I spent the morning finding the locations in town that Orleander had marked on the map, spending a few minutes at each location sinking into the meditative state required to ignite the Flow to disrupt the Inculid ritual. The results of my efforts were more dramatic, since the power pumped into the ritual had increased so much. Instead of just a wildfire, it was dumping lamp oil onto a mound of kindling and then lighting that on fire. With the touch of power, my will nearly exploded out into the Flow. The proportional knockback out of meditation wasn’t nearly as satisfying, though.

As I rode between each location, the people stumbled around in a lethargic haze, barely capable of conducting their business at all, and the worst part was that they didn’t even realize how impaired they were, as if the effect of the ritual being hidden from those affected had been baked into the power itself.

Each time I lit the wildfire in the Flow, the town around me snapped back into life. The effects of the ritual seemed to be cumulative, so even though it crept back in immediately after I cleared it out, the effects seemed to only gradually take hold. If left to work without my interference I had no doubt that eventually people would just drop to the ground in the street, passed out like a town full of drunks trying to get home the morning after a bender.

Finishing up at the last location, I rode back toward the north side of town, where the men at arms and other volunteers waited for something, anything, to happen. For all intents and purposes, they were soldiers, despite being a mix of guard, men at arms, volunteers from the town, and Ilfid vengeance seekers.

To my surprise, the soldiers didn’t seem to be as affected by the arrival of the Ilfid as I expected them to be. The Ilfid hadn’t been integrated directly into the other forces, the communication between them just didn’t exist and it would have just caused problems, but their presence had only caused a minor wave of unease. Even that seemed to be gone, the Ilfid mostly ignored by everyone, or viewed as a curiosity.

The human amongst them, I had trouble thinking of him as anything other than a slave, sat with the drone acting as translator, not being given any rest. He didn’t look all that tired despite everything. Maybe there were more benefits to being ‘bound’ than there appeared. I left them to their own devices, surveying the line of soldiers for the shiniest, stupidest armor I could find.

I spotted Clyde almost immediately, strutting around blinding people with his armor who were just trying to be good soldiers minding their own business. I steered the horse in his direction, admiring the organization I saw around me. I doubt Clyde had seen fit to impose this kind of order on the men, and some women too it looked like. I’d bet money on Orleander running interference.

Clyde spotted me well before I made it into speaking distance, his peacocking interrupted, waiting for me to approach. I dismounted, finding something to tie the horse’s reins to, then found a nearby log to sit on.

“Your Grace.”

“Clyde.”

“We’re as ready as we can be without knowing what’s coming. Your messenger said that you think they are likely to attack today, but we haven’t seen anything change. The scouts haven’t reported any activity.”

“They’ll probably wait until the evening. Carvers don’t enjoy the daylight, as most things in the Labyrinth don’t, Ilfids being the exception I guess. In the meantime, I wouldn’t keep everyone on high alert, they should rest up as much as they can. Real rest, not that bullshit they’re trying to do to us.”

“As you wish.” Clyde sauntered off, gathering a few soldiers, what looked like his lieutenants, to him and handing out orders. He could have at least pretended to want to stick around to chat, the asshole. Not that I’d want him to. Maybe I needed more rest than I’d thought.

I stayed seated on my overturned log, taking the opportunity to rest. I let my senses bleed out into the Flow, looking for any changes, which there weren’t. I focused on my own mental strands, the strange constructs I didn’t even know I had until the bugs had shown me their own, and led me to discover them.

The mental tendrils, as much as they weirded me out, did something interesting. They extended the range of my sense of the currents beyond my normal limit, but they also extended the range of my ability to touch and affect the currents. I couldn’t do as much when I used them far away, and the cost in concentration and energy to make use of them irked me, but it showed me a capability I hadn’t been aware of.

I pushed my tendrils out into the forest, grunting with mental effort. Wherever they went, I gained a vague sense of the surroundings. Not enough to tell different plants apart, but enough to discern large objects and a nebulous sense of movement among the currents of the Flow. The further I pushed, the fewer tendrils I could control, until I only managed to maintain a single thread, reaching what I imagined to be halfway to the Labyrinth entrance.

With a grunt of effort, I gave it one last push before the connection broke and I opened my eyes. I stretched my neck out and sighed. This wasn’t the best time to be trying to learn new things, right on the cusp of battle, but I needed to learn their tricks before their tricks turned me into bug food, or whatever they wanted to do with us.

Looking around at the soldiers surrounding me, I examined them for signs of suppression. Fatigue definitely colored their movements and conversation, but I couldn’t discern anything out of the ordinary yet. My ritual shredding activities had been effective, but I needed to know how long I could let it go uninterrupted before the effects started to affect our activities again.

Drawing a refreshment rune in the air before me, I used a mental thread instead of my finger to poke it and empower it. I scrunched my nose up at the cost. It wasn’t terrible, but it cost me more in power and energy than just using my finger. It would allow me to do something, though, that I hadn’t been able to do before and still use my special blend of Flow and runes; it would free my hand up to use a shield. I hadn’t used a shield since the old days when I trained with my own soldiers, but it would prove useful against the Carvers.

Swiping my hand through the rune, I let the effects wash over me. It wouldn’t replace sleep, but it would do as a buffer for now. I rose to my feet, stretched, and retrieved my horse. Somehow had staked it out so it could munch on the sparse grass, and for that I thanked my mysterious helper. It had been too long since I had to take care of an animal and some things just didn’t register anymore, out of habit.

I mounted and rode off to the Baron’s estate. On the way, I let my mental threads leak out into the currents, seeing how far they would go without me putting any effort into maintaining them. By the time I arrived at the estate, I’d reached a sort of equilibrium with my mental tendrils. I could maintain a fair amount without any effort that reached most of the way through town to the spiked barricade, and if I was willing to sacrifice a few of them for less coverage, I could get them all the way there.

Satisfied with my experiments of the morning, I handed off my mount to industrious stable boy and looked around for Kan’on. His normal spot on the other side of the courtyard was empty, so I made my way inside to my lair.

Rearranging my mental threads through the manor, I let my consciousness sink into them, allowing the nebulous sense of everything paint a picture for me. Despite my efforts, I couldn’t discern any specific people from any other, only that people moved about here and there as people sized blobs, and figuring out who they were from their relative location. Too bad this new ability couldn’t sense smugness or Orleander would have shone like the sun.

And then I found Kan’on. I didn’t so much find him but that his presence in the Flow shredded my mental threads to ribbons. Thankfully, there was no pain associated with the loss, just effort to reform them. It wasn’t as though Kan’on didn’t cause me enough mental anguish already anyway, what would have been a little more.

If I could locate Kan’on so easily, or the space around which my tendrils turned to mulch, then no doubt the Inculids were already aware of him. I’d have to move up the timetable to teach him how to hide his will in the Flow. The impending attack left no time for it, so he’d end up being a beacon out on the battlefield, which I imagined would suit him just fine, seeing as how he was into that sort of thing, battle valor and all that martial hero stuff.

Satisfied that everyone and everything were doing what they were supposed to be doing, I let myself sink further into the lush chair, dozing off. The filaments of my mind undulated freely in the Flow, feeding me impressions of the world. I sank further and further toward sleep, the last vestiges of my conscious mind wholly occupied with the waving mental strands.

As the last of my consciousness fled, something big surfaced from deep within the Flow. Something vast. Its attention focused on me for a moment, curiosity leaking to me along the currents, then directed its attention elsewhere and I sank the rest of the way into unconsciousness.