Book One – Chapter 14

With the Shaira, Barbarthara had first learned to distinguish what defined a being’s mind. At its core, it was impulses — layers of them. The conscious consisted of what she could best describe as impulses of spontaneous feeling, appearing and vanishing in bursts. The unconscious, in contrast, comprised of a buried strata of ingrained impulses, which were embedded and always traceable within the core of a being.

Barbarthara could not read minds, not like a witch. However, by honing her roots to an infinitesimal scale and threading them through the nerves of her host, she could send thousands of subtle stimuli — tiny provocations that elicited reactions she could study, interpret, and manipulate. It was a constant interplay of seeking and forcing, of probing, provoking and evaluating, until she could trace and master the impulses she wished to enforce.

It was demandingly delicate work. She was fighting against time and cold. The ork’s instincts, fragmented and disorganised as they seemed, were alive with a raw, feral vitality. Survival was imprinted in his kind — primitive, unrelenting, and deeply ingrained. Orks did not think their paths as wizards might. They felt them. Each step upon the mountain, each shift of the wind, each scrape of rock beneath their feet, was embedded into their bodies like a special sense. The runt’s connection to the Albweiss was almost preternatural in its intensity. Whether it was the urgency of Barbathara’s situation – her pressing need for freedom, the threat of freezing – or something unique about him, she could not tell. But it was there: stronger than anything she had encountered in an ork before.

She latched onto this instinct, diving into the currents of his deep-rooted awareness, seeking the inherited wisdom of a species forged by this hostile terrain. She did not try to dominate him outright. That would have been too risky, too blatant. She did not strike him with any more pain or sickness, nor with overwhelming ecstasy. Those were tools for brute control, not mastery. Instead, she made her will indistinguishable from his instincts. She blurred the line between her suggestions and the ancient, primal patterns that guided him; luring him with subtle sensations and truths that resonated in the marrow of his being: a fleeting warmth that whispered of solace, subtle euphoria that mimicked the gut-deep satisfaction of instinctual fulfilment. She no longer provoked reactions; now, she cultivated feelings in accordance with those deep-seated instincts that had harboured his people through generations. Barbarthara did not make him react. She made him sense.