She took a deep breath. Then another. She looked to Jinx and Sly and said, “I have to lower my shields. I’ll do my best to keep the tempest at bay, but if it should take me—”

“I have a little powdered Rezna’s rest left if you go full assassin on us.” Jinx shrugged nonchalantly, as if having to incapacitate a friend was simply part of her normal day. “But try not to go full Rage Roar. We’ve already got one unconscious body to carry; two would make things very difficult.”

“I will do my best.”

Sly opened her mouth as if to say something, but then closed it and simply nodded.

“What’s happening?” Nova asked.

“The way out is blocked, but I’m going to try something. It … I might have a reaction like I did before, when I squeezed your arms. I’m sorry for that, by the way. I promise, I will explain everything later when there is time.”

Aurora hated the fearful expression on her friend’s face, but Nova nodded all the same, loyal despite her misgivings.

“Why don’t Nova and I stand back to be safe?” Jinx offered. She took a pouch from her belt and held it out to Sly. “Sly can be your second. She brought you around pretty fast down in the tunnel.” Jinx shifted her focus to the other hunter and added, “If she becomes more than you can handle, just a tiny pinch of powder is all she needs to breathe in to be subdued. Any more and she’ll be out for the night.”

After a bit of shuffling, they were all in position, and it was just a matter of Aurora dropping her walls enough to choose a soul to summon a storm. It was not something she had mastered by any means, but the process was basic enough. It reminded her a bit of threading a needle. Aurora could feel spirits around her always, some distant and meandering, some close and suffocating. She merely had to choose one and pull it through the Stormheart she held in her hands, and the soul took on the life of that storm.

It was simple.

“Very, very simple,” she mumbled to herself, and then slowly began to lower the walls she’d erected between her own spirit and the world around her. She imagined taking away one stone, only one, letting in just a sliver of the outside.

Even that small opening seemed like a floodgate, filling her mind with noise and feeling and sensation that was not her own. It felt like an invasion, foreign and overpowering, and her instinct was to try to claw it away like a spider’s web she’d walked through unsuspectingly. Instead, she held still, trying to adjust. The world outside was loud and unfocused and chaotic, and it enflamed her own thoughts until they too were loud, competing as if to say, I still exist.