“I don’t know what to tell you, other than that she stayed. We were trying to better understand just what my mother had done there, trying to come up with what I knew about her, knowing she had…”
Tolan hesitated.
Everything started to fall into place in his mind.
“Oh, no.”
“What is it?” Ferrah asked.
“We need to return to the free elementals.”
21
Thunderclouds darkened the sky and the scent of rain hung in the air, but none of that fully drew Tolan’s attention. He looked around, searching for any of the elementals that had been here, but there was no sign of any of them. All of the free elementals were missing.
“So close, and yet we never looked here,” the Grand Master said.
It was only the three of them: Tolan, Ferrah, and the Grand Master. Coming back here, bringing the Grand Master, the head of the Academy, felt somewhat like a violation. At least it had. Now Tolan had to think they were underprepared.
“What happened?” Ferrah asked.
“They’re all gone,” Tolan said.
“All of them?”
As he probed with spirit, he didn’t detect anything. Not only were the elementals gone, but the people who had filled the city were gone as well.
And it was his fault.
His mother hadn’t found what she wanted. Not until he had come here.
Tolan strode forward, using wind and earth along with fire to propel himself. There was a sense of energy that was here, but it was an unusual sense. Tolan wasn’t able to determine just what it was, only that he could feel it pressing against him.
It wasn’t elemental energy. It wasn’t even the power of the element bonds.
What was it, though?
As he neared the Convergence, he did so with trepidation.
Would his mother have influenced it? That was what she had seemed like she was doing in Par, but perhaps he had been misguided in what he believed her to be doing. Given how confused everything was when it came to her, he could only think he had been mistaken.
They neared the entrance and the Grand Master grabbed his wrist, stopping him.
“Careful,” he said.
“Do you detect anything?” Tolan said.
“This is where you think your mother was posing as your grandmother?”
Tolan nodded. It was the only answer that made sense. He had given thought to it, and worse, he had seen his mother doing something like that before. When she had been captive, she had changed her appearance, demonstrating what she was capable of doing, using the subtlest of shapings. That had been so quick, so minor at the time, something that had seemed like she was trying to torment him, but it had to have had a different meaning.
She wouldn’t have expected him to have detected her.
And he hadn’t.
That was the worst part of it. With everything she had done, she had hidden in plain sight all along. More than that, she had used him.
“If this was where she was going, she might’ve laid some sort of trap to capture you when you come in here. We should trigger anything before you go in.”
“I’m not sure I’ll be able to do that,” Tolan said.
“Then let me.”
The Grand Master closed his eyes, and there came a powerful surge of energy from him, a shaping that was potent. Tolan realized he was drawing from the runes and wondered at first how he would have known about them before remembering he had shared with the Grand Master about the runes on their journey here. He used that power, and the stone around the entirety of the Convergence separated, peeling away. It opened like a shell, and he pulled it up, opening it, and then with a burst of energy, he sent those fragments flying outward.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Tolan said.
“It was the only way. There was a barrier present around it. A shame,” he whispered. “I can only imagine Asmane would have enjoyed exploring the structure.”
“Why would Master Minden want to see that?” Ferrah asked.
“She has a connection to some of these older buildings. Consider her something of an archaeologist.”
The Grand Master strode forward, though he had a powerful shaping wrapped around him as he did, drawing on energy with each step, holding it wrapped around him.
Something crackled in the air, but when it hit the shaping the Grand Master held onto, it bounced off.
It was a trap.
His mother had set something for him. Or if not for him, then for whoever would come here.
Had the Grand Master not come with him, Tolan would’ve gone inside, and he would’ve sprung the trap on himself.
She would’ve expected that.
Would she have expected the Grand Master to have come?
Possibly.
She knew about the Circle. She knew who was there. She had even come to the Circle meeting.
“I can feel the trap,” the Grand Master said.
“Not far from here,” Tolan said, pointing.
It was his turn to draw upon the elements and the element bonds, along with the runes. He didn’t have the power of the elementals as he had before, but for what he needed, he didn’t need them. He used that connection, lifting the stones, freeing the covering that obscured the Convergence.
When he did, the cavern opened below them.
The Grand Master watched him, a hint of a smile on his face. “You are a quick study, Master Ethar. There aren’t many shapers who would be able to replicate that shaping quite as quickly, and fewer still who would be able to do what you just did.”
Tolan just nodded. He didn’t have the heart to tell the Grand Master he hadn’t replicated anything. He had simply done what he felt. Lately, that had been his approach. It was different than what he had done when he was training within the Academy. Learning shapings from his instructors had been a matter of memorization and repetition, but none of that really mattered when he had an ability to connect to the elements, the elementals, and the element bonds. He was able to do anything that he imagined, if only he had the right connection.
With a shaping of wind and earth, they dropped down near the Convergence.
Tolan hesitated as he did, approaching it with trepidation. He pushed out with spirit, probing, worried that there would be some sort of influence here, the way that he had felt his mother had intended to influence the Convergence within Par, but as he pushed out with spirit along with the other elements, he didn’t have that sensation.
Whatever she had done was not an influence here.
What was it, then?
“The Convergence isn’t tainted,” he said.
“Are you sure?” Ferrah asked.
“It’s not. I can feel the sense of it, and I can feel what she was doing here, but…” As he said it, he realized that it was true. He could feel what she was trying to do, even if he didn’t know entirely what that was. There was a touch here, an influence, something that she was trying to accomplish, though as he probed at it, he wasn’t able to come up with answers as to what it was. “She wanted to use it.”
He could feel the residual energy of the shaping that she had held. It was a bondar, and that was the key. His father had been here, and his knowledge of the bondars would have been crucial for it.
He had left her with everything she had needed in order to be able to reach and access that power here. It was his fault, but at the same time, he knew he couldn’t blame himself. She was incredibly gifted, and with her shaping, there was no way to have uncovered what she was doing. There was no way to have known how she was summoning that power. There was no way to have stopped her.
She was after the elementals. She was after the people. But why?
She had been here before. When she had come before, she hadn’t found what she wanted. She would’ve gone away, searching. That would’ve been her reason for disappearing. What had she gone after?
Knowledge and understanding.
When she had been h
ere the first time, she hadn’t been quite as twisted. She had been powerful, and she had wanted more power, but at the time, she had not yet become the person she now was.
It wasn’t until after she had left here that she had changed. Which meant that whatever she had uncovered here had led her somewhere else.
It was the time following her first departure that he needed to better understand. If he could know what she had been doing in that time, what had prompted her to go after the other places of Convergence, then perhaps he might be able to know just what she was after.
Perhaps she hadn’t known there was a Convergence here. Or she might have known there was one, but reaching it was a different matter.
Could that be why she had wanted him?
That didn’t seem quite right.
He had to find a way to understand just what she had done.
Before the attack on this place, he would’ve gone to the elementals. He would have seen if there was anything that he might be able to determine from them, but the elementals were gone.
It was like Terndahl.
Tolan turned to Ferrah. She looked at everything with an appraising eye, but she said nothing. What was there for her to say? With what had happened here, the change that he saw, that he could feel, he didn’t know if there was anything Ferrah could even say.
The Grand Master continued to stride around the circle, looking at everything.
Tolan closed his eyes.
When he did, he focused on the sense of hyza. The elemental was there. The sense of him was there. It was distant and faded, but when closing his eyes—especially when closing his eyes—he could feel the connection between them.
Are you there?
Tolan hadn’t known whether or not hyza would be present. Perhaps hyza would have been chased off by whatever had happened here. It was possible hyza had been caught up in whatever had taken place, but Tolan didn’t think the hyza he had connected to was actually here. Somewhere else, though Tolan didn’t know where. Hyza existed mostly within his vision, mostly within his mind, and the connection, though real, was also mostly there.
I remain.
What happened here?
She has used the Convergence.
Something about the way hyza said it suggested to Tolan that it was more than her using the Convergence. Something about it suggested hyza had a different name for the Convergence.
If only he were able to better connect to the elemental, he might be able to know what it was, but perhaps it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that his mother had come and had used the Convergence.
I didn’t know it was her. She used some shaping that had masked her presence. I—
The elementals weren’t aware of her until the bond was broken.
Bond?
For a moment, there was an image, but it was not so much the image that mattered as the feeling. It was a feeling Tolan recognized. That of power. That of a Convergence.
Had his mother brought the elementals here to a different place of Convergence?
There was an emptiness within that feeling, and he recognized which Convergence the elemental intended for him to see—the Convergence within the waste. It was one Tolan had felt but not seen, one surrounded by… the Guardians.
Tolan thought about what he knew about his mother. He thought about what she had done in the time since leaving here.
What was indisputable was that she had ventured across the waste. Irina had known that his mother had gone looking for something. She had found power, and Tolan had come to believe that she had found power within one of the Convergences, but perhaps that wasn’t at all what she had done. Perhaps she had been looking for the Convergence in the waste.
Is this about the Guardians?
They are among the oldest.
They never entered the bond, Tolan said across the connection with hyza.
They were the Guardians.
The Guardians. They had served as something of a protector. They were powerful. Ancient. Elementals of considerable energy and strength. The Draasin Lord might be tired, and when Tolan had visited with him, he had seemed as if he had wanted nothing more than to rest, but what would happen if someone like his mother—or whoever it was she now served—gained control over them?
Tolan had seen her capability. With what she was able to do, he had little doubt there was someone equally capable, someone who would be able to do much like his mother, someone who would try and attempt to control the elementals. With someone like that, he had to believe they would use their power and torment those elementals.
Perhaps it was more than tormenting them.
Tolan had believed she wanted control over the Convergence but had that been the case, she had that here. This Convergence was now open to her.
What can she do with the Guardians?
That was what he suspected this was about. Could she want to control the Draasin Lord? That would make sense, given what he knew of his mother. There were other Guardians there, so would that even be possible?
Hyza didn’t answer for a moment, and Tolan wasn’t sure if it was because hyza didn’t know the answer or if it was because hyza was troubled by the answer. When it came, the elemental’s voice, that connection that came across the distance, was faint and muted. Troubled.
They are connected to the source of great power.
The Convergence.
Yes.
Was that the key?
It was all about the elementals. It was all about control. And it was all about the element bonds.
His mother had wanted his father for a reason.
It was more than just about Tolan. It was his understanding of bondars.
He looked down at the Convergence, the bondars that were there. That was a level of control as well. The elementals that were here, that were free…
Were they ever free?
They existed out in the open, and he had believed that his mother had failed in this land, but perhaps that wasn’t it. Perhaps this was a test.
If that were the case, what had changed?
His father had claimed the bondar was one of the most intricate he had ever seen.
Tolan had seen his father’s carving. He had seen him working. He had those visions, and it was those visions which had helped him find an understanding of who his father was and the nature of the work his father had done. As Tolan shifted his focus, thinking back to those visions and what it had been like when his father had worked within the shop at their home in Ephra, he saw detail.
This wasn’t beyond his father. Had he known Irina wasn’t Irina? Could he have known his mother was here?
If so, what was he hoping to accomplish by not alerting Tolan to that truth?
Tolan thought of his ring for spirit. The level of detail on it was incredible. His father had made that.
Crouching over the space around the Convergence, Tolan trailed his hand around it.
It was the only one that had been like this.
Did my father make this?
Not him, but he understands the connection to the bond.
He can’t shape.
One does not need to shape to understand the bond. Certainly, you recognize that, Tolan Ethar.
And he did.
He had to try to connect to this bondar.
He didn’t necessarily want to, and there was a part of him that hesitated at the idea of trying to push power out through it, not knowing what it might do, but the bondar was the key. It surrounded this place of Convergence.
Whoever had made it had done it as a way to protect the elementals.
Why wouldn’t his father have revealed that to his mother, though?
Even though his father had been influenced by his mother, part of him had always remained free. That was something else that Tolan knew. He had made the spirit ring, not for his mother, but for Tolan. Despite her best effort at controlling his father, she had failed. She hadn’t been able to control him the way that she had wanted to.
<
br /> A shaping began to build within him. He mixed each of the elements, reaching through the element bonds before hesitating.
That wasn’t the kind of shaping that would be particular to him.
Others could shape through the element bonds. Not many could shape the way that he could.
He connected to the elements themselves.
“What are you doing?” Ferrah asked.
“There’s a message here.”
“A message?”
He looked over. “When we were here before, we saw this bondar and we questioned why it was so different than any others. I think that my father is responsible for creating the bondar.”
“Your father said that he wasn’t.”
“My father said that he wasn’t, but I wonder if a part of him was aware that Irina wasn’t who she appeared to be.” His mind was a jumble. Wasn’t that what Irina—his mother—had kept saying?
Tolan had to believe that jumble would make it difficult for his father to be able to do anything. And it was possible his mother was continuing to shape him, making it so that he would ignore the strangeness within her. It was possible his mother had been making his mind even more jumbled.
Much like he had when Tolan had been younger, some deep part of him had rebelled.
That was what he had to better understand.
It was why she had wanted to stay behind.
His mother had known that his father had done something. Rather than revealing herself before she was ready, she took the opportunity to do it alone.
He pushed those elements into the bondar.
They began to glow. Everything about them surged with a certain sort of energy, washing toward him, but only briefly. For a moment, it hovered, hanging there, but then that sense of energy shifted, rolling inward and toward the Convergence.
The sense of the Convergence was there.
As he focused on it, something about the bondar troubled him. He wasn’t entirely sure what it was, only that something seemed off.
The bondar was damaged.
When he had been here before, he hadn’t probed it, but Tolan had enough experience with bondars to recognize when something was amiss. In this case, he couldn’t help but feel how it had changed.
The Chaos Rises (Elemental Academy Book 6) Page 22