“Chirp,” Vex said. “Is there any chance that frog dude was the person you were so worried about?”

The red hawk shook her head, sending the streaming feathers on her head flapping. “Nope. Definitely not.”

“Great,” Kellen said. “So there’s this guy, who clearly wants to fight, plus something else who could show up and kill us.”

In response, the frog man began a bowlegged walk across the rock plan, carrying his large club over one shoulder. Heart racing, Kellen began the steps of his kyyoh. Over the past months, Nokom had taught him a shorter version of the mana dance that didn’t provide the same benefits as a prolonged mana dance but it worked in a pinch. As he progressed through each step and form, he felt a swelling in his beast heart, following by an energizing tingling in his hands, feet and neck. He only stopped when the frog man reached the middle of the platform.

There could be no doubt it was the same being or type of being the Snake Cultists had been trying to summon. The figure stared at them with bulbous yellow-green eyes. His tongue snaked out now and then to lick at his face or moisten an eyeball, a disgusting motion that made Kellen wince each time. Nobody spoke.

Kellen’s eyes darted around the rocky plane, looking for any hint of how they could ascend to the next level of the totem. His mind also raced with the possibilities of what the thing standing before them could be. Its mixture of animal and human parts made Kellen think at first of Coyote Lady. However, she’d said that she couldn’t enter the totem without losing her power. Did that mean this frog man was a primeval? If so, had he surrendered his powers to enter the totem with the rest of the Snake Cultists? And how far behind were the others? At last, the frog man spoke, ending Kellen’s train of wayward thoughts.

“I am the incarnation of Frog Priest, son of the Snake,” he said in a gravelly, rumbling voice. He held out the massive club and pointed it at them. Kellen could now see it was a gigantic bone of some sort carved into a fearsome weapon with the ball joint serving as the rounded end of the club. “I know you, spirit traveler. You were in the caves when the humans tried to bring me forth.”

The memory of an amphibian shape growing from the milk-white pool in the ritual chamber months before appeared in Kellen’s mind. Apparently, they hadn’t been as victorious as they’d all hoped.

He ran through their options. Much like when he tried to sense Coyote Lady, when Kellen inspected the Frog Priest with his mana sense, it came back as a void, rather than giving him any indication of how strong their foe might be. Fighting an unknown opponent didn’t seem wise. Neither did fleeing down the rocks when the thing chasing them had the jumping power of a man-sized amphibian.

“What do you want from us?” Kellen asked, trying to keep the shaking out of his voice. Though the mana stirred by the kyyoh still churned inside of him, it had mixed with cold adrenaline and fear.

“Your presence is nothing to me,” Frog Priest croaked. “If the mana spirit that accompanies you tells me where the heart of the totem is, I will let you live.”

Chirp landed on the ground between Kellen and Vex and covered her head with her wings. “Oh no, no, no. I can’t do that, don’t make me do that..”

Kellen didn’t understand how he could make Chirp do anything. She wasn’t bonded to him in any way and came and went as she pleased. He told the Frog Priest as much, noting that the mutant had taken several more steps closer to them.

“She knows the path even if she will not share it willingly,” the Frog Priest said, waving a hand at Chirp, who still cowered on the ground. “Make your decision. It matters not to me if you live or die.”

“I don’t think we want this guy to find the heart of the totem anyway,” Vex said in a low voice. “What’s it going to be? Fight or run?”

“Chirp, can you do anything to help us?” Kellen asked. “If that thing wins, I don’t know what he’s capable of doing to you or the Storm Horse totem.”

“I-I can’t!” Chirp wailed. She fluttered in the air back and forth, frantic. “I’m sorry—I have to go!”

She disappeared with a pop, only to reappear a moment later in the same place. “What’s going on?” she shouted as the Frog Priest raised a hand, appearing to pull her through the air toward him. “Let me go!”

Kellen formed a ball of sun mana in his hand and hurled it at the Frog Priest. At the last moment, the mutant ducked his flag frog head to the side, and the ball flew past him. Kellen yanked his hand backward in a reverse throwing motion. The orb rebounded and the Frog Priest stumbled forward as it struck him hard in the back. His connection broken, Chirp disappeared in a pop and a flash.

“Guess we’re fighting!” Vex growled, his markings and tail tips glowing golden.

“You should not have interfered,” the Frog Priest said, shaking his head. “Do you know how many Beastcallers I have slain? The rest of my followers will be here soon. By then, I will be swallowing your corpse.”

Kellen splayed his hands wide, dropping the gilded armor over Vex as the Mana Beast shot forward and leaped into the air. The Frog Priest took two bounds forward and sprang upward as well, his club raised overhead. The instant before the two collided, Vex’s storm of golden daggers rained down on the mutant. In the next instant, the Frog Priest’s club struck Vex hard, knocking him from the sky.

Vex landed in a crumpled heap at Kellen’s feet, groaning as he staggered to sit up. The Frog Priest landed in a three-point superhero pose a short distance away, club held aloft in one hand.

“This totem has drained my power, but there is enough left to defeat you!”

The Frog Priest leaped toward them. Kellen thrust his hands forward, throwing up a large sun mana shield in the space between them. Just before the mutant struck it, he raised his bone club again and crushed the working, sailing through the golden shards of broken mana. The attack by the rhinoceros had made Kellen realize he couldn’t deflect everything. And he’d grown tired of everything breaking through his shields with nothing to show for it.

As the Frog Priest rocketed toward them, Kellen clapped his hands together. The broken wisps of the sun mana shield reformed and flew at the back of their foe. A blast of triangular golden light shot from Vex’s mouth. Vex’s working struck the Frog Priest in his bulbous head just as Kellen’s remade shield struck it full on in the back. The Frog Priest flew off his trajectory, crashing to the edge of the rock platform before rolling off the side.

Kellen spun, a disc of sun mana rotating around each of his hands. For a brief moment, he thought the Frog Priest had fallen. His hopes were dashed a second later when the mutant creature flew up over the edge. At his peak high above them, the Frog Priest made a horizontal slashing movement with his bone club. A crescent blade of wintergreen mana arced down at them.

Vex jumped in front of Kellen and blasted apart the attack with one of the sun mana prism attacks. Split in half but not destroyed, the mana from the Frog Priest’s attack crashed down around Kellen, sending a similar feeling of dizziness and flu symptoms.

But Kellen had been an entirely different person—and Beastcaller—then. He shook off the attack, hurling several orbs of sun mana over Vex’s head at the spot he predicted Frog Priest to land. One caught the mutant in the air, two more sailed by, and a fourth struck the ground just before the frog man landed, exploding into a blinding flash of golden light.

Frog Priest cried out and shielded his large bulbous eyes as he stumbled backward. Vex was on him before he could recover, letting loose another rain of his golden daggers. Meanwhile, Kellen charged forward, shaping one of his mana prisons before him.

Just as their opponent recovered, Kellen flung the working over the Frog Priest. The rounded ball wrapped around the Frog Priest’s free hand, encasing it and pulling him to the ground like an anchor. Kellen threw another, which hit the opposite leg and jerked the mutant onto his back.

Flailing, the Frog Priest kicked with his powerful limbs still freed of the workings. Kellen threw another disc at the bone club, which hissed and sizzled like snow on a hot burner before breaking in a sparkle of light. It appeared the bone club’s strange markings worked much like the wrappings the other cultists wore. He immediately summoned another orb which he threw at the frog man’s arm, the impact forcing the mutant to release his grip on the club.

The Frog Priest let out a terrible guttural yell as he clawed at the mana spheres pinning him to the ground and struggled beneath the ever-tightening working.

“I think we’ve got him!” Vex shouted, bounding forward.

A deafening scream split the air. Kellen, Vex and the Frog Priest all collapsed in agony, trying to cover their ears against the sound. Head and ears ringing, Kellen looked up to see an eagle the size of a jetliner descending from above, its entire body made of crackling lightning. Kellen thought he knew what the new arrival was. He’d seen lesser versions of them—if they could even be described as “lesser”—during the fire bison stampede on the plains. Unlike the Thunder Bird Mana Beasts on the plains, this one’s mana aura was so powerful, Kellen guessed it had been feeding off of the dense storm mana in the totem for centuries. It had to have been Chieftain strength at the least.

The Thunder Bird landed on the platform, causing the entire surface to tilt and shake electric pulses crackled out from his taloned claws. On all fours, Kellen glanced at the Frog Priest. The last of Kellen’s sun mana orbs popped from the errant storm mana of the Thunder Bird. Rather than worrying about the wild Mana Beast, the Frog Priest snatched his bone club and lunged toward them. At the same time the mutant was airborne, the Thunder Bird let out another keening blast. Kellen collapsed to the stone. Somehow, over the terrible scream of the mighty eagle, he heard the cracking and splintering of rock.

Kellen’s world tilted. Like a great ship sinking into the ocean, the platform of white rock listed to the side, tipping upward as it fell through the sky. Kellen and Vex scrambled upward. Above them, the Frog Priest had jammed his bone club into the solid rock and hung on, leering at them with an impossibly wide smile. The mutant gestured toward the Thunder Bird with its free hand.

The Mana Beast spread its wings, then folded them in close. As it did, a whirlwind appeared at its feet, soon turning into a three story-tall gray-blue tornado that swallowed it whole. At the bottom of the tornado, a portal of white light grew until it was large enough for a bus to fit through. It could only be the escape from the crumbling world around them.

“Goodbye, puny human.” Wrenching the bone club free, the Frog Priest sliced it through the air in a single motion. A second crescent of pus-green mana flashed toward Kellen and Vex, too close to dodge.

Kellen raised a hand. He’d only summoned the first sparks of a shield when a flash of red and bronze feathers passed between them and the attack. He recognized Chirp an instant before she and the attack collided in a brilliant flash of white, orange and red.

The rock platform lurched again, throwing Kellen and Vex backward. Kellen skidded along the rock and jammed a foot into a crevice just in time to see the Frog Priest bounding toward the tornado portal. A second later, the white rock split with a thunderous crack. Kellen and Vex flew upward as the ground beneath them collapsed. The next moment, they were free falling.

Kellen! He heard Vex shouting for him in his mind, the whipping wind pulling them apart and making speech impossible. Eyes streaming from the force of the free fall, Kellen reached desperately, helplessly for Vex as the distance between them grew.

A current struck Kellen in the side, forcing his body upward and to the left. Over the roar of the wind in his ears, he thought he made out a whistling sound. He couldn’t see Vex anywhere. Another blast of wind hit him and he felt a yanking on his stomach as something pulled him sideways through the air.

He had only an instant to realize he’d been sucked into the heart of a tornado before his back struck something hard and his world faded.