He dived to one side, then thought to raise his shield. Nothing happened. Several timid movements drew no more reaction. Arlen scuttled forward and kicked the fallen stone. The instant it moved there was a whoosh of air, and something struck near his foot. Arlen shuddered and took two cautious steps back. In the flashes of scarlet light he'd seen smooth floor and the base of a square pillar. Then, wide-eyed, he understood he'd seen two muzzle flashes from some kind of gun mounted on it. But he needed that stone to see where he was going!

He took a deep breath. "Hockey." Using the stick from his mace, he leaned down... and decided he didn't want his face anywhere near the impact point. Instead he began conjuring a water spell... nope, not a good idea either! He stopped an instant before his hands would've glowed. So he kicked once more, sending the stone clattering farther along. Another shot rang out. He saw part of a wall and an open door. Good enough; he gave the hidden turret a wary glance and hurried on without his light source.

It turned out not to be needed. In here, something glowed in the same red-violet shade, sparkling behind a wall of ice. Arlen chipped away with a stone, then looked worriedly up at where a ton of icicles might fall on him. Magic might be more effective. He stood where the door would block any objection from the last room's turret, and went to work. His hands flickered and chilled as he drew on the spirits' power to reach into the frozen wall. It slowly warped and flowed under his touch. Weight shifted overhead and he sprang back in time to avoid the crash of stalactites. The little glacier fell in slow motion through the sparkle of pale blue and distant red light. Frost dusted Arlen's arms and face. Wisps of fog curled into the room like an invitation.

He climbed over broken ice and into a room of ancient control panels. In its center, a foot-wide cube floated, shining and slowly spinning. Circuit-like traces of light covered every face. The level of detail drew him closer in admiration. This was no crude automaton, but something made with intense purpose and skill.

Only one of the panels showed activity. Arlen didn't know Builder language, but he did recognize how they counted. A number glowed next to the dials, and it was in the hundreds of thousands. Population? Too high. A power reading? As he watched, it ticked up by one, but no further.

"New theory," he said, putting his shield down. "The Builders were working on something, they had machines manipulating the whole environment to study or test it, and they left the experiment running."

He took notes. If this cube were going to kill him, he was already doomed. With that comforting thought, he decided to try a low-tech approach and poke it with a stick.

A force held the cube in place so that it only wobbled. The controls told him nothing... no, a light had wavered. He tried turning the dial beside that mark.

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The cube's containment field weakened and it sank onto its platform. Arlen poked it again, then touched it with one finger.

It shattered into angular bits and surged toward him. Arlen yelped. He was overheated, crawling with spidery animate stones, and his vision blurred out. He couldn't fall; some force held him up. He felt locked in place, and reinforced. The artifact had dug into him and dissolved. When it reached his chest he feared the worst, but the brief chill and crackle he felt was more like what he felt from the use of magic. But stronger, far more forceful. He dropped to the floor at last, but the ground warped under him.

Singed and chilled and smoking, Arlen passed out.

#

When he woke up, he found himself in a man-shaped crater a few inches deep. He groaned and pushed himself up with one shaky arm. When he moved the other, the damaged floor flowed like clay. A trap? He tried to scuttle away from it, rolled, banged strangely into something, and ended up unsteady and dizzy on his feet. His skull pounded and his ears strained backward, which didn't seem right.

As he began to recover, something twitched behind him. He spun and sidestepped, and banged into the artifact pillar. Only it wasn't his legs that had hit it. He reached back, wide-eyed, and discovered he had a tail stuck to his spine! It was wide and muscular, hanging to below his knees, and the weight of it made him feel like he was leaning backward. He shivered at the feeling of it being touched. The same brown and tan fuzz covered it as it did for any of the natives.

"Like one of them," he said, looking at his hands again. Leathery skin had stretched between his fingers up to the second knuckle, giving him a natural paddle. He still had his boots on but would bet his toes had changed too.

He stood there in the chilly, dim room, trying to calm down. He'd changed, but he was still himself. Still nearly human. What was important right now was to figure out what had happened, and get to safety.

If the ancient facility had a crude security system that identified people as welcome based on whether they were physically human-shaped, he was now an intruder deep in an area where the kindly paternal attitude probably didn't apply.

Arlen found no trace of the cube he'd touched. It was probably embedded in him, though he couldn't feel it. He looked at one hand and wondered what the thing had done to him magically. He was able to conjure an orb of water to hover above his palm, still. No change. The soft glow of the spell revealed that crater he'd landed in, and he crouched to examine it. No way had he been slammed into the floor that hard without being a cartoon coyote. He touched the surface... and without meaning to, it flowed beneath his fingertips. He felt it as though he were gripping a chunk of ground several paces wide. The whole area coursed with flickers of the red-violet energy of the cube. At his touch the material slowly smoothed out until it showed no damage.

Arlen stared at what he'd done. The adepts of earth-themed magic that he'd seen could reshape a rock in their hands to do things like crafting sharper arrowheads and forming building foundations, slowly. This work was far beyond them.

He needed to get out and experiment. He snuffed out the spell's light and made his way to the room with the automatic turret. There he kicked the crystal back across the room and dodged the gunfire. In the process he stepped on one of the shots and paused to pick it up. A little lead ball. He held onto it and managed to kick the glow-gem out to a safe spot without getting any high-velocity bullet samples.