At first, it was like lying in a dark room, cold enough that I’d lost sensation in my arms and legs. I started pushing with my will, like testing the muscles of my fingers and limbs. I breathed in and out slowly, continuing to apply more will against what faced me, sinking my mind into the weave of magical constructs within the stone.
They were old. Stars and stones, I could feel the age bound within the rock, the slow memory of the witness of millennia passing like days. The rock remembered ice covering the earth and retreating over and over. The rock remembered rain that lasted for hundreds of thousands of years. The rock remembered shocks of impact from stone hurtling through the void and the sweeping wind that followed, spinning off in explosions of myriad hurricanes. The rock remembered eons of molten fire and smoke—all primordial forces that regarded mere flecks of organic matter, like me, the way a mortal would note the passing of a speck of dust in a beam of sunlight.
Dimly, back in my physical body, I felt the stone of the castle begin to shake.
Layer upon layer of memory, of enchantment to enhance that memory, began to envelop me, spreading out over me and pressing down with a heavy, even weight, with a terrible gravity that I knew could have ripped my thoughts to pieces if I allowed it, the superdense supernatural energy showing me that the castle itself had gained its own form of slow and obdurate sentience. I kept focusing harder and harder, sinking myself into that gravity, holding my thoughts together.
As Bob began activating the castle’s enchantments, that gravity spread out, drawing toward it flowing rivers of natural magical energy in the earth—ley lines—drawing them toward it like a star being drawn into a black hole, like rivers caught in a massive earthquake suddenly forced to a new course.
I planted myself in the rock and stone. Anchored myself in my thoughts, in myself, as that energy coursed over me in a tidal flood of power, because before those forces, Iwasa speck of dust. But I knewwhoI was.
I was a man.
I was a father.
I was a protector.
I was imperfect and flawed.
I was stubborn as hell.
I was a fighter.
I was a helper.
I was someone who worked every day to be a better man than I’d been the day before.
I was someone who would not stand by doing nothing when there was a clear need for action.
I was a wizard.
I was Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden.
The enormous power of the energy of conjoined ley lines flowed over me, and I stood before it like a great tree before a flood, balanced and ready, roots sunk deep into the earth beneath me, swaying slightly before the pressure and then stubbornly pushing back.
Power washed through me. Pure power. Power that could bring a forest erupting up through the streets of Chicago. Power that could level it flat. Power that could destroy those who made me afraid. Power that could warp and bend and break reality itself.
Hell’s bells.
In that moment, I knew what it was to be a little-G god.
With power like that, there was no place for fear. No place for anger. No place for passion. No place for outrage. No place for desire.
Only focus.
Only balance.
Only restraint.
Only thought.
Only pure will.
This wasn’t like when a Titan had tried to crush my mind. This power wasn’t being directed and focused upon me with intent. It was simply power, wild and rushing and as primordial as the first day of Creation.
I bent my will to it, not trying to move that power—God, the very thought was so obviously impossible that I’d have been incinerated if I’d tried. I just tried to redirect a tiny portion of it, to guide it around me.
I shaped the channels in my thoughts, years and years of experience in working with spells, with power formulae, with elemental forces, coming together in a whole. I took that fraction of power, focusing upon it with the forces of Winter, and even with my eyes closed, I could suddenly see the burning white light of Soulfire pouring out of the runes of the staff I held in my left hand.
