How to Train Your Channeler

[Oriena]

Sasha bolted, and it didn’t surprise her an inch. Ori spent several moments breathing before she pushed herself up on her feet. She still felt a little unsteady, but it was fading fast, largely overtaken by a new feeling of the most gratifying lightness. The claws in her head were gone – that constant, grinding pressure to act according to the oath she had made. She was free.

But she wasn’t alone.

Let us, Mother
Hungry, Mother
Please, Mother

Their voices weren’t distant static anymore, but like clear masculine whispers in the shell of her ear. When they spoke together it cascaded like a waterfall, but she realised now that they were not actually one being, as the amorphous hive had usually felt to her: they each had a distinct feeling and shape. Though she looked then, there was no evidence of the three of them in the darkness around them, though she could have pointed each one out where it hovered utterly invisible.

Oriena felt no sense of coercion. Their hunger was not bleeding into hers; she only felt it like a pulse of shared information. They were just… waiting.

Right.

That.

Her memories were fragmented, eroding like they always had in the past, leaving only the pertinent pieces of information with no real sense of how she had learned it. “You can’t kill him,” she said, to which the hovering ijiraq didn’t respond. At least not in words. They appeared to have understood something from her feeling, and that was what they each acknowledged. Ori’s expression darkened, and she wasn't quite sure what she made of it. Or even what they thought they had understood.

She glanced down at the fallen device, still twitching like a dying animal, but only nudged it with her foot as she passed. It looked like the kind of sinister shit Nox would be interested in. For now she left it though, in favour of the man slumped forward on his face – because the dumb fuck hadn’t gone far before collapsing. “Don’t thank me yet,” she said, as she shoved him with her boot to roll him over.

Sasha was tall and broad even if he was skinny, and it wasn’t like he couldn’t have resisted. But he was always a permanent victim. Ori straddled his chest, pinned his arms by his head. Mostly that was to stop him running again. He looked shitty and pale, and his day was about to get worse before it got better. Blood smeared his neck where the device’s pincers had retracted their hold, though it was too dark to see exactly how bad the mess was.

“You’re going to have to trust me,” she told him. A dangerous smirk played on her lips as she looked down at him. “I need you to channel.”

She just laughed a little over any whimpering protest he might offer. He hadn’t even known what he was last time they met, clutching his hand like his power came from a talisman rather than inside himself. It hadn’t been so hard to coax it out of him that time, and she didn’t think it would be this time either. One way or another at least, and Ori really didn’t care which method worked. She slid closer, pressed low enough that her breath touched his ear when she spoke next, more teasing lover than predator, though perhaps only just. Her weight pinning his hands did not relent.

“You should be angry, Sash. Incandescent with what they tried to take from you. And the sooner you learn to take what you want when you want it, the sooner it’ll never happen again.”