The Water Ruptures Read online

  The Water Ruptures

  Elemental Academy Book 3

  D.K. Holmberg

  Copyright © 2019 by D.K. Holmberg

  All rights reserved.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Also by D.K. Holmberg

  1

  The wind gusted around Tolan, who stared out into the distance. He and Ferrah stood upon the Shapers Path, once again walking to the edge of the city. They would soon depart Amitan, heading beyond the borders.

  Tolan glanced over at Ferrah. Her fiery red hair appeared to glow in the sunlight, and she surveyed the area around them. There was more suspicion within her deep green eyes than there had been before. Ever since stopping Master Daniels and being near the Keystone, something had changed for Ferrah. Tolan didn’t say anything about it, unsure if she wanted him to comment on it, but he could see it even if others could not.

  She remained near one of the master shapers, an older man by the name of Master Krall, staying a step or so away from him. Tolan could feel the shaping she held and wondered if he was the only one aware of her shaping. When he had first come to the Academy, he had believed many of the other shapers could detect shaping the same way he could, but that turned out not to be the case.

  An elbow caught him in the side, and Tolan glanced over to see Jonas looking at him. “You don’t have to moon after her like that,” Jonas said.

  “I don’t have to do what?”

  “I see the way you’re looking at her. Go up and talk to her.”

  “I’m not looking at her in any way.”

  “Not any way you should be looking at her. You’re just staring at her. It’s weird. Just go talk to her.”

  Tolan smiled tightly, pushing his friend away. “It’s not like that with us.”

  “Only because you’re afraid. I get the sense from her that she’s waiting for you to approach her.”

  Ferrah and Tolan had both agreed they would not share with Jonas what had happened because it was likely he wouldn’t really understand what had taken place. How could he, when he hadn’t seen it? Now the Keystone had been moved, there wasn’t any way to prove what they had experienced.

  “Can you really believe they’re allowing us to be a part of the Selection?”

  Tolan glanced over at Master Marcella, a lovely dark-haired woman who was only a few years older than him. She was speaking to Master Sartan, her hands moving animatedly while she spoke.

  “I didn’t think students ever went on a Selection,” Tolan whispered.

  “They don’t. Not usually. That’s why this is strange.”

  “Why would they suddenly change?” He hadn’t been able to get much information about why they would suddenly be permitted to travel with the Selection. It troubled him that it might be tied to what had happened at the Keystone—or any of the other strangeness that had happened since he’d come to Amitan to train at the Academy.

  “I don’t know if it has something to do with the increased movements of the Draasin Lord or not.” Jonas flashed a grin. “Either way, it’s good for us. Allows us to get out of the city a little bit. And this way, we get to do something other than focus on our training for a little while.”

  “If we don’t keep our focus on our training, we’ll never progress to finish the Academy,” Tolan said.

  “You have been spending too much time with Ferrah.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means it’s the sort of thing she would say. Aren’t you excited to leave the city?”

  “I am, but less excited about where they’ve asked me to go.”

  “Everybody is going back to their home towns. You’re not the only one going someplace they aren’t necessarily thrilled to be going.” His gaze drifted over to Draln. The much larger man stood with his back straight, a wide grin spreading across his face, and he seemed to notice they were watching. He turned and grinned at them. “He’s probably thrilled to be returning to Velminth. Last time we were there, he—”

  “Don’t forget both of you are different now you’ve been at the Academy.”

  Jonas sighed heavily. “I suppose you’re right. It doesn’t make it any easier.”

  “It’s not like he has any more authority now he’s at the Academy,” Tolan said.

  “In his mind, he does. Look at him. So smug. He’s going to go back, his parents will probably fall all over him, and who knows who else. My parents will be probably more annoyed I’ve been gone than anything else.”

  “Why would they be annoyed?”

  “They want me to train at the Academy, but my doing so also takes away their free labor. They probably had to hire on several others in order to accommodate me.”

  “I think I was lucky to have been Selected for the Academy. If I hadn’t been, I wasn’t sure what I was going to end up doing. With Master Daniels having been sent back to the city…” What was he doing, bringing that up? He shot a look over at Ferrah, who now seemed to be making a point of ignoring him. She was going to be traveling to Par, the farthest of any of them, and on a Shapers Path more treacherous than most. “Anyway, I was thinking I was going to end up working in the mines.”

  “What would that have been like?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been. Others without any shaping ability have needed to work in the mines. It’s a place those who aren’t able to secure an apprenticeship are forced to go.” And it was the reason he’d felt rescued by Master Daniels when his parents had disappeared. He had been young then, but not so young as to be ignorant of the consequences. With their absence, he would have been forced to find work that wouldn’t have been easy. Life in the mines was difficult, and he’d seen enough people who had returned to know just how difficult that was. Having Master Daniels apprentice him had saved him.

  And yet, now it felt like a betrayal.

  In the few months since the attack, he hadn’t been able to shake what had happened. Master Daniels had attacked him. Tolan still wondered whether there was some connection to the Grand Inquisitor.

  “Now you get to go back and show off,” Jonas said.

  He forced a smile. It didn’t feel like he would be victorious in any way, and certainly not to show off. Part of him worried what would happen when he returned. When he’d left, he had not had a chance to talk to Tanner and let him know he was even leaving.

  And now Tolan had progressed to the second level in the Academy, what would it be like if Tanner were somehow Selected?

  Undoubtedly, it would be awkward. He didn’t know what he would say to his friend, only that things wouldn’t feel quite the same as they ha
d before.

  He wasn’t the same. When he had known Tanner, his friend had been a wind shaper of some talent, but Tolan had no shaping ability on his own. In the year or so he’d been gone, he had developed a connection to fire, even if he required the furios to shape with it. His connection to the other elements had improved as well, though his connection to them remained different than others’. Tenuous. For the most part, it required he focus on the elementals, using that power to connect to the element bonds, and even then, he wasn’t sure if he was really connecting to the element bonds or to the power of the elementals themselves.

  “Are you ready?” Master Marcella asked as she approached.

  Jonas grinned at her. “You have fun,” he whispered, elbowing Tolan again and heading off.

  Tolan turned away and nodded to Master Marcella. “I’m ready.”

  “I wasn’t with you when you were Selected,” Master Marcella said, starting off. Tolan kept pace with her, and the city below blurred past. At one point, they paused and, in the distance, Tolan caught sight of the spot he knew the park—and the Keystone—once had occupied. The Grand Master had moved it to protect it, and in the last two months, he had been unable to find it. Tolan had searched, wanting nothing more than to see if he could discover that massive bondar again, but there had been no evidence of it.

  His training had become significant enough that he had felt compelled to focus on it rather than on his search for the Keystone. The time he’d spent in his classes had helped him continue to hone his connection to the elementals in the bonds, though he wasn’t sure whether he was shaping correctly—only that he was now able to shape each of the elements, something he had not been able to do before spending any time with that massive bondar.

  “Are most of the students returning with their Selectors?”

  “Most are,” Master Marcella said. “A few have gone off with others. I wasn’t promoted at that time, not to the point where I was able to go off and serve in a Selection, so this is something of an honor for me.”

  “Have you ever participated in a Selection before?”

  “I won’t be doing this alone, if that’s what you fear,” she said, shooting him a stern look.

  Tolan shook his head. He didn’t want to start off on the wrong foot with Master Marcella. She might have tried to kill him once, but she did have a desire to have him reach the various element bonds, and she had been particularly pleased about the fact he had begun to reach some of the other bonds. He suspected she wanted to take credit for it, and he worried she would try to use the same shaping techniques she had with him if she were to work with other students.

  “That’s not what I fear at all. I just wondered whether you had been a part of a Selection before?”

  “Nothing other than my own.”

  “What was yours like?”

  “I suppose mine was like any other,” she said.

  The ground continued to speed past them, flashes of color, greens and browns. Up this high, they were above most of the wind, though Tolan didn’t know if that was merely the height of the Shapers Path or if some shaping prevented the wind from gusting around them. It wouldn’t take much for them to be thrown free from this invisible platform. He had some control over his shaping, but possibly not enough to control a fall back to the ground and be able to survive.

  “I thought the Inquisitors were involved in the Selections,” he said.

  “The Inquisitors are involved when it comes to the actual Selection. The time leading up to that is different. We will have some time on our own, so you will have a chance to reconnect with your hometown.”

  He nodded but said nothing. Like most of the master shapers, she knew he’d been unable to shape any of the elements when he first had come to the Academy, but he wasn’t about to remind her of that fact. It wasn’t something he was particularly excited to reminisce about, and she probably had no idea what it would be like to have been selected without having spent any time at one of the shaping schools within his home. He was different, and while he had been in Ephra, that difference had been tolerated. When he had come to the Academy, that difference had become quite a bit starker.

  “We weren’t all that far from your home when we went to the waste,” she said.

  “Ephra isn’t far from the waste,” Tolan said softly. Up this high, the sun shone brightly, giving warmth. Every so often, he would reach into the pocket of his cloak and run his finger along the runes of the furios. If only he had been able to figure out how to make a bondar for the other elements. He might be able to shape them in class, but that required his connection to the bondar in order to do so. He had managed with earth using a bondar during his display in the testing, but even with that, he still struggled to reach it consistently. The only element bond he seemed to reach with any fluidity and consistency was fire, and that was because of the furios. “Maybe a day or so, but not much more than that.”

  “What was it like living so close to it?” Master Marcella asked.

  “I didn’t really think all that much about it. Some believed us to be closer to the Draasin Lord, and—”

  “The Draasin Lord doesn’t cross the waste.”

  Tolan glanced over at her. “The disciples attacked in Amitan.”

  “You’ve been to the waste, Shaper Ethar. You’ve seen the power there. Nothing lives within the waste. If nothing lives there, then nothing could cross it. Even the most powerful Academy shapers struggle to travel very far into the waste.”

  He had seen that. Growing up, he’d always believed the Draasin Lord had been on the other side of the waste. The master shapers of Ephra had done nothing to alter that perception. Was there some reason they would want people to believe the Draasin Lord was on the other side of the waste?

  “Why let people believe that?”

  “If people knew the Draasin Lord and his followers were closer, they would be more afraid. The Academy shapers and the master shapers scattered throughout Terndahl are capable of stopping the disciples of the Draasin Lord.” She looked over at him, fixing him with a bright-eyed stare. “Now you have progressed to the second level, you will be expected to be a greater part of the opposition. When your training is done, whether at the end of this level or in the future, you will be called upon to serve. All shapers who trained at the Academy are considered master shapers. Now you have progressed beyond the first level, you too will one day be called Master Ethar.”

  Tolan hadn’t given that much thought before. It was true. Now he had passed through the first level—the one widely considered the most difficult— he would be considered a master. It meant that regardless of what else he did, he would always have a position within Terndahl. He would never be forced into the mines. He had a place. What did it matter if his connection to shaping was different than others?

  As long as he was the only one to know about it, it probably didn’t.

  “Where is the Draasin Lord?”

  She grunted. “If we knew that, we wouldn’t let him and his followers continue causing trouble. Unfortunately, they’ve remained hidden and continue to attack such as you’ve seen.”

  They paused. From here, the Shapers Path veered off in several different directions. Master Marcella performed a shaping, sending it streaking away. For a moment, Tolan wondered what she was doing, but he realized she was using her shaping to guide her.

  Could she really not know where they were going?

  Perhaps not.

  “How extensive are the Shapers Paths?”

  “They have been added to over the years, and now they crisscross most of Terndahl. In places like Amitan and some of the other great cities, people with minimal abilities can reach the lower levels of the Shapers Path, but in most places, they require shapers with a reasonable ability. As you can imagine, there is some danger in coming to the Shapers Path.”

  As extensive as they were, he wondered if they all served the same purpose as the Shapers Path around Amitan. That one had served as something of a
protective barrier, and it had helped conceal the Keystone. Would the other Shapers Paths be similar?

  “Are there others as extensive as the one around Amitan?”

  “Amitan, as the capital of Terndahl and the location of the Academy, is different than many other places.”

  “It’s different, but are there others?”

  She shrugged. “When I visited Par, they had fairly extensive Shapers Paths as well. Doman did too. A few other places.”

  Tolan tried to envision the various cities. Par was near the edge of Terndahl, much like Ephra and Doman. Amitan was not, situated near the heart of the empire that occupied most of the free land. Though there were other nations beyond the borders of Terndahl, they were so far away as to be unreachable.

  As they walked, wind gusted, and Master Marcella stopped, forming a shaping to push against it.

  “That’s odd,” she said softly.

  “What’s odd?”

  “Part of the shaping that binds the Shapers Path is one that settles all of the elements around it. There should be no wind blowing like that.”

  Another gust struck and she reacted, throwing up another shaping. The wind settled for a moment or two and then it picked up again, once more swirling with incredible force.

  There was something within it that struck Tolan as strange.

  Master Marcella forced him down but he looked up as she continued to shape, holding her hands outward, bracing herself against the wind. It pulled at her hair, sending it whipping around her. While she was a powerful shaper, the power of the wind was something more than she could stop.

  It was elemental wind.

  Tolan could feel it.