normally his mountaintop calmed him, today it made him cold.
He’d committed treason last night, and he wasn’t even sure he regretted it. He had to get out of here before Celka’s burning belief and the wretched gaze of hungry villagers bruised his loyalty. He had to imbue and return home, gain his father’s trust and save his friends.
Imagining Filip waiting for him beside Hana and Darina and all the junior imbuement and strazh cadets, Gerrit fought his way back to true-life, struggling to leave sousednia completely behind. They needed his help. He had to imbue for them.
The next bolt of Gods’ Breath lanced fire down his spine, but his hold on true-life barely shook.
Unfolding the napkin wrapping his uneaten lunch, Gerrit knelt. He would start with a hunger imbuement—further from his core nuzhda and therefore harder to pull against, less likely to consume him the way combat had. Holding half his sandwich, he embraced the hollow ache in his belly from the skipped meal.
When he’d started Storm Guard training at age seven, they’d locked him in a cell of cold granite, the Song of Feeding engraved on one wall, a nuzhda bell hanging beside it. He’d thought the test would last only a few hours. He’d rung a nuzhda bell after fasting for Feeding Miracles before. But they’d pricked his finger and dripped his blood onto this bell, claiming it would help him see the weaves and understand what he needed to do.
Four days later, his fists ached from pounding on the door. Screaming had left his throat raw. They’d given him water and a bucket for waste, and the cell stunk of his own excrement. He hardly noticed over the hunger scraping his ribs.
“Please.” Gerrit’s voice echoed weirdly in the snake trailer as he let the ache in his stomach consume true-life.
Slumped against the stone wall, Gerrit chews on his scratchy wool blanket, reading the Song of Feeding until his eyes blur with tears.
A spinach-green glow pulses through the blur. He squints, wipes his eyes. Weak, certain he’s delirious, he crawls beneath the nuzhda bell, hearing the hitching rhythm of his own exhausted breath echoing from it. Parts of the bell glow brighter, and he strains to touch them. A smell like grilling meat makes him salivate. He whimpers, wanting to cry for the guards to feed him. Instead, he levers himself to his feet, leaning on the wall.
Closer to the bell, he hears nuance in its rhythm. Matching the sound with his breath, he discovers intricate glowing swirls. Unable to reach the bell with his hands, he strains with his thoughts, imagining the distance vanished, imagining touching the four brightly glowing points to his eyes, his nose, his mouth.
The taste of grilling meat floods his tongue. Strength jolts him, and he straightens with a gasp.
Distantly, he hears the bell ringing, hears a bolt slamming back and boots clomping into the cell, but he can’t turn away from the glow, can’t think around the ache in his stomach and the taste filling his mouth.
In the snake trailer, Gerrit locked his sousednia in that moment.
Salivating, he strengthened the cell walls in his hunger-warped sousednia then stepped outside them, icy wind stealing his breath. In his core sousednia, the bozhskyeh storm tugged against his spine. His focus shuddered.
Teeth clenched, he split his attention, reaching a third thread of his thoughts into true-life. Staring at the half sandwich in his hands, he pulled it into his snowy sousednia then returned to that hunger-warped part of himself.
There, he struggled to keep from shoving the sandwich into his mouth. But it would do so little for his hunger; he needed it to become more. The green glow of hunger nuzhda seeped from his hands into the bread, and he wove the hiccupping sound of his exhausted breath around it.
The storm yanked at his skull.
Panting, Gerrit forced himself to ignore its pull. This time, he would make no mistakes.
Shifting his focus outside his mental walls, he breathed deep of sousednia’s alpine freshness. Through the cell’s observation slot, he peered into his hunger-warped sousednia, meticulously inspecting his weaves, checking for frayed edges that could shatter beneath the flow of storm energy. A regular, simple rhythm filled the cell, befitting a Category One imbuement. It would increase the sandwich’s nutrition and hunger satisfaction by a factor of three. Such a modest increase on a small object would require hardly any storm energy to crystalize. Even if something went wrong, he’d hold true-life.