Chapter 382

“It’s accurate,” she corrected. “The shield is the anchor turned outward instead of inward. You’ve been anchoring for the last hour. The shield is the same thing, except instead of holding the power inside you, you push it out into a layer around you.” She stopped walking and turned to face me. “Try it.”

“Try just making a shield.”

“Try,” she said. “Right now. Before you think about it too much.”

I stopped thinking about it. Found the anchor – settled, warm, present. Then tried to imagine it moving outward. Not as a blast, not released and gone, but extending. Staying. Creating a layer between me and the outside of me.

The silver light moved. Not out and away like a blast – it spread instead, thin and even, and I felt it around me the way you felt clothing on your skin, present without being heavy.

Ivory threw a disc at my face.

The shield caught it. The disc hit the barrier of light and broke apart before it reached me, fragments scattering outward, and I felt the impact in the shield the way you felt a gentle knock – present, noticed, not harmful.

I stared at the fragments.

“There it is,” Ivory said, without particular drama. “Now hold it while you walk.”

I walked. Held the shield. It required more attention than the anchor alone – a second layer of awareness, maintaining the spread while also maintaining the foundation underneath it. Like patting your head and rubbing your stomach simultaneously, except that metaphor wasn’t quite right because it wasn’t two unrelated things. More like one thing expressed in two directions at once.

“Don’t let it thin at the back,” she said, walking around me in a circle that I found somewhat alarming. “You’re unconsciously concentrating it in the direction you’re facing. The threat can come from anywhere.”

–

She was right, I could feel the unevenness when she pointed it out the front thicker than the back, the sides somewhere in between. I worked to even it out. The effort was visible I could feel myself frowning.

“Less effort,” she said. “You’re working too hard. The shield should be automatic, like breathing. If you’re actively maintaining it, it’ll fail when something actually frightens you because fright will interrupt the active work.”

I breathed. Tried to make the shield part of the breathing rather than a separate task.

Better. Marginally.

“Good enough to keep going,” she said, which was Ivory’s version of very good. “The next thing.”

“There’s a next thing,” I said.

“There are several next things,” she said. “You have a significant bloodline and you’ve been practicing for weeks. We have ground

to cover.”

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10:45 am Pppp.

Chapter 382

+10 Free Coins

She moved off the flat training area and into the rougher terrain at its edge, where the scrub growth was thicker and the ground was less even. I followed, shield still up, anchor still held, watching the shapes around me with the expanded awareness that had been growing steadily since we’d started.

“Light,” she said.

“What about it?”

“You can affect it,” she said. “This is in the texts, but you’ve been reading the wrong chapter. Chapter twelve in the third volume, not chapter nine.”

“I read chapter nine,” I said.

“Chapter nine is about generating light,” she said. “Children of the moon don’t generate it – they move it. There’s a difference. Generating light means creating something from nothing, which takes enormous energy and isn’t sustainable. Moving light means taking what’s already there and shifting it. Concentrating it, dimming it, redirecting it.” She stopped and looked up at the sky, where the dusk had settled into proper dark now, stars visible, a half-moon above the treeline. “There’s light here. From the moon, from the stars, from the glow of the pack grounds behind us. It’s all around us. Try to feel it.”

I tried to feel it. This was harder than the shield, harder than the blast, because the light wasn’t in my chest – it was external, and reaching for something external was different from working with something internal.

“The anchor,” Ivory said, reading whatever my face was doing. “Root it in the anchor first. You’re trying to do this from the outside in. Do it from the inside out.”

I went back to the anchor. Found it. Then, from that center, reached outward toward the light the way you reached toward warmth from a fire – not grabbing it, just letting it become something you were aware of.

Something shifted.

–

Not dramatically. The scrub around us didn’t suddenly illuminate. But I could feel the light in a way I hadn’t before the specific quality of the moonlight on the left side of a boulder, the softer reflection of it off the pale path dust, the thin silver thread of it through the gaps in the scrub growth.

“There,” Ivory said, “Now dim the path ahead of us. About thirty feet. Make it darker.”

“I don’t know how-”

“You already know,” she said. “You can feel it. Just-pull it back. Like drawing a curtain.”

I tried pulling it back. The moonlight on the path ahead resisted in the way of things that weren’t designed to be redirected, and then it didn’t resist, and the path ahead of us went noticeably, definitely darker. Not blind dark. But dim enough that someone standing at the edge of it wouldn’t see us clearly.

Ivory looked at the dimmed path.

“Good,” she said. And this time there was something in the word that wasn’t just clinical. Just a thread of it. “Do you understand what this is for?”

“Moving through places without being seen,” I said. “Or- appearing suddenly where someone doesn’t expect you.”

“Attack and escape,” she said. “Move in darkness, strike from it, move again. The light manipulation is why children of the moon were valued as scouts and infiltrators, historically. Not just for the power – for the ability to choose when and where they were visible.” She looked at me. “In a fight, the person who controls what can be seen controls a great deal else.”

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0:45 am Pppp.

Chapter 382

+10 Free Coins

I thought about this. About the trap she’d been walking me through the discs and stones appearing from unexpected angles, the lesson in expanding awareness.

“You were teaching me to sense things I can’t see,” I said. “And now you’re teaching me to make things I don’t want seen not visible.”

“The shield is defense,” she said. “The anchor is foundation. The light is strategy.” She held my gaze. “Put them together.”

I put them together. Shield up, anchor present, light on the path ahead dimmed and shaped by whatever I was doing that I still didn’t have clean words for. It was like holding three notes of a chord simultaneously – each one distinct, all of them part of the same sound.

“Walk,” she said.

I walked.

Ivory stepped into the darkness with me, moving easily despite the dimness, and I realized she’d probably walked these lower slopes so many times she knew every rock and root.

We moved in silence for a moment.

Then she said: “The scream.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Lunar scream,” she said. “It’s in none of the texts because nobody who wrote the texts had ever heard one and survived it clearly enough to document it. But it’s in some of the older accounts – fragments, mentions in passing, people describing ‘a sound that stopped thought.” She glanced at me. “It’s exactly what it sounds like. You produce sound through the power rather than through normal vocalization. It carries the disorienting quality of the full lunar blast but in a form that affects the mind directly rather than the body.”

“I’ve never done that,” I said.

“You’re going to try it now,” she said.

“On what?”

She held up a hand and stopped walking.

I stopped.

“On me,” she said.