While we walked down the dimly lit tunnel I thought on what Isa had revealed to me. It was a bold claim to say he was her brother, given how long I’d spent with him. She was a shifter and if they were actual siblings it would mean that he was too. Yet I knew due to Lute telling me that when a shifter passed through the portal they would temporarily lose their false form, which I’d never seen happen with Lance.

“I’m sorry but brother?” I finally asked as I rubbed at my eyes. The fact that we were surrounded with the echoed howls of shifters didn’t even disrupt my curiosity.

“You came here to help him without being told anything?” Isa said as she moved down a different tunnel than any Lance or I had gone through.

“The brothers were quite adamant about helping out Viva,” I commented while conveniently leaving out the fact that I planned to use this to my advantage later. It would prove easier to coerce them into stopping at the oracle on floor thirty-eight if they owed me a favor.

“Lance sure.” Isa gave the mask in her hand a quick shake. “Viva wants this though.”

“Oh? Why would she care about some mask?” I feigned ignorance. Though I could recognize the mask and knew the origin there had been changes made that made me curious.

Our conversation was disrupted as from around the curve in the path ahead two figures bounded out. The sudden appearance of the shifters caused both Isa and I to freeze, while the shifters themselves glared at us with open hostility. Before Isa could make any type of move I lifted up my right arm to stop her from advancing.

“Stay back, you’ll just get in the way,” I told her while I raised my left hand.

A crackle of electricity ran from my shoulder down my arm and to my hand. A single golden shaft emerged from my palm and shot out down the hall to where the shifters were, and then it split into two pieces that shunted into the walls on opposite sides. They served as a source for my lightning, as that end of the tunnel turned into a veritable cage of electricity.

The reason I had opted for such a widespread attack was made obvious when the shifter on the left twisted his body. A sound as the bones warped beneath the muscle and skin was audible even over the noise of the electrical burst, the desperate shifter hurting himself in a vain attempt to avoid the magical attack. In the end his attempts to escape my attack were a failure as the storm devoured both of the shifters.

While the freshly made corpses smoked near the bend in the tunnel I turned my attention back to Isa. Her eyes were wide while the mask she held with one hand had been clutched close to her ample chest. The red eyes turned to look at me, one eyebrow lifted, as she attempted to word her jumbled thoughts.

“We’d better hurry up,” I gently reminded her.

The words shook away the confusion that had so readily seized her. Isa strode down the tunnel with a hint more speed than before. As she walked past the corpses of the shifters she spared them a look, a shudder visible on her thin shoulders. “Can all you Elf things do that?”

“No, I’m one of a kind.”

“I can see why Lance brought you along,” Isa spoke up, “why’d someone of your caliber be helping my little brother?”

“I’m merely trying to look after my family.”

Ahead of us the tunnel once more had what looked to be an intersection, though as we drew closer the fact that one of the pathways was actually a door into a large chamber became obvious. Within the room held a few dead animals that had been skinned, crude buckets placed beneath the hung bodies.

“You have kids?”

“Two daughters,” I said with a nod of my head, “we were separated and the brothers are helping me reunite with them.”

Another bend in the tunnel brought us to a straight hallway that inclined upward. From behind the sound of howls continued to resound, though no shifters could be heard chasing after us. Throughout the turmoil of noises I was unable to make out any sign that Lance had been caught.

“You’d risk your life for your family?” Isa’s voice couldn’t help but betray the surprise she felt at that.

“Always.” I stepped over a cluster of large rocks that had fallen from the ceiling at some previous point. “Their mother would never forgive me if I left them alone.”

“I wish all mothers thought like that.”

We walked on in silence after that, as the path ahead of us twisted and splintered numerous times. On the way in I had felt the nest was far too close to a maze for my taste, but the return to the surface only hammered in the feeling. I could only theorize it was a defensive measure built into the nest.

“You know,” Isa spoke up without warning, “if it ain’t for this mask I doubt Viva would have sent anyone to recover me.”

It was a sort of comment that I didn’t know how to respond to. So all I could do was look at her and wait.

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“You know, no you don’t, but you know, my brother ain’t even a proper shifter. He’s a halfie.”

It was obvious how surprised I was to hear that since Isa giggled at me. “I didn’t know shifters even mingled with other races like that.”

“We don’t, but Viva had a plan, she needed a tool,” Isa’s tone became noticeably darker while she spoke, “she used the Dopples to find any humans and then she...well you know.”

Before I could say anything in response Isa continued on, “I was still a kid, but even I knew what she was doing wasn’t right.”

“You couldn’t do anything to stop her,” I pointed out in an attempt to console her.

“Yeah, ‘sides when Lance found out what she’d done he took off.” Isa gave a small laugh, though her eyes still had a flare of anger to them. “Found that Adam fellow. Didn’t see Lance until eight years later.”

Isa’s left hand lifted up to get my attention, while she motioned with her right at a doorway on the right side of the tunnel. Her finger moved to her mouth to signify a need for silence. A second later her body rippled and shifted to what looked to be a harder skin.

We both quietly approached the door and Isa looked in first. A second later she let out a sigh of relief, and then started to walk in. “It’s clear, come on.”

“What are we doing here, we need to get out of the nest?” I asked as I followed after her.

It was a storehouse of some sort with numerous shelves made of wood shoved up against the walls. Crude clay pots along with buckets littered the open sections, each of which was filled with berries or herbs.

“I always planned to get out of here in a hurry,” Isa replied while she strode to the wall.

Her fingernails stretched out into long claws, and she used them to rip a large rock out of the wall. It slammed onto the floor next to her, revealing a tunnel that was large enough for a grown man to crawl through.

Before we could even get into the tunnel a cry came from behind us. I turned and saw a shifter in the doorway, and with a quick flick of my hand I threw a golden knife into the chest of the beast. When it struck the knife let out a burst of electricity, and so the shifter collapsed without making another noise.

“Come on!” Isa called out to me. Her body rippled and twisted as she turned into a thick serpent. Her new form easily slipped into the tunnel and moved on ahead without any further words.

Before I crawled into the hole after her I gathered a ball of light in my hand. When I dove in the hole the ball exploded behind me, the main direction of the explosion directed up into the ceiling. By the time I was a good distance the path back had been blocked off, at least enough that they’d need to spend some time digging at it.

When I emerged from the nest I drew in a quick breath of the cool air. I pushed myself up out of the hole, covered in grime, and smiled at the open sky above me. The moon hung above and bathed everything in a white light, and I had to fight the urge to spread my arms and bathe in it.

“Hey Elf, where we supposed to go?”

Isa’s question drew my attention back to her. She’d changed out of her serpent form and taken on her human aspect, but she’d made a few changes. Her body was slimmer, and her ears had been extended. The overall bone structure had been altered to resemble an Elf more than a human.

“We need to head for the portal, which was that way,” I said as I pointed in the direction I’d confirmed prior to entering the nest, “and my name is Fenix.”

“Well I’m Isa, though Lance already said that,” Isa hopped down the muddy hillside, “come on! The guards will find us soon.”

I ran down the hill after her, both of us abandoning stealth, as we headed in the direction of the stream. Beyond the frigid stream a forest spattered with thick oak could be seen. While I could not see it I knew that even further was a canyon that lead to where the portal.

After we splashed through the stream the night air grew to have a harsher bite to it. The crisp cool air poked at my exposed skin without a hint of mercy. The fact that I was still completely unclothed only added to my discomfort. From behind we could hear a few cries from the exterior of the nest as some of the shifters realized that the intruders had escaped.

The trees blocked out most of the moonlight, and it became so dark that even my eyes could barely see. Isa walked without any issues as her shifter nature allowed her to adapt quick enough, and so she took the lead while I tried to follow. There was one tactic I could have used to see but I had no interest in lighting up the forest.

We had barely gone into the forest when the sound of pursuit reached our ears. To the left and the right pairs of felines darted through the trees, low to the ground, and long and large enough to dwarf a regular human. I’d encountered those types of animals before on another floor, and I knew from their behavior they were shifters in disguise.

The shifters came in from both sides, a simple pincer maneuver. Yet when they got in close instead of an attack they blocked our front, their mouths open as they let out long hisses. Isa and I came to a stop, and she in turn hissed back at the shifters.

“Isa, be careful,” I warned her while I lifted up my hands, palms facing outward, “keep your eyes on the left, I’ll take the others.”

Four hostile shifters would make for four targets, and as I had only two eyes I could not keep my gaze on all four at the same time. I gave up on my backside and prepared to handle two of the four personally.

There was no incantation nor flick of the wrist, no trick that would warn the shifters of what was to come. Instead a burst of light erupted from my palms with such brilliance that the shifters could only cry out in pain, their bodies flinching instinctively away. Before they could recover I swung my hands out to the side, then brought them back forward.

What formed in the wake of my hand movements were two large blades. The blades swung in from both sides and cut the two shifters right through the middle. Before their bisected bodies hit the ground I turned to check on Isa.

Isa had already finished off one of the shifters and thrown herself at the other. With the mask discarded to the grass she rolled around, hissing and spitting, while she tried to tear at the throat of the enemy shifter. More monster than animal their bodies rippled as they grew extra limbs and tried to slash at each other, a tangle of what could only be called tentacles and hardened skin.

It had only been a span of ten or twenty seconds before Isa finished her fight with the second shifter. She stood up and her entire body rippled, the familiar human form she so favored appearing once more. Before Isa did anything else she stopped to study the wounds on her body, injuries that remained even after she’d changed her form.

“We need to find something to bandage that,” I walked over to her, “it’d be bad if you collapsed from blood loss right now.”

“Ain’t a problem.” Isa lifted her arm up so I could clearly see one of the cuts on it. As I watched the flesh acted almost like a thread and needle to create a stitch as expertly done as any I’d personally sewn.

“Well that’s nice, can all shifters do that?”

“Only the smart ones.” Isa ran her hand gently over where the wound had been, as though to test to make sure it was knitted together properly, before the rest of her cuts received the same treatment.

A figure burst out of the darkness of the forest, their form caught in a few shafts of moonlight that pierced the forest top. At a glimpse I could see red hair, ears that resembled a fox, and hands that had shaped into claws. The face was familiar but at the same time one I hadn’t expected to see at that moment.

“Lance,” I said to him with a nod, while I tried to look at his body to see any other alterations he’d made.

“I thought I smelled Isa, are you alright?” Lance said as he walked in closer to us. With a shake of his hands the claws shifted back to normal even as his ears reverted.

“Fine just a bit banged up.” Isa walked over to the mask and scooped it back up off of the ground. “You lost the others?”

“Left a trail of blood off to where Viva said the Bloods are coming,” Lance said as he brushed past the two of us and started to walk in the direction of the canyon, “doubled back, but you two made a mess so there ain’t no way they don’t know someone went this way.”

“You did a bad job as decoy,” Isa told him while she quickly followed after.

The two of them were dark figures that melted into the forest ahead of me. For a short while I stood behind and watched them leave, my gaze instead moving to the defeated shifter corpses near us. The way they had changed was something none of us ever expected, a change that would either bode fortune for their race or ruin.

“If only Lute could have seen this,” I murmured to myself.