He speaks.

He speaks with his arm this time, reaching it back, into the streams, and arcing it forward as fast as he can. It joins with the Voice to which his body has been tuned, thinning veils, merging planes, phasing with the dreamscape world and calling an imagined something from the space between the two. A double-bolus appears in his hand. Twin balls of blinding light, bound by no force he can see, which are assigned corporeal weight as he accelerates his hand, and reach their necessary mass just in time for him to release them with his throw. They hurtle across the space of the circle, neither rising on the winds nor falling to the earth, as fast as if he’d thrown a dagger, each orbiting around other like two halves of a binary star. Ylo watches them intently, tracking their progress, sensing their strength, as they approach the figure on the other side. A spark of hope flashes inside him as he prepares his Voice again, readying another chord. Maybe, just maybe, it could really be that easy…

They stop when they are a pace away and fall, lifeless, to the beach. Their light winks out, and for an instant they are solid, balls of matted, leaden grey. Then they are gone, returned to the rifts from whence they came, and all that remains are two plebian dents in the ground, where the shells that make it up are just a bit more crushed than they were before.

He tries not to feel let down. He had no right to expect it to land, he tells himself. It was an inchoate attack, a cheap shot he’d hoped to use to paralyze his foe’s preparations and cement his early lead. He shouldn’t be surprised it failed. He had selected that Voice for defensive reasons, anyways. Any offense he got out of it would have just been gravy.

And, uh…speaking of?

Right…

Now he speaks with both his hands, throwing them forward, facing outward, spreading his palms in a starburst of fingers just as the figure opposite him gestures toward him with its hand. A barrier explodes before him, spreading like a supernova from the locus of his thrust. He speaks with his heart as well, lending it structure, desire, passion and life, instilling in it the strength it needs to repel assaults of epic power, giving it the depth to ward against advances of cunning and guile.

But it is useless anyways.

He wasn’t sure what to expect out of the figure. The gesture wasn’t one he knew, the figure not one he can read. It could have gone a number of ways, from a Somme-like bombardment of shells designed to grind him down with sheer fatigue to a swift assassination meant to end it bloodlessly, to a single megaton explosion to try and blast him from the earth, to a probing sacrificial lamb, too pathetic to pose any real threat of its own but able to learn, interpret, react and report. But this…this is none of these.

It is a deep, subsuming warble, felt more than heard at first, the airy whisper of a ghost, the breathing in before the scream. It reaches an immediate crescendo, filling every dram of the circle, respecting nothing of the barrier. It hits him like a solid thing, knocking him back to the edge of the circle. The world slues. Perspective shifts, and senses pitch in a sickening combination of slurring and skewing. The world seems to separate into layers for a moment, twisting, warping, and stretching apart in awkward ways, creating gaps that shouldn’t be. Sound blends, its different sources, volumes and styles piling up upon themselves, losing all identity in a mad rush to reach his ears. His skin prickles in alternating bands of heat and cold. His connection with his Voices slips, and he can sense them trying to eel away, fleeing from this unsure thing. He reaches for them, groping semi-blindly in the funhouse world the circle has become, and, with some effort, opens himself up to one, and to it he attunes himself…