[Alucard's claws are buried deep in the walls. Magic, both inert and active, is everywhere in this corridor, and if it weren't for the fact that she's absolutely certain this building is warded to high heaven against magical spillage, they'd certainly be casting a mile-high beacon with all the different spellcraft ricocheting around at once. Tendrils are grasping at her, tongues of magical paralysis are licking at their shoes, and now with Alucard's band of light, she's caught in the midst of a tug-of-war of spells trying to throw her down and ones trying to keep her up.
But then comes something new, something different than anything she's felt before. This one feels like someone pounding at a door inside her mind with the pommel of a knife, something that leaves just enough of a headache behind to be noticed before washing down over her shoulders and heading toward her hands.
No — not over her shoulders. Through them. Through her blood, a spell running through her blood from her neck down to the tips of her fingers.
Before, when she'd caught hold of a wisp of magic and tried to pull it, the sigil in the floor had rendered it too weak to hold onto, and it had dissipated like fairy floss in water. But this — this is magic, this is strong and alive and there —
And it offers absolutely no resistance as she musters the wherewithal to think mine, this is mine, it's mine.
She couldn't possibly have hoped to structure this spell with the condition she's in. But it's no different than one of the written spells she'd shown Trevor all that time ago, the kind where she doesn't have to know the spell to use it, because the form is already there; the use is something completely different.
Mine!
And yet it takes something out of her, grasping this wild not-hers magic and making it her own, changing it in accordance with her intent. It burns and she aches but now it's the shadows on the walls that she's fighting, forcing her snare around them, a magical chain reaction that leaps from tendril to tendril as Alucard holds them back until she can arc the command to them all, and when it completes she has the brief sensation of being a puppeteer holding the strings of a thousand marionettes all tied up in a cat's cradle in her fingers, and she hadn't realized that she'd been screaming until she hears the last of one dying in the back of her ragged throat, but it dies and they don't, and the shadows are licking at the walls but they're not reaching for them anymore.]
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But then comes something new, something different than anything she's felt before. This one feels like someone pounding at a door inside her mind with the pommel of a knife, something that leaves just enough of a headache behind to be noticed before washing down over her shoulders and heading toward her hands.
No — not over her shoulders. Through them. Through her blood, a spell running through her blood from her neck down to the tips of her fingers.
Before, when she'd caught hold of a wisp of magic and tried to pull it, the sigil in the floor had rendered it too weak to hold onto, and it had dissipated like fairy floss in water. But this — this is magic, this is strong and alive and there —
And it offers absolutely no resistance as she musters the wherewithal to think mine, this is mine, it's mine.
She couldn't possibly have hoped to structure this spell with the condition she's in. But it's no different than one of the written spells she'd shown Trevor all that time ago, the kind where she doesn't have to know the spell to use it, because the form is already there; the use is something completely different.
Mine!
And yet it takes something out of her, grasping this wild not-hers magic and making it her own, changing it in accordance with her intent. It burns and she aches but now it's the shadows on the walls that she's fighting, forcing her snare around them, a magical chain reaction that leaps from tendril to tendril as Alucard holds them back until she can arc the command to them all, and when it completes she has the brief sensation of being a puppeteer holding the strings of a thousand marionettes all tied up in a cat's cradle in her fingers, and she hadn't realized that she'd been screaming until she hears the last of one dying in the back of her ragged throat, but it dies and they don't, and the shadows are licking at the walls but they're not reaching for them anymore.]