exhaled relief, but gave himself only a moment to rest in his sunlit alpine clearing before stepping his attention through sousednia’s granite walls.
Desperation stole his breath, and Gerrit fell to his knees, gripping his revolver with bound hands. Teeth bared, he fired at a rezistyent kicking his mother. The pistol’s report cracked the frozen air, and Gerrit shifted reality, echoing the sound off his mental walls, shaping the resonance that would magically sharpen his knife.
The fraction of his consciousness immersed in his combat-warped sousednia wanted to fire again and again, kill all the hail-eaters, smash their dog faces into the blood already frozen on the ground. But most of his focus remained in his core sousednia, surrounded by sun and snow—so he resisted.
Filip’s hand pressed against the back of his neck again, and Gerrit let one thread of his attention follow that sensation back to the rainy field. This time, when Gerrit drew his belt knife, he felt only the calm clarity that settled over him sometimes in field exercises. He was deadly, he could kill, but he was in control.
Inside his mental walls, Gerrit twisted reality to better match true-life. Instead of a revolver, he gripped his combat knife. When he wrapped his pistol-report weaves around it, his combat nuzhda coalesced until the blade appeared drenched in blood.
Focusing on true-life, Gerrit ensured that he held all three realities distinctly so that pulling down Gods’ Breath would not damage his mind. His core sousednia, true-life, and his combat-warped sousednia were each clear if he shifted his focus—as though concentrating near to far.
Back in his core sousednia, the thread reaching from the base of his skull into the clouds had thickened, now practically a rope connecting him to the bozhskyeh storm. Filip’s crimson-violet strazh weaves grew from that same point, travelling down Filip’s heat-shimmer arm to dive into the ground.
Satisfied that he’d prepared his imbuement correctly, Gerrit mentally gripped his storm-thread. This was it, the moment he’d dreamed of his entire life. The moment he imbued.
With a yank, he called Gods’ Breath down into himself.
Darkness flickered in his periphery, then lightning struck. Agony sluiced through his body from the nape of his neck like his blood flash-boiling. Teeth gritted, he struggled to hold his focus. Before he could cry out, a wave of euphoria transformed the pain, and his vision burst into flames.
SNARLING, GERRIT FIRED his revolver at one of the resistance scum. The rezistyent jerked and clutched their chest, and Gerrit fired again, hitting another rezistyent kicking his mother. They stumbled, but drew their leg back for another kick. Gerrit fired again, screaming, his throat raw. The second rezistyent fell, and Gerrit shifted his aim, pulling the trigger again.
But somehow the first rezistyent he’d shot wasn’t dead. Gerrit screamed. He fired again and again. His revolver should have been empty, the resistance dogs should have been dead, but they weren’t. He kept screaming, kept firing. Again. Again.
Time seemed not to pass at all. Or maybe days had already passed when Gerrit spotted a red glow in his periphery. But he couldn’t stop firing or his mother would die. He pulled the trigger again, shooting a hail-eater with a mangy beard, but the glow beside Gerrit strengthened, yanking his attention around to where a figure wavered the color of blood. Not dark frozen blood like around his mother, but the brilliant crimson of blood fresh from a vein.
Before he knew what he was doing, Gerrit stumbled toward the glowing figure—a youth around his own age, familiar in some way that slipped from Gerrit like water. He snarled again, needing to raise his revolver and protect his mother—but instead, he reached out, touching the youth’s face. The figure’s crimson glow flowed over his hand, echoing with pistol reports, though Gerrit had stopped firing.
As he struggled to understand, the glow shifted, crimson shading aubergine, rippling lavender and marigold. The sounds changed too, subtly at first, a moan rising from the screams of injured rezistyenti, howling into wind across ice and snow.
Gasping, Gerrit reached for that howl with all his strength, needing in a way he didn’t understand to feel that wind on his face, needing sunlight to sear his eyes and chase away the grim half-light of brutal death. Yet something resisted.
The world in which his mother succumbed had become too real, the grunts and shouts and sick crack of metal on bone too clear in a way he didn’t understand but knew, suddenly, was wrong.
Straining harder, Gerrit gripped the figure’s rippling, half-real