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Bronwyn wriggled her toes, making sure they all still worked. They were scorched and sore but otherwise whole; her boot was another matter. She took out another pair she’d picked up from the Colony Stone and stowed away her ruined pair. She scooted back against the tunnel wall, the stormy opening on her right and the descending tunnel on her left, and then she fished around in her pouch for some clean socks. Her right arm was particularly tingly and sore, and she figured that the lightning must have traveled through it as either the entrance or exit; she couldn’t tell which her foot had been. “Good as new,” she said, tying up the laces on her new boots.

She considered the three blessings she’d earned in the trial and, not for the first time, wondered if there were different ones. Could she have taken different paths or made other choices to earn different sorts of blessings? Bronwyn couldn’t think of a way she could have avoided the swarm. She supposed there could be some chance involved; if she’d waited outside the lightning-struck tree for a while or moved more quickly, could she have avoided it? Deciding she could ask the Queen when she finished, Bronwyn stood up, brushed the dust off herself, and started down the tunnel. She might have gotten her three blessings, but the Queen had said something about reaching one of the “Summer Sources.”

Bronwyn strode down the hallway, feeling surprisingly good for someone who’d just been blasted by lightning. She supposed she could chalk up her good feelings, or at least some of them, to the fact that her vitality was something like four times as high as when she’d first woken up in this world. That had to mean something, right? It didn’t explain her good mood, though. Really thinking about it, she decided she was happy that her gut instincts had paid off in this trial. She’d begun to doubt herself over the last few months, and it felt good that she was doing well and receiving “blessings” from the Fae for her choices and behavior. “Plus, it was fun as hell racing through that storm!” She laughed and didn’t try to stifle it, continuing to walk confidently down the springy, round tunnel.

She came to a junction of three tunnels and stood there for a moment. Looking in each direction, Bronwyn couldn’t see anything notably different about any of them. Each tunnel was roughly oval, and they each had a slight downward slope. Due to the slope, she could only see about a hundred feet in any direction. While she stood there, contemplating her options, she decided to take a few steps in each direction. She first walked down the right-hand tunnel, and she noticed something—she thought she caught a brief whiff of woodsmoke. She turned and went back to the junction and tried the central tunnel. She didn’t smell anything this time, but she did notice that the temperature dropped significantly. Turning around, she moved a short way down the last tunnel, the one on the left. This tunnel felt warm; she was sure of it, much warmer than the central tunnel. “Hmm, smoke, cold, or warm?”

She didn’t bother going back to the junction; she wanted to walk down the warm tunnel. “I’m supposed to be an Agent of Summer, right?” As she walked, she felt the tunnel begin to curve to her right, and then the grade grew steeper. She continued, walking confidently, and the tunnel continued to bend to the right, more tightly now and descending even more steeply. After a few minutes of this, she found her footing growing more and more unsteady, the force of gravity pulling her down the steep, tight spiral of the passage. It got to the point where she would have to sit down and scoot or start running to avoid falling, so she chose the bolder approach, allowing gravity to pull her into a run as she rapidly descended. She was braced for the end of the spiral, so it wasn’t with any great shock when, with a final stumbling step, she fell through open air to sprawl onto a soft, springy cavern floor. It was warm and bright in the room, and the ground was loamy and covered with soft green moss, so she didn’t suffer any harm from the fall. She rolled over onto her rump and sat up, looking around.

The cavern wasn’t huge, only about twenty paces across, and she couldn’t see any other exits. The warmth and light were coming from an orb that hovered in the middle of the room. It was bright, yellow, and warm, like a miniature sun, and it pulled at Bronwyn like a favorite friend, song, or food. It felt like a memory she cherished and wanted to savor, and it took all of her willpower to keep from rushing over to it. The orb pulsed, and another wave of heat washed over her, and she remembered lying on the beach, watching her aunt Tass chasing after her cousins while they screamed with laughter. “Holy shit,” Bronwyn hadn’t thought of her dad’s sister in years. She stood up and slowly moved closer to the orb, and it pulsed again.

Bronwyn was sitting on a rocky outcrop, looking over the canyon she’d just hiked. Her dog, Boots, was lying on the grass nearby, tongue hanging out happily as she soaked in the sun. Bronwyn pulled her hair out of its tie and let it fall down her shoulders. Closing her eyes, she, too, bathed in the sun and relished how her muscles felt after the challenging but rewarding hike up the canyon trail. She had a big tournament on Monday, and she’d come up here to get her mind off things. She took a deep breath, savoring the dusty pine scent of the air. Boots stood up and came over to lick her face, and Bronwyn laughed, reaching into her pack to find her collapsable dish so she could give the poor girl some water.

Suddenly she was back in the cavern with the pulsing globe of summer, and Bronwyn felt a surge of loss for her old dog, and her eyes filled with water. She hadn’t thought of Boots for a long time. Why? She’d loved her so much, and those hikes she’d taken with her had been some of the best times of her life. She didn’t know why the bright, pulsing orb had shown her those memories, but she was grateful. It felt almost like she’d been blocking off a part of herself all these years, and she didn’t know why or what it meant. Had her life just gotten too busy? Had she filled the corners of her consciousness with things she’d found more pressing? While she was thinking, she’d taken two more steps toward the orb, and she could feel the potential building like it was going to pulse again, and something made her quickly step forward and put her hand into the basketball-sized orb of radiant light.

White light filled Bronwyn’s vision, and she lost sense of her body. She was floating in space filled with warmth and potential, and she had the impression that she wasn’t alone. She didn’t know who was with her or what, but she felt as though she was under intense scrutiny. She could see nothing, or she could see everything; it was impossible to tell. She tried to imagine a way to define her surroundings, and the only thing she could come up with was that she was inside, no, not inside; she was part of the potential of Summer with a capital S. While Bronwyn struggled to perceive what was happening to her properly, a dry, deep voice rolled over her consciousness, “Ahh, has another Child of Summer come to drink from the well?”

“I’m trying…” She didn’t even know what to say she was doing. She tried again, “I want to be an agent of the Summer Queen.”

“So you need a taste of Summer to carry with you, no?”

“Yes.” Bronwyn thought it seemed right. She felt a prickling sensation starting at her Core and rushing through every fiber of her being, and then the voice sounded in her mind again:

“You bear the Queen’s mark, and you bear three blessings of Summer. Your heart seems true, Child of Summer.”

“What do I need to do?”

“Draw from me; pull me into your Core. Forsake what you’ve gathered thus far.” Draw from it? Did it mean she should cultivate the Energy here? Bronwyn couldn’t feel her body, let alone sit down with her legs crossed, so she turned her attention inward, looked at her Core, and began the cultivation drill that the System taught her when she’d earned her Amber Core so many days ago. “No, Child, not like that. Forget that petty knowledge. Reach out, feel the heat around you, embrace the summer Energy and pull it within. Let it course through your pathways and enrich you. Brace yourself, Child.” Bronwyn imagined herself breathing deeply, though her lungs were not something she could feel right now. Then, she stopped thinking about the cultivation drill the System had taught her, and she concentrated on the warmth around her.

The Energy around here was thick, and when she stopped trying to see it and just felt it, she knew it was surrounding her, pulsing against her like waves lapping at a rowboat. She concentrated on that feeling, the tingle of the Energy against her being, and she willed it to come inside; she pulled it toward her Core. As soon as the first tendrils started to flow into her pathways, she became far more viscerally aware of the Summer Energy, and she pulled it through her pathways toward her Core. It flowed thickly at first, like water pushing up a sand-clogged channel, but, just as water would as it soaked through the sand, the Energy started to flow more quickly, and soon it was surging through her pathways into her Core. At first, it was pleasantly warm and invigorating, but as the trickle grew to a torrent and then a tsunami of Energy, her pathways burned, and the Core at the center of her being flared with brilliant yellow-white light, pulsing and spinning rapidly.

Bronwyn did as the voice had instructed and braced herself. She wasn’t going to back down now, so she just held on and let the Energy wash through and into her. In her mind, she screamed like someone who was riding a rocket out of the atmosphere for the first time. Just as she was beginning to wonder if she could take anymore, her Core pulsed heavily, and the earth-attuned Energy she’d held and gathered for so long surged out. It ripped through her pathways, scouring them clean, and burst out of her to be burned up and absorbed by the Summer Energy surrounding her.

Bronwyn looked at her Core, and where it had shone with a steady amber glow before, it now flared like a hot yellow sun. She followed her pathways with her mind and saw that the nodes that she’d had in her hands were gone, replaced by delicate, multi-layered pathways. “You’ve done well, Summer Child. Your heart is a good match for us. I hope you’ll visit again with tales of what you’ve done for our cause.”

“Thank you,” Bronwyn said, or imagined saying, and then the white light filling her vision faded, and she was standing outside the cave, where the storm had been. The skies had cleared, and the fresh scent that always followed a summer storm hung in the air. Bronwyn took one step, and then suddenly, her vision filled with System notifications:

***Notice! Your Amber Class Core has been exchanged/upgraded to a Summer Class Core.***

***Notice! Your earth affinity has been lost!***

***Notice! You’ve gained an affinity for solar Energy.***

***Notice! You no longer meet the prerequisites for your skill: Fetters of Stone - Basic. You’ve lost this skill.***

***Notice! You no longer meet the prerequisites for your skill: Stone Fists - Basic. You’ve lost this skill.***

***Notice! You no longer meet the prerequisites for your skill: Stone Warding - improved. You’ve lost this skill.***

***Notice! You no longer meet the prerequisites for your Class: Stone Pugilist. You’ve lost this class.***

***Calculating***

***Congratulations! You are eligible for a Class Selection. Locate your class options via your status screen.***

“Ahh, fuck!” Bronwyn smacked her hand into her palm. She’d just started to get used to her skillset and had been happy with the way things were progressing. She hoped her new Core would prove to be stronger than the old one, but right now, she was feeling cheated. She called up her status sheet, and the first thing she noticed, other than her missing class and the new description of her Core, was that her new Core was rank three, whereas her old one had been two. Her solar affinity was a full point higher than her earth affinity had been, also. “At least that’s something,” she muttered and tapped the button for class selection. The list was much shorter than when she’d been level ten:

***Class selection option 1: Solar Monk - Advanced. Your affinity to the sun’s heat and vibrance allows you to shape Energy into martial weapons and boons. Class attributes: Agility, Vitality, Intelligence, Will.***

***Class selection option 2: Solar Mage - Advanced. You shape solar Energy into devastating attacks and use your will to bend it to great utility. Class attributes: Intelligence, Will, and Vitality.***

***Warning! Not a System-curated Class***Class selection option 3: Summer Banneret - Epic. Wield the might of Summer to spread its influence in hostile lands. Class attributes: Unbound.***

When she read the third option, Bronwyn’s lips spread into a wide, toothy grin. It was almost like the System was panicking with that warning. She wanted to select it right away, but just as she was steeling her nerves for the fallout, a shimmering, orange-yellow rip in reality appeared next to her, and she could see the Queen’s throne room almost like she were looking through a window. “Time for me to come back, hmm?” She figured it was for the best—it would be good to confirm with the Queen that option three was the way to go. Feeling rather triumphant, Bronwyn stepped through the portal, her mind full of questions and her heart full of heat.