Mazelton didn’t fall far- short pony, big bush. It was like he had been kicked in the chest, then a burning pain. He felt short of breath, suddenly short of breath. The echo of the report boomed off the mountains, he couldn’t process what it was for a moment, as he was tangled up in the bush. It was spikey, so he kept rolling. Another report and something whipped through the bush, tearing up the spot where he had just been. He could hardly breathe, but he scrambled behind one of the big trees. The wood was full of big trees, thick, old wood. Thick canopies. Not much underbrush once you got away from the road. Not many places to hide.

His eyes rolled wildly, as he pressed his hand to his chest. It wasn’t sucking. The ribs were broken, but the wound wasn’t sucking. He was having a hard time breathing, but not as bad as he should have been if the lung collapsed. His eyes darted left and right as he whipped his head around, trying to find cover. There! A tree had fallen over, leaving a big hole. He darted for it, trying to stay as low as possible. Moving was awful- sharp stabbing pain in his chest, it hurt every time he breathed, and he was hyperventilating now. No more shots. Maybe they couldn’t see him. Were they waiting, covering the road? He collapsed into the hole, trying to get his breath. Maybe they were hunting him.

He tried to catch his breath, but it hurt. Every time he breathed. It hurt. He was being hunted. They were coming for him. They HAD come for him! He had to run, but he couldn’t breathe!

“Panic is a weapon. Your weapon. You do not permit others to use it against you.” East Guardian rolled her chair with considerable grace, seeming to flick the rims as it glided across the frozen dirt. Her legs were gone from the hips down. Mazelton never found out how that happened, but it didn’t seem to interfere with her duties.

“You do not panic. Panic is fear magnified. Fear is the anticipation of pain. Pain is your mind interpreting damage in your body. Telling you that there is something that should be fixed, or avoided. Panic is you, responding to information, at three degrees of abstraction. And you are better than that. You do not panic. You acknowledge the fear. You acknowledge the pain. Then you look at the information, and do something about it. Calmly. Because it is your mind, and your body, and you are in control.” She looked calmly over the shivering, naked children. They were lined up next to the river. It was snowing, and a thin layer of ice had already grown along the edges of the water.

“You will swim down the river, to where West Guardian is waiting. It is very cold. Painful. It feels like stabbing needles, that kind of cold. You feel like you can’t breathe. But you can. Swim. When you get to West Guardian, come out of the water, and run for the shelter a league from here. Some of you will die. Those who panic. The lazy. The weak. But that’s up to you.” She smiled gently at them. “Jump. Now. Or I will kill you myself.”

Mazelton focused on his breathing. It was just meditation. Controlled breathing. He did it every day and every night. He could do it now. He half lidded his eyes, trying to imagine his breath as a great orbit of energy, pouring out of his mouth, down through his groin and up through his spine, then into his nose as he inhaled and started the cycle again. Breathing. It hurt. It still hurt. But he could breathe. He was in control.

He remembered the sharpshooters up on the mountain when Mendiluze went to confront Policlitus. He never saw them, until they got up and walked off the mountain. Even when he thought he saw them, he was wrong. They might as well be invisible. So. Enemies you cannot see, using weapons vastly more powerful than anything you have, with a range measured in the hundreds of yards. Experts at hunting people, and killing at range. This was literally their life’s work. He breathed another cycle. His choices were run, hide or fight back.

Run- where? How? They were between him and the caravan, and the Caravan was two days' travel ahead of him. Run east? Where? How? With no supplies or equipment bar his belt knife? With a hole through his chest? He might as well just kill himself, it would be faster and less painful. He couldn’t run.

Hiding, perhaps combined with a… strategic relocation in the short term? Once the search radius expanded past a certain point, hunting became functionally impossible. They couldn’t have sent too many people after him. They would be limited in what ground they could cover. But it was the same old problem- “What next?” No food, no water, no shelter. Dead in at most three days. Likely less, with the chest wound. And they didn’t have to search the whole forest for him, they could just cover the road. Keep between him and home.

Fight. With a knife, against invisible attackers with rifles, who live for this kind of battle. Holy warriors, hunting the cannibal necromancer who had cursed their honorable company, and murdered their beloved elder. They probably fought for the privilege of killing him.

Mazelton didn’t dream for even one second that he could be rescued. That just wasn’t a thing that could happen. His life and death was in his own hands. He breathed in. Held it. Breathed out.

He had to change the terms of the engagement. This was their battle ground. Their chosen field. Presumably they had picked it because it gave them every advantage. Fire? He looked around. There was leaf litter on the ground, and things looked pretty dry. A high mix of pine and fir. Those went up like torches. But all his handy little fire starters were safely packed away in his saddle bags. He knew you could strike a spark with steel and flint. He didn’t know what flint looked like. And he couldn’t imagine the snipers sitting around while he tried to start a forest fire. If he even could survive a forest fire. With a hole in his chest. No, he probably couldn’t change the environment.

His chest hurt. His ribs were broken. But it was manageable. He was just crouched in a hole. It was manageable. He would deal with any infection later. He was pretty used to dealing with infections. No big deal. It was manageable.

He needed something that could completely change the calculus of the battle. Something that they could not have anticipated, and that they had no counter to. The horror leapt to mind. Sitting safe in its jar. In his saddlebags, on the cheve. He tried to listen. Could he hear the cheve? No. Wait. A tearing noise, like something was being ripped up. A bush shook up a racket, a hundred yards away.

The lazy beast had run off, then stopped for a bite. Mazelton was always fighting with the little bastard, trying to keep it from eating with the bit in its mouth. Who was going to have to clean that, all covered in foamy green slime? Him. Because he was very unlikely to reach the camp tonight and persuade a teamster to look after his tack. The sheer injustice of it all made him forget his situation, until his broken ribs nudged him with a fire poker and brought him right back.

Alright, the cheve was a hundred yards closer to the wagons than he was, and still mostly on the road. Presumably they had eyes on the horse. Him reaching the horse and trying to run away was a pretty plausible scenario. He would be on the lookout for it, if he was them.

He looked around, breathing hard but more calmly now. He would have to move from cover to cover as best he could, without knowing where the snipers were. Snipers liked high places and long grass. Places they could maneuver from in cover. Would they hold still, waiting to catch him on the road again? No way. They would move. Reposition. Even if they weren't actively closing in on him, they would be trying to find an angle that would give them a better line of sight into the trees.

Oh. Happy thought. He had no way of knowing how many of “them” were here. A single skilled sniper? A team of two? Of ten? What was the Collective’s Marksman tactical doctrine? He had no damn idea, because it had never mattered before today. Such fun he was having.

There was another good sized tree about twenty feet west-northwest of him. It took him a little further away from the road, and there was a decent rock along the way. He did his best to tuck a handkerchief over the chest hole, and tried very hard to ignore the fact that there was nothing covering the exit hole. It was very odd, feeling air get into his chest that way, and not at all nice. But pain was just information. He had the information. Survival was more important than pain.

Mazelton creeped out of the hole, crawling with his belly barely above the ground. Hunters used the corners of their eyes, he remembered. They looked for movement. So he moved slow, and low. He used every bit of rock or shrub to break up his form, make him look like something other than a man crawling in the dirt. He was exhausted by the time he reached the tree. He couldn’t hear the snipers. Nothing but that hungry cheve, and his own struggling breath.

And then he looked around for the next tree, because he was going to have to do it all over again. It took more than an hour, and the bastard fucking cheve had jogged a bit further down the trail, but he finally caught up. He was soaked in sweat, filthy, almost crying with pain, leaking blood and plasma and utterly exhausted and somehow all of that just served as the plate presenting the fecal extravaganza he was to dine on. He was fucked. Completely and utterly.

The cheve was standing quite happily in a gentle bend of the road, head down, cropping the soft grasses growing there. Nice, open bend. The trees cut well back from the trail. And a wonderful view up to the mountainside overlooking the road. The sniper would have to be stone blind to miss him from there. There was nowhere to hide. He could see the horse. He could see the saddlebag with the horror in it. It looked so close. Like trying to pick the Moon from the sky, pinching the vast empty with his fingers.

He put his back to the tree and slid down, getting as low to the ground as he could. He tried to focus on his breathing, and not thinking about what that little sliding maneuver shoveled into the bullet hole. Breathe. Hold. Breathe. Hold. Ok, so he needed the horror. No plan B, needed it. In order to deploy, the jar had to be open and power fed into the base of the jar. Or… power the jar, then open it. Yes, that sounded right. Wake the thing up, open the lid and turn the fucker loose. It would kill everyone not right next to the jar. And then he would get it back. Somehow.

Ok, he couldn’t get to the jar. Which meant that he couldn’t slap a core into it. Was there a way to power it without getting a core into it? Mazelton thought about it, desperately trying to remember everything he could about transmitting heat over distance. The more frantic he felt, the less he could think or remember. He had to breathe. No rush. The other guys were more nervy than he was, they were anxiously waiting for their shot. He could wait, and breathe.

Mazelton tried to remember. He knew it could be done as a weapon, or means of communication. That was just… different sorts of heat transmitting, right? But using them to power a machine was something entirely different. Power over distance was really electricity’s game. Radiation struggled with air, bouncing off every little thing. It took a lot of energy to push those energetic little particles any kind of distance. Helped if you had some kind of tool to direct them too. And he had neither. He had a couple of mediocre, barely polished cores.

He kept coming back to the image of the Stone God. Hovering with invulnerable majesty, directing blasts of energy into the carvings in the hills around it. He pictured the black sun, cycling energy.

He looked at the saddle bag, and the forest around him. It’s not like there was no heat around him. He just had to, you know, do something completely fucking impossible to get it.

He reached into his pouch and pulled out the biggest core he had. About the size of a big pea. It must have been a damn old tree. Mazelton closed his eyes, and just… gently pushed out some of the heat in it. Just let it flow out into the air. And as the heat went out, he cast around for another source of heat to draw on. Usually he had to be touching it. Better still would be if the heat was already on his body or in his flesh. But this time, he stretched his senses into the tree he was leaning against, found its core, and gently pulled it. See the heat leaving this core? It’s making space for you. A hole for your heat to run down into. Come on. It will work. That’s definitely how radioactive decay works. Let’s just reverse entropy for a holyfuckitsworking!

In absolute defiance of everything Mazelton thought he knew about moving heat, the tree’s core sent it heat out through the sap and wood. It flowed towards him, through him, and into the core. He kept pushing it out, further and further, reaching towards the saddle bag. To that empty void that he just knew he could fill up with heat.

He didn’t know how long it took, but moment by moment, he filled up that hole. The jar started glowing in his heat-sight. Something inside of it started moving. It started unscrewing the lid from the inside. He kept pouring in power.

Something, he couldn’t tell what, was unscrewing the jar, and when the lid was off, it pushed it to the side in the saddle bag. It crept out of the jar, seemed to poke around the saddle bag for a moment, and then made its way up. It seemed to struggle with the canvas flap for a moment, then neatly bypassed the problem by poking a neat hole through the fabric. One tentacle reached through the hole. Then another. And another. And another. The Horror of the Bo was creeping out into the world, for the first time in an epoch. And Mazelton had no way to get it back in the jar.