How could I find the Guardian?
The Guardian was different. The Guardian wasn’t tied to spirit. It should be protected from what happened with hashin—and whatever Roland intended.
Tolan had come to realize that though not all elementals were connected to spirit like those he’d discovered beyond the waste, all had at least a trace of a connection. It was what allowed them to speak to him. Now that he’d been in the bond, he wondered if that was because of what he detected of the bond itself, and not of the elemental.
The Guardian drew upon earth, but if he felt what Tolan thought the elemental felt, it was possible the Guardian drew upon pure earth; not mingled with spirit. That distinction mattered, though Tolan had no idea why.
He pushed away the sense of spirit, focusing only on earth.
It was there, flowing all around him, the power and energy of earth everywhere he was. Tolan focused only on earth, ignoring the sense of spirit, ignoring anything else and trying to ignore even that of the Convergence.
What he needed was earth. Pure earth.
What he needed was to reach the Guardian.
He could feel the energy of earth and noticed a drawing sensation. A flow of power. He held onto that flow of power and drifted toward it.
It carried him up.
Something shifted around him.
There was pressure, and Tolan held onto the Convergence, to earth, and nothing else. He ignored spirit. He ignored anything other than what he could detect, and only focused on that drawing sensation.
There was another flow.
It was similar to what he’d felt pushing him down toward the earth bond. This was one that started to pull up, dragging from some hidden place, carrying him away. Tolan let that fill his mind. It radiated within him.
He drifted, and then he found a void.
This was different than the one he’d come through to reach here. Though there was a sense of gray and nothingness to it, there were also no elementals within it. Unlike the last one, this was simply a flow of power, drawing away from the earth bond.
Tolan was carried along it, feeling the effect as it was pulling him through, and he was guided out, along the bond. The energy continued to drag him out.
Within it, he thought that he recognized the Guardian, but there were still no answers as to what he needed to do. In order to get free, he had to know whether or not the Guardian could even help him.
Tolan let the sense of power continue to drag him along. He drifted with it, focusing on nothing other than power.
He lost track of how long he was here. He’d been here for what seemed a long time, and yet it might only be moments. What was time to him?
Energy rumbled.
As he neared it, a strange chill worked through him. Whatever was in front of him was unpleasant. It was earth, but it was earth in a different way than he knew.
Earth not bound to spirit.
Tolan could feel this elemental and the way it tried to push out, trying to draw free of this barrier, but it seemed to Tolan that the Guardian held it back. Whatever else the Guardian did, it protected the elementals within the bond.
From what, though?
Tolan pushed out a sense of earth, trying to probe and see whether there was anything he might be able to uncover.
When he did, he realized his mistake.
The elemental turned its awareness toward him.
Power slammed toward Tolan.
He reacted, drawing upon earth, using the Convergence, the strength of that power as it funneled through him. He resisted, finding a way to overwhelm it, but in doing so, he wasn’t entirely sure what exactly he fought.
Power slammed out from the elemental.
Tolan continued to push, resisting, and there was something pushing against him.
He had to fight.
More than anything, that thought was in his mind. He had to find a way to ignore what was pressing in upon him.
Tolan had no idea what this thing was, but he could feel the energy. He could feel the power. He could feel malevolence within it.
It was trying to do something to the bond.
Tolan pushed against it.
There was a shriek. It came within his mind, and it practically ripped through him.
Tolan added more spirit, using that to protect himself. As he did, he could feel the shriek as it screamed again. He struggled against it.
It came again.
Something pulled on him. Like a shadowy form, all of spirit, it strained toward him.
The energy striking him was familiar. The power told him this was Roland.
It was almost as if Tolan could see Roland reaching for him. Made completely out of spirit, some sort of creature was coming out of the bond. The shaping that was Roland reached for him; grabbing at him. Tolan attempted to escape, feeling the energy coming off him, that power that surged to almost more than he could tolerate. He pushed back, wrapping each of the elements around him.
He trembled, focusing on trying to escape as the creature tried to grab him. If this malevolent creature reached him, Tolan had no idea what would happen. He might be trapped here. Roland might consume and destroy him.
Suddenly, earth energy dragged him, forcing him down. It was almost as if he was thrown. It was a blast of power, and he was forced back toward the bond, and then beyond. He went rocketing away and streaked back toward the Convergence he’d used to enter the bond.
Tolan was thrown free and came to land in the middle of the Convergence, staring up. Though he saw the cavern beneath the Academy all around him, the only thing in his mind was that strange power along with fear about what it represented.
16
Tolan paced in the main hall of the Academy. He debated going up to the spirit tower, or going to Ferrah to try to smooth things over with her even though he didn’t know if it would make a difference at this point, or even going to the Grand Master. He didn’t know what he needed to do, only that his mind continued to race. This was Roland.
The problem was that he knew it, but others would not. He would have to prove it to them. Knowing what he did of the others and the experience that he’d had, it was incredibly likely that they wouldn’t believe him.
Not unless they could enter the bonds.
He took a deep breath and headed into the library. He grabbed books from the shelves, quickly finding those that he needed on the element bonds, and set them on a table and began to look through them. He didn’t feel as if he could settle.
The vast expanse of the library stretched around him. Tolan rested near one corner of the library, a stack of books on the table towering in front of him. Something had changed. Time spent in the bond had changed him… he just didn’t quite know how.
Tolan flipped open the book resting on the table near him and began to read through it. It was an older work, one of the earliest within the library and one designed to help others understand the element bonds in a way he currently did not. He stared at the page, his gaze drifting along the words, searching for understanding.
That was all he could do. Though he searched, he didn’t feel as if he were finding the understanding he sought. He worked through the pages, skimming the words.
In the time he’d been the Master of Spirit, Tolan had taken the time to work on learning as many of the ancient languages as he could, using them to help him better understand these older works. There were a half-dozen ancient languages important for the books stored in the library.
This time, what he needed was to see if there was anything the ancients understood about the element bonds. They’d used them, forcing the elementals into the bonds. They must’ve had a better understanding of the element bond itself; one greater than Tolan’s current understanding. He’d been working with the element bonds ever since coming to the Academy, trying to understand what it meant to try to free the elementals, but something about what he’d uncovered still didn’t make complete sense.
He had flashes of images. The
memory of what it was like as he’d been floating through the bond; the power that had crashed into him. Within that image, there had been a sense of power—and a sense of terror. Now, probing the earth bond was terrifying for him.
He needed to face that fear, and face the threat of whatever existed within the bond that terrified him, but Tolan didn’t want to press upon it and risk it, not without knowing what exactly was there. In the time since he’d been out of the bond, he’d hesitated.
“There you are.”
Tolan looked up. He’d been unaware of Ferrah coming into the library. He’d been so focused on staring at the book and doing nothing else.
“Ferrah,” he said to her.
She studied him, giving him a knowing look. Likely she understood that he’d been avoiding her, even if he hadn’t really been avoiding her.
She took a seat, looking at the stack of books. “What are we studying now?”
“The element bonds.”
“Is there a reason that you’re studying the bonds themselves and not…”
She shook her head, looking over at him and watching with the same barely suppressed irritation she’d worn around him the last few months.
He sighed. “I tried finding you to explain what happened, but I think you were busy with your students.”
“It’s early in the new students’ arrival, so I do tend to be preoccupied.”
“I know, and…” He didn’t want to admit it, but there wasn’t anything she was going to be able to do. She was a powerful shaper, and connected to the element bonds in a way he oftentimes didn’t feel as if he was, but would she fully understand what he had done?
That wasn’t the reason that he hesitated, though.
Tolan wanted answers about what had taken place, and wasn’t sure if he could find them on his own, which had brought him to the library. When he’d come here, thinking he might find Master Minden or Master Jensen, the librarians on duty been some of the other librarians he didn’t have the same relationship with, which meant he had to look himself.
“Something happened.”
“I gathered that, otherwise you wouldn’t be sitting here with the stack of books in front of you.”
“Something happened with the element bonds. Roland attacked.”
“Tolan—”
“This time I’m sure it was him.”
She took a deep breath. “Let’s start through this together. I thought you were trying to understand what the Guardian was telling you. What happened?”
Tolan nodded. The sound of the Guardian still echoed within him, rumbling within his mind. When he focused, he could practically feel the sense of that Guardian as he tried to reach for Tolan, but there was something else he needed to understand now. It was less about the Guardian and more about what else had taken place. Tolan wasn’t going to find those answers through the Guardian. He wasn’t going to find those answers any other way than by understanding the bond and what Roland intended with it.
Ferrah grabbed the stack of books, pulling it toward her, and began to sort through them. As she did, she glanced up at Tolan every so often, her gaze locking on him before settling back down to the book.
“Why these?” she asked.
“I…”
He needed to tell her, but what had happened to him was so fantastical and so impossible for him to believe that it had even happened. It was almost as if it had been in his mind; imagination rather than anything real. More than that, he didn’t know if Ferrah would believe him.
“Do you need to go somewhere else to share with me?”
Tolan looked around the library. There were a few students sitting in the center. Most of them were older students. The younger-level students still hadn’t learned that the library was a place they could come to and escape. They hadn’t been at the Academy long enough to take advantage of it. Tolan hadn’t even started coming the library until he was farther along in his first level.
He used a shaping of wind. There was a barrier around the library that prevented most from being able to shape within it, though Tolan, along with several of the master librarians, could shape here. By using the shaping of wind, he created a barrier around them, sealing himself and Ferrah inside.
She arched a brow, almost as if she could feel what he had done, though he didn’t think she could.
“Is that necessary?”
“You’ve never been able to detect a shaping in the library before.”
She tapped her pocket, and Tolan leaned forward, noticing that there was a small orb resting inside it. A bondar.
Of course. The bondar was what she had used in order to be able to shape in the waste, but it would also allow her to shape in the library. The separation was similar, though not quite the same.
“Are you going to tell me what this is all about?”
“I suppose I should. Maybe you can help me.” He took a deep breath and looked down at the book before turning his attention back to Ferrah. “I went into the Convergence, thinking I needed to find understanding about what happened with the earth bond.”
“What do you mean you went into the Convergence?”
“I went into the Convergence.”
“Tolan—”
“I’ve done it many times, and I know what I was getting into.”
“Many?”
Tolan met her gaze. She knew about several of those times, having been there with him. “When it comes to trying to understand the elementals, sometimes I need to go to the Convergence in order find answers.”
“I didn’t realize you had done it many times.”
“I’m doing it because I want to try to find a few answers.”
“You can find answers other ways.”
“I think the Convergences are meant for us to be able find answers,” Tolan said.
“You said the Convergences are places of incredible power that connected to the source of the elements themselves.”
“They do, but I think it’s something else as well.” There weren’t many who had ever risked going into the Convergence. Tolan did, and he suspected Master Minden had. The Grand Master might’ve gone into one of the Convergences, but Tolan didn’t know whether or not he had. Tolan had never spoken to the Grand Master about that. According to Master Minden, anyone who didn’t have a connection to spirit had real danger when approaching the Convergence. They might not even survive it.
“What did you uncover?”
“I went to see if I could uncover anything that happened to the element bonds and to discover what has been troubling me.”
“Well?”
He took a deep breath. This was the harder part to admit to Ferrah. “I ended up shaping myself into the bond.”
She sat there, her eyes hard, saying nothing. Tolan could feel the irritation within her, and didn’t need for her to speak to recognize what upset her. “You did what?” Her voice was low. Dangerous. Angry.
“It wasn’t what I intended to do. I was trying to use the power of the Convergence in order to understand the element bonds, and I ended up turning the shaping power upon myself so that I forced myself into the bond.”
“That shouldn’t be possible.”
“It seems that it is possible.”
“You’re not an elemental. You shouldn’t be able to enter the bond.”
“I don’t even know how much of me actually went into the bond versus how much it was just my mind. When I was using the shaping, the sense of power consumed me and pulled me in. It dragged me forward, almost to the point where I wasn’t able to do anything else.” That was the hardest part to admit. When Ferrah realized he’d lost control of the shaping and that he hadn’t been able to separate himself, requiring something else, whatever that external influence to be, in order to escape, she would be angry. If it had been her doing what he had done, he would’ve been angry. “Eventually, I was pulled all the way in, and I could feel the energy of the earth bond.”
Ferrah watched him, and at first, Tolan wasn�
��t sure what she might say, how she might react, but he detected the sense of anger stirring from within her. “What did you ultimately uncover?” she asked. “Tell me that you found your answer. Since you’re sitting here in front of me, I presume you were able to escape what happened, but you’re also troubled by what happened, so I suspect something occurred.”
“I was nearly trapped.” He glanced down at the book. “The bond isn’t anything like what I expected. There was a sense of power, and I could feel the elementals. When I was feeling them, it seemed as if they were not within the bond itself, at least not the part of the bond I was deep within. They were in a separate part of the bond; the part hardest for me to try to separate from. They were in the part of the bond pushing me down like a river.”
“I doubt there would be a river within the earth bond,” she said.
“A river of power. A flow. A real surge of power. It was amazing,” he said. That part of the earth bond really was amazing. There was so much power and energy there that Tolan had felt compelled to try to embrace it. He couldn’t help but do so. “I felt as if I could do anything with the sense of earth there. I felt as if the sense of earth was everything. It was all around me, pressing upon me, but there was more to it. Spirit was there.”
“Why would spirit be in the earth bond?”
“I don’t know. That’s the strange part. When I was there, it seemed as if spirit was twined within it. Earth and spirit; not just earth alone.”
“There isn’t a spirit bond,” Ferrah said, “otherwise I’d be able to reach it. Only shapers able to reach—”
“Able to reach it from themselves can use spirit. I know.” It was why spirit shapers were so rare. “I felt it, Ferrah. I saw it. They were there, together. I don’t know why others can’t reach it, but it’s there.”
Ferrah frowned. “When I use earth, I don’t have a sense of spirit.”
“None of the spirit shapers ever commented on the idea that there was anything else mixed within the element bonds,” he said.
“If spirit is mixed in the bond, then it would seem that all of us were spirit shapers.”
The Shape of Fire Page 17