They progressed quickly after the initial proof of concept had been tested. Grandma further refined the zipline setup, adding an axel that attached to the rope harness to reduce friction as the grooved wheel rolled along the zipline, and other small improvements. Their speed was limited by the amount of vines they could gather. They had to rely on the miasma creatures to help collect the materials, then wait for Tanner to braid and weave the strands together. Finally, Grandma infused it with what iron she could pull from the surrounding mountains, strengthening the rope.

The miasma creatures had a lot of fun flitting about, free from the confines of their usual bodies. They made the most of it, soaring through the sky, hassling the assorted birds that lived among the cliffs and in the valleys. Grandma couldn’t figure out how the birds stayed alive, since there was barely any food and water to be had. No wonder she had been attacked while crossing the canyon. Were they just subsisting purely on mana here? There certainly was enough of it.

Even the soldiers only ate and drank out of habit. With the mana circulation technique that they had learned, none of them needed to actually eat or drink to sustain themselves; all they had to do was pull sufficient mana into their bodies to use as fuel. Of course, this was not sustainable long term, nor with extreme physical exertion, and definitely not outside of the mana rich dungeons. But in the meantime, it was fast and efficient.

They finally arrived at what the miasma beasts and Mina all agreed was the final peak, the nearest to the core of the dungeon. Whether it led to another layer or held the miasma at the center of the dungeon, they couldn’t tell. Grandma led the way, working grooved handholds into the stone even though her gecko appendages needed no such assistance, and climbed until they could peer over the edge of a tall ridge of rock.

On the other side, the land dipped in a bowl, and inside the bowl was the thickest, densest miasma they had encountered so far. One after another, the team peered over the lip of rock, staring at the roiling gray cloud below them.

“That’s not a cloud, is it,” Donovan said flatly.

“On the bright side,” Mina whispered, “We don’t have to climb anymore.” She started to duck back down, but the miasma suddenly moved, shooting a tendril of mist straight through Mina’s skull.

[Mina!] Grandma screamed in horror, before more tendrils shot out, impaling every person present. Belatedly, Grandma noticed that she also had a tendril through the head of the golem, but since that wasn’t where her brain was – indeed, since she had no such organ at all – it had not affected her. Grandma abandoned her golem and slid back to Mina through their shared link, panic and fury clawing at her thoughts, but although Mina’s body was frozen in place, her thoughts seemed positively gleeful. [What the heck?] Grandma looked around in confusion.

[Oh! Hello there,] a strange voice said. [You must be the oddity.]

[And who might you be?] Grandma shot back, fear sharpening her tone.

[I am Gray,] the voice said. [You’re the first people to visit me in a very, very long time.]

[Grandma! Gray is the miasma creature. It was telling me about its home!]

[Yes, I gathered. Why did you stab us in the head?] Grandma was still worked up from the sudden distress of it. How strange it was that she felt as if she were pumped full of adrenaline, seeing as how she had no body, no brain, and no adrenal glands.

[I do apologize for any distress. It is how I connect and communicate with others.] Gray’s voice sounded cool and smooth, like a stone worn by wind and water.

[Are the others all right?] Mina asked, worried.

[They are unharmed.]

[And our other miasma friends?] Grandma pressed.

[I am chatting with them. They are very young, compared to me.] Did Gray sound smug at that? Were miasmas capable of smugness? Perhaps if they were very old, they might learn such a thing.

[You can talk to multiple people at once?] Grandma didn’t want to be impressed, but there was no helping it. [That’s handy.]

[Alas, hands are one thing I lack.] Gray’s voice brimmed with humor. Did miasmas learn jokes too as they aged?

[Ahem. Well. We’re here because monsters from your home have been running – er, flying – amok outside and killing people and animals.] Grandma wondered how their conversation had gotten to where it had, and tried to wrestle it back into something resembling productivity.

[Ah, yes, I had sensed that the mana here was overflowing. I hadn’t realized that my residents had gone out.]

[Your… residents?] Mina asked, confusion fizzling across her mind.

[You keep giant shrikes as your pets?] Grandma couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

[Oh, no, not pets. I merely take care of them here, give them mana to feed on. They’ve grown much larger over the generations!] Gray sounded proud of its shrikes.

[They’re killing a lot out there. Can you, I don’t know, call them back?] Mina asked, brows furrowed in concern.

[I could, but they would only fly away again if I leave the dungeon open. I need something else to do with the mana.]

[Can’t you keep expanding the dungeon? I mean, it’s already pretty large, but presumably it could be bigger?] Grandma tried.

[There is a limit to how large a space I can create. Over the years, I’ve grown stronger, and expanded my realm, but any larger than this and it will be difficult to manage.] Gray sounded regretful.

[Our miasmas from other dungeons have been eating the mana from other dungeons. Maybe we could siphon off some of your excess mana?] Mina offered.

[That sounds painful,] Gray replied, dubious.

[I mean, some of the other miasmas died after being eaten, so I would assume that yes, it was painful.] Grandma thought. [What if you used the mana to do more things?] She sent impressions of the effects that she, Mina, and Tanner had created with magic; throwing balls of water, heating and cooling the air, creating light, moving the earth, and other things they had done. [If you convert the mana into some kind of physical effect, wouldn’t it consume the mana here?]

[What a fascinating theory. Let’s test it.]

[First let everyone else go please,] Grandma said firmly.

[Ah, yes, of course. They do not know what I need in any case.]

Grandma felt Gray slide into her mind, distinct from its connection with Mina, so she slowly migrated back to the golem. Presumably the others would rouse from their frozen torpor and do… something. It would be nice if they set up camp here for a while. Grandma had the sneaking suspicion that this chat would take some time.

Gray and Grandma talked for an interminable amount of time, impossible to tell in the unchanging interior of the dungeon, with its flat gray light, its windless peaks, its still, changeless clouds draped about the mountains like scarves, and its dry, lifeless valleys.

Mina roused with a start, her hands flying to her head to check for injuries. There were none. She breathed a sigh of relief before checking on the others. Tanner was rousing as well, groaning and clutching his own head. The others roused slower, with Donovan the last to wake up from his torpor.

“Let’s set up camp,” she whispered to Tanner. “I’ll catch you up on what’s happening with Grandma.”

The two worked in silence to pull up slabs of stone to shelter them. They surrounded Grandma’s golem in an extra layer of rock so that it would not be disturbed, leaving a doorway through which they could peek to check on her.

The soldiers knew things were happening when a breeze stirred their hair and tugged at their clothes. The clouds, below them, whipped to soft peaks, then collapsed again. They darkened in color, and then distantly the team could hear the hiss of rain. In the sky above them, the sourceless light coalesced into a single brilliant point, a miniature sun made of pure magic. It gave off no heat that they could discern, radiance without fire, and as time passed, it drifted slowly across the dome overhead, describing a leisurely arc.

Several artificial days passed, with more and more intense weather effects. Tanner and Mina reinforced the stone shelter they had pulled from the mountain, keeping everyone safe and waiting for Grandma to finish her discussion with Gray. 

Finally, on the fifth “day”, Grandma sat up and said, “Done.”

Gray had been able to create raw matter from pure mana, a feat that took an absolutely disgusting amount of power, but which it had an overabundance of. So it had created water from sheer magic, and Grandma’s head still hurt at the implications. Was mana some form of energy? Was there some kind of E = mc2 thing happening here? What was the conversion formula anyway?

Disgusted, Grandma set the questions aside and did not ponder them further. Suffice it to say that Gray had picked Grandma’s brain about the entire breadth of her knowledge, from rudimentary quantum physics to permaculture, anything and everything that Grandma could tell it. Then it had cherry picked the things it wanted to try doing in its home, starting with simple air movement, then moving on to creating water from pure power and imagination, a fake sun, and other “natural” phenomena. The least egregious thing it had done was to carve switchbacks into its mountains and build bridges over its valleys. That had merely been moving existing matter.

“Let’s go home,” Grandma growled. Even though she didn’t really have a head, she felt as though she should have a headache. “I’m tired.”

The journey home was much easier. They alternated between jogging and walking, striking a swift pace along the fresh, smooth trails, eating and resting as the “sun” rose and fell. The miasma creatures flitted around them, quiet and thoughtful for once. Pluot occasionally settled around Grandma’s shoulders like a shawl, sprawling out until its misty form nearly dragged on the ground.

[What’s wrong?] she asked after a day, concerned.

[If I grow older and stronger, will I be clever like Gray?] Pluot asked.

[Do you want to be?] Grandma asked back.

[Yes! Gray is amazing!]

Grandma could distantly feel Fiddler’s grudging attention, and even more faintly, its agreement. [Well, perhaps if you study hard,] she said, noting the absurdity of using a line like this on a magical creature with no real physical body to call its own.

The team reached the dungeon exit, and the miasma creatures reclaimed their bodies. There was a bit of a squabble as some of Tanner’s miasmas tried to steal each other’s physical forms, but Tanner, with a sigh of long suffering, set them straight with strategically placed threats and  the occasional tongues of fire. The bodies that had been left behind had fared surprisingly well, given how long they had been left unconscious and unattended. Grandma suspected that Gray had had something to do with it, but didn’t think it important enough to point out.

On the other side of the exit, back in their low mana world, Grandma felt an odd tug. It was as if something was whispering in the back of her mind, [Come. Come. Come here. Come home.]

“Take cover!” Mina suddenly screamed.

The sky darkened abruptly with a cloud of shrikes and other birds. They flew in eerie silence, as if marching in lockstep, heading relentlessly towards the dungeon entrance. It reminded Grandma of a murmuration of starlings, only instead of organically shifting shapes in the sky, the birds swarmed and dove into a single point.

“Well,” Tanner huffed after the storm of feathers subsided. “That’s one way of dealing with the problem.”

Behind them, the dungeon entrance closed on its own with a soft slurping sound.