Kellen opened his eyes and stared up at a bluebird sky. A white, fluffy cloud drifted by like a cumulous sheep grazing across a pasture of ozone. He had a weird metallic taste in the back of his mouth. All of his limbs tingled like they’d fallen asleep simultaneously.

Groaning, he rolled over and yelled in surprise.

His stomach lurched. While he lay on red sandstone, there was nothing in front of him but more empty blue sky with no sign of ground below. Rolling back over, Kellen squeezed his eyes shut and focused to slow his breathing while the stabbing adrenaline in his stomach eased. He felt Vex stirring beside him and threw out his arm to hold the Mana Beast in place while he woke.

“What the—holy smokes!” Vex hollered, coming to the same realization as Kellen. “Where’s that mana spirit? I’m going to kill her!”

“Now is that any way to talk to me after I was so unhelpful?”

Kellen opened his eyes and saw Chirp hovering above them. “You said, ‘take us into danger,’ so that’s what I did,” she said. “Wait—does doing what you ask count as helping?”

“This is not helpful,” Kellen said in a shaky voice. Perhaps they should have thought through the potential consequences of their request to Chirp a bit more. He sat up carefully, peering at their surroundings. They were on a round slab of red rock that appeared to be hovering in the air. Altogether, it wasn’t much larger than a car and wobbled under the slightest shift in their weight.

“Chirp!” Vex said, exasperated. “Are you trying to get us killed? We’re on a floating rock in the middle of literally nothing!”

“I am only doing what you asked,” Chirp sniffed. “If you’re going to be rude, I’ll go away.”

“No, wait!” Kellen and Vex shouted in unison. Chirp turned back around in midair.

“We were just a little… surprised, is all,” Kellen said. “Sorry. Thank you for your… uh. For this.”

“That’s better,” Chirp said. By the sound of it, she was still somewhat offended. “And you’re welcome.”

“Is there anything you can tell us about this place?” Kellen asked. He thought better of it and added, “Anything unhelpful?”

Chirp thought about it for a moment. “Don’t fall off?”

“Wow,” Vex said. “Of all the—”

“That’s, uh, great,” Kellen said, cutting off Vex before he offended their guide. “Anything else?”

“This probably goes without saying, but you’re very high in the totem,” Chirp said. “Oh, and congratulations! You’ve finally found some other humans!”

She swooped a short way off to their right, indicating a direction. All Kellen saw was more floating rock platforms, at the same height as them and some ascending overhead. It was like a twisted version of a Mario map from hell. Except Kellen didn’t have any extra lives. He also didn’t see any people in the direction Chirp had quasi pointed.

“They’re over there, trust me,” she said as if she could read Kellen’s question. “Some of those nasty people with all the wrappings all over them. They’re not friends of yours, are they?”

“We are most definitely not friends,” Vex said.

“Hey Chirp,” Kellen began, an idea forming in his mind. “Do you know what would be really unhelpful for those people?”

The red hawk swooped in closer, her long tail feathers drifting out behind her. “What’s that?”

“They’re trying to reach the heart of the totem,” Kellen said. “And if they find it, they’re going to do bad things. If you showed us how to get there, they really wouldn’t like it.”

“Or you could just go push them all off the rocks they’re standing on?” Vex suggested. Kellen winced. He wouldn’t have advocated for outright murder, but Vex had a point.

“Oh, they wouldn’t die if they fell off,” Chirp said. “They’d just fall for a long time. Maybe forever—I don’t really know.”

“What do you think?” Kellen asked before Vex and Chirp got sidetracked too far.

Chirp considered this for a long moment, running her wing over her beak in an action similar to a man stroking a goatee. “It’s not like you wouldn’t figure it out on your own, anyway. All you have to do to move the rocks is push them.”

“Is that all?” Vex said, dripping sarcasm. “You wouldn’t happen to have an extra pair of wings for us, would you? If you hadn’t noticed yet, Kellen can’t fly. And I can only hover a little. It’s not the same.”

“Hold on!” Kellen cut in, raising his hands as Chirp somehow adopted an offended expression on her hawk face. “He was only joking. I think I have an idea.”

The closest rock platform to theirs was just outside of jumping reach but still inside throwing distance. Kellen summoned a sun mana orb in his hand, then flatted it out into a Frisbee-like disc. He threw it at the neighboring rock. The moment the disc struck the rock, it bounced back toward them like a boomerang. Kellen guided the mana back to his awaiting hands and caught it against his chest with a slight grunt. The motion tipped him backward a bit but sent their rock platform coasting through the sky like a raft shoved away from the shore.

They drifted until they drew closer to a large rock platform, this one like a miniature mesa the size of a three-story house with steps and various tiers they could climb up. Kellen thought he spotted a path from the top of the larger platform to ledges even higher up. There was no doubt in his mind the name of the game was to climb higher. Between him and Vex, they maneuvered their platform close enough to the larger rock that they could hop on. The feel of solid rock—even if it was still floating in an ocean of sky—relieved Kellen more than he thought it would. He recalled himself a few months earlier, shaking and struggling to climb one of the Tall Spears on Nokom’s first day of training him as a Beastcaller and smiled at how far he’d come.

“Don’t get too excited until we get to the top,” Vex said. “But I’m proud of you.”

With Chirp tagging along, they continued up the various ledges until they reached the top of the house-rock. The wide platforms gave Kellen the impression of a giant jungle gym, like fast-food restaurants had for kids to play in back on Earth. Except here there was no safety net or ball pit. Atop the plateau, they peered into the distance in the direction Chirp had pointed out the Snake Cultists.

“I can barely tell there are people out there,” Kellen said, looking at Vex. “Can you see them any better?”

Vex squinted into the distance. “There appears to be a pretty big group. Maybe… a dozen? There’s one in the middle—boy, is he ugly—I can’t tell from this distance, but his shoulders are massive. He’s taller and has twice as much muscle as the others. They’re the same cultist dudes with all the wrappings. We’d better—oh, wait!—the big dude just went full frog mode. Jumped off the rock they were on and landed on another one way out there. He’s got to be a Beastcaller to move like that.”

“Probably a Chieftain too, unless he knows how to use storm mana somehow,” Kellen mused. He’d seen the figure jump and was impressed even without the detail of Vex’s vision. “We’d better avoid them if we can.”

“Righto,” Vex said. “Onward and upward then! We should hurry. That frog dude is really moving.If it’s a race to the top, we’re gonna need all the help we can get.”

“That one is the worst,” Chirp agreed. “And yes, he is quite ugly. I hope you beat him, though of course I can’t do anything to help you.”

They continued climbing up the various floating ledges and platforms, all close enough that the rocks only required a few nudges to get them close enough to hop over the gaps. On the occasions when there was nothing to ricochet a mana working against, Vex could jump the gap, then he and Kellen extended a golden strand of rope-like mana across the distance to tow Kellen in.

The idea came from Vex, recalling the strands of golden mana they’d used to help Shani cross the gap inside the caves of the Wakar Mountains when they’d been searching for Ubira. It proved more effective than Kellen’s boomerang approach and allowed them to increase their climbing speed. As they ascended, Kellen noticed dozens of other mana spirits floating by: vague, ghost-like outlines of birds and winged creatures, drifting as if they had no sense of Kellen and Vex’s presence. When Kellen asked Chirp about them, she seemed to grow sad.

“Not all the mana spirits become as aware as I am,” she said. “Most of them float around just like that until they combine to form a stronger mana spirit. That only happens by accident, mostly. There are some that become self-aware enough that they try to eat other spirits. Those ones are nasty. I believe your humans have ran into a few of them as well. They’ll eat anything they sense has mana inside it, Beastcallers, Mana Beasts, you name it.”

“Are there wild Mana Beasts inside the totem?” Kellen asked. So far they’d been fortunate to run into neither a wild Mana Beast or a malevolent mana spirit, aside from the Thunder Beast, and he hoped their luck held.

“There are some Mana Beasts that appear in areas where the storm mana aura is extra thick,” Chirp said. “Most of the ones that came out of the cavern when the totem first opened were formed when the mana of the totem was released into the outside world. They don’t work the same was as the mana spirits, though they can eat the spirits to grow stronger too. That’s probably what you did inside the Thunder Beast!” she giggled. “He spit you out because you were giving him a stomach ache burning through all the mana in his belly.”

As they continued to climb, Kellen soon lost track of the shapes and colors of the various mana spirits floating by like wayward balloons lost to the heavens. Vex, of course, wanted to eat one after listening to Chirp. None ever came close enough to offer the chance, however.

“But what if there’s a pizza flavored one?” Vex asked. “Or French Vanilla?” He looked at Chirp, drooling out of one side of his mouth.

“Don’t even think about it,” Kellen warned.

It wasn’t long before a wide shelf, about the size of a football field, appeared a few stories overhead. There were no rocks above it and the fact that the rock was white instead of the red sandstone of the rest of platforms told Kellen that it might be their destination to the next area of the totem.

They’d long ago lost sight of the jumping Snake Cultist. Looking across the open air, Kellen spotted several other paths of rock platforms the cultists could have used to reach the same ledge they were aiming for.

“We should try to get up there as fast as we can,” he told Vex and Chirp. “I don’t know where the cultists went, but I don’t want to meet them at the top.”

“Are you sure you need to get to the top?” Chirp said, suddenly nervous again. “We’ve passed a lot of really nice rocks. Isn’t there one that you maybe want to pick and—I don’t know—live on forever?”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Vex said. “Every time she gets like this, something bad happens.”

“Is that the way to the next area?” Kellen asked.

Chirp clamped her beak shut and gave a half nod, half shake of her head.

“Is there another way out of this plane except that way?”

Again, Chirp gave an unconvincing affirmation and denial.

“Is there something up there that wants to eat us?” Vex tried.

“Maybe,” Chirp said. “To all of your answers. That’s all I can say.”

Kellen and Vex shared a look. “Guess we’d better be careful then,” Vex said.

They continued climbing until they reached a skinny, tall ledge just below the flat, white rock. Kellen took a moment to catch his breath—what would have taken him several minutes before his advancement to Guardian—and surveyed how far they’d come. It was the first time he’d looked down. His stomach lurched at the seemingly endless void of floating rocks and blue sky. They’d climbed high enough he no longer had any idea where the rock they’d started on was. The problem now was what lie ahead.

“Let me go first,” Vex said. “I’ll scope things out.”

Kellen agreed, and Vex ventured over a long natural arch that also doubled as a crude stairway from their pillar of rock to the white expanse of rock above. Watching him disappear over the rim, Kellen’s mana senses reached out for any sign of danger or unexpected surprises. None came. Soon enough, Vex’s fox-like head appeared back at the far end of the arch. Rather than shouting over the distance, he sent Kellen a mental pulse that everything was clear as far as he could tell. Kellen glanced at Chirp.

“Anything you can say before we go up there?”

The red hawk shook her head grimly.

Fighting a rising unease in his gut, Kellen began the ascent up the archway to the flat white rock. The arch was as wide as a single lane road and easy enough to limb. That didn’t stop the void on both sides from sending shuttering butterflies throughout him. He focused his attention ahead on Vex. When they reached the top, he took several additional steps away from the edge.

The white rock looked much the same on the top as it had the bottom. As in it was a flat, white-ish rock floating in the air with nothing else to speak of. Kellen’s eyes scanned above and around, waiting for a whatever nasty surprise that was likely waiting for them to show itself.

“Oh good,” Chirp said with a sigh. “He’s not home.”

“Who’s not home?” Vex asked.

“What? Uh—nothing, nobody!”

Kellen sigh of temporary relief caught in his chest. On the far side of the rectangular rock, a figure crawled over the edge. It stopped when it saw them, a hulking brute with bowed frog-like legs, lumps of muscle heaped on its shoulders and a no neck to speak of. Its skin was a milky white, broke up by glowing patterns and symbols in faint green all over its body. Aside from a skirt, he wore nothing but a pair of bronze arm guards and a wide, fanning necklace of metal and green stone that lay across his chest and shoulders. Even from the distance of a full football field away, Kellen thought he recognized the mutant..

Not only was it the figure Vex had seen climbing the rock platforms, it looked just like the thing the Snake Cult had tried to summon from the well within the Wakar Mountains before Allison broke the ritual.

The half-frog, half-man raised a war club in his hand and croaked out a challenge.