The images came faster and faster. Within those images, he saw the elementals freed, but briefly. Then he saw them changed, twisted in some way, though not in the dangerous way he saw from the Guardian. Finally, there was something else, the bonding of the elementals. That was how the Draasin Lord viewed it, and it was almost as if the elementals were sweeping down into the element bond, but for what purpose?
As Tolan looked around, he confirmed that the waste was a separation. His people had never been beyond it. Whatever the Draasin Lord feared was on the other side of the waste.
“That’s what it is, isn’t it?” He thought about what hyza had told him, the way that there was something beyond. Whatever was beyond was what hyza feared. It was what the Draasin Lord feared. “Why can’t you tell me?”
“Because the memory has been lost.”
“How?”
“The Great Mother has taken the pain from us.”
Spirit shaped.
There was something beyond, that much Tolan at least knew. And his mother had discovered what it was. By freeing the Guardians, the separation that the waste formed, the division that existed, would be gone. The power of the Convergence would be released.
That was what the elementals feared.
That was the purpose of the Guardians.
That was what his mother wanted.
Tolan turned to the other Guardians. They were under attack, and somehow, they would have to stop it, but how? He could feel the energy in the air. It was coming from shaped power all around him.
The orbs and the orb shapers were far more numerous than he had realized at first.
“Can you help?” Tolan asked the Draasin Lord. “If we need to stop her, if we want to keep her from releasing this separation between here and what’s beyond, then I’m going to need your help.”
The Draasin Lord roared, and he dove toward Tolan.
It happened so fast that Tolan wasn’t even able to react. Suddenly, Tolan found himself sitting on the Draasin Lord’s back.
There was heat that radiated from him, and through that heat, there was a sense of connection, a bridging from the fire that flowed through the Draasin Lord and into Tolan.
A connection to the bond.
When the Draasin Lord said that he was connected to the element bond, Tolan hadn’t known it would be nearly so powerful and potent. As he felt it, it surged up through him, a source of connection that was far greater than anything that he had been able to tap into on his own, short of standing within the Convergence.
Power flooded him.
The draasin swooped down, streaking toward the earth Guardian. Flames streaked from his mouth, shooting outward. Fire shot across the waste, scorching the already broken land.
Tolan could do nothing more than hold on.
A burst of power streaked toward him.
Tolan twisted and realized that he and the Draasin Lord were under attack.
A dark shape came toward them. It was sweeping at them, surging up from the ground in a serpentine fashion. An image of what Tolan could only think was another draasin, but how was that even possible?
He tapped the Draasin Lord, who roared, twisting, angling backward. When he did, Tolan got a look at the creature.
Power began to flow out of him.
It happened faster than his reaction could keep up with, but there was a familiarity to it.
The creature leapt up toward the Draasin Lord.
The Draasin Lord shot up into the sky, but he wasn’t fast enough. The creature slammed into the bottom of the Draasin Lord, and they twisted, tumbling.
Tolan fell.
It took everything that he could focus on in order to prevent himself from crashing into the ground. Only through his connection to hyza and the joint bond of earth and fire was he able to cushion the blow.
Tolan came to a stop at the edge of the circle that had formed around the Convergence. He looked up. The Draasin Lord battled a dark creature with his mother sitting astride it.
This was the twisted elemental.
This was the fourth Guardian.
When Tolan had first met the Draasin Lord, he had believed he was the most powerful elemental that he had ever experienced. When he had worked with the Keystone, first beginning to gain an understanding of the elementals and how to free them from the element bonds, forming their image in his mind, Tolan had experimented by drawing upon the draasin. When he had done so, he had believed that the draasin was the most powerful of the elementals. Seeing this creature, whatever this snakelike elemental was, left him questioning whether that was accurate or not. The elemental somehow stayed in the air, even though he didn’t have wings. He attacked the Draasin Lord, opening a massive jaw that snapped at the Draasin Lord. He attacked with violence that the Draasin Lord simply didn’t have, mostly, Tolan thought, because he was still weakened from his time serving as the Guardian.
The Draasin Lord needed his help.
Worse, his mother sat atop the other elemental, commanding it.
There was something in her hand.
A bondar.
That was the key.
Tolan raced forward until he found Master Minden and the Grand Master. He pointed, but they were already nodding.
“We need to get the bondar from her, and we need to figure out what it will take to restore that elemental.”
“Restore?” the Grand Master asked.
“That is the fire Guardian. Not the Draasin Lord.”
Master Minden frowned. “I sense a great darkness within that elemental, Tolan. I don’t know if there’s anything we can do to save it.”
That was the same thing that the Draasin Lord had said. Perhaps that was why the Draasin Lord had been so willing to sacrifice himself, to remain within the waste.
There would have to be something. They would have to try.
If his mother was controlling it with the bondar, perhaps a bondar would be the key.
Bondar.
That was it.
Tolan found Ferrah. She had three orbs in her hands, shaping with them as she created a barrier that prevented any of the other attackers from reaching them. Even that wasn’t necessary. If they were able to stop his mother, he suspected that the rest of this attack would end.
“Find my father. Get him to the Convergence where the free elementals were.”
“Why?”
“He needs to restore the bondar that’s there.”
“Tolan?”
“Trust me. I think that’s what we need to do in order to protect the elementals.”
All of that free elemental village had been about protecting elementals. They had been safe there. There might’ve been a hint of the darkness within them, but none of them had been violent or wild. None of them had been twisted. If he could get this elemental to that Convergence, using the bondar there, he had to think that it was possible he could save it.
And if not?
It might already be too late.
“What do you plan to do?”
“First I have to stop my mother, but then I’m going to draw the elemental away and toward it.”
He expected her to argue, but she didn’t. She wrapped her arms around him, hugging him tightly, and then kissed him. With a nod, she took to the air on a shaping and began to search.
Hopefully his father would be able to help. Hopefully Ferrah could free him from the nature of the attack. He tried not to think about what else she would have to do in order to succeed. When he reached Master Minden, she glanced over at him.
“She will need help,” Master Minden said.
“You know what she’s doing?”
“I heard what you said. I think that your father will require a touch of spirit. Unfortunately, Master Changen does not have the connection to spirit yet.” With that, Master Minden disappeared on a burst of lightning.
It left Tolan looking around. The master shapers all around were continuing to battle, and it seemed almost too much for them, but what he needed
was to target his mother. He would have only a limited strength. His mother was connected to something. The bondar was somehow tapping into power beyond what she should be able to reach out here on the waste, and it gave her enough strength to control that other elemental.
Which meant that it was likely a spirit bondar.
Of course, it would be. Knowing his mother, knowing the type of power she had and the kind of power that she wanted, he wasn’t at all surprised that she would use spirit. He wasn’t at all surprised that she would have some way of tapping into that spirit, of using a bondar that would grant her even more strength than what she should have.
Holding onto each of the elements, Tolan shaped. He wrapped that power toward him, pulled on a warrior shaping, and landed atop the Draasin Lord.
The Draasin Lord roared.
“I’m going to go after my mother,” Tolan said. “I need you to keep the elemental busy.”
“I will do what I can.”
“I think there’s a way to help him.”
“There is no way to restore him. We have tried.”
“I haven’t.”
Tolan realized how arrogant that sounded, but the Draasin Lord rumbled his approval.
Turning his attention toward his mother, he focused on the warrior shaping. His strength was getting weaker, and he could feel the way that it was starting to fade. He wouldn’t have much time remaining.
It was going to take a blast.
His mother wasn’t able to shape the same way he could. She’d made clear time and again that she had wanted him because of his different shaping ability.
There had to be some way to use that in order to get to her.
It had to be the warrior shaping.
That was one thing that she wouldn’t be able to do. She could shape spirit, and she could use the bondars, but from what he had seen from his mother, she didn’t have a connection to the warrior shaping.
Tolan focused on the power. He had to shift as much as he could to fire and earth because they were still potent for him, and he worried that if he didn’t latch on with enough strength, he would fail.
Wind and water were growing distant to him. Spirit remained there, a pool of power that filled him.
He would find the strength within himself.
Drawing on the elements, he used a warrior shaping and burst into the air.
It brought him down immediately next to his mother.
The strange elemental writhed beneath him. There was heat and something else—a connection to earth, of all things. His mother turned toward him, and a spirit shaping started toward him, but Tolan reached for her, wrapping his arms around her.
With a burst of power, he carried them up, the warrior shaping lifting them into the air, and then he slammed them back down where he and Ferrah had rested near the fingers of rock on the waste.
It separated him and her from the elementals. It separated them from everyone else. Most of all, it separated her from the strange and twisted elemental.
She took a step back, glaring at him. “Do you think I can’t call to him even here?”
“I’m sure you can.” Tolan focused on trying to protect his mind from a spirit shaping. He used everything that he could in order to do so, but he feared that she was already slipping beneath his protections. She had done it so many times that he no longer trusted himself when it came to what he saw and experienced around her. With her connection and her power, it was likely that she would be able to overwhelm him. He had to act quickly.
Rather than conversing with her, Tolan pushed on earth, wrapping it around her.
She smoothed it back out, stepping forward.
Wind and water had to be preserved, so Tolan focused on fire, adding heat to the earth connection, but as he twisted it around her, she twisted it back.
She was connected to the other elemental.
She smiled at him. “You recognize what has happened.”
“How?”
“There is a way of connecting to elementals. It took me some time to learn to force it. I am impressed that you learned at nearly the same rate as I did.”
“I haven’t forced anything.” His connection to the elementals was by choice, not by force.
“I must thank you for helping me find him. When I freed kaas from the bondar all those years ago, I thought I would be able to connect to him then. Unfortunately, the separation had some detrimental effects. Not only for him, but for me.”
She was stalling, and he could feel her spirit shaping working around him. He pushed back, but his store of spirit wasn’t nearly as strong as hers.
He tried to fight, tried to take a step toward her, and found that he couldn’t move.
She grinned at him again. “It has taken me a long time to uncover the key to releasing the others. Your father and the others protected it. That bondar was hidden. The one I needed to find. Now that connection is gone…”
“What’s beyond?”
She smiled at him. “There was a time when I would’ve shared that freely with you. Now I think you only want to know so that you can stop me.”
“I will stop you.”
“You have grown far more capable than I would’ve expected.”
She took a step toward him. Tolan struggled, trying to draw on fire and earth, but the connection to them wasn’t enough to be able to step free of it.
“Do you even realize you are the reason I was able to find him again?”
With a dawning understanding, he realized that even when it came to this, she had used him in a certain way. She had needed him to find the wild and twisted elemental. His mother had used his ability to connect to the elementals, his ability to shape in the waste, and had borrowed that.
He was how she had uncovered the serpent elemental. Had he not come out onto the waste she never would’ve found him.
But then, Tolan wouldn’t have learned of the Guardians. He wouldn’t have realized there was something that had happened here, some twisting to that elemental. And he believed that he would be able to do something to help the elemental. All it would take would be stopping his mother first.
She took another step toward him. Spirit was building. The sense of it was seeping down into his mind, flowing through him.
It was powerful and more than he could withstand.
He needed that orb.
He might have enough strength to leave. That would be all that he had, though.
“Who do you serve?”
“What makes you think that I serve anyone?”
“You wouldn’t have learned all of this on your own.”
She grinned at him again. “You really do take after me at times. You’re right. I didn’t know about any of this before venturing out. My mother believed that my journey across the waste was in fact a waste. I knew better. The Academy never really believed there was anything beyond the waste. They never really wanted to know.” She stepped toward him. “I did.”
“Because you wanted power.”
“I wanted understanding,” she snapped. “There is a reason for all of this. There’s a reason for the waste.”
“It protects us.”
“Much like the bonds protect the elementals?” she sneered.
Tolan tensed. She had stopped across from him but was still near enough that he thought he could reach out to her. All he wanted was the opportunity to grab at her, to keep her from using the spirit orb on him.
“Who is your master?”
“When this is all over, everyone will come to know who the true Draasin Lord is,” she said, smiling.
“That’s what this is about? You want to control the elementals?”
“I want everyone to know the truth. Sometimes, the truth is painful.” She took another step toward him.
“They sent you to do this all by yourself?”
“When it’s done, there will be no need for me to do anything by myself. You will see.”
She was close.
Her touch of spiri
t was strong, subtle, but he could also tell that the way she was using it was trying to force him to think that he didn’t have enough power. It was because of her that he had believed that wind and water were too weak for him to be able to reach in the waste. That sense of the elements was still there. All Tolan had to do was reach for it.
When she was close, he called upon the warrior shaping.
It was a burst of power. It carried him up and immediately back down so that he slammed to the ground next to her.
He grabbed the orb from her before she had a chance to react. She staggered back, attempting to shape, but without the orb, Tolan knew that she had no way to do so.
“It’s over. You are over.”
“You don’t understand anything, Tolan.”
She reached into her pocket and grabbed for something, pulling it out.
He pushed outward, probing to see what she was using.
A strange bondar. It was nothing like anything that his father had ever made or used. She squeezed it in her hand.
A dark bolt of lightning streaked from the sky, and it carried her away.
Tolan stood fixed in place.
He had stopped her. He had learned about the Guardians. And he had uncovered this place at the heart of the waste—along with the purpose of the waste. Then she had escaped.
Still, there was something that needed to be done.
Holding onto the orb for spirit, he tested it, pushing a shaping through it.
His mother had wanted to use it against him, but now he thought that he might be able to use it for another reason.
25
It didn’t take long before a sense of movement came toward him. Tolan hadn’t wanted to leave where he was and had hesitated to do so. The rocky ground was familiar from when he and Ferrah had come through here, still rife with the lingering stench that he remembered from their passage. The rumbling sense echoed across the waste, a powerful surge of energy that rippled toward him. The Draasin Lord flew overhead, his shadow sweeping across the ground.
The Chaos Rises (Elemental Academy Book 6) Page 26