Free Nawashi by Gray Miller

palm, and
instinctively he grabbed it, twisting his wrist in a circle to
grasp the loop of rope that Sullivan had given him more tightly. A
bright line of energy cut through the wash of pain surrounding him,
and instantly he could feel every inch along the length of rope, as
it looped around his hands and flowed out to… to the strong hands
of Sullivan, loops flowing over his palms and across the backs of
his hands, and again the rope moved out to… to the woman’s hands,
this time, the Wiccan that Brian didn’t know the name of yet.
    But as he felt her hands on the
rope, as his mind’s eye expanded with it to where it met her skin,
he knew her far more deeply and intimately than if he’d spent hours
with her. It was not about the collection of facts and statistics
that normally make up a person’s identity, the things he felt were
far more important than that. He could feel her , and with it came her peaceful
strength and determination to help heal him.
He drew on that strength, pulling it back along the
woven rope, past Sullivan’s hands again, which also added their raw
and wild power to him, with an unspoken but very clear “Go get ‘em,
tiger” added.
Brian came back from the momentary respite to his
body, to the pain, to the twisting shadows that had been planted by
the ‘pressors and Vashte’s mistake. The pain was greater than
before; Elyse and Alan had managed to erode the dark knots until
they were hard, unyielding balls of roiling pain, smaller but still
blocking the flow of energies between the glass cups with their
tiny draws of flesh. Though he couldn’t see it, Brian’s flesh under
the cups was now a dark and angry purple, the flesh close to
bursting from the energies that were drawing beneath it.
    The pain was greater… but Brian
found that the strength he drew along the rope made his awareness
larger than the pain, larger than just the tortured vessel his body
had become. He looked at the darkness they were battling with an
awareness that was now dispassionately removed from the agonizing
sensation… and he saw, with a cold clarity, just how wrong they were. They
were ugliness incarnate, planted in his flesh by the Repressors and
their tools, and they offended him.
He got mad. He got to work.
    His awareness poured around the
cups, diving into the lines of energies that they conducted, and
like a body surfer riding a wave he let the current carry him.
Instead of a soft beach, though, they were carrying him towards a
hard reef of coiled wrongness, that frustrated the sweet taste of
the ki seeking
release.
But his awareness could see the coils, could see
where they lay across each other and pulled their own darkness into
themselves… and it could shape into a fine spike of power, a pick
that drove into the first knot and sank between the coils like they
were soft wood, not all the way through but deep into them.
    And the energy guided by Alan and
Elyse could feel that attack, and sensed a victory. The waves of ki
washed over Brian’s sharp awareness and worked it into the knot,
loosening it bit by bit, the darkness boiling inchoately with the
frustrated rage of being inexorably overcome. For Brian didn’t give
back any ground, simply worked forward through the knot, until
finally it dissolved in a silent roar of release as the ki surged up past it,
joining the line of current connecting the cups above, and again he
rode it, Alan and Elyse moving the cups to give him that extra
drive, this time going deeper into the next knot with the first
thrust. It took less time, not because the shadow twist was any
less deep but because the energy had increased exponentially as it
danced across and through his body.
The last two knots of painful darkness dissolved
almost at the first touch of Brian’s mind spike driving through
them with the roaring power now flowing freely through the cups.
The mounds of flesh under each glass globe were no longer a bright
purple, and the burning had subsided to a