The War for the Waking World Read Online Free PDF

hands. To them, they were sinister things . . . ghostly even. They fled from the palms faster than Archer was able to scoop them up. It was maddening, and the tornado closed in.
    Finally, Archer let them down and removed the hands. The farmer huddled his family at the storm doors and once more tried in vain to yank them open. “Stupid!” Archer yelled, but he wasn’t referring to the farmer and his family. He was thinking of himself. He’d panicked and, once again, his solution had been too complicated. This time, he’d keep it simple.
    The Dreamtreader willed a crowbar to appear in the man’s hands. The farmer stood very still for a moment, looked skyward, and then went to work. With Archer applying a little will to assist, the man got the doors open. He hustled his family down below, and then slammed the doors shut. Archer added a few layers of reinforcing steel before turning back to the approaching nightmare.
    Ducking debris and shielding his eyes, Archer rose well above the farmhouse and faced the twister. Thunder sent deep, vibrating shock waves rolling over Archer. He steadied himself and fought down the panic rising within. He had a hundred storm-stopping ideas careening through his mind—putting up a massive shield, building a box around the storm, or creating some gargantuan vacuum cleaner—but none of them made any sense. They were all stupid, panic-driven absurdities like the bunker buster. The storm was so close now it cast an eerie pale green aura on the entire farm. Intensifying crosswinds threatened to yank Archer from the air, but each time he readjusted some facet of flight to hold . . .
    His . . .
    Position . . .
    An idea burst into Archer’s mind. He went into a power dive. For the plan to work, he needed his feet firmly on the ground. He had no idea if he could stay conscious, much less maintain flight, with the amount of mental will he was about to attempt. He had his limits, even with the Rift supercharging them.
    The roar of the storm seemed to become a physical thing. The glowing funnel itself grew right before Archer’s wide eyes. It became a massive wedge of churning debris, blotting out the horizon on either side and even the sky overhead. The roar intensified to a constant thunderous explosion. The winds tore the fence line and its concrete footings out of the ground. So powerful and voracious was the wind that it began to gouge out huge strips of earth, carving hundred-yard trenches with each advance. It might have been an F5 storm before. Now, no F-scale could measure its wind speed. Archer’s ears popped as the air pressure dropped. Phantom gusts raked at his coat, relentlessly trying to pull him into the churning vortex.
    â€œI don’t know if I can pull this off!” he yelled. “But . . . I need to!” Archer narrowed his thoughts and thrust both arms forward. Slowly, deliberately, he began crafting his own tornado.
    It was small at first, just a ropey thing, but it was growing, and, more importantly, it was rotating in the opposite direction of the nightmare twister. As if his mental energy were sand in an hourglass, Archer could feel it draining quickly as he willed his tornado to grow. His funnel spun faster and faster, sucking up more soil and debris. The wind speed of his anti-nado picked up. F2 then F3—the thing was getting harder and harder to control. He had to keep it churning, keep it spinning in the right direction, so he filtered in a little blue light. Now he couldn’t just feel the wind’s movement; he could see it. Yet the nightmare twister was still so much bigger, so much stronger. It was like a ghostly silhouette looming behind Archer’s baby storm.
    But Archer was far from finished. His roar joined the thunder-train sound of the other two storms, and he spent a chunk of his will all at once. It was so large he swayed where he stood and almost toppled. His storm tripled in size. Still not quite there,