but that didn’t mean that it would keep working out. I felt certain that I was pretty much swallowing bottles of nitroglycerin, then jumping up and down to see what would happen, but at this point I had little to lose. I gathered up soulfire, used it to infuse my raw will, and cast the resulting compound against my bonds.

Soulfire, according to Bob, is one of the fundamental forces of the universe, the original power of creation. It isn’t meant for mortals. We get it by slicing off a bit of our soul, our life energy, and converting it into something else.

Bob is brilliant, but there are some things that he just doesn’t get. His definition was a good place to get started, but it was also something that was perhaps too comfortably quantifiable. The soul isn’t something you can weigh and measure. It’s more than just one thing. Because soulfire interacts with souls in a way that I’m not sure anyone understands, it stands to reason that soulfire isn’t just one thing, either.

And in this case, in this moment, I somehow knew exactly what the soulfire did. It converted me, my core, everything that made me who I was, into energy, into light. When I turned my joined will and the blazing core of my being together, I wasn’t supercharging a magical spell. I wasn’t cleverly finding a weak point in an enchantment. I wasn’t using my knowledge of magic to exploit what my enemy was doing.

I was casting everything I had done, everything I believed, everything I had chosen—everything I was—against the will of an ancient being of darkness, terror, and malice, a fundamental power of the world.

And the bonds and the will of Mother Winter could not constrain me.

There was a

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