Basic Thaumaturgy for the Emotionally Incompetent

The wind took them.

The air beneath the grates detonated into a column that seized Fabrisse’s legs, back, ribs all at once. He felt his feet leave the ground, but then the sensation was gone.

Fabrisse peered down and saw a crystal bulwark already blocking the wind beneath them. Faceted and translucent, it angled downward like the face of a slanted shield. Wind screamed against it, scattering into a thousand fractured currents that clawed along its surface.

They didn’t rise as fast.

That was the victory.

But they still rose.

“Vertical denial.” Severa gritted her teeth. “Approaching this bat is going to be profoundly inconvenient.”

The bulwark shuddered again. The pressure didn’t fluctuate; it layered, like the chamber was stacking the same force over and over rather than changing direction.

That was when Fabrisse noticed the silence between gusts.

There weren’t any.

No crosscurrents grabbed at his cloak. No eddies scraped sideways along the shield’s edge. The air was laminar, impossibly so, a single coherent flow rising from below and threading the entire chamber like a spine. Every breath, every loose thread, every grain of grit moved with it or not at all.

Shapes peeled themselves out of the darkness above and dropped themselves into the current. The miniature vaultwings came first, angling their bodies just enough to let the rising air catch beneath their membranes.

They didn’t flap. The wind carried them.

They accelerated frighteningly fast, silhouettes sharpening into jagged detail as they rode the same column lifting Fabrisse and Severa.

He took out his Stupenstone and placed it on his slingshot. This wasn’t time to think about wind.

Severa didn’t turn her head. Her left hand remained splayed, and with the remaining hand, she shot a Fireball at the incoming bats. It struck the lead vaultling; it flashed white-hot, smashing into the ones behind it. Immediately, five bats were incinerated.

If she could do that—

Another vaultling broke formation, peeling away from the column in a shallow arc that would bring it close; too close.

He sighted slightly below the creature, judging where the column would carry the stone once it left the sling. I have to keep the wind against me in mind,

He’d never fired like this before. Not into a moving air mass this dense, not while being carried by the same force he was trying to exploit. But the theory surfaced anyway: wind advects. Once a projectile surrendered to a coherent flow, it stopped behaving like something being resisted and started behaving like something being transported.

Which meant fighting it was pointless.

You compensated by letting the wind do the work and correcting for the moment of entry.

Fabrisse tilted the sling a few degrees off-center, not aiming at the vaultling but at the space it would occupy after the stone was caught by the column. He adjusted again, lower than instinct allowed, forcing himself to trust the math rather than his eyes.

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