mental practice

The White Council hated mind magic, generally speaking. If you beat someone’s defenses, you could do a lot of things to them, and precious few of them were good. Events, however, had forced them to acknowledge the necessity of giving all of its members lessons in psychic self-defense that were more comprehensive than the simple wall technique that I’d been briefly introduced to. A couple of old-timers who knew how to play the game had begun dispensing the basics to everyone interested in learning.
As it turned out, I had a natural fortress of personality, which explained a lot—like how hard it had always been for faerie glamour to trick me for long, and why I’d been able to grind through several forms of mental assault over the years. If someone came in after me, they had a big badass castle to contend with. They could pound on it all day, as such things were measured, without breaking the defenses, and I’d been told that it would take an extended campaign to conquer my head entirely—like any decent castle, there were multiple lines and structures where new defenses could take hold. But I didn’t have much of a forward game. For me, the best offense had to be an obstinate defense.
Molly, on the other hand . . . well. Molly was sort of scary.
Her castle wasn’t huge and imposing—the damned thing was invisible. Made of mirrors, covered in fog, wrapped in darkness, and generally hard even to pin down, much less besiege; anyone who went into her head had better bring a GPS, a seeing-eye dog, and a backup set of eyeballs. Worse, her offense was like dealing with a Mongolian horde. She’d send in waves and waves of every kind of mental construction imaginable, and while you were busy looking at those, ninja thoughts would be sneaking through your subconscious, planting the psychological equivalent of explosives. We’d practiced against each other a lot—immovable object versus irresistible force. It generally ended in a draw, when Molly had to quit and nurse a headache, at which point I would join her in scarfing down aspirin. A couple of times, my thuggish constructions had stumbled over her defenses and started breaking mirrors. A couple of times, her horde had gotten lucky or particularly sneaky. We’d had the same thought-image set up to signal victory—Vader swooping down in his TIE fighter, smugly stating, “I have you now.” Once that got through, the game was over.
But outside of practice, that thought could just as easily be something more like, “Put your gun into your mouth and pull the trigger.” We both knew that. We both worked hard to improve as a result. It was a part of the training I’d taken every bit as seriously as teaching her theory or enchantments or exorcism, or any of a hundred other areas we’d covered over the past few years.
But we’d never done it for blood.


Ghost Story Chapter 48, Page 512-513