Frayed Ties (Ties, Book 1) | ✓

Chapter 8

It was also extremely uncomfortable. Energy was naturally drawn into a mage when it was close to them, so pulling it out of himself and holding it at a distance felt wrong. Like he was trying to turn himself inside out. Every time he managed to make progress, his energy would escape his grasp and suck back into him.

He tried painting it with a glowing light, as the book suggested, and that helped a little bit. It was easier to perceive it as an external object that way and easier to manipulate it when he didn't have to hold the visual aspects of it entirely in his mind.

He broke the energy up into threads and practised moving them in front of him. At first they moved around without much grace, like cooked spaghetti, but with a little focus he managed to bend them into geometric shapes and then arrange them into patterns. Interlocking hexagons was what the book recommended for a shield.

The hardest part of the whole thing was fighting the reflex to pull his energy back into himself, but once that stopped feeling quite so unnatural the whole thing wasn't so hard at all. He practised dropping his shield and pulling it back up quickly. It still made his head spin and his stomach churn, but he could do it.

He held the curved, hexagonal grid out in front of him and let himself fall forward against Simon's armour chest. The chest slid against the ground. The shield held strong. He could do this.

Danya collapsed down on his cot, his head spinning, and let out a long breath. Maybe nobody else would ever know, but he had done it. The power of his ancestors was alive in him. Danya tried to push himself up and immediately dropped back down as the whole world swung to the side.

Panic set in in a strange, throbbing way — too intense one minute and then fading to detached apathy the next. He was out of balance. He had been, increasingly, as he recovered, but the sudden drain on his energy had knocked him completely out of alignment. He felt sick and starving and desperate and absolutely nothing at all, and everything at once, and then — and then some uncertain time later, Simon was back.

"You awake?" Simon asked. His voice sounded weird, like it was warped.

Danya managed to make a sound that was vaguely affirmative.

"You hungry?"

His limbs felt weird as he sat up, like they didn't really belong to him but he could give them instructions and they would probably obey. More or less.

A chunk of cheese appeared in his hand... somehow. Simon must have given it to him, but the part of his memory where that happened was missing. There were two bread rolls on a sheet of paper in front of him as well.

He shoved the cheese into his mouth and discovered he had forgotten how to chew. He gnashed his jaws repeatedly, letting cheese fall in slobbery pieces down the front of his robe, then swallowed what remained in his mouth.

Simon was talking again, but it didn't really sound like anything. He was so handsome. Danya reached out to touch his face, and then he was leaning over, throwing up on the floor.

Everyone was very close, and then the world felt a little less tilty. Wait, everyone? Danya reached up and smacked someone in the face, and then an unfamiliar man calmly pushed his arm back down.

"Do the two of you have an intimate relationship?" the man asked Simon, and then pushed Danya's arm back down when it smacked him in the face again.

"I don't see how that's any of your business," Simon said. He was sitting in front of Danya, but not touching. Bad.

"It's relevant, but I suppose I don't need your answer. It's clear enough from the state of him."

"I didn't do anything to him!"