Emily connects the heavens and the earth and strikes the ground beside her sleeping friends, just outside the barrier she left. A spray of snow flies out as she slams into the rock beneath, leaving a scorched smear with blackened veins spreading through the permafrost around it.

  The tingling of her skin recedes as the flash of lightning finally clears from her eyes, and she’s left staring at her right hand, watching the vibrating, blurred edges of her flesh knit back into solid form.

  “What the hell was that?” Pod asks, his voice alerting her to the deactivation of her barrier disk.

  Emily tears her gaze away from her hand and looks to her apprentice, seeing him and the rest of her friends and children watching her with varying degrees of awe and bleary-eyed confusion.

  “Where’s the storm gone?” Enzo asks before she can respond, wiping the sleep from his eyes and glancing up at the cloudless night sky.

  “I think…” she says, pausing as she reaches inwards and feels another presence woven into her metal arm, twining with her dual energies. “It’s in me.”

  Pod fixes her with an unamused glare, still waiting for a clearer explanation of what he just saw, but her children rise and approach her. Mensacus cracks open his third eye, letting a thin sliver of mind-numbing light wash over his mother before shutting it and focusing on her left arm with a glare. Silica sniffs at Emily’s metal hand, only hesitating for a moment before licking it in satisfaction and pushing her head into the palm, welcoming the new family member.

  “What did it look like to you?” Emily questions while taking a seat beside Mensacus, keeping part of her focus on the minute twitches of her arm as the elemental settles in.

  “Well, it was kind of hard to see from down here, but I managed to get a few birds close enough to see you at first,” Pod explains. “One moment, you were flying circles through the clouds, covered in lightning and drawing every nearby bolt towards you, and the next you were just… gone. Most of the birds got fried at the same time, so I couldn’t see much after that, but the lightning all sort of blended together and lit up the clouds before striking right there in one huge bolt, and you were back.”

  “I see.” Emily nods, ignoring the self-inflicted loss of a few of her drones. “It’s a little difficult for me to be certain of what happened since I entered a focused trance, but I think I became one with the lightning.”

  “That’s possible?” Tom questions, looking at her with a dazed expression and crust still sitting in the corners of his eyes. “Is it a trait of elementalists?”

  “Is my dad gonna spontaneously combust?” Dante adds in a half-serious tone.

  “If he didn’t in Lebard’s volcanoes, I don’t think you have to worry any time soon,” Emily scoffs.

  “So, the storm dispersed because you drew all of its lightning mana into yourself?” Enzo asks, circling back to his initial query.

  “Kind of. I think the storm itself was a lightning elemental, or it was at least fuelled by one, and I took that elemental into me.”

  She holds up her left hand and whispers a request through her mana. Sparks of plasma somewhere between golden and white race between her fingers from base to tip, but they sputter out before spreading into the open air.

  ‘Unstable/Unbound/Tethered,’ the elemental responds, still twitching Emily’s servos.

  Emily frowns, but before she can tell her friends they’ll have to wait to meet them, her fingers curl without her command. It’s a slow, disjointed movement, and she has to take a deep breath to relax and resist the urge to take back control, but her hand turns to point at her son.

  ‘Multiple streams/While binding and tethered/Can I try?’

  Her friends watch on in silent confusion as Emily nods in understanding and reaches into her belt. She pulls out one of her mechanical birds, an older design with wound gears in place of servos, and holds it in her metal palm.

  The golden-white lightning skips along her fingers again, but this time the burning streams leap to the bird instead of dispersing, and though some of her mana drains as her arm feels lighter despite never losing mass, she can still feel the warm presence getting comfortable within her. The bird shudders, the sudden motion nearly shaking it from Emily’s palm, before it stumbles to balance itself.

  It stands up straight and unfurls its wings, quivering like a new-born fawn trying to find its legs, and ripples of golden sparks dance along the fine metal feathers. Burning plasma fills the empty sockets where eyes should be, and when the bird’s small head turns to look up at her, Emily knows the experiment was a success.

  The bird beats its wings and takes off, flying up a few metres to circle the campsite before diving back down and landing on Emily’s shoulder. Its beak isn’t articulated, but its eyes crease to convey a grin before all the lightning filling its body flows down through its talons and back into her arm.

  The full weight of the elemental returns as the inert bird tumbles from her shoulder, and Emily feels raw joy and excitement bubbling up through their still forming connection. She catches the bird and watches as the elemental start taking control of it again before she turns to address their audience.

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  “That’s an elemental?” Tom questions. “Don’t they need cores? Is that inside you too?”

  “And shouldn’t we be able to feel another presence?” Ivor adds, his signing lit by the still-burning fire. “You don’t feel much stronger than before we went to sleep… is it weak?”

  “They’re not weak: nothing below fourth circle could create a storm that large,” Emily explains, placing the revived bird back on her shoulder. “And yes, as far as I’m aware, elementals need a core to bind them. However, I’m not sure this one could be considered a full elemental before I interacted with them. They were more like a distributed consciousness drifting through the clouds than a single entity, and now, my circles are acting as a stabilising element in place of a core.”

  “Wait, if it has no core, it doesn’t have any circles, right?” Dante says, scratching his head and glancing at the others to confirm it makes no sense to them either. “How can you call it fourth circle?”

  “I didn’t, I just said they aren’t weak. Think of them as a being of wild mana and thought: they had the raw quantity of mana to match a fourth circle being, but no way to direct and delicately control it. Now, once we finish connecting, I’ll act as a guide for their energy.”

  “So, they’re part of you now?” Pod asks, meeting the bird’s curious gaze and flashing them a smile.

  “Yes, she is.” Emily nods, tilting her head to look at the clockwork bird. “I think I’ll call them Harriet.”

  ˉˉˉˉˉ

  [Harriet (They/Her)]

  [Rank:] Familiar

  [Stats:] +100 int

  [Description:] A lightning elemental that took an interest in Emily Coldstone and bound itself to her.

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  [Status]

  [Name:] Emily Coldstone

  [Race:] Human

  [Age:] 21

  [Magic Circle:] Fourth Circle

  [Machina Cortex:] Fourth Stage

  [Familiar:] Harriet (lightning)

  [Attributes] Strength 28 (47), Dexterity 150 > 155 (167), Agility 115 > 121 (134), Vitality 26 (39), Intelligence 373 > 380 (480)

  [Health:] 400/400

  [Stamina:] 1010/1010

  [Mana] 91200/91200

  [Machina] 91200/91200

  _____

  ***

  ‘What’s this?/Something fun?’

  Harriet’s interest tickles their connection, drawing Emily’s attention.

  ‘Gross/Cold/Boring.’

  Harriet’s excitement quickly slips into disappointment and they lose interest in their find, but Emily tells them to wait before continuing their search for entertainment.

  “Harriet’s found something,” she informs her friends, pausing their climb to another peak with a raised hand.

  She focuses on the connection with her familiar, which hasn’t yet stabilised in the few days they’ve been together, feeling out the position of the fragment of the elemental within the bird despite it being outside her area of magical control. It points her past the current cliff they’re scaling to several peaks away, so Emily wraps her allies in a thin film of buzzing purple-gold mana and weaves a teleportation spell together.

  She anchors the warp to Harriet and, with a light pull, they shuttle through space to arrive halfway up one of the southernmost mountains of the range. Before anyone has a chance to speak, a crackling streak of lightning shoots out of the mountain and onto Emily’s shoulder, reforming into a clockwork bird the moment it’s stationary.

  “Wait, was she underground?” Pod asks, glancing between Harriet and the thin sliver of empty space in the rock at their feet that she rose from.

  “It looks like it,” Emily replies, scratching under the bird’s chin as she crouches to inspect the ground.

  It’s faint, but she can feel a dense, pulsing magical signature deep in the mountain, leaking out through the small crack.

  ‘I did good?/You like cold thing?/Can I go yet?’

  Emily nods and lets her familiar take flight again as she begins pouring earthen mana into the ground.

  “There’s something in the mountain,” she explains, spreading a twisting matrix of geometric shapes and runes as she weaves several simple spells together to soften and spread the rock like putty. “I don’t know what exactly, but Harriet calls it cold and boring.”

  “Another ice crystal deposit?” Ivor suggests.

  “I doubt it. It’s quite deep and I can faintly feel it from here. If it’s a crystal deposit, it’s the largest Ulea’s ever seen.”

  The parted rock hardens once the slanted path is wide enough for Emily to walk through unimpeded. She keeps pouring mana into the excavating spell as she follows it down, and the others enter one by one behind her.

  A little over thirty metres into the mountain, and the thin crack Emily’s widening opens up naturally into a several-metre-wide tunnel. The walls are lined with dark rock covered in a thin, perfectly-translucent sheet of ice that drips in sharp stalactites from the ceiling.

  “N-now this f-feels like T-The Glade,” Tom mutters, shivering as Emily illuminates the passage and the light scatters against the ice, creating dancing patterns and casting shifting, unnatural shadows on the walls. “I-I’m g-going just as n-numb.”

  Emily dismisses her tunnelling spell and tints her light with fire, turning the floating orb into a quivering white flame that fends off the chill rising from below. She leads them through the natural pathway, the sharp metal tread on her and Pod’s boots making easy work of the slippery ground while her friends make do with the extra wraps of chain she made for them.

  The passage winds a circuitous route down through the mountain, following a spiral that slowly narrows as they dip below sea-level.

  “Is it just me, or does this tunnel feel intentional?” Dante asks, a little unnerved by the complete lack of life or branching, alternate pathways.

  “It’s almost as if it’s reaching for the surface,” Emily responds, more as a statement than a question as she recognises the oddly-neutral energy signature now only a few dozen metres below them.

  She speeds up her descent, forcing the others to keep pace as they travel the final stretch of the passage. When they walk around the final bend, the space opens up into a small chamber, barely five metres wide and only a couple tall. The walls are covered in crystalline formations, some of pure ice and some of icy mana, and in the centre of the room is a distorted crack in space emanating the pressure of a fourth circle being.

  “Is… Is that a dungeon?” Enzo asks, stepping towards the crack and pausing when Emily places her arm in his way.

  “It’s not a stable one,” she says. “That’s certain at least.”

  “Right.” He nods, staying behind her.

  “Mother…” Mensacus purrs in recognition, his metal jaws stretching into a grin.

  “Yes, I know.” She glances back to catch his eyes, matching his grin. “It has the same signature, but the blend of spatial mana is a little different. I’m guessing they’re both entrances, but to different areas.”

  “Wait, the same as what?” Tom cuts in, looking between them in confusion.

  “A whirlpool just off the coast of New Denntimo that I’ve been watching for when it forms into a dungeon proper.” Emily clarifies. “It was there when I first left Modo, and had grown from third to fourth circle in energy level by the time I returned. If it continues along that trajectory it will reach the upper bounds of fourth circle in a little over two years, but I don’t think it will stop there.”

  “You don’t mean…”

  “Yep. I think we’re looking at Ulea’s first fifth circle dungeon.”