Chapter Twenty-Eight

It made sense, I thought dully, as I watched Andrew realizing what had just happened. That was the worst part in some ways. It made total sense. I could have seen it coming a mile away if I’d stopped and thought about it. Andrew looked down at the sword now protruding from his chest. He was dead; his body just hadn’t figured it out yet. The strike was placed well, cutting through the spine. I was betting it was charged silver, too. Coming on top of all the other injuries, I was quite sure he was dead.

Audgrim, who had only ever agreed to work together until the hunt was concluded, pushed the dying werewolf off of his sword. Andrew fell to the grass. It felt like everything was moving in slow motion. Audgrim turned on Jack next, while the exhausted druid was just beginning to process what had happened. He didn’t stab Jack, though, perhaps feeling like he wouldn’t be able to cut through that magically reinforced coat. He just punched the other man hard in the face.

It was enough. Jack was already injured and running on fumes, and at the end of the day, as strong as Jack Tar was, underneath all the magic he was only human. Audgrim was stronger than a human, wearing heavy steel gauntlets. Jack went down hard, and he didn’t get back up. Audgrim, as I’d known he would, turned towards me next.…

Magical Mechanics

Magic in this setting obeys a lot of rules, and they aren’t all obvious at a glance. Since the mechanisms and effects are starting to come up in more depth, I thought I’d talk about that, because they very much do matter. And they actually have more in common than you might think with theoretical physics in the real world. This is going to be a particularly lengthy discussion, and while it may come up over the course of the story, including it directly in the narration would be quite a bit of needlessly-technical exposition. So, while it might be an interesting example of how I think about the setting, it’s not necessary information to understand the story. That said, here are the basic rules about how magic works and where its limits are.…

Mages and Humanity

Now that you’ve seen more of what mages are capable of, the question arises: Are mages human? This is a question that’s kind of interesting to look at, and it isn’t as simple to answer as it might seem. There are a number of elements that have to be considered to really assess it. The first, and probably the most intractable, part is: At what point does someone stop being human?

Certainly they started out human. But Kyoko thinks of vanilla humans and mages as being very distinct categories, and in some ways she has a point. How much humanity can someone shed and still be reasonably called human?…

Chapter Twenty-Seven

It was a smaller group, now, that was pushing on through the forest. One of the wolves was dead, and as I understood it the escorts watching our collective back had also suffered losses, a wolf to a silver bullet and two of Audgrim’s people to constructs. Richard’s shoulder was cut badly, and also dislocated. He had to retreat; there was just no point in dragging him onward, he’d get killed without accomplishing much. Similarly, Melissa was in no state to be fighting, and while the wolf who took two silver bullets in the chest was still alive, they’d be lucky to stay that way even with treatment and rest.

So, we were down people. Losing Richard, in particular, was an issue; the pyromancer was our biggest single threat after Jack, I was pretty sure. At least against groups. I wouldn’t bet on him in single combat against, say, Andrew or Capinera, but when it came to wiping out whole swathes of people in an instant, it was hard to beat fire magic. It was going to be harder to get through the swarms of constructs without him.

Andrew and Cassie conferred briefly, then had another two wolves join us. That left the rear guard rather sparse, particularly given that the group of wounded needed an escort to get out of the forest safely. Audgrim had wanted to have them chance it, arguing that Richard was still capable of defending them and most of the constructs behind us were already destroyed. Then he saw the wolves, Jack, Capinera, and me all just staring at him in a very unimpressed way. He knew better than to keep pushing at that point.…

Chapter Twenty-Six

I was not prepared for what came next.

In some ways, I had been overconfident, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that my opinion of myself had been lower than was warranted. It was true that I had been around violence a lot of times. It was true that there were periods of my life where it felt normal. It was even true that some of those fights had escalated far enough that I’d seen people getting killed.

But what I was discovering now was that those had been, well, fights. Many had been pretty much just brawls between vanilla humans. Some had involved other creatures—werewolves a few times, Audgrim and once another dvergr, mages—but they were still relatively small in scale. They had been solidly something you would call a fight.

What I discovered now was that this had not remotely prepared me for what I had to imagine counted as a small battle, or at the very least a skirmish.…

Chapter Twenty-Five

While I was talking with Cassie, the last few people had arrived. One was a woman on a motorcycle I recognized from Softened Dreams, but hadn’t ever spoken with. I wasn’t sure what she was; her magic smelled cold, like snow and wind and the polar night where the sun doesn’t rise for weeks and the only light is that of stars and aurora. Definitely not human, but no clue what she actually was.

The last to arrive was a bit more of a surprise. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting there, but it definitely wasn’t Melissa driving a beat-up old jeep. The fact that she had Capinera in the passenger seat was really just icing on the cake.

I walked over to where they were getting out and grabbing their stuff. “What are you doing out here?” I asked. I was legitimately confused by their presence; I just wouldn’t have expected to see either of them out here, wasn’t sure who would have even asked them.…