“Well that doesn’t sound good.”

Coyote Lady and Raccoon Boy felt the tremor all the way on the top of the rock spire they sat on. It was close to the great totem, rising to the Storm Horse’s stifle. She’d been listening to Kellen and Kiypu speaking with the Elders when the shaking began. Then the ring of wind had surrounded the base of the totem and she heard nor saw no more. She recognized the power of one of the Wild Mother’s children at once. Pierce the ring of storm mana was impossible, no matter how hard she tried. A moment later, the Storm Horse goddess’s presence vanished.

“What’s happening?” Raccoon Boy asked, though he could see and hear as plain as her. “It’s not… it not collapsing, is it?” He wrung his tiny paws together, showing a rare moment of worry.

Coyote Lady didn’t answer. She stared down at the tent, waiting and watching to see what happened next. The ring of storm mana grew, expanding beneath the Storm Horse Totem until it encircled the base of the structure. Fierce winds blasted out in all directions, sending frantic flying Mana Beasts and people rushing to escape its path. The winds overturned tents and kicked up a dust cloud in the air, spiraling all around the totem up into the ominous cloud hovering above the Horse’s head. When the two collided, a sonic boom cracked the afternoon sky, sending an explosion of hail in every direction.

The force hit Coyote Lady and she staggered backward, shielding a hand against the dirt and debris lanced with flying raindrops. It ended in a blink. The purple storms still raged overhead, but had risen higher into the sky, revealing the head of the Storm Horse Totem. It was hard to tell from her vantage, but it appeared the totem’s eyes glowed with an unnerving electric blue light.

“Look!”

She followed Raccoon Boy’s furry paw downward. “Well, that is… unexpected.”

Dozens of wild Mana Beasts poured out of the cavern, bellowing, screeching and howling in rage. They spread in all directions, stampeding through the crowds of people still stunned from the blast of air that had ripped away the Storm Horse Elders’s council tent. Storm Horse Beastcallers of all strength immediately rushed to the defense of the crowds, and combat between the wild Mana Beasts and the Storm Horse Mana Beasts broke out all throughout the Wind Bones. Some fought in pairs, while in other spots, whole groups clashed, lightning, thunder and wailing wind exploding all around Coyote Lady and Raccoon Boy’s vantage point. She thought she spotted Kellen down below, chasing after a rhinoceros.

Coyote Lady looked back to the newly formed cavern beneath the totem. After the initial wave of a hundred or so wild Mana Beasts, the gaping hole remained empty. Without a word, she leaped from the top of her rock spire, sailed through the air and landed briefly on the side of the Storm Horse Totem’s leg. Pushing off an instant later, she dropped right at the cave’s edge. A howling filled the air as Raccoon Boy sailed after her, arms pinwheeling through open air. He face-planted on the ground beside her, limbs sprawled out in every direction.

“You know I can’t do landings,” he groaned, pushing himself up and shaking his head.

“I do,” Coyote Lady grinned. Even in the midst of this chaos, it was still good to find something to grin about. Her expression soon faded. “Now what do we have here?”

As Coyote Lady paced around the sloping cave entrance, she wondered if something similar had happened to the other totems. Questions sprang to her mind with very few answers or even guesses.

“We won’t find anything out standing up her,” she told Raccoon Boy. “Let’s go see—”

The toe of her moccasin brushed the threshold from dirt to rock. Coyote Lady cried out and fell backward. She trembled, lying on the ground, staring at the cavern with new respect and fear. Normally, Raccoon Boy would have relished seeing his friend out of sorts. Coyote Lady, however, was not shaken easily.

“What happened?” Raccoon Boy rushed to her side and placed a furry hand on Coyote Lady’s shoulder.

“My powers… left me,” Coyote Lady gasped. “I felt it instantly. I do not think we can enter, not without losing our power.”

Raccoon Boy glanced back at the cave, his curiosity at what lie inside forgotten, replaced by a growing dread. “All of our power?”

“Based on what happened to me, yes,” Coyote Lady said. “We’ll have to think of another way inside…”

A deafening thunderclap split the skies. Coyote Lady and Raccoon Boy looked up and saw a massive lightning bolt spearing toward the ground, straight at them. Neither panicked or tried to move. In struck just feet away from where they sat and a woman appeared in the resulting flash, Mana Beast at her side.

Winoyah Thunderborn, Paragon of the Storm Horse Tribes, gazed at the gaping cavern beneath the feet of her goddesses’s Totem. White and purple mana paint in intricate lightning bolt patterns that stood out from the umber skin of her hairless head. White eyebrows scowled above flashing blue eyes crackling with electricity.

A great, silver eagle stood next to Winoyah. Its jagged wings looked like lightning bolts hammered out of gleaming metal: silver, gold and copper. The Mana Beast was as tall as its Paragon. It let loose a screech like rippling thunder.

Even though Coyote Lady and Raccoon Boy were primevals with strength beyond that of Winoyah and her Mana Beast, the pair still felt the weight of the Paragons’s aura pressing against them. It was a testament to the power that mortal Beastcallers had attained over the thousands of years since the Wild Mother first awakened the power of mana in humankind.

The mightiest Beastcaller or Mana Beast in all of Oras couldn’t see or sense the immortals if they wished to go unnoticed. Coyote Lady watched, interested to see how the Storm Horse Tribe Paragon would react. Coyote Lady knew Winoyah and her eagle, Windwake, had been at a gathering of the Paragons, somewhere to the northeast. All the other Great Totems were experiencing the same strange storms as the Storm Horse. Aside from the vague prophecies about the coming of the Fourth Noctun, no one knew what it meant. Not even Coyote Lady had expected the totem to open. She wondered what powerful remnants of the Storm Horse goddess might lie inside… and who would seek to claim them.

Mortal and demi-god alike lived in strange, unknown times now, the future beyond the reckoning of anyone save the Wild Mother herself. The thought sent a shiver all the way down Coyote Lady’s tail.

We sit on a cliff at the end of time, and no one knows what awaits in the abyss below.

Winoyah looked to be having similar thoughts, based on the deep furrows in her face. Her appearance was deceiving. She’d been raised to Paragon strength hundreds of years ago, yet looked no older than a woman in late middle age.

“What lies inside, I wonder?” she asked her Mana Beast.

Windwake stretched out his great neck as if sniffing at the cavern air. “Who can say? I sense no more wild Mana Beasts within, but there is a density of storm mana within like I have never felt before, obscuring everything.”

“There is only one way to know for sure.” Without hesitation, Winoyah stepped across the theshold. Coyote Lady and Raccoon Boy watched unseen as she gasped and sank to her knees, just as Coyote Lady had. Windwake reached forward and snagged her leather tunic by the shoulder, dragging her back into the dirt.

“What is it?”

“An unseen veil,” Winoyah coughed, chest still heaving. “I felt as if I was no stronger than a Guardian, or Chieftain, at most.”

“How is that possible?” the eagle asked, staring at the cavern with new respect.

“Was that the same thing that happened to you?” Raccoon Boy asked Coyote Lady.

She nodded then shushed him before he could ask another question, curious to hear the rest of the exchange between the pair.

“I do not know,” Winoyah said after several more labored breaths. “It felt as if my beast heart would have bled dry had gone further.”

“This is certainly nothing I have ever heard of,” Windwake said, cocking his head at the cavern. “There should not be a power in Oras than can drain the strength from a Paragon so freely.”

“If we had both crossed…” Winoyah trailed off. “We should hold council with Onaka, and the Elders. Some of them may be trapped down there, or injured in the storm. The people were restless before. They will be close to panic now.”

An irritated caw drew the attention of the Paragons and the two primevals. All four peered into the depths of the cavern and soon heard the sound of footfalls on rock, followed by a string of mumbling curses.

“Careful!” Came the admonishing of a crow. “Buried!”

“Well, this is an interesting twist,” Coyote Lady remarked asKiypu and Shakraa appeared out of the cavern.

Having no clue who the mummy was, Winoyah was on her guard immediately, storm mana workings bursting to life in her hands as she levitated off the ground, held aloft by a crackling electricity.

Seeing the Paragon, Kiypu threw a husk of an arm up to shield his jeweled eyes from the light emanating from Winoyah. Shakraa cawed and flew in panicked circles around the mummy’s head.

“Peace!” Kiypu shouted. “Peace, mighty Paragon. We mean you no harm. We are guests of your people.”

Winoyah descended back to the great and Windwake folded his wings, though he continued to watch the strange pair emerging from the cavern with a sharp eye. “What are you?” Winoyah asked.

“Just an old Beastcaller in the wrong place at the wrong time… I think,” Kiypu said. “We were meeting with your Elders, my friends and I, when the ground swallowed me up. I found myself deep underground and have only now found my back.”

Coyote Lady felt Winoyah’s mana sense wash over Kiypu. Or it would have, had it not withered at the invisible veil around the cavern.

“Step out slowly,” Winoyah said. “If you attack, I will destroy you where you stand.”

“No need, no need,” Kiypu said, raising his hands in the air. Shakraa landed on his head, rustling her wings anxiously.

Winoyah waited for the pair to cross the cavern threshold, where stone gave way to trampled dirt. She’d backed up several paces, holding a powerful whirlwind working in both hands that could have turned Kiypu to dust.

Her mana sense washed over the mummy again and she frowned. Coyote Lady knew what she’d discovered, or rather, what she hadn’t discovered. To anyone below the rank of Elder, Kiypu’s aura would appear as one attuned to earth mana, somewhere in the realm of Guardian. The most powerful Beastcallers, those at Elder or Paragon, would still sense Kiypu at Guardian strength. Examining his beast heart closer, however, they’d find a complicated swirl of mana. Like muddy water churned up with paints and colored sand.

The mana veil hadn’t impacted Kiypu or Shakraa the way it had Winoyah and Coyote Lady. Coyote Lady made note of that. The Snake Cult would learn of what had befallen the totem, if they didn’t know already. And they would use it to their advantage.

“What are you?” Winoyah asked the mummy, breaking Coyote Lady’s thoughts.

Kiypu bowed and Shakraa let out an irritated caw at being displaced from his head. “That,” he said, “Is the question I’m trying to find out for myself.”