I sat on a fallen log, staring into the fire and sipping from my troll-mojo flask—the same one I used to recover after those spells with their troublesome mix of white magic. I was trying to coax my poor neurons into sparking a thought or two, but my mind stubbornly refused to cooperate, still reeling from the magic’s aftershocks.

  Alice returned from her patrol to report that she’d seen no signs of danger as the orc armies retreated. Soon they’d be safely back in their own lands.

  I could barely focus on her words, but her calm assurance that everything was under control was enough to soothe me. I lifted the flask in silent offer. She chuckled, took it from my hand, and sat beside me on the log.

  Seeing that we didn’t plan to depart immediately, Grubber made himself comfortable, lowering his massive head to the ground behind me and to my left, crushing bushes and small trees in the process. His huge body now shielded us from the rising wind. He half-closed his eyes, staring lazily into the fire, and through our telepathic link I felt the slow rhythm of his satisfied purrs.

  I lifted my gaze from the flames and turned to Alice.

  “Do you think they’re right when they say that making an undead stops the soul’s evolution in that form?”

  She raised a brow and didn’t answer right away. Instead, she took a sip from the flask and handed it back to me. The firelight painted one side of her face in warm gold, while flashes of distant blue lightning lit the other. The pale shimmer in her eyes added to the effect, making her look both eerie and beautiful.

  She chuckled.

  “It’s bigger on the inside,” she said, giving the flask a little shake. The liquid inside sloshed with a deep, resonant sound—like a barrel being rolled—and for a moment I thought she hadn’t even heard my question.

  Somewhere behind us, I heard Grubber stir, followed by the faint crack of breaking wood deeper in the forest. Alice turned her gaze back to the fire and added another log. Her hair caught the light and shimmered, as if spun from flame itself.

  “Who are they?” she finally asked with a faint sneer, while I took another sip from the flask.

  My eyes stayed fixed on her hair, the strands dancing in the light wind. A branch in the fire cracked, sending a burst of sparks whirling upward.

  “Priests and philosophers,” I said, pursing my lips. “I found a compendium on undead treatises in the library.”

  She smiled.

  “And why do they think a soul can’t evolve just because it lingers in one place?” she asked, tilting her head, her gaze still on the flames as though she could read her answer there. “Always making assumptions about things they don’t understand, things they can neither see nor measure.”

  She turned her gaze toward me, a faint smile curving her lips.

  A hard answer from Alice. I sighed and lifted my shoulders in a helpless shrug. What could I say? I knew nothing about souls, or about meddling with them. It wasn’t wisdom that drove my thoughts, only fear. Fear of the things I was doing without understanding them.

  As a demon, shouldn’t I know more about souls?

  And yet, here I was, no wiser than before.

  Had I done the right thing with Miranda again? My gut whispered a probably yes, but could I even trust my gut anymore?

  Grubber reappeared, dragging a dead tree in his jaws. He began tearing the branches apart as if they were straw, his claws, teeth, and tail working in perfect, brutal harmony. Within a minute, the tree was reduced to kindling, which he piled neatly over the fire.

  A thick cloud of smoke rolled over us, but he gave a powerful beat of his wings to blow it away. The result was… mixed. Then, with visible pride, he exhaled a stream of dragon fire over the pile.

  The bonfire roared to life, flames leaping four or five meters high, devouring the smoke and burning clean. His face glowed with satisfaction.

  Our own faces were now darkened with soot, turning red from heat as the air became almost unbearable, but I didn’t move away. I didn’t want to disappoint him.

  Grubber settled his massive head on the ground again, watching the flames with a contented, lopsided grin.

  Staying put and testing my fire resistance, I took another sip from the flask and turned toward Alice, who had lifted her legs and swung them over to the other side of the log to sit farther from the flames.

  “I sent Mira, well, Miranda, with the peasants toward the next village. Could you check on them from above and make sure they arrive safely? Then take Mira - this is her new name - back home to the castle?”

  “Sure, my Queen,” she said, standing and bowing her head slightly in acknowledgment. “I’ll go check on her.”

  I almost sighed at her calling me Queen even when it was just the two of us, but then I remembered Cala’s struggle to make her loosen up. At least she didn’t say Your Majesty. Her respecting my wishes mattered more than any title, and I knew she was always doing her best.

  I watched as she walked up to Grubber, scratched his chin, whispered something to him, and then the two of them took off.

  Only after they left did I realize I’d forgotten to tell her that Mira had a new face to go with her new name, but I figured she’d work it out.

  Having dumped on Alice the responsibility for Mira and the peasants, I lifted my gaze toward the east, where the storm was brewing. Could I really do something about it, with Yisila’s help?

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  I turned back to the fire and extinguished it with a wave of my hand, drawing out every trace of heat. Then I slipped the flask back into my inventory, shifted into dragon form, dissolved my conjured clothes—reclaiming the mana from them—and launched into the air, not without breaking a few more trees in the process.

  All the spells had worked beautifully, flowing one into the next, except for that damned takeoff. I still hadn’t quite mastered that part.

  As soon as I was airborne, disorientation hit me: everything was black and howling with wind. A lightning flash, closer this time, split the darkness and briefly outlined the landscape below, helping me find my bearings.

  I turned eastward, where more flashes lit up the clouds, and an idea struck me. Why try to shield my domain from the storm when I could try to stop it altogether? That way, I wouldn’t just protect my domain but also save more of the harvest. If everyone else kept their crops, food prices would stay lower, and I could still buy what we needed without competing in a famine.

  With that thought in mind, I flew straight toward the heart of the storm.

  Wasn’t this just a meteorological event, after all? Warm air rises, cold air sinks, vapors condense, and then rain ensues. I vaguely remembered something about storm cells and pressure systems… or something like that.

  Damn. Maybe I really should’ve paid more attention in class. But, in hell's name, if the whole problem was just warm and cold air fighting over who gets the upper hand, shouldn’t I be able to influence that somehow?

  Once I rose above the clouds, I finally could see, and was struck speechless by the sheer size of what approached: a mountain of cloud, a colossal wall stretching up into the heavens, rolling forward in the pale light of the moons and stars like a world-shattering tsunami.

  A monstrous golem, wielding thunder as its weapon, and I was just a tiny speck in a sea of black.

  If this was what they called a storm cell on Earth, it had to be at least a couple hundred kilometers wide.

  It was beautiful. Magnificent.

  In the cold light of Frigg and the bloody glow of Kargath, I caught sight of a flock of small shapes plunging into the clouds.

  The sight tugged at a memory—Sid’s laughter echoing in my ears:

  “Oh yeah! Jump, Mom! Jump higher!”

  My lips curled into a smile, my mood lifting. I folded my wings and dove towards them, only to realize, a heartbeat later, that they weren’t birds at all, but wyverns, riding the storm for fun.

  For a moment, I hesitated and veered off course to avoid them. I had no intention of drawing their ire, but that hesitation might’ve been my mistake. Several wyverns broke from the flock and darted toward me, and in the next heartbeat, the entire swarm followed.

  Another flicker of doubt struck. Should I turn back? Would these blasted beasts block me from reaching the storm?

  But the thought of fleeing — of running from wyverns! — burned itself into my mind, and something deep inside me shifted. Anger flared, primal and irresistible. I snapped my wings, changed course, and dove straight toward them.

  My heart hammered in my chest. Was I flying toward my doom? Maybe. But another voice inside whispered that I had to master this, or be mastered.

  The flock twisted ahead of me, their formation tightening, rolling into a shifting sphere. My wings morphed instinctively into a sleek, elongated V, and I plunged toward the swirling mass.

  That’s when chaos broke loose. Some wyverns panicked and veered away, but most held formation. I realized—too late—that they were casting something.

  I flew headlong into the heart of a glowing blue sphere that erupted in a blinding flash.

  A deafening boom and I could see only white. White consumed everything. Then pain followed.

  When my vision returned, every nerve screamed. Frost bit into my skin; shards of ice clung to my wings and claws. Pain throbbed through me like molten fire beneath frozen scales—

  But in my grasp, struggling weakly, was a wyvern.

  It was about a quarter of my size, still twitching weakly in my claws, but the meat I was chewing had a heavenly taste.

  The flavor had an almost magical effect on me; it tempered my rage and dulled the pain. I turned back toward the storm, still gnawing on the now-limp wyvern, ignoring the rest of the flock as if they were nothing more than a cloud of bothersome sparrows, though, deep down, I wasn’t entirely sure I’d win if they all came at me.

  Drats. There must be some kind of inborn antagonism between dragons and wyverns; otherwise, I couldn’t explain the fury that had flared inside me moments ago. Still, Sid had been right about wyvern flesh, it was exquisite.

  The flock, however, seemed to have no appetite for revenge. They were scattering fast, veering north… or at least, I thought it was north. Hard to tell. My sense of direction was about as precise as a drunk compass, but that had to be roughly it.

  Happily chewing on the divine morsel in my claws, I tried to focus my mind on the storm and recall what little I remembered from school: hot air rises into the upper layers, meets cold air, turns into water droplets, and then falls back down… or something like that.

  Probably that was what I was looking at, the giant mountain of clouds, the thunderous golem towering above the land. It must have been hot air rising and condensing into rain.

  But then a thought struck me.

  What if I went inside the storm, cooled the rising air and warmed the descending one?

  Sure, that would require absurd amounts of energy, but wasn’t that exactly what magic was for? The real problem was the scale: the storm was enormous, and I was nothing but a speck against it.

  Still, a speck with a sizable domain, about four-five additional specks each side. And now, with the technique I’d learned from Jin’Sue, I could expand that domain even further, create funnels of mana to reach across a much wider area.

  And so, naturally, I began to tamper with the storm.