Emily blinks back to awareness with a shiver, feeling machina run down her spine and map out her body in an instant, confirming her size and measurements remain unchanged. She lets out a relieved sigh, retracts her extended blades, and drops her head into her hands, massaging her brow to try and ease the splitting headache that’s followed her out of the dreamscape she was trapped within.

  She can hear and feel the infernal chorus of counting voices still, sitting in the back of her mind like an unwelcome presence watching her every move, but it refuses to abate even after she commands her cores into silence.

  Damn.

  Gritting her teeth, Emily tries to trace the mental artefact to its source, but she finds echoes of its presence no matter where she looks in her cortex. It’s only when she devotes one of her cores to cataloguing and unravelling the layered song of voices, noting the age and varying depth of emotion behind each tone while trying to work out exactly how long she spent lost in a dream, that she finally feels any relief.

  With the distracting, chaotic flood of mental signals bound to one core, Emily finally opens her eyes to take in the volcano around her.

  She’s still on the metal platform she formed at the peak of the mountain, but instead of sitting in the centre, she’s standing by one of the edges, surrounded by the brutalised remains of dozens of her metal soldiers. They’re all scorched and mangled, leaking coolant and hydraulic fluid from shredded, half-melted armour panels mottled with deep black electrical burns that flow out from her position, tracing intricate fractal patterns across the entire platform.

  Emily frowns at the sight of her ruined machines and realises with a start that a low, simmering rage has started to build in her chest. It’s only faint, as if she were watching distant shimmers of motion dancing in the depths of a lake from the surface, but it’s undeniably there, burning away quietly to thaw the bite of her emotional dampening.

  “It worked!” she mutters with glee, feeling the dulled anger blink out in favour of excitement.

  She can still feel the old bundle of tainted machina in her cortex, but upon closer inspection, it’s been noticeably reduced by almost a quarter of its volume. Emily decides to test it, reaching out for the memories most affected.

  As images of Herber and Anna flick through her focus, she still feels a sickening sense of apathy, but when her thoughts drift to her biological parents, it shifts to a muddied blend of muted acceptance and fresh grief, as if their deaths happened mere moments ago.

  Emily blinks away tears and shakes her head, turning her attention back to her surroundings and observing the ring of still-standing droids watching her from a distance. They’re positioned around the volcano’s mouth with weapons trained on her, wrapped in a layer of protective winds.

  On the far side of the platform, Via’s standing with her brows furrowed and her arms outstretched, half-translucent as they meld with the powerful winds trapped in the array carved into the platform, guiding them as an extension of her body. She’s staring at Emily while protecting the droids and folding layers of air together above them as if waiting for an attack from the heavens. Silica and Pod are both standing behind the Lebard mage, while Mensacus is where Emily started her healing process in the centre of the platform, splayed out on the ground with his tentacles spread and covered in scorch marks, with most of those once-connected to his shoulders completely severed at the base.

  The anger she felt at seeing her soldiers damaged returns in full force as she sees the state of her son, but a single glance at the sky turns the anger to dread and guilt.

  Where once there was a sea of blue dotted with pale clouds of ash, there’s now a thick layer of blackened storm clouds, teeming with crackling charge. Arcs of plasma leap between the dark clouds, following a rhythmic pattern of spirals that gather towards the centre, directly above Emily.

  She can feel the sky above resonating with her nearly-empty circles, rumbling in time with her steady heartbeat and waiting on her call.

  “Mother?” Mensacus calls out to her with a hopeful tone, drawing her eyes back down to him. “Are you back?”

  “Yes, stand down,” she replies, feeling out her connection to the raging storm and willing it to disperse. “The potion has run its course. What did I do while I was out of it?”

  Emily sends out a wave of machina, reestablishing her connection with the surrounding soldiers and instructing them to clean up their fallen comrades as she approaches her son, wrapping him in a protective layer of mana and weaving it into new temporary limbs.

  “You remained motionless for the first ten minutes, but your mana and emotions grew wild and called in a storm almost immediately,” he explains, shivering in distaste, as Via drops her defences and reforms her arms before walking over to join them. “I haven’t caught the same scent on you in years. If not for your orders, I would have activated your contingency the second you became distressed. It was…”

  Emily runs a soothing metal hand down the scales covering his neck.

  “I formed a barrier to protect us when your structure drew down the charge you were gathering,” Via continues, tapping her foot on the scorched platform. “But, after exactly ten minutes, you rose without responding and turned your blades on us. To be specific, you went for my throat.”

  The First Mouth shivers and raises a hand to her throat in emphasis, running her fingers along a thin line of dried blood tracing her jaw.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “If not for your son’s quick intervention, I fear I wouldn’t have moved my defences in time to be speaking to you now. For that I am grateful.” She nods towards the chimaera in thanks. “Young Pod then had a few of your soldiers fire on you, and you immediately responded to the threat, diverting your focus from me.”

  “And so you used them to keep me distracted till I came to?”

  “Exactly.” Via nods. “Can I take it from your earlier exclamation that your treatment was a success?”

  “Partially, at least. The layer of separation between my thoughts and emotions is still there, but the suppression has eased in part, and I no longer need to actively use machina to force through it. Unfortunately, I also appear to be suffering some lasting effects,” Emily explains while checking Silica for injuries, catching a concerned glance from Pod as he helps the droids clean the platform, unharmed bar a few light burns across the armour plating woven into his clothes. “The brew forced me to relive a particularly unpleasant memory until I faced it and came to terms with it, but each attempt left a scar on my mind. I can still hear an echo of each repetition in the back of my head, and, though I believe it will fade, I get the sense repeating this experience too soon would be a mistake.”

  “That’s to be expected. Whenever we give high doses of vapourised salvianross, we never repeat the treatment within a year. The mind needs time to recover from such a forceful process, let alone when dealing with a concentrate as powerful as you just took. Are you willing to detail your experience further? Your body’s reaction was… shockingly coordinated, and I’m wondering if you actually maintained control to a certain extent.”

  “I was definitely moving only on instinct. What I saw was far too removed from this space to align and, proportionally, the times don’t line up,” Emily explains, breathing in the heated mana rising from below and slowly refilling her reserves. “You said I began moving after ten minutes, and the treatment lasted twenty, correct? Well, for now, I only have a rough estimate on how long I experienced, but I started fighting against the visions I saw when the first count in my head reached thirty hours, and it’s currently well past a hundred.”

  “The first count?” Via questions the odd term with a confused tilt of her head.

  “The memory I was forced into-” Emily starts, pausing with a furrowed brow as a faint sense of discomfort simmers under her skin when she tries to explain her experience.

  She quickly flushes her mind with machina, returning to the same sense of cold, unfeeling that has accompanied her for the last few years. Her discomfort vanishes and her face falls back into a calm mask, but the incessant count in the back of her mind reacts to the suppression immediately, increasing in volume and pushing against the core keeping it confined, trying to bleed into the rest of her thoughts.

  “-ended with me counting the seconds passing to keep myself distracted. I stopped when the memory repeated and I forgot it had happened before, but each time left a small artefact that built into a chorus of voices in my head. The noise helped me realise what was going on and break free…”

  “But it persists even after the treatment is done.” Via nods in understanding. “Thank you, that’s most helpful. I’ve seen a similar reaction in several of my patients, but none of them have been able to so concisely explain what caused their mental scars during the treatment.”

  Emily answers a few more of Via’s questions as the last scraps of scattered metal are removed from the platform, before easing the machina in her head once the questioning is finished and feeling her weak emotions return. When her soldiers finish and return to Elisime, she turns her focus to the large construct below her feet, breaking it back down into mana and reabsorbing as much unspent energy as possible before heading down to rejoin Virgil in the scorching basin of magma below.

  ***

  Months later, Emily finds herself sitting alone cross-legged in the centre of a large metal chamber deep in her Modo factory. The walls and floors are humming with charge, arcing with streaks of electricity, being pumped out of the small, stable reactor above, that dance across Emily’s skin.

  Floating directly above her lap is the lightning essence she was rewarded with upon her return to Modo, suspended in place with tendrils of mana curling out and joining the electricity humming through the air. As she gazes into the crackling wellspring of energy, her thoughts drift back to a question Virgil asked her while she was bathing in a volcano’s throat, watching fire weave around his body in response to a freshly-formed connection.

  “This is incredible. Is this what you always feel? It’s like I’ve become one with the flames… How do you wholly devote yourself to an element with a secondary energy type inside you? Surely it forms some conflict.”

  She found herself unable to provide an answer she was happy with, but, after forming a connection with fire herself then watching closely as her energies entered a state of half-separation, inspiration stuck.

  Machina and mana are both unique energy types, but machina has some similar properties to lightning and metal mana, and it’s easier to convert between them. I can’t consume the lightning essence and attribute my circles as a mage without limiting myself, but what’s to stop me focusing it on my cortex instead?

  Instead of reaching out and drawing the essence into her arms, or trying to swallow it like a potion, Emily fixes the bundle of charge with an intense stare, building up machina in her eyes and drawing mana away from her head. As pressure builds, the tendrils of charge reaching out from the lightning essence are slowly drawn towards Emily’s face, each touch sending a tingling spasm through her muscles.

  More and more streams leap to her eyes in favour of the floor and, as the strikes accelerate in frequency, Emily feels a cold, sharp energy pierce her mind. It slices through her cortex like a knife, seeping into every nook and cranny and twisting itself around the electrical signals firing in her synapses.

  The essence floating before her shrinks, pouring itself into her mind without restraint, but before it reaches a quarter of its original size, the cold, almost soothing, pain in her head turns molten. The lightning turns in an instant from a frigid touch to a burning weight, and her machina rages in response.

  The pressure in her mind mounts and Emily’s head sags. She can feel her thoughts slowing to a crawl as she begins fighting off the change she has invited in, pushing mana back towards her cortex and trying to smother the essence. Her own mana burns away when she tries to directly combat the foreign energy, and when she attempts to attribute it with metal and use it to draw the energy into the rest of her body, it’s quickly overwhelmed.

  Gritting her teeth, Emily twitches her left arm, activating The Clock before the essence can finish binding itself to her. She shivers at the unsettling feeling of the connection beginning to reverse and unravel as she slips into the folds of time.

  It felt right up until the moment it didn’t… The essence overwhelmed my machina, but my current stage shouldn’t be the issue since my progression calls for them to be consumed. Do I need a stabilising element? A metal essence would be perfect, but I don’t know where I’ll find another, so maybe a reinforcement brew will work…

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