You don't get a last moment many times in life. Most people don't even realize it's there. They go to bed, never wake up. They step off a ramp, touch the wrong rail, get hit by a bullet.

  I knew. This was the end.

  My mind felt enormous, a wide, empty plain. I'd had fever dreams like that, with a vast, grey plain and nothing on it. Now it was real, cold sand beneath me, the distant glare of ward wakes ripping up the air high above me.

  The rifle was cold in my hands. Solid. Still. Two threads dancing in my mind. I plucked another from the planet around me, and another.

  The fifth wouldn't come.

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  I tried conjuring it, but it was like lifting a thousand spaceships with your bare hands. I could feel it, couldn't grab it.

  The four threads I already held in my mind vibrated, touched against each other, fizzled, threatened to dissipate. I tried to separate them, ground my teeth.

  My mouth filled with the iron tang of blood. The thread wouldn't come.

  A warm, moist, slimy pressure touched my mind. I tried to remember where I'd felt it before, failed. The threads I'd conjured faltered. I couldn't keep them in my mind and defend against a magic attack.

  I didn't try, focusing on keeping the threads alive, on conjuring a fifth.

  The pressure enveloped me, flowed over me. Into my threads.

  Strengthening them.

  Holding them.

  I let them go, conjuring with violent speed, yanking a fifth thread from the void, then shoving everything into my rifle all at once.

  For a second, I felt the hot, greasy vibration of the Bucket's engines. Then my threads triggered the rifle's flame wards, and the world exploded.