As it turns out, I’m the rotten egg, but there’s a good reason for that: the hot springs are, well, hot.

  The samurans, probably because of their reptilian natures, seem to cope better than I do – they just go straight in and start letting out hisses of contentment at its heat. I dip one foot in and then let out a hiss of my own – mine not so content.

  I’m stuck hovering at the edge of the pool as all of my samurans relax in the waters. Fenrir tests the water with a paw, then huffs quietly, a sense of joy coming down the Bond between us, and jumps straight in. Several samurans exclaim in annoyance as their peaceful soak is interrupted by the over-exuberant lizog.

  Pack-leader, come in! he urges me, bouncing slightly and sending more ripples through the pool.

  “It’s too hot,” I tell him with frustration. Pride also wades in with a happy snort, though he chooses to stay next to Catch. As for the felines, Storm is true to the stereotype in avoiding the water. Bastet does walk in enough to coat her talons, letting out a sighing huff of content, but doesn’t go deeply enough for even the ripples to touch her feather-fur. Lathani stays next to me, eyeing the water with disdain. Interestingly, though, Ninja seems willing to paddle a little, soaking her taloned feet up to just above where the feathers start.

  Sirocco comes to land on my shoulder, her weight reducing as she makes herself smaller to fit more comfortably on me. As she does so, I see Komodo waddling into the water too – unsurprisingly, he finds it as much of a joy as the rest of the reptilians.

  Honey relaxes on the bank near us, lying on her back with her eyes closed as if she has no concerns – though she normally likes the water and regularly swims in any river we come across, I think this is a bit warm for her. Post Evolution, she’s about twice the size and she’s developed some distinct markings: ironically enough, honey-coloured jagged lines decorate her back and her thick, furry tail. Unsurprisingly, her Tier two skill makes her better at completely overwhelming her opponent – the flurry of enhanced blows she’s able to embrace has made her an excellent shock troop member in several of the fights we’ve had. Right now, though, she appears to be sleeping.

  I redirect my attention to the water, leaning down to brush my fingers through it again, some hopeful part of me wondering whether maybe I thought it was warmer than it really is. My fingers tell that part of me to shut up.

  Mourn not, Sirocco tells me in tones which I’m pretty sure are meant to be sympathetic, but come off more patronising. Water is not fun to be in anyway.

  “Not for those with feathers or fur,” I comment, eyeing her, Lathani, and Storm, “but I actually like it.”

  Then go in, she urges as if I haven’t thought about it. I roll my eyes.

  “It’s too hot.”

  Then make it less hot, she answers like it’s obvious. I send her an incredulous look.

  “Make this massive pool of water less hot? That’s probably way beyond my capabilities, if I even knew where to start.”

  She has a point, Bastet comments thoughtfully. Storm looks at her as quizzically as I am; Ninja appears enraptured by the ripples her claws are making in the water.

  “What do you mean? I can’t change the temperature of this massive pool,” I object.

  Perhaps not, but you can change your own body. I have seen you do it many times before.

  She…does actually have a point. Immediately, I can think of several options ranging from making my skin more heat resistant to cooling my internal temperatures. Not that they’re all necessarily good ideas. But it does remind me that magic is possible.

  Hmm, I wonder, I say to myself thoughtfully. Closing my eyes, I look at the pool with my magic sight. I hadn't really taken notice of it before but there is no scent of sulphur near this pool. To my knowledge, hot springs on Earth usually smell of it because of the way that they are heated. With my magic sight activated, I can see that there is a very different reason here.

  The water is thick with fire magic as well as something else, a kind of magic which I can barely see and which slips away from my mental touch any time I come near. The two types of magic do not interact; if anything, they act more like repelling magnets, moving away from each other as soon as they come anywhere near each other. It’s a wonder that each is so relatively evenly spread in the water.

  The greatest concentration of fire magic is in the centre of the pool, and I can sense it coming from somewhere down below. Opening my eyes again, I touch the Bond I have with Dusty, our Water-Shaper.

  What do you sense here? I ask her curiously.

  Lots of water, obviously, she answers immediately, then hesitates. But…there is something else. I see no reason why water should be so hot. I am not complaining, though!

  Suspicion confirmed: the two opposing elements are indeed water and fire and, not having any magical knowledge of fire, Dusty is unable to sense the fire magic just as I find it difficult to identify the water magic present. But it’s interesting to also confirm that the heat of the water is purely due to the fire magic within the water.

  Now, how can I use this?

  Reaching down to almost touch the water, I once more close my eyes and then reach out with my mind to make contact with the fire magic within.

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  It’s immediately curious, sparks flocking to me. Perhaps it’s partly because it is being repelled by all the water around but not by me that it is so eager to come; perhaps it’s also because I offer it something different that it might burn. It tries to burn my flesh, but I stop that quickly enough. I don’t have control over the magic in the same way as I do my own transformed mana, but…it’s not all that dissimilar.

  It takes a bit of a twist of thinking, and a reminder that all fire is of Fire and therefore if I can control my own fire magic, there is no reason why I cannot control this, but I succeed in taking control of the fire magic near me. And from there, my control spreads in a circle around me. I sense that the circle extends about twice as far as I can reach with my hands.

  This time, when I put my bare foot into the water, the fire magic does not burn me, making it feel like I’ve stepped into a boiling hot bath. Instead, this time it feels cold. I wonder why for a moment before realising that, in removing the effect of the fire magic, I now feel the temperature of the water as it would be without it.

  Though I don’t mind a cold bath from time to time, I was rather looking forward to the ‘hot’ aspect of hot springs – as long as I don’t cook like a lobster.

  It takes a bit more time and experimentation to find the right level of allowing the fire magic to affect me without risking becoming overheated. In the end, I find that the best strategy is actually to allow the fire magic to do its thing, but just to lessen its concentration in the water around me.

  And how do I do that? Well, by feeding it to my friendly fire elemental, of course! Aingeal is very happy to receive a flow of fire magic from the water around me, joy and contentment conveyed across the link between us. Actually…. Is it bigger? I ask myself, eyeing the little ball of fire. Although it isn’t back to the size and intensity it was before the fight with Raven where it detonated to defeat the Tier three’s final attack, it is definitely growing and intensifying again.

  Hmm, I wonder how much it needs to grow before it is able to Evolve? I ask myself. Unfortunately, I don’t have that information about the elemental in my Bound tab of my status screen.

  I push the question to the side for now, taking off my clothes and stepping deeper into the water. Sighing with contentment at the feeling of the blissful heat sinking into my muscles, I move deep enough that I can float on my back without touching the ground.

  No one speaks for a while: everyone is just happy to bask in the experience. Then I find my curiosity becoming too much for me to contain.

  Does anyone know what created this place? I ask idly.

  Out of everyone, I’m surprised when it’s Windy who answers. The samuran is still a pain in my arse sometimes, but she has definitely calmed down a bit. I think that it helps that she has started seeing the benefits of helping the village more.

  These days, she often goes out with a larger hunting party – always taking at least two Warriors with her, of course – and helps them track prey to kill. I’ve also seen her working with Happy to help get the furnace to higher temperatures, and she’s warned us about a bad storm coming twice over the last month. In return, she’s earned some good time in my den and has made some good progress to the next tier. Of all my Bound, she’s actually the closest to Tier three at eighty-nine percent, though she still has a way to go.

  Her increased helpfulness doesn’t stop her from being abrasive, rude, and irritating, but at least I don’t feel like she’s just a waste of resources anymore. Still, I’m surprised when she’s the one to respond to me, and relatively politely for her.

  Everyone knows the legend, she answers snidely. Everyone who Evolved the normal way, that is. I sense that River, Happy, Yells, Dusty, and Hunter all disagree with that: perhaps it’s something they only learn on this first trip to the Festival. Once there was a village of People here. One of our largest villages. Some stories say that it was filled with fifty Pathwalkers; others with five hundred. Yet everyone agrees that it was populous. Perhaps too much so.

  It is said that they turned away from the ancestors – they believed that they were populous enough not to need the knowledge and wisdom of their forebearers any more. And that led to their doom. An immense rock fell from the heavens. It smashed into the village and obliterated it, destroying every trace that it ever existed. The impact was strong enough to flatten the forest for days around. I know from experience that ‘days’ is not meant to imply time, but distance – a day’s walk.

  Over time, Windy continues, her usual scorn gone from her tone as she gets into the swing of the story, the destruction healed itself. The forest returned to where it had once been; the creatures followed. The rest of the People came to see what had become of the village, the strongest of them all. Where the village had stood, there was nothing but a deep hole. A hole which had filled up with clear, pure water. Water that was hot for no reason that any Water-Shaper, or Water-former, or Water-whisperer has ever been able to fully understand.

  It has become our sacred place. A place for the tribes to meet and for mating. And it is a reminder that we must always cleave to the ancestors and that, however big we might get, we are never invulnerable.

  There is silence after her telling. I find myself mulling over the story; I suspect everyone else who has heard it for the first time is doing the same. Maybe even those who have heard it before, as well.

  A meteor. That makes sense. That it seemed to aim directly for the largest samuran village of the time seems supicious, though that might be an erroneous attribution: a meteor landing directly on a village was more likely just to be bad luck in the probability game than anything else. Then again, this is a world of magic. Who’s to say that another village didn’t secretly want the strongest village destroyed and somehow managed to affect the aim of the meteor? Or perhaps there’s even something to Windy’s belief in the ancestors, though I’m even more doubtful about that possibility than the previous.

  It doesn’t explain the heat, of course, but possibly there’s some sort of chemical reaction happening in the centre of the meteor, or maybe it holds some super Energy Heart from outer space which enables it to feed fire magic into the surrounding water. And continue doing so for what I have to guess is a very long time given Windy’s implications in the story.

  As I think about a burning ball of rock hurtling down from space, another thought occurs to me.

  I can create a furnace hot enough to melt iron. I can create a cape of fire to drape over my shoulders. I can encircle creatures in a curtain of fire. I can cook food between my fingers without burning myself. Heck, I even once condensed the power of an inferno into a tiny ball which became Aingeal.

  But I can’t throw a fireball.

  That’s the most basic attack which any fire mage learns at level one. But somehow, I’ve got to Initiate five – checking my status screen, I correct myself – Initiate six in Fire-Shaping without even trying to create a fireball. And Aingeal doesn’t count even though it basically is just fire in a ball shape.

  This is a problem. How can I even dare to call myself a fire-mage if I can’t even throw the tiniest fireball?

  Soaking quietly in the hot spring turns into the perfect opportunity for me to work out this attack – without risking lighting something on fire which I really don’t want to burn.

  By the time we get out, I vow, I will be a true fire-mage!

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