A Fading Fire

by D. K. Holmberg

  She was trying to understand the bondars, but why?

  Tolan knew there were things she had done, things she had been doing on behalf of Roland.

  Why remain?

  If this was all about what Roland wanted him for, then it didn’t make sense for her to have remained in Ephra. There was some other reason for her to have done so.

  That was the secret that Tolan needed to find, but he wasn’t sure how to dig that out of his mind. He probed, trying to uncover the conversation.

  His parents were arguing about something.

  The bondars.

  He had a sense of the power that his mother was trying to get from his father. Some way of augmenting spirit.

  That was it.

  She had always wanted him to make something more powerful with spirit. The shaping she used was not only on Tolan to try to hide what she was doing, but was on his father, trying to encourage him to create ever more powerful bondars. Most of them were for the other elements, but she wanted a bondar for spirit. She wanted it for a specific reason. With a bondar of spirit, she could become more powerful.

  When Tolan had been aware of his memories before, he’d thought she wanted the power only for herself, but that wasn’t it at all. Now that he was here, in this memory and bridging the connection between him and his mother, aware of what she was doing and what she had done, he could feel the energy of why she had acted the way that she had. He could feel the connection she had. He could feel that there was something more that she had wanted.

  It wasn’t just the shaping, and it wasn’t just the bondar. She wanted power for herself, but not simply for the sake of power.

  She had wanted to protect her family.

  Tolan hadn’t felt that before, but now in this memory, now that he was aware of what he detected, the way he peeled it apart, he could feel it.

  She had wanted to protect them.

  Why, though, if she were truly serving Roland?

  Perhaps the time away had shifted something for her.

  If that were the case, then everything that he had begun to believe about his mother might have been incomplete.

  Could it be that she had actually cared?

  Maybe some of his memories, some of the happiness, had been real.

  As he withdrew from the memory, he realized something.

  The shaping of spirit he detected over some of his earliest memories hadn’t been to mask those memories. It hadn’t been to shape specific memories. His memories of that time, the experiences that he had, had been real. The happiness that he remembered had been real.

  The only thing that the shaping had done was hide something else. In tracking through it and focusing on the shaping of spirit, he could detect that she was trying to keep him from shaping, but it was also to avoid drawing attention to him.

  She didn’t do anything to try to create emotion within him.

  He focused on another memory, but this one was more powerful.

  It was the last memory he had of his parents before they’d left him in Ephra. Now that he knew what had happened, he realized she had left on her own. Something had changed, and whatever it was had forced her away.

  There was something that he wished he would’ve asked her when she had been alive. Now that she was gone, he didn’t have the opportunity, but maybe he could dive into more memories, to the connection that would have formed, and maybe he would be able to uncover just what she had done and the reason behind it.

  Tolan remembered sitting at the table in their kitchen. The smells of bread baking, his mother having spent the better part of the afternoon working diligently, making his favorite meal. The meat was savory and tender. His mother looking at him, her eyes sad. His father with a blank expression on his face.

  She had known. His father had not.

  Tolan ignored the conversation. None of that mattered. It wasn’t the words that were said that had any meaning at this point. It was more about feelings, more about what he could detect between the sense of spirit that she was using. He could feel the way she was shaping, and he could feel the spirit upon him.

  Now it was different. Targeted.

  She pushed it into his mind, forcing a deeper shaping. There was more anger with it than there had been in any of the other memories. She was holding onto a tight shaping of his father, as well. In the other memories, the spirit shaping had been far more subtle. This was less so.

  Something had changed right before this.

  Something had forced her away.

  Tolan dove into the connection that formed.

  He had been older. Some part of him had been aware of what she was doing, and some part of him had detected that sense of spirit. Because of that, and because of spirit leaving a trail as it did, he could track that. He could reach into her mind.

  She had no idea he would be able to do anything like that, so there was no barrier placed into her mind. Sitting as they were near the edge of the waste, within Ephra, there were no spirit shapers, and so she never really ran the risk of any danger. There was a benefit in that.

  Tolan had grown up wondering why his parents remained at the edge of the waste. His father was a skilled craftsman, and he could have plied his trade anywhere. Their parents were both gone, at least as far as he had believed, and it seemed to him that they could travel anywhere within Terndahl.

  Now that he understood his mother’s connection to the waste and to the place Beyond, he understood what she had done, though not the reason behind it.

  He focused on what she was trying to shape within him.

  She was hiding him.

  Not only that. She was trying to set him up so that he would reveal himself at the right time.

  But why? Why this shaping?

  He probed into her mind.

  It was a mess. There were shapings and trails of spirit all throughout her mind. Strangely enough, he could track it and feel where those shapings had been. He could feel the touch of Roland all throughout her mind.

  Roland had been influencing her for a long time. Tolan had known that Roland had been a part of his mother’s life for a long time. He had known a man had been there, digging into her mind, forcing her to think in specific ways, but feeling it as he did now, being aware of it as he was now, was far different than simply knowing what the other man had done to her.

  This was abuse.

  She had wanted to serve, but how much of it had been because of her, and how much of it had been because of the way she had been shaped over time?

  Without having her alive, and without having any way of piecing apart her mind, he didn’t really know. Perhaps it was for the best.

  But what he could tell was that there was a surge of shaping tied to this memory. The shaping was external, coming from Roland, and it was instruction. He had somehow found her, connecting to her, and had forced her to return.

  That was the reason behind what she had done.

  Somehow, she had still fought.

  His mother could have brought Tolan with her. She could have dragged him along, brought him to Roland. He would’ve been used.

  Somehow, despite the spirit shaping used on her, his mother had still managed to fight and had resisted what Roland had wanted from her.

  Tolan backed out of her mind.

  He stayed within his memories, focusing on spirit that had been used there.

  There were other memories that were more recent, and Tolan found it easier to probe into those. He thought about the first time that he had encountered her. He could track across that spirit connection and dive into her mind. At that point, she was too far gone. The connection with Roland had been far too great, and everything that he had done to her had changed her, likely permanently.

  There was the sense of the darkness, though.

  Within the darkness, Tolan recognized that there was something else. If he could come up with the answer as to what it was and the reason behind it, then maybe he would understand just what Roland was after.

/>   It was something he hadn’t been able to remove by going into the Convergence.

  That had been his belief. He had thought that by going into the Convergence, he would be able to peel away whatever had happened to her and whatever had changed for her, but it had remained a part of her.

  At the time, Tolan had believed that maybe she was the one who was twisted, that it had always come from her. Now he could feel the way that it was bound within her, the way Roland had shaped her mind so often and so frequently that anything within her had been twisted. There was nothing that he would’ve been able to do to separate her from that shaping.

  Tolan thought about whether there was anything he might have been able to peel away from her, anything that he might’ve been able to do, but at the time, he wouldn’t have known enough. He wouldn’t have been strong enough.

  She had been lost even then.

  Still, she had fought.

  He moved along the memories he had of her, finally coming to the last one again, to when they stood upon the tower. Within that memory was the way she had gifted him knowledge.

  It had surprised Roland, though the other man had known just what his mother had done. He had been able to react, but he hadn’t expected it.

  It was her last act of defiance.

  Those memories were there. How to shape. How to control spirit.

  All of that had helped Tolan.

  By focusing on what she had done, he thought that he could feel something else within his mind. There were other memories there. There would have to be.

  He tried to piece together those memories. He tried to grasp just what his mother had done, and tried to see if there was anything she might have been able to give him about what Roland was after.

  Understanding. That was what the lizard elemental had told him.

  Tolan had needed to find that understanding, and had been told that it was within him. He had gone looking externally, and had gone looking into the bonds, had gone looking into spirit, and had gone looking for other ways, but none of that really mattered.

  All of what mattered was within him. All of what mattered was the power he possessed, the connection that he had.

  There was another gift from her.

  She had shared with him what Roland was after.

  She had knowledge of the man from all the years she had spent serving him. She had known about spirit connections. She had known she would absorb information from him the same way he could pull information from her.

  And she had not fought.

  Here Tolan had believed she had served him willingly, and she had, though perhaps not for the reason that he truly understood.

  There was something else hidden within those memories.

  It was buried deep within the knowledge she shared with him. There was something that drifted to him, an understanding of something that she had done. It was almost impossible to believe she had control over it, but as he focused on it and thought about what she had done, the way she could use power, he recognized that there was a different touch to his mind.

  Buried within her thoughts was a sense of resistance.

  She had gone and served, but she had also recognized the danger.

  She had stayed with Roland, though she had been forced to, but at the same time, she had known that there was something she could learn from him. She had opened herself to it, embracing the power. In doing so, she had connected herself to something of him.

  His mother had purpose.

  For some reason, that mattered to Tolan more than he ever would’ve expected it to.

  He took in a deep breath, focusing on the sense of what he could, and tried to pull apart that knowledge, using spirit as he peeled away the layers. It was buried so deeply that it took all of his knowledge of spirit, all of the power he could connect to, to be able to find what was deep within him.

  The more he dug and pulled apart, the more Tolan began to realize that knowledge had been placed within him all along. The shaping she had done to him had been layered into his mind. He sensed a pattern.

  It had begun when he was a child, and the shapings he had experienced all along, every single time she had pressed power upon him, had carried some other nugget with it, and within that, she had managed to piece together a puzzle that he didn’t know otherwise.

  The answer was in peeling away that shaping.

  He might not be able to see it on his own, but if he pulled it back, if he revealed it, he thought he would better understand.

  Drawing upon the sense of the spirit bond woven within each of the elements, and drawing upon the power of the lizard, Tolan pulled that spirit shaping from his mind. It ripped free.

  He cried out, pain screaming through him.

  And then it was gone.

  Something throbbed.

  He released the spirit shaping, blinking open his eyes, looking around the strange chamber here in the heart of the waste. The lizard was gone, leaving Tolan alone. There was still light in the chamber, and it illuminated everything, giving him enough to see. The sense of the Convergence was beneath him. There was some aspect to it that he was aware of, though as he strained to recognize it, he thought he understood.

  The Convergence created the waste.

  He was certain of it. All that power funneled here—for a purpose.

  Why, though?

  He thought about the darkness he’d experienced, thought about what he had believed his mother had been doing, and thought about how that had been part of something she was trying to shape upon him. That had been a spirit shaping, he now understood. Spirit that he hadn’t known at the time.

  The power here had been real.

  There was a reason behind the isolation of the land Beyond.

  Was it feared?

  He didn’t know, but this was what Roland was after.

  Strangely, Tolan recognized he could release this power. He didn’t have the knowledge of the runes that surrounded it, but he recognized enough to know that all it would take would be to blast through it, and he could dive into that power and release whatever was stored here—and possibly heal the waste.

  The problem was in knowing whether or not that was the right thing to do.

  He needed answers. He needed the Draasin Lord.

  He hoped he had time.

  18

  The warrior shaping carried him up out of the chamber, back to the heart of the waste. The air had shifted and something was stirring within it. It was the first time that he had been out on the waste, and something had changed about it.

  Maybe that was only his imagination. It was possible that all he detected was the natural currents, but he didn’t think so. Tolan could practically feel the various elements now. They seemed disjointed, though out here in the heart of the waste, it was not unusual for the energy to be disjointed in such a way. Typically, he couldn’t even feel the power of the element bonds, though he had a strange thought that were he to reach for them, he might be able to connect, find that power, and gain the understanding that he had lost.

  The draasin remained curled around the center of the clearing.

  Tolan approached and used a shaping of spirit and fire, drawing through both in order to probe the Draasin Lord. Gradually, the Draasin Lord stirred, opening one eye and looking over at Tolan.

  “You know why this is here.” He stepped toward the Draasin Lord, holding onto fire and spirit. “When I came the first time, you told me that I shouldn’t pursue it, but I know more now.” He glanced toward the Guardians. “They gave me permission to come here.”

  “They did.”

  “They wanted me to know. The Convergence here is not just protected by the Guardians. It’s the reason for the waste.”

  After learning of Roland and the land beyond, he had come to believe the waste had formed a barrier; a protection.

  Though from what? What if the waste wasn’t a protection for Terndahl from the land beyond but a protection for whatever it was that was trapped deep ben
eath the ground?

  Whatever it was had been discovered before.

  The runes suggested the ancient shapers had known this place.

  They suggested that it was important to them. The sheer number of runes used in the creation of the chamber deep beneath the ground suggested that this was some place of power for those ancient shapers, something that had mattered to them. Perhaps only because of the Convergence, but perhaps for some other reason.

  Tolan swept his gaze around, looking out around the waste. Here at the heart of the waste, it was empty. Bleak. Desolate. There was energy here, but the energy was not completely clear. Perhaps the runes within that chamber disrupted that, though if that were the case, Tolan wondered why.

  And he wondered why the Convergences all poured energy here, as if they intended to create this, whatever this was.

  The answers were in the land Beyond, though he didn’t know how he would find those answers without taking considerable time to pour over the various texts within that library.

  “There was a time long ago when everything changed,” the Draasin Lord said.

  “I thought you didn’t remember the time long ago.”

  “I don’t. All I have are flashes, hints of memory.”

  Tolan smiled at the Draasin Lord, understanding what he meant for the first time. “I used spirit to dive into my mind.”

  “What did you uncover?”

  “That my memories weren’t as I thought.”

  They were coming back to him now. Having peeled away the layers of spirit, he realized everything he had believed about his mother before learning she served Roland was still there.

  It was freeing, in a way. It was strange to feel fully aware of what his mother had done to him. For the first time, he thought that he understood.

  That was the strangest thing of all.

  “You’re connected to spirit. You should be able to use it to try to understand what happened before as well.”

  The Draasin Lord swiveled his head, opening one golden eye and looking at Tolan. “I have tried.”

  Which meant that he had failed.

  “What were you able to determine?” Tolan asked the Draasin Lord.