The Elements Bond (Elemental Academy Book 7)

by D. K. Holmberg

  There was a surge of energy and explosion of light, and then it faded.

  It washed outward and the power holding him failed.

  Tolan struggled against it, straining to get free, and he found he could move a little bit. Not much, but enough he was able to scramble free of where he was.

  He looked all around. There was no other movement.

  A figure came toward him.

  He didn’t hear Rory screaming, but he didn’t feel him, either. Could it be Rory?

  The figure was large, much larger than Rory.

  What about any of the other elementals?

  He thought he’d freed them by breaking through the bondars and thought that shaping had been enough to rescue him, but it was possible it hadn’t been enough.

  He tried to probe outward, but the effort of using spirit had taken considerable power. He didn’t have access to the fire and earth bondars anymore; they had been damaged in the attack. All he had was his own shaping, and with as much energy as he had used, his own shaping was weakened.

  He was weakened.

  Tolan stared at the figure coming toward him.

  Was it earth?

  He took a step back, trying to get away from this shaper.

  He stumbled, falling.

  The figure loomed over him.

  There was energy coming from it. Power. Earth power.

  Tolan braced for the attack.

  Wind suddenly rustled toward him, whipping around, and Rory shimmered into view. He stopped in front of the earth shaper, blocking him.

  “No!” Rory said.

  The earth shaper looked up, and Tolan was prepared for him to pull a bondar out, to use it upon Rory, but instead there came a shimmering.

  When there was, Tolan breathed out.

  An earth elemental.

  If that were the case, it meant the others would be freed as well.

  Where were they?

  That was what he needed to know, and he scanned the horizon but didn’t see any sign of anyone else. Only Rory and this earth elemental. Rory stayed in front of him, blocking the earth elemental from getting to him.

  “No,” Rory said again.

  There came a hint of spirit.

  Tolan detected it as a subtle touch, nothing more than that, but it came from Rory, heading toward the earth elemental.

  Did Rory even know what he was doing?

  The touch of spirit was soft enough that it was possible that Rory didn’t know.

  He waited, knowing that if the earth elemental were to attack him, there might not be anything that Tolan would be able to do.

  He was tired, and with each passing moment, he did feel strength returning to him, but it wasn’t fast enough. He was still going to need more time. He was going to need more energy.

  The shapers who had attacked were gone.

  If they had returned to the others, then they might not have much time. They might get help, and when they brought help, there wouldn’t be anything that Tolan would be able to do.

  He looked up at Rory, but the elemental was looking away from him. The sense of spirit remained within him, powerful as he pressed it toward the earth elemental.

  This time, Tolan suspected it was intentional. There had to be something Tolan could do, but he didn’t want to try to counter anything that Rory did.

  Getting to his feet, he looked around.

  As he did, he realized it wasn’t just the earth elemental Rory was pushing out to. It wasn’t just the earth elemental that Rory was even talking to.

  There were other elementals around him. Five, not counting Rory. All of them were surging toward Tolan, all of them pressing power toward him.

  The sense of spirit radiated away from Rory, pulsing out in a circle. Something about that sense of spirit was off, but it seemed to work. For now.

  Had Rory not been here, the elementals would have targeted him. They would have attacked. Tolan could use a warrior shaping if it came down to it and let it carry him away, but…

  That was the key.

  Rory was struggling, trying to deflect the attack. When Tolan had first encountered Rory and the other two elementals, there had been a sense of hesitation when Tolan had pulled upon the warrior shaping.

  If he used it now, even if he didn’t go anywhere, maybe…

  Tolan strained, reaching for each of the elements.

  He wrapped them together. It wasn’t going to be a strong warrior shaping, but as he pulled on the elements, adding spirit to them, lightning crackled in the sky overhead. The distant sound of thunder rumbled, though it was faint.

  The pressure upon him began to ease.

  Slowly, softly, there came a strange sort of murmuring all around him. Tolan was aware of it in a way that fully made sense. It didn’t come out loud. It was almost as if it came from somewhere within himself.

  The murmuring said the same thing.

  Warrior.

  18

  Tolan stood apart from the elementals. Rory was speaking to them, wind swirling around him, and there was something quite animated about him as he struggled to try to reach them. Tolan didn’t know if there was anything that the wind elemental would even be able to do to reach them, but perhaps that wouldn’t matter. All that mattered was that they understood that Tolan didn’t want to harm them. He needed them to know he had done all he could to help them.

  Unlike the elementals in Terndahl, elementals he hadn’t been able to save or rescue from the element bond yet, here he was able to do something. Here he was able to use his control over the bondars to help them, to rescue them.

  Hopefully he could continue to do the same.

  He focused on the elementals, trying to listen to them, but there was nothing within their conversations that suggested what they intended. He didn’t even know if they were angry, but he detected an agitation within them, the same agitation that Rory had.

  Tolan would have to do something.

  “I can help,” he said, moving forward.

  “Back,” Rory said.

  Tolan looked at him before turning his attention to the other elementals. “I understand you want me to stay back, and I understand you question whether or not you can even count on someone who can shape.”

  That was what this was about. The elementals didn’t trust him. It was his shaping they trusted, nothing more than that. Surprisingly, it was a shaping they recognized.

  “I’m not like them.”

  “All same,” the earth elemental said. It was a deep rumbling sort of voice, and as it rolled toward Tolan, he braced himself for the energy of it. It was powerful in the way that it slammed out from him.

  The strange way of speaking was the same as it was with Rory.

  Why would that be?

  Could it be the strangeness within spirit he detected?

  It was the only explanation he had.

  Tolan looked around, focusing on the elementals. “That’s your understanding, but I’m not like them.”

  He tried to push out with a sense of spirit, focusing on what he could of it, thinking that would be the easiest way to communicate with the other elementals, but even as he did, it didn’t seem as if there was anything he could send across to them.

  The understanding was there, and he could feel it, but he wasn’t entirely sure how or why he was aware of it.

  “I helped you.”

  The earth elemental turned toward him again. “Trap Wind.”

  There was a gesturing of sorts toward Rory.

  “I did, but I did it because I thought he was in danger.”

  A sense of earth began to build, and Tolan braced himself for the possibility that the earth elemental might attack. No attack came.

  He breathed out. He didn’t want to have to face this elemental, and certainly didn’t want to battle with him.

  “I want to help. I think I know how to help.”

  There was a murmuring, and it came within spirit, but it was so fast that Tolan had a hard time keeping up wi
th it. That murmuring seemed to suggest they didn’t know whether or not they could trust him. Tolan understood they might not be able to, but he tried to offer them something.

  “I can help you know how to keep them from trapping you within the bondars.”

  Rory turned to him, studying him.

  “I know how to break you out of the bondars.”

  He pushed the knowledge through spirit.

  When he did, there was a hint of echoing understanding, something of power, but there was something else as well.

  He let that sense continue to explode, holding onto the awareness of it, trying to fill them with the necessary knowledge they would have to have in order to break through the shaping.

  The bondar wasn’t complicated to break through. It took the right strike of spirit. If they were able to hit it in just the right fashion, they would be able to break through the connection, and in doing so, they could tear through what was done to them.

  Tolan believed they wanted that.

  He could feel that overwhelming desire within them. He could feel how they strained toward that. They longed for it.

  The knowledge poured from him and into the elementals.

  He stepped back.

  Now they had to decide what they wanted.

  If he was successful in what he shared with them, they could use it, and they could rescue others.

  “You don’t have to be captured anymore,” he said.

  The elementals stirred, a great sense of power flowing around them, and Tolan turned away, waiting.

  He focused on spirit, trying to see if there was anything within what they were saying to each other he might be able to understand, but he couldn’t pick up on it. They were speaking through spirit, but his understanding of it was such he couldn’t detect everything in it.

  There was a hint of power to the way they used spirit. Nothing more than that.

  Tolan breathed out, focusing on everything he could. He focused on the energy here, and he focused on the sense all around him.

  Regardless of what they decided, he would still have to do what he could to free the others. If they were captured, that was what he wanted to do. He wanted to free the other elementals.

  He wanted to stop his mother and whoever she served—the one ultimately responsible for this. That thought consumed him. It stayed within him, a desire and a longing to keep her from harming anything else.

  Tolan felt as if he had no choice but to do so.

  He focused on that, thinking about where she was and what she was doing. Something had brought her here.

  That was what he needed to understand.

  He pulled on the power of the environment all around him. Once again, he was aware of the strangeness here. The absence of the element bond. That strangeness struck him, filling him. It was that strangeness he thought he needed to better understand, and that strangeness that consumed him, trying to tell him that there was something else here too.

  In the distance, power exploded every so often.

  It was far from where they were, and he was aware that the movement continued. That movement was what he needed to find.

  It was where he would find his mother.

  He used a shaping of wind, adding a little bit of fire, and he took to the air. He drifted beyond the elementals. He ignored the sense of spirit, the awareness they had he was leaving them, and he ignored everything else about them. Through it all, he focused only on the sense of what he detected in front of him.

  He wanted to be done with this. He wanted to be done with his mother. When he was, then he could return to the Academy. He could return to Terndahl. He could return to Ferrah.

  What he wouldn’t give for her to have been with him.

  He didn’t like being separated from her.

  She helped him, and though she didn’t have a connection to spirit, and though she didn’t have the same connection to the elementals, she had still helped. She might not understand what he was doing, but that was because she hadn’t been able to reach the elementals the same way he had.

  The elementals within Terndahl were nothing like these elementals.

  Those elementals wanted to help. They wanted to work with the shapers. They wanted to find a way to have a sense of peace. The elementals here had an edge to them. He could detect it through spirit, and he detected it through the nature of how they communicated. It had to be from what they had experienced throughout their lives, as long as those lives were, but even with that, there was something else about them that troubled Tolan.

  He let himself be carried, heading along the ground.

  It troubled him that his mother would be out here, attacking elementals. What purpose would she have in coming here? It didn’t make sense she would choose this location. Why out here?

  The only thing he could think of was that she had uncovered something.

  She was after power. That much he knew, but what else was she after?

  The bondars. She had used his father; she had used everyone within the village, and she had discovered the key to the bondars and how to trap the elementals. If that were the key, then he recognized the nature of that, he recognized what they were doing and the power out there.

  He believed his mother had chosen a dangerous path, and he believed she’d done so because she chased power, but in this land, he didn’t have any understanding of what else she was chasing, or why she was so busy chasing it.

  There was power here. It was different. It was less than it could be. He felt that difference, and he felt the shifting energy here. He focused on it, struggling with the nature of that power, and he struggled with whether there was anything he might be able to understand within it.

  Understanding was the key.

  Tolan had to find that understanding.

  He held onto the sense around him.

  The longer he spent here, the more he was able to recover. He could feel his strength gradually returning. He still wasn’t going to be strong enough to fight if it came down to it, but he could feel the energy here.

  Tolan focused on that sense, focusing on the power here, and he wondered if there might be something he could do with it.

  In the distance, power bloomed again. It came over and over, a cacophony of energy that continued to thunder all around him. Each blast struck, leaving him shaking.

  They were heading toward something.

  He traveled through much of the night, holding onto his shaping, not using anything with much energy. He was able to maintain the shaping far longer than he had thought he would have been able to. Traveling in this way sapped his strength, but he was moving slowly enough that it didn’t sap him entirely.

  He looked around as he traveled, thinking he had to find some answer, but as daylight began to break, he still didn’t have one. The mountains loomed in front of him. He hadn’t even in the darkness of the night. Tolan had been so focused on the shaping, traveling as he had, he hadn’t paid any attention to the shifting nature of the landscape. Now he was here, now he saw the mountains, he could feel something from them.

  Power and energy.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, hovering in place, thinking about what Rory had shown him. There were other cities throughout this land, but in none of those snippets of images had he seen this place.

  Why would they be coming here?

  Tolan probed outward, using a hint of each of the elements.

  When he did, he realized this was still abutting the edge of the waste. It wasn’t all that far from here.

  Strange.

  His mother had chosen this place intentionally, but why? What was it about this place that had driven her to come here?

  He focused on the sense of power he could detect. There was energy here. It had shifted in the night, a change to a sense of energy he hadn’t even been aware of. In that shifting, Tolan recognized that there was a different sense of power flooding outward, all around him. He held onto that sense, straining for understanding.
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br />   He slowed.

  In the distance, the pressure around him continued to build.

  Sunlight reflected off a dark structure, a building near the boundary of the mountains. Power bloomed around it.

  That was where they were heading.

  Slowly, carefully, before lowering himself to the ground, Tolan wrapped himself in a shaping of earth to conceal himself. He didn’t want anything to recognize he was there quite yet.

  While there, he waited.

  Power exploded again.

  It was strange what he was able to detect, the nature of the power out there almost familiar to him. As he focused on it, he realized why that should be.

  Elemental power.

  Why would there be elemental power out here?

  It was a different kind of elemental power than he’d detected before. He could feel the nature of it, and he could feel the energy of it as it continued to expand outward, filling him with understanding and energy.

  Tolan reached for it, struggling to see if there was anything within that power he might be able to grasp, but he couldn’t master it. He stayed in the shadows, staying masked, and approached the building carefully.

  As he approached, he realized the source of the elemental power he detected.

  It was an attack.

  From where he stood, he could see the nature of it. He could see the energy lashing out, the way that power exploded as it struck, targeting the structure. He could feel elemental energy being expended in either direction, power battering against power.

  Some of it had to be from shapers holding onto the bondars, but some of it had to be from elementals.

  Why would they be battling here?

  Tolan glanced behind him, back in the direction he had come from. If only he had taken the time to try to better understand Rory, he might know what this was.

  He could feel the energy blasts.

  Rory had made it sound like they been fighting for a long time, and he had said that Tolan’s mother had shifted things, but how?

  The bondars.

  The elementals wouldn’t have been able to be attacked, not easily. Why would he have thought they could? In this land, the elementals would have been powerful. They would have been able to hold onto that energy.

  Without having the bondars, he had a hard time thinking that anyone would have been able to do anything.