So I kicked him in the face.

He went down with a grunt, and a chip of broken tooth skittered across the floor. I didn’t know what spell he was getting together, but it seemed a good bet that I didn’t want him to finish it. I broke his circle with my will as I crossed it with my body, unleashing a ripple of random and diffused energies that had never had the chance to coalesce into something more coherent. I knocked his skull goblet into one of the enormous nearby tanks with my staff as I raised it and pointed one end of it at the stunned Denarian, snarling, “Forzare!”

Some of that searing storm of power I was holding in screamed out of my body and down through my staff, hurtling at the Denarian, an invisible cannonball surrounded by a cloud of static discharge. It was more power than I’d meant to unleash. If it hit him it was going to throw him halfway across Lake Michigan.

But while the Denarian’s mortal set of eyes may have still been blank with shock and surprise, the glowing green set was bright with rage. The thorny Denarian lifted his left hand in a sweeping gesture, made a rippling motion of his fingers, drawing his hand toward his mouth, and…

…and he just ate my spell.

He ate it. And then that gaunt, skeletal face spread in a toothy smile.

“That,” I muttered, “is incredibly unfair.”

I lifted my left hand just as the Denarian crouched and vomited out a spinning cloud of black threads that came whirling through the air in dozens of tiny, spiraling arcs. I brought up my shield, but none of the threads actually came down to touch me—they landed all around me instead, in a nearly perfect circle.

And an instant later my shield stuttered and shorted out. I still had the energy for it—I hadn’t been cut off. But somehow the Denarian’s weird spell had disrupted the magic as it left my body. I tried to throw another bolt of force at him, and got to feel supremely silly, waving my staff around to absolutely zero effect.

“Interruptions,” the Denarian said in an odd accent. “Always the interruptions.”

His left hand returned to rummaging in his bag, while his mortal eyes went back to the now-scattered remnants of the spell, evidently dismissing my existence. The green eyes remained focused on me, though, and darkness suddenly gathered around the forefinger of his upraised right hand.

Time slowed down.

Dark light leapt toward me.

Sheer defiance made me step forward, trying to brush past the little spinning columns of shadow that surrounded me, only to find them as solid as steel bars, and colder than a yeti’s fridge. I threw my magic against those bars to no avail as a shaft of dark lightning streaked toward my heart.

Something happened.

I don’t know how to describe it. I was trying to slam another bolt of force between the bars of my conjured prison when something…else…got involved. Ever been carrying something and had someone intentionally, unexpectedly jostle your elbow? It felt something like that—a tiny but critically timed nudge just as I threw my will into a last futile effort of defiance.