Dust scraped against my eyelashes at the crack of dawn.  Jaded tendrils of ice juxtaposed with the gentle streaming of vapor.  I braced one hand against the earth.  Eyes widening in hunger as blue and white beads emerged from the grout.  I picked through as much as I could carry, my feet wandering before I could excuse them, and then I saw it.

Them.  What was left of it anyway.  My attempt at ceramics had ended in disaster.  Bullets of ice had been popping craters in everything below the clouds.  I felt my abdomen and tried to place the damage.  Other than a renewed sense of fatigue and knots of tension, I didn’t find any injury.

Maybe I was immune to it somehow.

The two vases I had moulded had split into multiple parts.  A fair amount had been ground to rubble, but I still had a few saucers, and a small bowl where the base had sunken.  Best of all, it seemed they had hardened.

Not like clay though.  There was some kind of crystallization that left the surface irregularly glazed.  I wager that one of the dishes was porous, but at the end of the day, my hope of gathering water had proven fruitless.

Not all was lost though.  I now had five tools.  More than I’d had in a long time.  Investigating the mound of earth, I discovered that a length of wire, and some of my finer tools had survived.  Albeit, blunted and in various states of disrepair.

I couldn’t keep doing this.  The storms kept breaking down whatever I put together, and I had no way of protecting them on my person.  Using a grey gem, I hammered and moulded an edge into the surviving tools, but In my head I was cooking up a plan.

Dry and eroded though it was, the ground was still malleable.  Rough and crumbling, but still some mortar left in there.  I set a bowl down and dumped the crystals into it.  I folded my legs, and sat there, thinking.

Who knew how long the ground would be workable.  In an hour, it could be reduced to dust and smoke.  There were also the crystal fragments to think about.  Wasn’t about to give up the one thing in this place that proved useful.

But it didn’t have the luxury of a goal.  I could commit to scavenging more and more, but unless I had something to hold it to, the storms would keep hijacking my efforts.  No, it wasn’t just the basics of survival anymore.  Somehow, I had to get ahead of it.

The sky is a patchwork of different colors.  The various elemental storms competing for land to tear apart.  I’d kept an eye and a arms length trained on the aurora swirling into the sky.

On a whim, scooped up some dirt, walked up to the nearest stream and tossed the thing into the base.  The mortar dried almost immediately, and then the ball devolved into lava and slag.  Clusters boiled to the surface before fizzing out.

I watched the ball intently.  The veins that spread their way around the clump, the hues and shades that diffused into the ground.  My brow and lip twitched.  I mounded up a fair amount more soil, trying to coax the base.  The energy licked at my finger-tips and a part of me retreated from it.

But the rest.  I hesitated for an instant, and them buried my hand up to the forearm.  My skin crawled, numbed and blackened.  I felt the tendons seizing, knots forming in my flesh, nerves and veins withering beneath the starlight.  But as one, I felt the rock.  Through sheer intent, I caused my arm to find the melted rock and shape it within my grasp.

After a moment of so, I called on the remaining sensation of my arm and invoked the fate of my past.  Blackened beneath the starlight, my skin began to flake.  Charred stone streamed down my arm in a layer no thicker than paper, and seams of foreing energy erupted from the stone.

Layer by layer, it all kept peeling back,  My focus crashed as a wave of pressure flowed down my arm, but seeing as it was still attached to me, I vowed to expose whatever power dwelled within.  Unable to overcome the pressure, I called upon it.  That part that begged to retrieve my arm, and the part that demanded to brave the storms clashed in a fierce stalemate.

It was either me or the rock, and I wasn’t tapping out untilI lost the limb.  Chunks flung from my fingers, obscuring the stone in its entirety.  I felt movement in my arm, and will all of my being I recreated the feeling.  The pale flesh of my elbow spasmed beneath the glove of ash.  A tugging that cause my arm to ache, and the phantom of my arm to erupt like a supernova in my minds eye.

The force of a battering ram lashed across my chest.  My breathing slowed.  The fingers in my off hand filled with pressure until I thought they should burst, and then I snaked back down my arm, striking a tangent to the wave of pressure that mounted along my dominant arm.

My upper arm felt full, swollen, and devolved from the senses.  Beyond that, It felt like a fraction of what it should be.  Through that struggle, I came to terms with my situation.

The scattered shards laced with the power of an ice storm.  Rain and water, Fire and wind.  The ground held beneath the palm of my hand, my feet.  I felt a pressure engulf me.  A living breath.  The city forsaken, The relic of a forgotten era, the focus, the being taken by it.

A wave of dirt erupted out in front of me, even as my arm had already extended to the heavens.  A unmasked gem received the light of the heavens, and directed everything into my arm.  Every part that could do me harm either diffused into the aura or countered with power summoned from the ground.

My brow prickles as a shower of lighting snaps at the ground around me.  Blue and white stars, flung into the air.  The bowl of shards overturned, dragged through the earth yet fused together before it even reached me.  Like a hammer raised to strike a bell, my off hand and the many sided die extended into the air.

An umbrella of baby blue extended over me, then spiraled back again and cracked down with a force that twisted across my ribs.  I observed a silent scream, then my focus shifted.  From the forecast to the ceramics to the monument.

In answer a wave of force swept out from the latter.  An arrow that was a world apart from my focus.  It plowed into me, broke my root, and sent me soaring across the plateau.

Confusion crossed my mind as the horizon wobbled, and then the world spun into blackness.

A wave of debris was cast from the dunes as the smoking form of Tracy.  Crashed into it.  Her own mass should have deflected, bleeding it’s momentum into the hills and heavens respectively, however the spell upon her held true to it’s heading.  Tons of earth were spun and spilled, and the surface of the land was swept by a Tsunami.  For once without the herald of a storm.

Once, twice, Tracy burrowed through hills.  Faced with a third, she began looping the spell.  The impact of the first two hills leveraged to prevent the next.  With the surface of the desert at its lowest point, she raised one over her hip and another just shy of true north.

With the flail of the gods, She thrust a spear into the earth.  An impact that caratered the desert, and raised the surrounding land three inches.

As the pit began to collapse in on itself, tendrils of debris wove their way toward the center, and the surface at the bottom began to ripple.  A dome was erected, driving steam out from the surrounding desert and fusing the grain.  A subtle groan filled the air above the shallow, as the porous rock began to absorb air like a sponge.  The dome sand deeper against the surface.

Sealed within the cavity, several stories high and out like a light, Tracy fell limply to the ground.

If I pull the blanket a little tighter, maybe I won’t shiver so much.  Tracy thought to herself.  She was aware that she’d been driven from the city, and in a moment of inspiration created a humble shelter.  She understood that it was only a matter of time before it broke down and she would would be left to fend for herself.

What she did not grasp though was that - in what felt like a very forgiving night - her shelter had endured for the better part of a year.  Storms raced across the crystal lattice, shaving the surface and pitting holes in it.  The dust and debris that they created however buffered the construct, and even dunes would roll across it like slow moving waves.

Every now and then, Tracy would mime brushing something out of her hair, and a patch of crystal would be exposed to absorb air.  Month by month, dozens of storms swarmed over her, pressing and testing her stronghold.

Harvest season came, and what remained of the crystal lattice began to refine itself.  At her side, primal stones of each element appeared.  In her eyes, the very same fostered with her growth.  The scale of the lattice shrank quickly that season, as the starvation imbued with her presence was sated.  During the following storm season, the Sphere was pummeled on all sides.  Leeching mana directly through the earth, rather than exposing to the sky.  Even then, the shell began to fail.  Tracy would look up and see the fraying ceiling of a cave, feeling gratified that her shelter kept the draft at bay.

She could not see the sun.  The clouds forever coated the sky during storm season.   Her only clue to the passage of time was the pattern and interactions of the storms.

Then, sunlight did begin to fill the cavern.  Blinking in day by day, until all at once Tracy saw the figure of a man in the distance.

She saw a ghost.  Many ghosts.  Demons of all shapes and sizes, and a scheme that rivaled anything she could put up.  That much she was used to, however there was one thing they had that daunted her.

A soul.  An immortal.  An entity that did not yield to the spirits, the storms or the influence of her own familiars.  She saw a monster thoroughly defined against the horizon, who in a heartbeat, undermined the nature of the world as she knew it, and at the same time, fed her insight that galvanized a beast within.

The sorcerer saw a bloodied husk.  He could not see the ‘normal’ in the way that she had adopted it.  Malign and archaic energies clung to her and fused with her body.  Her aura, veins and mana coils were exposed and pumping raw ether, and snaring magical potent out of thin air.

Knowing the grievance that brought her to this state, He turned a blind eye and reached for his canteen.  He had a kit tailored to emergencies in the void.  It would take everything he knew and then some but she would recover.  All soul’s did.

Sensing something amiss, The sorcerer groped around for his canteen, then checked himself as he’d misconceived it from the ether.  He’d already had it in hand, and channeled enough focus though to weaponize it.

That is, it should have been volatile, had it not been drained.  He saw the girl in the corner of his eye, trembling with fear.  He saw the essence of the kit floating toward her.  She stood and the cave shivered, chunks of petrified stone and soil crashed around her and released blades of sunlight into the chamber.

“Who are you?”

As she spoke, the kit and the shell integrated with the girl, attaching and optimizing to her presence in such a way that her sense of flickered over what he saw.  His magical sights were going haywire as decades of study fought to piece together exactly what he was seeing.

Then he saw them.  A shroud wrapped around the girl as she took a fighting stance that was both raw and ancient.  Four primal stones.  Others rolled and took positions dangerously similar to a ritual circle, and still others sat inert.

Forget a canteen.  A single primal stone could amplify a magician’s abilities a hundred fold.  With them, even a complete outsider could eke out a spell.  Manipulating more than one - lords forbid a ritual cast with them - was unprecedented.

He felt a spell lock on to him.  She marked him as a spell’s target, and for several seconds nothing came of it.  She’d activated a formulae inadvertently.  Her attention, enough to command the space around her.

“I’m an eccentric old fool with too much time on his hands.  They call me grave.  Now rumor has it that a missing person got themselves lost in the mountains.  Does the-”

He didn’t get to finish.  Tracy’s eyes widened and she wailed in despair.

The sky darkened.  The ground around him began to glow and mound.  He could only imagine - impressions left by the storms.

One word, cannibalized from a semblance of so much suffering, rang out above all others.  Her cries for help literally wrenched his heart, and stole his breath away.  It was all he could do to nod and gesture reassuringly.  He certainly couldn’t help the halo that his magic formed in response.

Her breathing slowed, a forgiving peace came around her even as the aura around her carried out the dregs of her incantation.  So meagre that it barely grazed his senses, she spoke, “Please, will you help me?”

Resolve and solemnity sealed his features, and the sorcerer nodded firmly.  By the shadow of the mountain, he would not be the last.