Three days into traveling with the party, you've established a routine.

Mornings: Gale cooks. You eat whatever he makes and ask no questions, because the answers always involve terminology you don't understand and digressions you don't have the attention span for. Tav briefs the day's route. Lae'zel cleans her sword. Shadowheart prays — or meditates, or plots, it's hard to tell with her — facing away from the group, her back a wall.

Marching order: Tav and Lae'zel at the front. Gale and Shadowheart in the middle. Karlach wherever the biggest threat might come from. You and Mama at the rear, the cub riding her back like a feathered palanquin.

And Astarion — always Astarion — drifting between positions, but gravitating back to your elbow like a compass needle finding north. You've stopped noticing the cold. You've started noticing the absence of it when he's scouting ahead.

He brings you things. Not obviously — a mushroom left on a rock near where you were sitting, an arrowhead he "happened to find" that would make a decent scraping tool, a waterskin refilled from a stream you hadn't noticed. Small, deniable acts of usefulness that could be coincidence if you believed in coincidence, which you don't.

You don't mention it. He doesn't acknowledge it. The cub eats the mushroom.

On the third day, the forest goes quiet.

Not the gradual quiet of dusk — the sudden, held-breath quiet of a space that has just been vacated by everything that knows how to listen. Birds stop. Insects stop. The ambient rustle of wind through leaves stops, as if the trees themselves are holding still.

You notice because noticing is what you do. Five days alone in the wilderness taught you that silence is a warning sign, not a comfort.

"Ambush," you say, low, and you're reaching for the dagger before the word is fully out.

Tav's hand goes up — a silent halt. The party freezes. Astarion's posture shifts — barely perceptible, a subtle dropping of his center of gravity that tells you he heard it too, probably before you did.

"Two from the left," he murmurs, so quiet that only you and Tav can hear. "Three ahead. One in the trees above us."

The two surviving goblins from the owlbear cave found reinforcements.

You have an idea. It's a bad idea. It's the kind of idea that gets people killed, or at the very least, deeply traumatized.

"Give me thirty seconds," you whisper to Tav.

"What are you —"

You're already gone.

Invisibility is — technically — the wrong word for what you do. What you do is tell reality to stop looking at you. No incantation, no gesture, no spell slot. Just a flat, stubborn, psychic assertion that you are not here, that there is nothing to see, that the space you occupy is empty air. It's the magical equivalent of standing very still in a basilisk's den and hoping it doesn't look directly at you.

It works. Sort of. You don't disappear so much as become ignorable — the eye slides off you the way water slides off oil. You're still there. You're just... uninteresting.

You circle wide. Climb a low ridge. Position yourself behind the goblin ambush line — six of them, crouched in brush, bows and blades ready, absolutely focused on the spot where Tav's party has stopped.

You drop the invisibility.

Not quietly. Not subtly.

You let the suppressed kinetic energy burst outward in a flash of purple light and a sound like a firecracker, and you fill your lungs with the deepest breath your cracked ribs can manage, and you scream:

"OOGA BOOGAH!"

The effect is — spectacular.

Six goblins, every nerve already wound tight with ambush-tension, receive the auditory equivalent of a bucket of ice water to the brain stem. The formation doesn't just break — it atomizes. Goblins scatter in six different directions, arrows flying wild, blades dropped, one of them running directly into a tree.

Before they can regroup, you lock your mind onto a spherical boulder at the top of the ridge. It's the size of a watermelon — too heavy to shove without Gale's containment, but you've been practicing. You trace the mental pattern, feel the force contain inside the geometric boundary instead of radiating out, and give the boulder spinning torque.

It rolls.

Not gently. It rolls down the ridge like a bowling ball, skipping once on a flat rock, and clips the charging bugbear — the ambush leader — across the shins. The bugbear folds like a card table. Behind it, the boulder sweeps through three goblins and carries all of them over the cliff edge in a tumble of limbs and shale.

Karlach and Astarion come through the brush at speed and clean up the scattered survivors. It takes eleven seconds.

Gale, arriving last, surveys the aftermath. A boulder at the bottom of a cliff. Four goblins under it. Two more scattered in the brush, courtesy of Karlach's axe and Astarion's blade.

"She utilized high-level kinetic manipulation," Gale says, with the calm, measured tone of a man whose worldview has been comprehensively demolished, "to simulate a lawn game."

"Bowling," you correct, shaking the residual sparks from your fingers. "It's called bowling."

"A crude label for a sophisticated application of rotational kinetics."

"Gale. It was bowling."

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