The shift hit him suddenly, without any warning at all. Usually he felt like he stepped backwards and the badger forwards, but this time, Riordan just was his badger, changing between the space of one strained breath and the next, standing on the ground where he’d been kneeling a moment before.

The sheer joy of finally being able to let this side of himself out again--the first time since his magical system had gotten split--gave way to the righteous anger of a pissed off honey badger. His mind filled with the fierce determination and fight of his badger side, pushing back fear or worry.

The tendrils flailed at the empty air where Riordan’s body had been. His physical shape changed and shrunk with the shift, no longer existing in the space it had been grabbing at. The tendrils lacked a conscious mind, but their targeting system needed to reclassify Riordan.

Riordan didn’t give the spell the time to react. Biting through fur and tough loose skin with those tiny mouths wouldn’t be easy, but he was also a hell of a lot smaller now. If the tendrils could wrap up a damned moose, they could certainly constrain a badger.

Riordan scampered forward, his low-slung body twisting and winding through the tendrils. His flexibility was backed by enhanced strength to jerk free of the first attempts to grab him. He slipped past Maudy’s hooves, her stamping becoming less frequent as she began to fall to her knees, and reached the magical circle spawning the damned tendrils.

In all the other rooms in the basement, even the one where the zombies had been stored, the spells had been discharged before the team reached them. They had let their guard down and failed to consider why the room was so undamaged when they reached it, despite obviously being a place to make charms and other spells. The work room had either been deliberately excluded from the destruction spell or its own wards had protected it until that spell had moved onwards to the rest of the complex.

If this magic circle wasn’t directly related to the destruction spell, then it must have been a trap. Something about them triggered the effect, likely the moment Ingrid passed a certain proximity. Riordan couldn’t imagine that the three death mages would have set something this dangerous up in the middle of their work room unless its effect only triggered on strangers or other unauthorized access. Then again, they were a mix of crazy and ignorant, so what did he know?

But now Riordan was left with a conundrum. Specifically, how the hell did he break a magic circle safely?

As he paused to consider the circle, the tendrils caught up, wrapping around his middle. Riordan suppressed the automatic urge to whip his head around to bite it. The inside of his mouth lacked the protections of his outsides and he hardly wanted a tendril biting his tongue. Instead, Riordan reached out a paw and dug his claws into the black thing, tearing at it with claws capable of ripping up asphalt.

The tendril resisted his counter attack before slowly tearing, its detached end falling limply to the ground and dissipating into even more death-aligned energy to fill the air. Another tendril eagerly came to take its place.

Riordan couldn’t focus on the tendrils. Fighting them directly was a losing battle of attrition. He needed to cut off the source at the circle.

Once again, Riordan cursed his misspent youth. He’d had opportunities to learn more about formal casting, but his damn pride in being a shifter and only a shifter got in the way. He’d never wanted to be a pack shaman and he’d rejected the idea that he could be anything else.

It didn’t help that Riordan had little opportunity to fight other mages before now. Why would he have? In a community as relatively small as theirs, outright warfare was highly discouraged. Conflicts should be resolved in other manners, which led to all sorts of strange traditions and competitions. Mostly though, he’d fought for humans against other humans, just using his shifter gifts to give him an edge.

He had some experience with fighting other shifters, though usually not to the death, and then the last few missions of his mercenary pack put him in conflict with the magical community. It had been smaller things, spying and stealing and so forth, until that last stupid mission, but it still should have been one hell of a red flag.

Of course, his mercenary pack had their own shaman. Kwaku had been more than happy to handle any wards or magical trouble they ran across. Riordan’s role as vanguard had been to draw attention and buy time.

Now he had a fancy circle inscribed into the floor, spewing out shadows, and no clear plan of what to do about it.

Well, shit, there was no time to get fancy or worry about safety, so Riordan started with the obvious. He looked for any parts of the circle that looked important and began to claw them up.

The floor itself was bare concrete here. Likely it had once been covered in carpet like the rest of the basement, beige and boring, but that was long gone. Riordan’s badger claws weren’t enough to tunnel through concrete with any real efficiency, but they scratched up the surface and circle in nice gouges.

Magic began to bleed from the circle in shadowy wisps, briefly visible even on the physical realm.

The tendrils latched on tighter to the bitten mages, drawing magic from them even faster to shore up the damaged spell, wisps of other colors bleeding into the roil around the circle before during black as death. Riordan could practically feel their wells emptying. And once the wells were empty…

Ahlgren said the spell was trying to eat their affinities. Riordan had never heard of such a concept, but trusted the agent knew what he was talking about. That sounded like permanent damage. As fast as the spell was draining them, he only had a few minutes at most before it got to that stage. At least he hoped that stage wouldn’t start until their wells were drained.

Riordan needed to cut the tendrils off in one fell swoop so they couldn’t keep patching up the spell with stolen energy. The circle should collapse quickly without that aid.

That meant either a miracle of physical destruction against the tendrils--without hitting his allies somehow--or casting a spell to do the same.

Casting meant being human again, which Riordan wasn’t sure he could manage. The tendrils swarmed at him now, hungry and desperate, wrapping around his small body. As convenient as becoming smaller had been for slipping their first hold on him, it worked against him now. And even if Riordan did manage to go human, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to do a partial shift in time.

Shifting would result in Riordan being bitten and drained right along with the rest. His honey badger was designed to resist bites. His human side was not. The teeth on the mouths were short and not particularly strong. There were just a ton of them, each seeking a weak point to bite. Eventually one of them would get lucky.

Casting was done in human form because it usually required chanting or gestures or manipulating foci. All the spells Riordan had jury-rigged up before his system got split relied on those things. But those were crutches to focus a paradigm, not an essential part of casting.

All he really needed was to attach his intention to his magic and then somehow to his target. And then get it to move. Intention, mana, medium, trigger.

He had intention and mana. That part wasn’t the hard bit, at least not for him. Riordan had a firm willpower and good visualization, which all lent itself to the ability to hold an intention in mind.

A trigger could be a simple thing, just some key thing to signify the transition from thinking about a spell to making that spell do something. The spirit realm was so reactive that it often triggered just from a strong intention, but first, this was the physical realm and second, Riordan wanted casting to happen when he meant it and not before. He could probably get away with a simple gesture that even a badger could do.

That left the medium. That was the way in which Riordan defined and attached the spell to its constraints, such as a target. The more codified or solid or resonant the medium was, the easier the spell became. He couldn’t do some big chant and hand gestures. He couldn’t make his own magic circle. He didn’t have rocks to imbue. He needed something that was easily available and strongly resonant, because he wasn’t going to do a neatly codified spell as a badger.

If he was being sane about this, then he needed to set some conditions in there too. Unfortunately, Riordan doubted he’d have time to come up with a system for adding conditions to his casting on the fly.

He needed time, damn it. He wanted to be able to make his foundations not in the middle of a crisis for once! Despite what everyone had to think about him, Riordan didn’t actually enjoy winging it with magic.

Of course, Riordan had no time. Well, it wasn’t the first time. Wouldn’t be the last. Unless they all died here, but Riordan was determined not to let that happen.

He searched his mind and surroundings for an appropriate spell medium to use as a fucking honey badger with no time for finesse. The side tables held materials for charms, whether in the forms of jewelry or bone bits or bullets. The mess was eclectic and unfamiliar, at least as far as their magical properties. He didn’t have time to sort through the resonance of the items there.

The altar held religious and spiritual items. There were elements that Riordan recognized from Hinduism and Buddhism, but it was mostly subsumed by pseudo-pagan goddesses, which were the root of the Daughters of the Divine Feminine, a goddess in four parts. Religion was a mess for Riordan and he generally considered himself agnostic these days. This was not the time to take of a magical faith and hope it worked.

Then his eyes fell on the bowls full of disgusting old blood on the altar just as a tendril got a lucky bite on his snout. Blood welled up even as he felt a tug against his well. Against both wells. The drain was small and shared, letting Riordan fight off the wave of fatigue and blankness that came with the bite.

But blood. Riordan had never let himself consider blood as a spell medium because it was the root of, well, the blood affinity, which was a part of death magic, which had corruption.

Except Riordan already had the blood affinity and was immune to the corruption.