The impact rang through the hollow like a struck bell. The sound traveled down Kaelen's spine and settled somewhere behind his navel, a deep and resonant hum that felt less like hearing and more like being felt from the inside. He wrapped himself with mana and held on. The barrier around his body was a second skin of raw force, a liquid armor that drank the concussion and spat it back into the stone around them.
He shouldn't have been able to do this. He could feel it through the barrier, the sheer impossible cost of standing his ground against something that outmassed a mountain and had decided, for reasons of its own, to fold itself down small enough to fit through a gap in the rocks. Mana poured out of him in a flood. It wasn't a gentle stream. It was a hemorrhage. Each second of resistance drained what would have taken a normal mage a year to accumulate.
