[ IP ] Running to the end

I closed my eyes and exhaled, followed by a deep breath. Exhale again. I focused, pushed the noise from my mind, just the way the Nanook taught me. Calm swept through me. Quiet filled my head. 
 
 I opened my eyes and marveled at the landscape blazing before me under the night sky. The Las Vegas valley filled my vision, the lights of the city an accent to the pulsing, throbbing ley energy that spilled from the dozen fault and thrust lines that crisscrossed the playa before me. Detail crept into view as my vision expanded, taking in the warp and weft of the magical energy as it crossed Las Vegas, misshapen wards and barriers rising into the night. The boundaries between the Houses, the constantly warring factions of the world, were plain to see. 
 
 At my feet, ley energy burbled to the surface from the Node deep below my feet, an opening to the Earth's core that leaked eldritch energy to the surface, where Men fought over it like any other source of power. My mother was of one such House, a witch in every respect of the word. 
 
 We did n't get along. 
 
 My father was, like me, a half-breed. Navajo and Cherokee. I was half whatever he amounted to, and the rest of me was Old Blood European. Neither my mother nor my father would tell me how they met. No one talks about it. They were never married. As best I could tell it had the strong odour of Romeo and Juliet to it, with a healthy dash of Harry Potter. I'd cut ties with my mother, and my father had cut ties with me. 
 
 That'd left me in an awkward position when my seal had broken, the natural barrier in all people that protects them from magic, and hides it away from them at the same time. I'd learned about magic the hard way, thrust rapidly into a world of open conflict and brazen public murders, as a centuries long cold war had finally boiled over into public combat. My seal had snapped under the fallout of a magical fight between Shao Mi Li, late of the Chin Dynasty, and High the Mennonite, brawling in the skies above San Diego. Below, I was working at Best Buy, a teenager on adult probation, hawking computers to people who would just use them to vomit bile into the comments section on Youtube, eking out a living like any other delinquent. High had killed Li, releasing a wave of eldritch energy that every practitioner in the area had felt, including my skinny ass. But, I'd left a resonance in his wake, and everyone in the area had felt my seal break. 
 
 A lot had happened since then. I'd gone on the run. The Nanook had found me, saved me. Taught me. 
 
 My particular dominant affinity for ley energy made me the enemy, to every House I was n't aligned to, which was all of them. I'd inherited this from my father, though it had skipped him. His rejection of me was just as much jealous anger, as it was an effort to protect his tribe from any collateral damage. From my mother, an earth affinity pulsed within me, energized by the ley line I stood astride. I shrugged the stray thoughts aside, almost losing my zen. 
 
 I focused my thoughts to the wolf, as the Nanook taught me. Swift, tireless, the wolf was the totem he'd given me. Himself a student of the Great Bear, he was like me, a ley walker, master of none and all, but old. I could n't even fathom his age, the lines on his face almost obscuring his Nunavut heritage. He was, like his totem, a great bear of a man, impossibly strong and unshakable in his mastery. The Houses, great and minor both, feared him like no other. I was still new, they thought I could be managed, handled, stopped. The Nanook was their boogeyman, the scary stories they told each other when things went unexplainably wrong. 
 
 And like him, I ran. The energy of the ley line filled me in a crescendo, like an old modem training an open line. I buzzed and hummed with it, skipping across the surface of the world at a speed that defied understanding. Laughter sprang out of me at the sheer joy of it. The night was mine. 
 
 I descended upon Las Vegas like a missile, severing wards from the ley lines that surrounded it with little more than a swipe of my paw, a ghostly appendage formed of my will, the shape of my totem pushed forth from my soul. Various Houses had tapped the ley line, building invisible walls between their hotels and casinos, their physical hooks into the mundane world, one manifestation of their power. The cold war had raged in Las Vegas for years, different factions taking advantage of the fractious politics and setting up shop under each others noses, all polite elbows and jabs while maintaining a cover of normalcy. The Italian Mafia. The Yakuza. The Chin. The Holy Roman Church. The Mormons. They each had a power base here, some overt, some well hidden. I shredded their barriers and sensory webs with no effort and there was nothing they could do about it. It'd take them weeks to repair the damage, maybe longer if they came to blows over it, like the shittiest neighbors possible bickering over fence lines. 
 
 They would n't blame each other for my efforts, they all knew what I was about. They'd been trying to kill me for months now. This was war. 
 
 A zephyr sprang up beside me, dancing in my wake, a sense of amusement spilling out from it. We ran together as I sundered Las Vegas clean, severing link after link to the web of ley lines beneath it. Here and there, I felt mages of all affinities tap the lines, probably just to be sure they still could. This was my web, now, I was the spider, they the flies. I could n't draw lightning, or spin fireballs, I could n't warp a man's mind or listen to his thoughts. I could n't move dice with my mind or influence chance, but all of that took power, and the power it required was mine to shape. That's what made me dangerous, to them. They all wanted me dead. Several of them had tried already. Had I aligned with any one House, they'd be unstoppable. 
 
 I slid to a stop just outside Henderson, and grabbed the line feeding the eldritch mesh under the city, the strongest link to the Node. Even with most everything severed from it, the flow weakened, it was like trying to hold an electric eel, or at least that'd how I imagined it. Alive, electric, humming within my grasp while trying to wrest itself free, I concentrated my will upon it, physical strength meaningless. I pushed it, gripped it, bent it, until my grasp was firm. 
 
 And then I pulled. 
 
 The world resisted, but I did not relent. I pulled, screamed with the effort, but did n't let up. My brain felt like a diamond on fire, an uncontrollable brightness that tried to drown out all of my senses. 
 
 I pulled. 
 
 And it tore. 
 
 Across the valley, the ley lines faded out, leaving only the glow of man's works behind. And so the war began.
