Chapter 60 - Hold Your Breath

I snapped my eyes shut.

There was no time to waste. With how long it took me to grasp and pull right aspects, I was afraid that the fight will be over before I will finish my spell.

Alexandra warned me, both in the manual and personally, to not try to bite off more than I can chew. If an aura was too powerful, whether that be in brightness (like auras of supernatural creatures and items) or in size, careful control was vital for channelling them.

In my first attempts to channel aspects, I couldn't always stop in time before pulling an aspect out entirely. Then, it only meant that the aura I took it from wouldn't restore itself to its former state.

When the aspects were too huge, the consequences of not stopping in time were far worse. After listening to and reading Alexandra's explanations, I imagined it to myself like digging a channel out of a pond. If the pond was too big, the water will overflow the channel's banks and flood everything around.

In this metaphor, the channel was my well, and 'everything around' was, therefore, me. I swallowed hard and wrapped my hands around my shoulders.

So much for raising my morale. I didn't want to risk myself that way, but I had no better ideas. Just a single glance at Christina's pulsing aura convinced me that throwing minor aspects at her in hope that it will slow her down would be as useful as trying to extinguish a forest fire with a watering can.

For someone so powerful, I needed an aura of comparable power, and the only thing in my current range of vision was the ground beneath my feet. Something that I'd never ever try to touch if I followed every single one of Alexandra's rules, because there just weren't things with more powerful auras than these.

But this was an emergency!

So I promised myself to be as careful as I hade the time to afford, and focused my well's vision there, below the building's foundation, where soil and stone connected as a part of a much, much bigger shape. The Earth itself.

I couldn't see the entirety of it, but even in the small piece that I took a hold of, I felt the power too huge to fathom. Deceptively still, in its aspects I could feel the Earth spinning, circling around the sun, just like I could feel its mass and the blazing heat hiding within. It sang of life that came from it and thrived on and in it, dead who found their last respite in its depths, and their rebirth in new forms. Its aspects were uncountable.

Many of them were deadly in a pinch, but not all of them I could reach from my spot, and not all that I could reach were there in large enough amounts. I knew there was blazing heat in the Earth's core, but it was too far away from me. The earthly material aspect itself could be used to turn Christina into stone—but would that make her less dangerous, or actually the other way around?

It would've been quite easy to make Christina collapse under her own weight with the aspect of the Earth's mass, I imagined, but the mental picture that appeared in my mind forced me to pick something else. Velocity.

With utmost care I reached out for the chosen aspect, but at my slightest touch it rushed into my well like a flood.

I gasped, feeling myself suffocating despite the fact that my lungs were full of air. My well was bursting with power, stretching painfully to accommodate it. I was drowning on dry land, choking on the water that was forcing itself inside me.

The panic pushed everything besides my survival instinct aside. I pushed away at the power like I'd push away an assailant. A burst of pain went through my hand and a part of me realised I hit it on the table I hid under.

It made me curl on myself in a defensive position, and this was when I finally wrenched my well shut.

An instantaneous relief hit me. The absence of the cacophony of auras around. The darkness of my closed eyelids. The swishes and crashes of the fight between JJ and Christina were nothing compared to the song of aspects.

I took in a deep breath, and the scents of soot and smoke filled my nose. Even that didn't seem so bad now, though I could still live without.

As I took another breath, I realised that my body felt strange. A moment later, I knew why. While my well was closed now, it didn't feel like it always did—right now it felt full. Too full, in fact, and threatening to burst like my bladder after drinking too much tea at once.

A brief glance was enough to know that its void was filled to a brim with the aspect of velocity.

It was unbelievably weird, yet at the same time, made perfect sense. I often felt that my well was similar to a third lung, and lungs could hold air in them—but not for long.

Another crash alerted me to the world outside. My eyes flew open just in time for me to see JJ breaking a chair over Cristina's head. In the next moment, I knew it didn't slow her at all. Both of them became even worse for wear while I was doing magic.

I wished I had time to aim better, but I could feel that as soon as I opened my well again, the magic inside would burst out. I had to lock on Christina first, with my eyes, but she was too quick. Despair engulfed me. I didn't think about how I will actually hit her, and now my earlier efforts and risks were for nothing.

Then, as if some kind of god in the sky heard my thoughts, Christina stopped on a spot several steps away from JJ, a pleading expression on her face. JJ watched her, his shoulders sagging with tiredness I never saw in him before.

"My love, stop with that resistance! I don't want to harm you any more! I just—"

I didn't let Christina finish.