starborn

“And it don’t go quite low enough to get us enough water to get them immersed in it,” he added. “All right, boy. Time to start teaching you this starborn business.”
I blinked and almost tripped over my own feet. “Wait, that? You’re going to start talking about it … now?!”
He cuffed me on the shoulder irritably. “We got maybe half a minute. Do you want to take a walk down memory lane?”
“Freaking wizards,” I complained, rubbing at my shoulder. “Fine, tell me.”
“Every couple or three wizard generations,” Ebenezar said, “the stars line up just right, and what amounts to a spotlight plays over the earth for a few hours. Any child born within that light—”
“Is starborn. I get it,” I said. “What does it mean?”
“Power against the Outsiders,” the old man growled. “Among other things, that their minds can’t be magically tainted by contact with anything from Outside. Which means …”
My eyes widened. “Hell’s bells,” I breathed.
See, when it comes to entities from way outside everyday reality, there are only a few options for dealing with them. In the first place, they aren’t really here, in a strictly physical sense. They’re coming in from outside of the mortal world, and that means constructing a body from ectoplasm and infusing it with enough energy and will to serve as a kind of avatar or drone for the supernatural being, still safely in its home reality. That’s what the cornerhounds had done when they’d come to Chicago to mess with us.
Fighting something like that was often difficult. The bodies they inhabited tended to have no need for things like sensing pain, for example, and it took a considerable amount of extra energy to make a hit sink home. To fight them physically, you had to dismantle the machinery of the construct’s body, breaking joints and bones until they just couldn’t function anymore.
For any creature of the physical size and resilience of these corner-hounds, it was a far easier prospect to bind and banish them—to simply pit your will against their own and force them out of the bodies they inhabited when they came here. But that was sort of like rubbing your brain against a bus station toilet; you simply had no idea what you were going to pick up by doing it—and wizards who frequently tangled with Outsiders (or even the weirder entities from within our own reality) tended to go a little loopy due to the contamination of direct contact with alien, inhuman intelligences. That’s why there was a whole Law of Magic about reaching beyond the Outer Gates.
But if I was insulated against such influences …
Was that why Nemesis, for example, had revealed itself to me but had never actually attacked me in an effort to take control of my thoughts and actions? Because it actually couldn’t? It made sense, grouped with my previous experiences with Outsiders, where others had been disabled by their attacks while I had still been capable of taking action. It meant that not only could I resist their influences, but I could go up against these things, mind to mind, without fear of short-circuiting my brain along the way.
The old man meant for me to banish them, to trap them in a circle and will them straight out of reality.


Peace Talks Chapter 12, Page 97-98