Bob the Cicrcle

“Bob,” I said. “We’re going to a bind a Titan.”
“Fuck that!” the skull sputtered. “I’m going to Utah! Stuff like this never happens in Utah!”
“Buddy,” I said, turning the skull to look at me. “I need you.”
Bob the Skull’s eyelights dwindled down to little points and he said, in a tiny voice, “Dammit.” He shuddered in my hand and then the lights brightened again. “Think of all the girls we’ll get when we lock her up!”
Such a long night.
“That’s the spirit,” I sighed.
“Oh! I see what you did there.”
“Dammit, Bob, focus!” I snapped grumpily. “You’re the circle. And if we survive this, you get a twenty-four-hour pass. Shore leave.”
“Whoop!” Bob whooped, and campfire sparks soared out of the skull’s eye sockets and into a swiftly moving cloud in the hellish air.
Ethniu recoiled from the rebounding stone, snarling in frustration, and started clubbing Marcone with one arm, the motion primal, brutal. His shields were comprehensive, if not really first-class in strength—but he just kept spinning new ones off his fingers, defenses akimbo. Ethniu’s furious blows would shatter the shield they struck, but by then Marcone would have spun up another one.
She switched tactics, kicking a cloud of stones at him with her broken foot—which already looked steadier than it had been. Marcone had to drop a new shield low to intercept the stones, which scattered off in random directions as the spell fractured, breaking the rhythm. He had to dive to one side before Ethniu compressed his spine into his tailbone, and she surged after him, snarling.
I took the bloodied knife and swept it over the smoldering light of the crystal, and it flared to life as the blood of the Titan touched it. It might have been really bright. I could barely tell. The world was turning into weird shadows and odd streaks of color. My good hand was shaking hard.
I drove the crystal down into some rubble so that it stood up from the ground. Then I smeared more of the Titan’s blood onto the tip of the Spear.
My heart suddenly skittered along even faster. Thrumthrumthrumthrumthrum.
Marcone did something that made greasy black smoke condense into a thick, choking cloud and sent it zipping toward the Titan’s face, where it clung in a wobbly bubble of impenetrable fog. The Titan swiped at it uselessly.
“Namshiel,” she snarled. “You greasy little snake!”
Marcone spoke in a different voice even as he ducked behind a chunk of fallen concrete the size of a tractor trailer. It sounded like him, mostly, only with a very formal British accent. “You haven’t changed much, either, darling.”
In answer, Ethniu screamed and surged directly forward and through the concrete and the rebar inside it alike. It exploded and came sloughing over Marcone in an avalanche. Marcone played a desperate move and threw a telekinetic strike at his own feet. Magic is awesome, but physics are still physics. Throw a bunch of force at the ground, and the ground throws just as much force back at you.
Marcone exploded out from under the avalanche of shattering concrete, flew up at maybe a twenty-degree angle, and landed a good fifty feet out into Lake Michigan.
And the Titan’s furious gaze immediately whipped toward me.
“Filthy little thief of Power,” Ethniu snarled. Spittle and foam were falling from the skullified side of her face, along with a steady patter of some kind of yellowish slime as she came skittering toward me over the stones. “I will feed you to the Eye.”
“Bob!” I screamed, and seized the Spear, holding its point up above me.
The cloud of campfire sparks swirled in a helix up around the Spear, touched the blood at the tip like a hound picking up a scent. I whirled the Spear in a circle, gathering up the substance of the spirit around it along with my will, and murmured, “Ventris cyclis!”
Wind and spirit flew toward the Titan, too swiftly to be seen as more than a single blur of light that whipped thrice counterclockwise about the Titan and then settled into place, a whirling cyclone of motes of light, a solid bar of my will that encircled her.
Thrumthrumthrumthrumthrumthrum.
I sent my will into the Spear, my own power flooding out along with Bob, infusing his essence, just as my will could have infused a circle of chalk or silver.
Ethniu staggered as the lights surrounded her, shielding her eyes—and then she let out a choking sound and screamed in denial as the circle closed around her.
Wizards are the gatekeepers, the defenders of this world. Or at least we are when we’re at our best. And if some immortal thing rolls in here from Somewhere Else, we can say something about it. We can pit our will against them. We might not win, but with a proper channel and a circle of power, we can make them stop to fight us.
The circle closed on Ethniu, and suddenly I found myself pitted against the mutilated will of a Titan.
There was a horrible pressure, a whole-body crushing agony, as if I had suddenly blinked to the floor of the sea. And that was what it was like, with the force of that mind pressing against mine—like trying to hold off the weight of the tide.
But the sea had tried to wash my mind away before now, and I knew the secret of facing the will of supernatural beings. I might be nothing but a grain of sand on the shore of that ocean—but pound as it might, the ocean couldn’t destroy that grain of sand. Not if it was stubborn enough to hold together. Though the ocean might wash the sand here and there, might batter and rage at it, when the ocean’s rage is gone, and the waters once more serene, the sand will remain.
So I took the pressure. Though my head felt like someone was trying to squeeze my brains out through my nose, I kept my will on the Spear, on the circle.
The snarling rage of the furious, terrified Titan filled my head. Literally. Her voice was echoing off the surface of my skull, deafening and inescapable and really, really uncomfortable.
“Mortal,” she snarled. “Do you think you can pit your will against mine?”
“Obviously,” I muttered. “That’s why you’re in a circle, genius.” I took a slow breath and in that deep, echoing voice called, “Ethniu, daughter of Balor! I bind thee!”
The Titan wailed and shook her head violently, spittle and slime and worse spraying everywhere. She thrashed and suddenly there was a hideous power raking at the circle.
Bob screamed in agony. The sparks began to fly apart.
“No!” I said, and sent my will rushing into the Spear, out along the stream of sparks still connected to it like some kind of bizarre whirling lasso. I fed power and will to the familiar spirit, fighting the pressure from the Titan, binding together his immaterial substance and preventing her from tearing it apart.

Battle Ground Chapter 34, Page 333-336