Kellen felt as if he were inside a blender. He spun and flipped around, limbs flailing from the centrifugal force of the whirlwind. A roaring wind filled his ears, tearing at his clothes.

As quick as it started, it was over. Kellen collapsed onto a bed of clouds, groaning. The world still spun violently, even with his eyes closed. He thought his brain might have shaken loose from his skull.

When things finally settled down, he cracked his eyes open to see where he’d landed. Pale morning sunshine met his eyes, though there was no direct source of it anywhere. He was sitting on a fluffy cloud that floated through the air like a sheep in a blue sky pasture. It was about the size of a large couch. There were dozens of them all around him and as far as the eye could see in every direction, moving in lazy random patterns.

The warmth in his pocket reminded Kellen of Chirp’s egg. He pulled it out and held the small red-gold egg cupped between his hands. It gave off the same reassuring warmth. Nothing appeared changed. He’d harbored a small hope Chirp might emerge. Her presence was reassuring in a quirky way. It almost felt like being around a little kid who thought you could do no wrong.

He sighed. No Chirp. No Vex. No help of any kind. It was down to him and him alone to work his way through this predicament. Or was it?

If Kellen could find a mana dense area to draw on, he might be able to connect with Kiypu’s memory presence again. That seemed as good an option as anything else he could do at the moment. But was there a concentrated source of mana in this expanse of clouds?

As he scanned his surroundings, he noticed the clouds changing from white to a golden color, including the one he rode on. He reached down and patted it with his hands. Nothing else appeared different. Except…

He jerked his hand back in surprise. The cloud, which had just been a normal cloud—albeit one solid enough to sit on—had changed. He now felt a budding spark of sun mana at the center of it. As he stretched out his sense to confirm, the clouds changed color again, this time to a brilliant emerald green. The core of the cloud changed as well, now exuding a hint of nature mana instead.

Kellen sat for about an hour as the clouds cycled through every kind of mana he knew: sun, nature, water, earth, shadow, fire, and last, storm. At the end of the cycle, there took on the milky yellow-green cream of the mana he’d seen from Shakraa’s attacks, then back to the brilliant white.

Still floating along, Kellen tried to make sense of what this meant. He assumed it was a natural phenomenon. If he’d caused it, logically the clouds would have remained as sun mana. He wished Vex were there. With all the different mana types present, they could continue to test the theory that Vex could absorb any kind of mana. Given the amount of storm mana he’d taken in within the Thunder Beast, Kellen was eager to see what they could do with other sources.

The clouds turned gold again. Kellen wasted no time, pulling at the tiny sparks of sun mana as far as he could reach. In every direction within a stone’s throw around him, the clouds pulled closer. The moment they touched his cloud, they blended together. Just as they did, the mana shifted to a brilliant Caribbean blue of water mana.

Kellen's excitement spiked. The core, as he called the condensed area of mana in the clouds, had grown several times larger. Once more, he waited for the shifting clouds to transform into their sun mana stage, then pulled as many as he could into his ever-growing cloud. After doing this three more times, he now sailed on a cloud as large as a house. He estimated it held about as much sun mana as he had as a ward—a decent amount for his work, but far from what he’d need to charge his connection to Kiypu’s presence within him.

Encouraged by the progress, the slowness of it still frustrated him. He’d counted out each cycle as taking about thirty minutes, which meant he’d already spent two hours on the project. It was time he didn’t think he had to waste.

The next cycle when the clouds turned gold, Kellen reached out to them, yanking desperately rather than carefully guiding them in to his growing cloud blob. The urgency helped him pull in a few more clouds but still wouldn’t get him the density he’d found in the Thunder Beast for… days? Weeks?

Kellen walked close to the edge of the clouds, a pointed area he’d inadvertently shaped like a ship’s prow. As he drifted forward, he noticed something he’d missed before from his vantage in the center of the mass: like a giant snowball rolling down the hill, the smaller clouds stuck to his bigger cloud as he drifted by.

The next time the clouds turned golden, instead of pulling them into him, he positioned his cloud ship toward the areas of the sky with the most little clouds, then sat back as it did all the work for him throughout each of the following transitions. It still wasn’t fast enough. He didn’t have days to spare, and he was trying to create a collection of mana as powerful as the Thunder Beast, which had exuded an aura even greater than the Storm Horse Elders. He now wondered if he’d underestimated days or weeks for years.

The clouds shifted the blue-gray of storm mana. Eager to get a head start on when they turned to sun mana, Kellen stretched out his sense to the nearest and pulled. To his surprise, the tiny amount of storm mana in the cloud responded. The cloud shook and jerked through the air like a kite fighting against the wind but there could be no mistake. It had moved. Another type of mana had responded to him.

He was so excited by this revelation that he almost missed the cycle of sun mana in the clouds. Pulling on the storm mana felt like the first time he’d purposefully tried to channel mana in his second day as a Beastcaller. It was an enormous pull on his focus, yet it had been possible. Was it because of Vex harnessing the storm mana to aid in their advancement to Guardian strength?

As soon as the cloud turned the emerald green showing a nature mana attunement, Kellen reached out to the spark of mana within it and pulled. The cloud wobbled but didn’t move any closer like the storm mana had. Had that been his imagination? Kellen tried again when the cloud turned ocean blue. Once more, it wobbled but nothing else. Still, it was progress.

Kellen got into a comfortable position and let out a long breath, settling in for the task ahead. Excitement filled him. He didn’t understand how he was channeling another type of mana. He didn’t care. Each time the mana changed, he reached for it, opening his beast heart to it. When the cloud turned to sun, he steered it toward the thickest areas of smaller clouds. During storm mana’s turn, he found he could pull one or two additional clouds in. For each of the others, it was enough to see the clouds wobble.

Yet with each passing cycle, the clouds moved a little more while in their other types of mana. Since he was using mana from without, Kellen’s internal mana didn’t need to be used. Add that to the fact that he didn’t need to eat, drink, or sleep in the totem, and he had the methods of infinitely practicing to channel every type of mana as he built his cloud larger and larger.

The next time the clouds turned white, Kellen walked around his creation. Without being able to see how large it had grown beneath his feet or over the edges, he estimated he’d pieced together a cloud as big as his high school. What was more, in the gap left in the wake of his cloud ship, more tiny clouds had already appeared. He had an infinite source of mana at his fingertips.

But not enough time. The tiny bit of mana in each cloud felt to his sense like a grain of sand. He’d built an impressive sandcastle when what he really needed was pearls. If only there were a way to speed things up.

An idea crossed Kellen’s mind, born of what brief snippets he’d retained from high school physics. What he had on his hands was a frictionless environment and the ability to set an object in motion.

Golden hues melted over the massive cloud. At the same moment, Kellen stood in the center of the cloud and squatted down. While there wasn’t an enormous amount of mana, it had condensed in the central core of the cloud. Burying his hands in the cloud, Kellen reached for the source of sun mana, feeding his own mana to it like a long chain. He had to be quick before the cloud transformed again.

The moment the sun mana from his working connected to the mana in the core, he thrust himself upward as if he were coming out of a dead lift. The cloud shot upward, moving twice as fast as it had before.

He dodged to the side as smaller clouds pelted the top of the cloud mass like raindrops striking pavement. The next time the cloud turned golden, he repeated the action until he zoomed through the air as fast as he dared, moving at highway speeds.

Higher and higher he flew, with no ceiling or end to the clouds in sight. Now at speed, he worked to spread and shape the sun mana each time it cycled around, spreading it out like massive heaps of icing over the top of a cake. He now estimated he had as much mana in the cloud as he held in his Guardian strength beast heart with more growing by the second.

By now, the cloud pulled in its tiny counterparts all on its own, sucking them as if it were an all-consuming black hole. The growth rate become exponential. For the first time, Kellen worried he’d started a chain reaction he could no longer control.

What would happen when the cloud pulled everything from that level of the totem? Would it be strong enough to pull mana spirits and auras from other areas of the totem? Had he inadvertently created a vortex that would implode the entire structure? The mana accumulating in the cloud gave off an overpowering aura, one that felt at least as powerful as Elder strength, if not matching the power he’d sensed in the Storm Horse Paragon. He had the mana density he needed, but with the cloud rocketing out of control, focusing enough to tap into Kiypu’s memory presence would be almost impossible.

Eyes streaming from the speed of travel, Kellen craned his head back to look directly overhead. A gray shaped loomed above them, small enough to hide from his vision with his hand at the distance but growing faster by the second. It didn’t take long for Kellen to realize he was staring at the underside of a massive tornado.

Soon, he was close enough to distinguish the top of the tornado from the long, snaking tail that whipped back and forth underneath. At its widest part, the tornado stretched almost out of sight in the sky above him, lightning flashing in its depths. A glowing blue light whipped back and forth at the bottom of the storm, shifting from electric blue to bright purple.

The mass of cloud—currently in a rich, loamy bronze color of earth mana—jerked from its course. The tail of the tornado had somehow snared it and pulled it diagonally through the air. Thrown onto this face, Kellen could only grab at the cloud with his hands as wind whistled by. Beneath him, the cloud churned, rumbled and buzzed with mana, more than he’d believed could be condensed into one area. Turning golden with sun mana, the weight of it pulled at his beast heart, weighing on the mana channels throughout his body like anchor chains.

He struggled to push himself up from the cloud. The force of their accelerating upward trajectory combined with the pull of the cloud’s mana core pinned him down. Panic seized him and he fought with all his might, managing to roll onto his back only after the cloud transitioned out of its sun mana phase.

Lying on his back, he stared upward. The tail of the tornado loomed ever closer. It would be a toss-up now if they were sucked in or the sun mana consumed him.

Just as the cloud turned to storm mana, the tail of the mountain-sized tornado latched onto to it. Perhaps half a mile away, the tornado sucked at the cloud, which held its storm state as the tornado reeled it in. Kellen felt the ground pulling him toward the tail of the tornado. It was all he could do to crawl away at a snail’s pace, each lift of his arm or leg a momentous effort.

Looking over his shoulder, he saw there was no chance of escape. His last thought was a desperate hope that he’d at least thwarted the Snake Cult, even if he’d killed everyone inside the totem.