The final meal came and went without ceremony. Eleanor"s nerves were so keyed up by the time it arrived that she could barely force herself to eat. Had the gnoll guards not been standing watching her, and she known she would need all the strength and energy she could get soon, she probably would have refused food entirely.After the guards left her alone again, she laid back against the post, closed her eyes, and set about mediating to focus her mind and calm her nerves. In few hours time, she"d be free, or die trying to be. The prospect of the first excited her. The prospect of the second, however, terrified her. She"d been in danger before, but never had it felt so real.
As she thought about it, the fight with the Shaman was the first time she"d ever really experienced defeat. Well, at least outside of an educational context. She"d lost magic duels in the academy before, but the instructors prevented real injury in these test bouts. A bit of pain was instructive, they said. Crippling wounds were not. It would be of no benefit to anyone for students to suffer or be rendered unable to study and practice.
Having now experienced real pain, and real incapacity, she couldn"t help but resent them for not having prepared her better for it.
She drew a deep breath, and measured it out slowly, willing her hands to steady and her stomach to calm down. 10 seconds in, hold for 3 seconds, 15 seconds out, pause for two seconds, repeat. The mechanics of why this worked had something to do with the balance of the elements in her blood. She didn"t have to remember the academic explanation to know that it worked. Before too long, she found her anxiety starting to lessen, and she was able to focus better and keep her hands from quivering as she practiced forming her spellsigns with her fingers.
The plan for how things would progress, once she got out of her neck fetter, would be simple enough. She"d meet several guards friendly to Marg"faz at the end of the corridor, where they"d guide her to the hovel under the appearance of her being moved under arrest. Once there, she"d dispel the wards over the lintel of the door, and collect whatever else Marg"faz had to offer her. From there, a.s.suming nothing had gone wrong up to that point, they"d gather all members of the tribe loyal to the cause, and set to work suppressing resistance before storming the throne room and wresting control from the Shaman.
When laid out in sequence, it all sounded so easy. Deceptively so. She was reminded of some of the lessons she"d taken where the instructor would show the first few steps of a complicated spell, then show them the end result and tell them to simply fill in the rest. The most popular example of this in the academy was when Magus Jermaina would give her lectures on polymorphing spells, and would turn a rat into an owl in front of the cla.s.s. She"d give the creature a beak and feathers, then in a flash of movement and a flurry of words spoken too fast to be comprehensible, she"d complete the rest of the owl transformation without explanation. This lead to the student referring to any lesson or problem that lacked crucial middle steps as a "rest of the owl" problem.
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And this situation, as she was thinking it over, was very obviously a "rest of the owl" problem. It was fine and great to detail things out like this. It was another thing entirely to figure it out in real time.