After checking to make sure that none of the bodies lying all around the confluence were still breathing, Bernt walked back to where the summoning circle had been to retrieve his bag. He was limping slightly. Now that the excitement of the fight was wearing off, Bernt realized that he hadn’t gotten away unscathed.

  One of his ribs was definitely broken and every breath felt like someone was shoving a knife into his ribs. Besides that, he’d managed to hurt his ankle somehow, and two fingers on his left hand were numb, though sensation was starting to return with a painful tingle. The broken rib was courtesy of the slinger, but he had no idea how he’d managed to pick up the other injuries. Regardless, he needed a healing potion.

  His bag had been protected by his heat barrier at first, but the spell had run out during the fight, leaving it exposed to the heat. The old leather was twisted and cracked – not as bad as his belt and boots, which had been hit by hellfire, but Bernt’s heart still sank when he caught sight of it. Was the enchantment on it still active?

  Carefully, he picked it up and carried it outside the depressions surrounding the confluence point. It didn’t feel full, which was a good sign, at least. When Bernt opened it to retrieve his things, though, the brittle material cracked further. The contents was intact, but the bag was obviously ruined. He withdrew a healing potion and held it up to the light. It looked fine at first, but then, right where his fingers were touching, the liquid started to turn cloudy.

  The stopper, which should have kept it firmly sealed, popped out with a plopping noise and fell at his feet.

  Steam rose from the potion. Then it began to foam and bubble angrily. It was boiling. Within seconds, the liquid solidified, coagulating into a brownish sludge. Bernt stared at it for a moment, uncomprehending.

  Had he done that? No, no way. He hadn't cast anything. Maybe he was too close to the confluence, still? He couldn't really feel the heat anymore.

  Bernt checked the bag. The other healing potions seemed normal. Unsure, he gave the ruined potion an experimental sniff and then tossed it. Yeah… that definitely wasn’t going to work anymore. But if it wasn't the environment...

  Was he burning – like an elemental? Bernt looked down at himself in sudden panic, half expecting to see flames rising from his skin, but there was nothing.

  Whatever the case, he needed to work out a way to drink one of these potions, and soon. There was no way to know if there were more demons out here, and even if there weren't, he had a long way to walk. Whatever the future held, he really didn't want to face it in his current state.

  Not sure what else to try, he pulled out another vial and set it down on the ground in front of him. Nothing happened. So far, so good. Moving quickly, he gripped it high up by the neck with two fingers, popped the stopper out with his other hand and drank.

  The potion boiled the moment it hit his tongue, forming a horrific-tasting, slightly grainy mass that coated the inside of his mouth. Bernt gagged and spat, pain wracking his chest as the motions jostled his broken rib. Trying to control his breathing, he dug out his cup to conjure water for himself.

  It, too, boiled as soon as he had it in his mouth. He spat reflexively again and groaned in renewed agony. What was happening?! His entire body was hot enough to boil water.

  It was the elemental, it had to be. Whatever its idea of "equilibrium" was, it didn't consider little things like being able to drink water. Or eating food, probably. Bernt felt sick. Would bread char inside his stomach, leaving him to slowly starve? Clearly, the elemental had found a way to keep his blood from boiling inside his veins, but how far had it really thought? Sure, he'd been under some pressure at the time, but what good was surviving an attack if he was doomed to die in its aftermath? His hands shook as he sorted through his things. He wasn't sure what he was looking or, but the familiarity of it helped to calm him a little.

  His papers, his useless potions, a cup, a hatchet, a knife, his bedroll, some food and a few magical materials. The papers didn't catch fire when he touched them. They didn't even change color.

  Bernt exhaled slowly. He wasn't on fire, he was just... a lot hotter than a normal person should be. Hot enough to cook things with his body. That didn't mean he couldn't eat, he just had to learn how. It was a problem to solve. Besides, who was to say he couldn't learn to control his temperature? He'd gained control of his first sorcerous investiture. Why not this one as well?

  After washing out his mouth thoroughly, he chanced swallowing a sip as it bubbled on his tongue. To his relief, at least some of it stayed down, though he did have to burp. At least he wasn’t going to die of thirst. Still, healing potions were apparently not an option right now. He would have to be careful to avoid getting into any more fights for the time being.

  For now, he needed to get out of here. Several of the cultists had gotten away, and there was no way to know if there were more demons out here. Only some demons could track by scent, and none of the cultists could, so getting some distance would be a good idea. If he was lucky, they wouldn't have any more hellhounds.

  A dull tearing sound drew his gaze back down to his bag. The enchantment on his old bag of holding had finally broken, the ravaged material tearing as his notes, his food, and his now useless potions materialized inside it. Sighing to himself, he looked around for something to carry it all with.

  A few minutes later, Bernt lifted his new makeshift sack – the remains of a mostly intact blanket that one of the dead cultists had been carrying – to his shoulder and set off. He'd also traded in his carbonized boots and belt. Looting corpses still felt a bit dirty to Bernt, but these people had tried to kill him. They owed him. His injuries made the process more than a little painful, but he checked each one for valuables, anyway. Most of them had been dirt poor, with nothing but a few coppers in their pockets.

  In the end, he left almost everything behind.

  Bernt knew that shuffling along with a swelling ankle, a painful broken rib and an incredibly inconvenient sack made him a relatively easy target for an ambush, but he didn't have any safer options left. He kept his eyes up, vigilant for any signs of pursuit and limped on gamely for as long as he could. Still, he doubted he’d made it much more than half a league from the confluence before his ankle forced him to stop. There hadn’t been signs of anyone else – demons or cultists, which was a small blessing, at least.

  He peered into the distance, noticing for the first time the yellowish clouds approaching from the south, glowing like gold in the light of the setting sun. Burning rain. It would be here soon.

  Maybe… maybe he really was alone out here, now. If those surviving cultists didn’t have anywhere to hide, he certainly would be by morning.

  Bernt looked around tiredly. There weren’t any convenient hillsides, large boulders or cliffs to tunnel a shelter into, but that didn’t mean he was going to sit out in the weather. He could probably survive that, now, but it would ruin his supplies. Raising his left hand, Bernt began casting through his iron ring, raising thick earthen walls, compressing them, and eventually joining them into a roof of sorts.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  It took about ten minutes to make a stable structure big enough for him – he still wasn’t very fast – but his geomancy was leaps and bounds better than it had been only a few months ago. He wasn’t sure that it would keep the heat out entirely, but he supposed he could always bury his supplies in the ground if it turned into an oven in there.

  Crawling inside, Bernt let himself relax for the first time since the attack. He’d made it. He’d fought the demons and their lackeys, and he’d won. By himself.

  Better yet, he’d succeeded in summoning a powerful elemental and it had chosen to help him – even if the help was a little less than ideal.

  Bernt had seen into the creature’s mind. It was still an entirely alien lifeform, but he understood its purpose on an intuitive level. It had understood his problem in its own way, and provided a solution. It hadn't helped him form an augmentation – that much was obvious, but now at least, he had a little time to work out exactly what had happened.

  Closing his eyes and focusing inwards, Bernt could feel the sorcerous channels that had replaced much of his normal mana network on the right side of his body. Smaller veins branched out from them, weaving their way through his flesh and extending further, branching over and over throughout his entire body, thinner on the left than on the right. Their presence alone was weird, but the way mana moved through them was even more strange. It didn’t circulate. Instead, it flowed one-way, feeding directly into his flesh.

  The more conventional primary channels were obviously arranged into the shape of some kind of investiture. He couldn’t analyze it precisely just by feel, but its shape, along with the way it attached to his normal mana network created multiple circulatory loops and nested together into a dense, interconnected knot just behind his navel.

  Those tangents should have caused chaotic interference in the flow of his mana, but it didn’t. The flow split evenly at each one, circulating through the entire system unimpeded in a complex pattern. That, he realized, was the reason he’d been able to weakly cast even before the investiture had finished fully incorporating itself into him.

  All spellforms that mages actually used were unidirectional – a single flow of mana shaped into a spell and connected back to its point of origin. A complex circulatory network like this… well, it was crazy. The entire thing reminded him of diagrams of blood vessels that he’d seen at an introductory healing lecture at the Academy years ago – not magic at all.

  The idea of splitting mana flows inside a spellform wasn’t groundbreaking or new, of course. Many inexperienced mages eventually tried it at the academy. Theoretically, it would allow someone to run more mana through some parts of a spellform than others, which might improve efficiency or even produce unique effects. In practice, though, it would only disrupt your spells and cause them to fizzle – mana flows were incredibly finicky, and any potentially chaotic elements had to be handled with extreme care.

  Modifying an investiture to incorporate these kinds of tangents was just begging to be left with the kind of crippling problem that Uriah had. And Bernt didn’t have one of these odd features, he had dozens. Despite that, his mana flowed smoothly in and out of his investitures while a small portion of it was forced down the odd branching capillaries into his flesh, manifesting in the form of whatever spell was woven into his new investiture. “Life”, he supposed, as defined by a fire elemental. Whatever the technical details were, he’d already observed its effects – he was immune to heat and even hellfire, and his body temperature was high enough to boil water at a touch. Plus, his unshaped mana now spawned some kind of temporary fire elemental, or maybe a living spell of some kind. He wasn't sure how to think about it, exactly.

  Xul’evareg had told him part of his spirit was fire, but now… well, it felt real, now. He'd need to take some time to experiment with that, but it could wait until he was somewhere safe. The side effects had been... unpleasant.

  Smoke tickled Bernt’s nose and he started, opening his eyes. The edges of his makeshift sack were blackening in the heat and he stared at it dumbly for a moment. The burning rain hadn’t even started to fall yet… Then he scrambled to grab it and push it outside. How could he be so stupid?! He’d been worried about his little shelter being turned into an oven from the outside, but he was a walking fire hazard now. He would ruin his supplies and every bit of clothing he owned – except his fire resistant robes – if he sat in there with them on.

  Hurriedly, took off his boots and belt and buried them along with his sack under a few feet of dirt, stopping only to pull out his pot, a spoon and a few handfuls of dried beans. The burning rain began to fall just as he settled back down in his shelter.

  He would need to learn to control his temperature as soon as possible – assuming he could. The branching channels were sorcerous, so he should be able to control them with practice. He just hoped it wouldn’t take him too long. If he had to just keep sleeping outside on the bare ground when he got to the Sacral Peaks, Bernt was going to scream.

  Waiting for the beans to cook, he dug around in his pocket for a bit of chalk. It was past time that he contacted Jori. She needed to know about the attack, and he just… wanted someone to talk to about all this. It had been a hard day.

  He created a smooth surface on the ground with his stone shaping spell and chalked out the now mostly-familiar portal circle. It still took him over half an hour to create, which was why he didn’t bother most nights when he settled down, bone weary from a full day of hiking. Today, he was even more exhausted than usual and injured to top if off, but he didn’t have much of a choice – he needed to tell someone what had happened. One quick check of the runes later, he inserted a thread of his spirit into it.

  “Bernt!” Jori called out urgently, even before he’d fully managed to shake off the disorientation of the empowered familiar bond. “The demons are on your trail, you have to hide and set an ambush!”

  She was scampering with a group of her imps over a flat, rocky plain. Something absolutely enormous wriggled disgustingly on the horizon and a misty, vaguely anthropomorphic wisp floated along just in front of her.

  “What do you mean?” Bernt frowned out at the burning landscape in front of him. He had a good view southward. If anything was following him, he’d see them first. “Are there more?”

  “It’s Zijeregh, the whisperer – she can get into your head and she’s very powerful. But I have a plan!”

  “Ah... what? The dwarf?”

  “You’re hurt!” Jori gasped, registering for the first time the pain in Bernt’s ribs and his swollen ankle. “What happened? Did you fight her? How did you get away?”

  “I didn’t,” he said heavily. “It was mostly cultists, but there was a hellhound and a possessed warlock. It had powers like you said – like the one we caught in Halfbridge. I thought I was going to die at first, but then the new investiture started working – and the elemental…” Bernt cut off when he felt Jori’s mounting confusion and took a breath. “Let me start from the beginning.”

  Backing up a few days, Bernt explained the chain of events that had led to him summoning an unknown, colossally powerful elemental with enemies bearing down on him in the middle of nowhere in the Phoenix Reaches. Talking about it now, it all felt like an insane risk. He should have just tried to negotiate for help against the demons. If the elemental had agreed, maybe he could have spent more time working out a safer solution after the fighting was done.

  But it had all happened too fast. In the heat of the moment, it had been the only thing that made sense to him. He couldn’t have anticipated that the elemental would tear out a part of his soul and replace it with the modified spirit of a fire elemental. Besides, there was no guarantee that the elemental would have fought for him, or that he could have afforded whatever price it asked even if it was willing.

  In the end, the elemental's investiture had protected him from both the heat and the whisperer's mental magic, and his sorcerous mana network was far more developed than it had been.

  Jori listened patiently, though he knew she was focusing through their bond, trying to feel the new channels coursing through his body.

  “So… can you eat magical materials now?” she asked when he was done.

  Bernt shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t tried it yet.” He’d also buried the materials in the dirt along with his other belongings, and he was too tired to worry about it now, regardless. “Do you think the whisperer demon possessing the Duergar was really Zijeregh?” he asked, trying to change the subject.

  He felt Jori’s face stretch into a grin.

  “I don’t know for sure. But Ed and I are going to find out!”