He had no time to grieve. His companions were out there somewhere, still; and he was not alone. There was still an enemy here.

An enemy who had crafted their own destruction, and cursed them all for wanting to stop it.

Anger flowed into him again – not the all-consuming rage of a few seconds ago, but enough to push back the grief and loss. Enough for him to lift his head, and focus his reddening gaze on the startled Stonekin a few feet away, staring down at him.

“You,” Mulin growled.

He yanked his knife free of the Siurrah’s corpse, the clear crystal covered in a film of blood. “This is your doing,” he said, rising to his feet. “This place is of your design. You brought here the hands that helped to complete it. Tell me why you shouldn’t share his fate,” his knife swept back to point at the body it had just left, “before I decide that you should!”

“I – I…” The topaz eyes shifted to the body on the stone, to the one in the cage, and back to Mulin’s own; their owner swallowed. “All the words I have are… weak. I didn’t want any of this – no bloodshed, no pain, no disaster. He promised me… promised that we would make a place where people could be themselves, where everyone could be happy, no matter how strange their people thought them. Four Winds, how did it come to this?” The old male swayed on his feet.

It was the disorientation in those eyes, more than his words, that stayed Mulin’s hand. A part of him still wanted to be angry, and he was all too aware that he’d been creeping through the caverns for the best part of a day and had not had any sleep since the night before last; but now he still needed to think clearly. At least fatigue made it harder to stay angry.

He let his knife hand sink to his side. “He used you, then.”

“I look back on the past several months, and it’s… horrifying,” the Stonekin breathed. “Yet, when he speaks to you… everything he says seems to make sense, somehow.”

“What of those he had a tighter grip on?”

“They’ll likely be unconscious now,” said the old spell-crafter, dropping apparently by reflex into a scholarly, even professor-like tone. “I didn’t see it often, but there were some few he let go after controlling them thus. He essentially puts their conscious minds to sleep – they are, in a way, sleepwalking to the dreams he sends them. The – ”

There was a sudden crash; the doors to the chamber started to draw open.

“That would probably be my twin,” Mulin said, peering into the yawning gap.

So it was, but he wasn’t alone; Vhish was with him, and even across the distance between them Mulin could see that she looked unsteady.

Kralin, however, stood upright and strong, his gaze coming to rest on his twin.

Thanks be to the Stormwright that the day wasn’t a total disaster. Kralin lived and was well; on the wings of that thought, a weight was lifted from him.

“Bide a moment,” Mulin snapped, running over to meet them.

He and Kralin met with a jolt in a tangle of limbs – arms and wings and tails going every which way. His sheer presence was such a soothing thing – the worries and pain of the day didn’t entirely flee, but they were muted somewhat. Bearable.

Much more gently than their initial collision, they touched their horns together. “You look utterly wrung, brother,” Kralin whispered, “but it’s so good to see you whole.”

“I am, and I agree, but there’s no time to rest just yet.” He turned his attention to Vhish; the healer had a bewildered and rather guilty expression on her muzzle. “Vhish – three levels up from here, south by southeast, there is a cell block – do you know it?”

“Y-yes.” The guilt in her expression got rather stronger.

Even at a time like this, she didn’t clutter the air with extra words. Frustrating though she might be if one wanted a conversation partner, she attended his words as keenly as ever. “Sharliss was there when I last saw him, in a delicate state. I feared to do anything for him, lest it only weaken him further; he needs expert help.”

“Of course.” She started to turn, paused; with a rather plaintive look, she said to him, “We must talk, after,” and then she was a red streak across the floor.

It was rather bemusing, really, in spite of the moment. A healer who knew of a patient in need could manage an amazing turn of speed.

Mulin untangled from his twin, save for an arm around his shoulders and pulled him back toward the focus, and the Stonekin still waiting there. He felt Kralin stiffen as they drew nearer the cage, felt a wrench of grief – “Later,” he hissed.

“Oh, Mulin…” Kralin squeezed his shoulders in turn. “Not too much later, I hope.”

Mulin turned his attention back to the old Stonekin. “This thing,” he pointed at the floor, “needs to stop.”

“Stop? You don’t understand – that’s the one thing that – thing – was right about! It’s been running too long, built up too great a reservoir – if that collapses uncontrolled, it’ll set off mana storms such as have never been seen,” the builder protested. “It can’t stop now – it’ll take hard work just to turn it from one feeding one being’s power into something that provides stable mana flow. Even tuning it will entail channelling so much mana…”

“You mean it could be made to work?” Kralin was sceptical; but he wasn’t outright dismissive, and from that Mulin forced himself to listen to the reply as well.

“Yes. The sooner started, the better – do either of you,” he glanced up at them, at the short but pristine horns that said as clearly as anything that they couldn’t be very old, “know anything of spell-forms? Even without the theory – ”

“I have a working knowledge of them,” Mulin cut in, “and both of us were taught something of the practical matters.”

For the first time since the Siurrah had fallen, the old man looked slightly relieved. “Then – then we can make it work. We can stabilize the flow, we can… channel power from here to the mana fonts of the cities; it’d take care, but it could be done.”

The confidence in his voice was an amazing thing. There was a solution – perhaps not ideal, but this was someone who had worked in the field for almost ten times as long as the twins had been alive. He knew the work; he knew the details of this particular font that the Archwizards of Druumat could only guess at, knew them intimately. He knew how to tune it and make his grand mistake a bit less calamitous. Words and explanations flowed over Mulin’s senses as the old artificer brought them through a few turns of the halls, lower still, into the workings of the mana font itself.

Now they stood at its focal point. Wards had been set, five layers thick, to keep the collosal flow contained, and still the air tingled with it.

It was here that any work to correct the mechanism would need to begin.

It was here, as well, that any effort to stop it entirely would need to start.

It was Kralin who raised the thought first: “What if the flow is reversed? What if, rather than an uncontrolled cascade, the mana is channelled back into its normal course?”

“It can’t be done, not now.” The Stonekin’s tail swept. “There’s too much mana coursing through the very place you’d need to alter. Nobody could live long enough there to install a new form.”

“Not even Magekin?” After all, the Archwizards had thought that the two of them could channel a near infinity of mana. How, they’d been at a loss to explain…

“Look, the pair of you have managed some amazing things just to get down here and bring an end to this nightmare, but listen to reason. There’s so much mana coursing through the heart of the mechanism that it’d dissolve any physical matter that tried to enter it. Only pure mana can possibly exist there – ”

“Wait,” Mulin said.

Pure mana.

Nightkin, Flamekin, and Frostkin could adopt the character of their respective elements without harm. Stormkin could do much the same, albeit more transiently, with lightning, and that was more energetic by far; in contrast, Stonekin could actually become the substance of their affinity…

“I was able to meld with stone to get into the Nexus chamber,” he explained. “What if I melded with the mana?”

“Insane!” the Stonekin declared. “It’s not a static flow of stone – even if you could transmute yourself to pure mana, the flow would be battering you apart! It’d be attacking your very identity, your self – like trying to slip through lava…”

“My self?” Mulin repeated.

“Well… yes. There have been a few Stonekin that did shift through a magma flow – but…”

“But?” prompted Kralin.

“But… they had an anchor.” Flat refusal was fading; in those topaz eyes, as in his voice, was the glimmer of hope, of something that just might work. “A template, someone they trusted utterly and who trusted them, by which they could remake themselves even as the flow did its best to unmake them.”

Mulin squeezed Kralin’s shoulder. “I have an anchor. The best sort; we came from the same egg. There could be no closer match to my self.”

“…This is madness,” the Stonekin said again. “There’s still more mana close to the centre than three Archwizards could even tolerate being near. But if it can possibly work… I’ll start reversing the forms.”

“We all will,” Kralin agreed. “Show us your tools. The less time they spend in opposition before the flow turns around, the better.”