12:08:47.716229Z 1D80F.B75AC8A372606FAC6046 : ERROR ThreadID=1025981

  12:08:47.716230Z 1D80F.B75AD96A6A012599ED7C : TrackDescription=Host L6 “Dawn”

  12:08:47.716230Z 1D80F.B75AD96A6A012599ED7C : PostLogFile invoked -6670

  As Dawn surveilled the guards at the sentinel fire that marked one corner of the camp, she kept a running mental commentary with Nyx, the two exchanging thoughts and observations as images. Most of those images were bathed in white, because the tents of the camp, the open field in which it lay at the bottom of the narrow valley, and the surrounding fir trees were all covered by the same driving and drifting snow that had dogged Dawn since shortly before she crossed through the mountains into Wyste.

  Running her eyes over the encampment once more, she upped her estimate of the total population within to twenty-six. There was guesswork involved, but she doubted the tents or wagons she had counted could support more.

  It’s time, she thought for Nyx’s benefit.

  The great cat sent an affirmative response.

  Here’s what I’m going to do, Dawn thought, and then she pictured her carefully prepared gambit.

  After a moment of considering the images she’d received, Nyx signaled confusion.

  I know, Dawn thought. It’ll make more sense in a minute.

  Remaining just inside the tree line, Dawn rose to her feet, confident that as midnight approached the shadows cast by the waxing moon would prevent the guards from seeing her. She turned her back toward the distant camp and rehearsed for a final time the sequence of meliá she’d been studying and practicing for the preceding month. Each had been rehearsed hundreds of times, but this was the first time she would be using them when confronting soldiers of Wyste.

  “Translocate behind the guards across the fire,” she said quietly. “Skin contact with each to incapacitate. Sweep of snow to conceal the bodies. Sound-dampening sphere. Approach nearest tent. Enter. Incapacitate. Search tent. Move to next tent. And again.”

  Nyx expressed confusion once more and, to clarify the source of her confusion, sent back to Dawn an image of the moment in which Dawn intended to suddenly appear behind the guards at the fire.

  “It’s what I’ve been practicing while you’ve been napping,” Dawn said quietly. “Just watch, then it’ll make more sense.”

  Over her shoulder, Dawn sized up the distance between her position and that of the guards. She tried to think in terms of the confusing and seemingly arbitrary units of distance her work with meliá had revealed as a property of the world. Facing away from the distant fire, she pulled off her gloves, pushed them into pockets of her cloak, and began the translocation cast. Reaching the last motion of the sigil she had devised, she glanced at Nyx, winked, and swiped her ring fingers in a downward arc.

  In an instant, her view changed from one of dark trees to one of a snowy field bathed in a small circle of firelight. But the lighting was not what she expected, and the fire casting that light was not a yard or two before her, where she expected it to be.

  “From what gods is this!?” A gruff voice behind her shouted.

  With the thrill of the daring translocation already waning, Dawn began to feel the heat of the fire penetrating her thick boots and leather leggings. Simultaneously, she began receiving a flood of images from Nyx, the precise meaning of which Dawn could not discern in the moment, but the gist being that Nyx did not, in fact, find the opening gambit to be making any more sense now that it was in motion.

  Come to me! Dawn thought frantically, as she high-stepped out of the fire while spinning—painfully conscious of her empty, weapon-free hands—to face the guards who had already risen. One was tall, with a disconcerting mixture of elfin and other features that reminded Dawn of kobolds. He held a sword. The other was stout and bat-faced. He, or it, held a large knife.

  Stumbling into the snow next to the fire, Dawn was unsure whether she would have time to complete a cast before they struck her. Gambling that her mode of appearance might buy her time or credulity, she threw her hands into the air and said, “I am a spirit of the forest! You have summoned me!”

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  The guards glanced at each other, then looked back at Dawn.

  “Bolx,” the swordsman said. “Yer no spirit. Yer cloak’s on fire.”

  Dawn didn’t have time to check whether he was speaking the truth or trying to distract her, because the guard with the knife lunged toward her. The blade did not find her though, as Nyx arrived via a leap over the fire that carried her into the man’s face just as he was beginning a scream in response to her unexpected appearance.

  Dawn used the distraction to leap close enough to the other guard to thrust her hand against his cheek before he could swing his sword into action. She instantly felt the force that guided him and disconnected it from his body. No longer animated, the guard’s body slumped into the snow at her feet…at which point Dawn saw that, yes, the hem of her cloak was on fire in several places. But shouts from nearby tents drew her attention from her burning cloak, and she saw half a dozen guards in various stages of leaving their tents while donning armor and weapons.

  Make for the trees! Dawn thought to Nyx. I’ll meet you there!

  Dawn began casting a meliá that would reverse her earlier translocation. Hurrying through the last few motions, she staggered a step as the fire found her skin above one of her boots. Distracted by the pain and the uneven footing beneath the snow, she tripped and fell forward into a drift as she attempted the last gestures of the meliá.

  She quickly pushed herself out of the snow, rose, and was relieved to find herself back among the trees, but her relief vanished as a camp guard wearing only his nightshirt fell slowly from one branch to the next in a tree some dozen yards away, each new impact accompanied by a pained grunt. Dawn’s eyes widened as what appeared to be the entire contents of the guard’s tent—including the guard’s tent-mate—followed the guard in a cacophonous tumble through the branches. She looked around and saw dozens of other guards, and guard tents, in trees, under trees, or bouncing noisily through trees.

  “I moved the whole camp?” She said to herself, confusion competing with a moment of unexpected delight. She began turning to look for Nyx but then instead dropped to her chest, her vision again lost to snow. An arrow whistled through the air where she had stood. She thanked her fortune for the hundredth time that she had discovered the persistent meliá that now allowed her to sense the entire trajectory of any projectile at the moment of its release. Somewhere not too distant, she heard a curse from the quick-witted archer who had, far sooner than his colleagues, overcome the surprise of being translocated into the forest. Dawn rolled to her back, stared up at the trees for half a second as she considered her options, and then recast the first spell of her intended camp-raid sequence.

  The undersides of snowy trees were replaced with an unobstructed view of the sky, which again brought Dawn delight. It, like her relief seconds earlier, was short-lived. The ground was not there to support her, and still oriented horizontally and staring at the sky, she grimaced as a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach announced confusion among her internal systems. She was falling. The fall lasted little more than a second, but felt to her much longer. She landed in standing liquid of a foot or two—only deep enough to slow her descent sufficiently to avoid serious injury when she impacted the mud beneath.

  Dawn struggled to her feet, slipping in the muddy water in which she’d landed. Shin-deep, feeling both dazed and nearly overwhelmingly alert, she looked around the huge, perfectly hemispherical hole in which she stood, into the bottom of which was seeping groundwater that had recently been freed by translocation of the camp—or, more precisely, a spherical portion of the world in which the camp happened to be contained—to the nearby forest.

  Images from Nyx found Dawn, and she could see the cheetah was streaking out of the trees, heading toward the giant hole with camp guards close behind.

  Meet me on the far side of the hole, Dawn thought.

  Dawn looked at the lip of the hole high above her, its wall nearly vertical for the last many feet. Not going to be able to climb there, at least not quickly, she thought.

  Shaking her head at her lack of options, Dawn began for the third time the translocation cast. Since she was at the precise lowest point of the hemisphere, she knew that her amount of rise needed to almost perfectly equal her lateral translation. But how much of each? Too little, and she’d find herself tumbling down the inside edge of the hole. Too much, and she’d find herself falling toward the earth beyond.

  Better to fall a few feet just outside the hole than remain within it, she thought.

  She estimated the diameter of the hole in the units by which the world operated, began the cast, smiled nervously, half-crouched in case she again found herself falling, and made the final gesture to complete the meliá.

  She fell, but only a few inches.

  She looked behind her. Her right heel projected beyond the lip of the hole by maybe half an inch. She was safe.

  Dawn looked north along the lip of the hole. Nyx was loping toward her. The great cat sent an image in which Dawn could see herself as Nyx currently saw her: plastered with mud from head to toe, half crouching with her back to the giant hole she’d accidentally created, and smiling like a fool.

  “Come on,” Dawn said, waving Nyx toward the forest farther up the valley in the direction that would put the huge hole directly between them and the disgruntled and confused Wystean soldiers.

  Dawn laughed loud as she began to run. She immediately received a mental message from Nyx, the basic meaning of which, Dawn was fairly certain, was “I cannot take you anywhere.”

  Dawn laughed louder, a stitch forming in her side as she ran.

  “It worked!” She said to Nyx, who ran beside her. “Well, not in the way I’d originally intended, but maybe even better, really. I understand so much more of the meliá, and not just that meliá, but all of the meliá that share its structure!” She whooped.

  Nyx turned her head toward Dawn and watched her for half a dozen strides. The great cat then turned and stared toward the fast-approaching trees.