Kellen and Vex tumbled and rolled down the Thunder Beast’s throat. The slope was steep and the bouncy, slippery clouds that made up the Thunder Beasts’s insides were like snow on a tubing hill. Their sliding fall continued for long minutes before they came to rest with a final bounce. Kellen sat up, groaning, his vision swaying. Beside him, Vex stumbled around like he’d had an overdose of cat nip.

When Kellen’s vision settled, he looked around at what he guessed was the stomach of the Thunder Beast. It was a cavern made of clouds, with flashes of lightning and broken chunks of mana crystals providing light. The area was about the size and shape of a quarter-mile running track and filled with odd assortments of objects, including a pile of what looked like snow, several bright blue trees flickering like dying light bulbs, and other random features. A shower of purple rain poured down in a small circle while several silver whirlwinds spun lazily throughout the space with no apparent pattern. The whole thing was more like a terrarium than the inside of a stomach.

“This is… unexpected,” Vex said. “I really hope there’s a way out of here. Do you think Thunder Beasts have bowel movements?”

“If they do, I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Kellen said. Serious remorse from about walking through the archway filled him. At least the infinite canyon had been somewhat safe, if boring.

“Chirp!” he called out, cupping his hands to his mouth. “Chirp!”

If the mana spirit heard him, she didn’t show herself.

“Birds,” Vex muttered. “I knew I should have tried to eat her.”

“The way things are going in here, she probably would have turned into a giant dragon or something and eaten us,” Kellen pointed out. “Let’s take a look around.”

They began a walk around the edge of the beast’s belly, careful to avoid the silver whirlwinds whenever they meandered by. The whole thing looked just like a giant landfill for mana flora. A stream of translucent white liquid poured down a waterfall from the far end of the stomach into a deep pool, the only hint at an exit to their predicament.

“This is probably not a good time to mention that I can’t swim,” Vex said. “And I really, really don’t like to get wet, so if you’re thinking about going out that way, think again.”

Kellen grabbed a nearby rock the size of a baseball and tossed it into the pool. It disappeared without so much as a ripple. He didn’t take that as an encouraging sign. Next, he shaped a small orb of sun mana and threw it in to the center of the liquid. The moment it hit the surface, a geyser erupted from the spot, spewing them with the milky liquid.

The liquid tasted like crafting glue mixed with paper mache paste. Kellen spat it out and wiped his eyes clear. When he saw Vex, he burst out laughing. The white liquid was quickly drying like glue all over Vex’s body, leaving his fur spiked and standing on end and looking like he’d been dropped in powdered sugar.

“Not. Cool,” Vex said, shooting him a dirty feline look. “I’m surprised that I have to be the voice of reason here, but after what happened with Kiypu’s mana stone, did you think before you lobbed a mana working into there?”

“Sorry,” Kellen said, trying to force back another chuckle. “You’re right.”

“What was that?” Vex asked. He lifted a tufted ear, still dripping with white goop. “I couldn’t hear you through this sludge.”

“I said you’re right,” Kellen repeated. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

Fortunately, when the white substance finished drying, it peeled right off. After a brisk scrubbing, both Kellen and Vex were in almost the same shape they’d been before the ill-fated eruption. They continued exploring the circular cavern, finding more heaps of what Kellen called mana debris: various glowing crystals in different sizes, shapes and colors, weird pulsating moss and fungi and a patch of flowers that made a sound like the wind rustling through the trees and smelled of pine. After their misfortune by the pool, Vex didn’t try to eat any of it, which was a pleasant surprise.

“Well, there’s no going back up the way we came in,” Kellen said, hands on his hips as he looked at the spot where they’d been dumped out. There had been a trampoline-sized hole there, but it had apparently closed after depositing them in the belly of the Thunder Beast.

“So now what?” Vex asked. “They way I see it, if there’s no stomach acid to melt us, and this thing never goes to the bathroom, how are we going to get out?”

Kellen shook his head. He had no idea, either. “Chirp!” he yelled again. As expected, there was no response.

He sat on the fluffy, cloudy ground and leaned back against a large rock. He needed to think. For the moment, at least they were safe, which meant it was time to stop reacting and use his head.

“This Thunder Beast isn’t a Mana Beast, right?” he asked Vex.

“I don’t think so,” Vex said. “Though I have no idea what my insides look like, to be honest. For all I know, I’m just bones and fur stuffed with mana dust.”

“If it’s not a Mana Beast, is it a mana spirit, like Chirp?” Kellen wondered aloud. “That seems the most likely, though based on what we saw from Chirp, she wasn’t a solid form. So maybe that means this is another level within the totem?”

He fell silent, pondering his own questions, until Vex suddenly sprang up.

“Wait, I’ve got an idea!”

Before Kellen could stop him, the Mana Beast sprinted straight toward one of the cloud-covered walls of their dungeon. He smacked into it face first, body scrunching like an accordion behind him in an almost cartoonish way. Kellen winced as a dull pain filled his head from their shared sensations. Like stretching a hand into a rubber glove, Vex carried on, pushing at the rubbery cloud boundary for a few more feet before the whiplash flung him backward into the chamber.

“Could you maybe ask me before you do something like that again?” Kellen asked, rubbing his forehead.

“Noted,” Vex said, wobbling as he got his feet underneath him. “I just thought how stupid would we feel if we sat in here for a week and then realized we could just walk out?”

Kellen blinked again, thankful for the pain receding in his head. He supposed he couldn’t fault Vex for trying. “How about we just sit here for a few minutes and think things through?”

He cleared his mind and sat in a more alert yet still relaxing position. Vex laid down beside him and Kellen closed his eyes, reaching first for his beast heart. By now, the practice had been so drilled into him through months of repetition from Nokom and then Kiypu that the practice came almost natural. Feeling his mana spread from the source in the right side of his chest throughout his limbs and the various channels, he let out a long breath.

“Mana is all around you at all times.” Kiypu’s words came back to Kellen as he took another breath and exhaled once more, sinking deeper into the meditation. “It is up to us to feel it, connect with it, no matter if it is storm, sun, shadow, fire, water, earth or nature. With effort, we can become as one.”

The words had always struck Kellen as strange. Kiypu spoke like he expected Kellen to connect with all mana regardless of type.

Yet with each breath in and out, Kellen felt less like as an island of sun mana surrounded by an all-encompassing aura of storm, and more as one with the Thunder Beast’s mana. It wasn’t unlike the moment during the fire bison stampede when he’d somehow drawn on the storm mana to power his shield before he lost consciousness.

A calming sensation flooded him and he stretched out, not to grasp at the powerful storm mana all around them, but to sink into it. For an instant, Kellen felt himself part of the Thunder Beast, part of the mana flowing throughout the Storm Horse totem. Alarmed, he jolted out of his trance, eyes snapping open.

“Did you feel that?” he gasped

“Whoa,” was all Vex said in reply. Neither of them spoke for some time, just breathing and staring, wide-eyed, until the sensation wore off. It was like a rush of adrenaline without the crash, yet also calming and serene. Kellen felt rested like never before, and… fluid, like he could race an Olympic sprinter and win, or out-lift the strongest man in the world.

“Vex,” he said finally as the feeling faded. “When did Kiypu ever tell us that stuff about becoming one with different types of mana?”

He waited while Vex contemplated the question. “You know, I can’t remember. But the words popped into my head the same time they did yours. I could hear him saying them, but it doesn’t seem like he ever told them to us, if that makes sense.”

“Huh.” Kellen stared at the clouds and mist swirling around them, trying to wrap his head around what had just happened. Now that he wasn’t trying to find a way out and paid better attention, the density of mana within the Thunder Beast overwhelmed him. He couldn’t imagine how he’d ever missed it.

“I feel weird,” Vex said.

Kellen nodded absently. “Me too. It’s like something is staring me in the face but I’ve got a blindfold on and can’t see it. I just know it’s there.”

“Should we try it again?”

“I… I’m not sure,” Kellen said. The sensation felt empowering but also ominous somehow, like holding your hand over the detonator button of a nuclear warhead. The sheer power that had flooded through them was too much for Kellen to control. He knew that. He worried if he gave in too much, it would consume him.

He now believed the Thunder Beast was a spirit of condensed storm mana—that was the only logical explanation for the sheer density of the surrounding aura. It scared Kellen, but making that connection again might be the only way for them to escape.

“Didn’t Coyote Lady tell us the first thing we should try to do in the totem was grow stronger?” Vex said. “I don’t know any more about advancing to Guardian than you do, but this seems like as good a place as any to try.”

Would it work? Both Kiypu and Nokom had told them they’d need to find a powerful source of sun mana to advance to Guardian. There wasn’t a drop of sun mana inside the Thunder Beast, nothing aside from the storm mana.

But now that he’d touched on that strange sensation of oneness, Kellen didn’t know if the rules applied the same way. And there was one other thing going for them: at Ward strength, Vex had two different forms, one that seemed influenced in some way by storm mana.

“I don’t know if I have any affinity with storm mana,” Vex said, reading Kellen’s thoughts. “I haven’t felt that way since I advanced to Companion. Before that, I had no idea how I was doing it. I just popped between forms whenever I wanted.”

Kellen didn’t need to be a scholar of mana to know what they’d attempted and were contemplating to attempt again was risky. What choice did they have? Coyote Lady was gone, Chirp was gone, and who knew how far away Shani, Kiypu and the others were? If they were going to get out of this predicament, it was up to Kellen and Vex to make it happen.

He reached out and placed a hand on Vex’s back, feeling the soft fur and watching the rippling turquoise light from his Mana Beast’s markings play around his fingers. Taking a deep breath, Kellen closed his eyes.

“Let’s try this again.”