The Wind Rages (Elemental Academy Book 4) Read online

  The Wind Rages

  Elemental Academy Book 4

  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

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Author’s Note

  Also by D.K. Holmberg

  1

  Tolan stared out at the vast expanse of the waste, his gaze lingering on the rocky ground stretching before him. There was nothing in the waste. No sense of the elements. Nothing of the elementals. No shaping. For the first time in his life, that scared him.

  There was another emotion that needed to be dealt with first. Anger.

  Running his hands across his jacket, he smoothed it out, wishing he had his furios or other bondars, and yet here he was, empty-handed, about to be asked to head into the most dangerous place in the world.

  “Why did you bring me here?” Tolan asked.

  “This is the next step in your training,” his father said.

  Tolan looked over at him. In the hours since his rescue from Amitan, his father had been on edge. Partly, that came from the fact he was running from the potential shapers of Terndahl, and partly it came from the fact that it seemed to Tolan as if his father didn’t want to answer him.

  All he needed was the answer to a simple question. Did they serve the Draasin Lord?

  Despite wanting—needing—that answer, his father had been silent, racing away from Amitan and everything Tolan knew, and toward something else. He didn’t have any idea what would be asked of him.

  All he knew was he’d been banished from the Academy. The Inquisitors had done it. Aela had done it.

  And he couldn’t return.

  How many left behind had been hurt by the Inquisitors? He hoped none but considering what they had done to him and the way they had been willing to attack, he wasn’t convinced that was the case.

  “You haven’t told me anything yet.”

  “I’ve told you what it’s safe to tell you,” his father said.

  Tolan tore his gaze away from the waste. It was emptiness. Desolation. Nothing but rock and desert. Even the power of the element bonds had abandoned people out in the waste. There was no reason for him to venture out there, nothing other than the test the Academy used on young shapers.

  “Do you know what they said about you in Ephra?” Tolan asked. They weren’t so far from Ephra now. They were on an edge of the waste unfamiliar to Tolan, closer to the northern border than he’d ever been, with Ephra a few days from here. The shaping used to carry them had been impressive, but now Tolan had experienced it, he thought he could recreate it.

  “I’m sure they said a great many things,” his father said.

  “They did. They accused you of serving him.”

  There it was. He’d managed to say it, and even though he had, he watched his father, waiting for him to give him some sort of sign he didn’t serve the Draasin Lord.

  “They said it out of fear, I imagine,” his father said.

  Tolan looked up at him. In the chase from Amitan, he hadn’t had the opportunity to really look at his father and try to understand what had happened with him. Now he was here before him, Tolan saw the same man he’d known growing up. The same dark hair, now peppered with much more gray. The same sharp chin. His hair was shorter. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes ran deeper. The clothes he wore were a different style and cut, but otherwise, he was still the same man.

  At the same time, he wasn’t. The man Tolan had known had been a craftsman, an artisan, and had served Ephra.

  “How could they say it out of anything other than fear?” Tolan asked.

  “They said it out of ignorance, as well.”

  “You haven’t denied anything.”

  His father sighed, stepping toward the waste. He seemed unmindful of the fact one foot was on the border of Terndahl and one foot practically across the border, very nearly in the waste.

  “You shouldn’t have needed rescue yet.”

  “You expected this?”

  “We weren’t able to bring you with us. You were too young, and the road too dangerous. We wanted to.”

  “You’re saying it’s all true.”

  His father turned to him. “I’m saying there is much you don’t understand. I don’t know you can understand.”

  “I understand my father and mother abandoned me. You left me for the Draasin Lord.”

  Now he’d said it. Tolan ventured a glance behind him, looking over to where the disciples remained. There were three with his father, three disciples of the Draasin Lord, men and women who served, who wanted nothing more than to summon the power of the elementals in order to serve the Draasin Lord. Ones who wanted to release and control the elementals.

  That might be why Tolan felt the most conflicted. In his time here, he’d come to understand the elementals were nothing to fear, and he didn’t want them controlled. He’d felt their pain when they had been forced back into the bond. He had known the agony the elementals had known, and had felt the desire to do anything he could in order to ensure they no longer suffered.

  His father—and the disciples of the Draasin Lord—didn’t just want to free the elementals from the bond. They wanted control over them.

  “It was dangerous for you to come. You weren’t ready.”

  “And I’m ready now?”

  “Not as ready as your mother would have liked, but the time had come.”

  “Why now?”

  “Because now you can touch the elements.”

  Tolan licked his lips. “I’m not supposed to be a shaper,” he whispered, looking out at the waste. “I’m not supposed to be anything here.”

  “Not supposed to? And who decides what you are and are not supposed to do?”

  “All of this,” he said, motioning toward Terndahl, waving back toward Amitan and the Academy, “was an accident. I went to a Selection to support a friend.”

  “You did what?”

  Tolan felt a flush work through him. “I couldn’t shape. I had some sensing ability, but not enough that I would even be interesting to the local shaping academies. I went to the Selection in order to support Tanner.”

  “He wouldn’t even have known.”

  “I didn’t know that at the time.”

  His father chuckled. Tolan tried to decide if there was any darkness within it but couldn’t tell. Maybe there wasn’t. Maybe his father really did just laugh at the idea that Tolan had gone to a Selection to support a friend. The Great M
other knew he had laughed about it often enough.

  “It’s unfortunate we weren’t able to be there with you, to guide you, to help you understand the world as we know it.”

  “As you know it? Had you stayed, you would have forced me to serve the Draasin Lord. You still want to force me to serve the Draasin Lord.”

  “And what do you think that means?”

  Tolan looked around him. Strangely, he felt almost as if he was just as much a prisoner now as he had when in the Inquisition. When he’d been there, there had been a desire to break something out of his mind, though at the time, Tolan hadn’t known he needed anything in his mind broken free. He understood that much better now.

  “I know it means you want to release the elementals from their bonds.”

  His father nodded. “That is true.”

  Tolan thought of the various elementals he had experience with. Since going to the Academy, he had known many of the elementals, and even felt as if he had communicated with some of them. He wasn’t sure if it was true or not, but there was the feeling he had, and the feeling the elementals had wanted him to know what they were thinking, wanted him to know how he could help them.

  It was how he had known they didn’t want to return to the bond. There was pain within the bond, and fear.

  “And the Draasin Lord seeks to use their power.”

  His father’s eyes twitched a moment. “In a way.”

  Tolan licked his lips. Saying these things out loud left him scared and troubled, but it was better than keeping them to himself. It was better to admit what he feared, to share what he believed, than to hold it inside and continue to worry about it. That worry did nothing other than leave more worry.

  “And you want the Draasin Lord to control the elementals.”

  His father’s gaze drifted to the disciples. They were standing guard, peering away from the waste as they looked toward Amitan. There was no reason for them to focus on the waste. There was nothing out there. There wasn’t even any sense of the element bonds, so there really was no reason for them to keep their attention fixed anywhere but toward the settled places of Terndahl.

  “This is the part I’m not sure you’re ready for.”

  “To talk about the Draasin Lord? I suppose you’re more like the Academy than I realized.”

  “The Academy doesn’t want to talk about him?”

  Tolan shook his head. “I know he studied in Amitan.”

  “That is true in a way.”

  “You know him?”

  A slight smile curved his lips, one reminding Tolan of how he’d smiled at his mother when she asked him to stop tinkering in his shop. “Very well.”

  “And you want the same things he wants?”

  “I do, but not for the reasons you think.”

  Were it any person other than his father, Tolan thought he might run, to escape and get anywhere but here. But this was his father. It had been years since he had seen him. He’d known they weren’t dead—at least, he’d hoped they weren’t dead—but knowing a thing and seeing it play out were very different experiences.

  For so long, Tolan had wanted nothing more than to return home. He had wanted to feel the comfortable embrace of his mother, to hear his father offer the kind of advice he often would offer while sitting in his shop and working. When they’d disappeared, so much had changed for him. So much had been harder.

  And here his father now stood before him, trying to tell Tolan he didn’t understand the things he’d seen and heard.

  Worse, the man in front of him, the man responsible for the things he now knew his father to be responsible for, wasn’t the kind of person he remembered as a child.

  That made him question how well he’d ever known his parents. Could they have hidden that side of themselves so well, even from him?

  He never would have believed it before, but now… now he wasn’t sure he could believe anything else.

  “Why don’t you help me understand.”

  His father took a deep breath, and then he nodded. He stepped forward, making his way out into the waste. “Join me out here.”

  Tolan hesitated. The last time he’d been out on the waste, he hadn’t been nearly as attached to his connection to shaping as he was now. He could shape, which meant being separated from that ability would be a far more startling experience than it had been when he’d come through here before.

  At the same time, Tolan hadn’t cared. He had been willing to venture deeper into the waste than anyone else in his class, anyone other than the Grand Master.

  He took a step forward.

  When he did, everything shifted. There was a sense of loss; suddenly, the power he knew within himself, the power connecting him to the elements and the element bonds along with the elementals, was gone.

  It was a hollowness. An emptiness. And through it, Tolan felt the pain of the absence acutely.

  “What do you notice out here on the waste?”

  “I notice there’s no way for me to shape.”

  His father nodded. He motioned all around him. “This place, this waste, is a barrier.”

  “A barrier?” In his time growing up in Ephra, they’d been taught the reason for the waste was because of the Draasin Lord and his destruction, though Tolan didn’t even think that was necessarily accurate. If it were because of the Draasin Lord, then the waste would have been there only since his attacks, and those who lived near it understood the waste had been here far longer than that.

  “It is. It’s a barrier isolating Terndahl.”

  “Let me guess: you would break that isolation?”

  His father chuckled. “I would, but probably not for the reasons you think. What do you feel when you’re out here?”

  “I don’t feel anything. That’s the whole point of the waste. We’re separated from the bond.”

  “I understand we’re separated from the element bonds. What I’m asking is what do you feel?”

  His father continued walking, leading Tolan deeper and deeper into the waste. A part of him hesitated, wondering if he should follow, but this was his father.

  “I feel emptiness,” Tolan said as he walked. It had always been that way, always the overwhelming sense when he had been out on the waste. There was nothing.

  “Where do you feel the emptiness?”

  “What are you getting at, Father?”

  “It’s a simple question, Tolan. Where do you feel the emptiness?”

  “I feel it everywhere.”

  “Everywhere?”

  “It’s an absence of the elementals.”

  His father regarded him for a moment. “Most would say it’s an absence of their connection to the bond.”

  Tolan cursed to himself silently. He wasn’t sure how much to reveal about his connection to the elementals just yet.

  “You are aware of the elementals, aren’t you?” his father asked.

  “You already know the answer to that,” Tolan said.

  “I know the answer, but I’d like for you to admit to the answer, to the truth, as well.”

  “There is no truth.”

  “None? I think you missed the point. What do you notice about this place?”

  “I already told you,” Tolan said.

  “What does that mean to you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “See? That’s why you aren’t ready.”

  “I don’t understand why I’m not ready.”

  “The Academy and people of Terndahl would have you believe the elementals are dangerous.”

  Tolan met his father’s gaze.

  “I can see from your face that you already know they are not.”

  Tolan shook his head. “I don’t think they are.”

  “Why?”

  Tolan shrugged. “I just don’t.”

  His father smiled at him. “You need to answer a little bit better than that.”

  “Why do I need to? I don’t think they’re dangerous. Not the way the master shapers at the Academy do.”


  “What has been your experience with them?”

  “What’s the point of all of this?”

  “The point is to help you to understand the nature of the elementals, Tolan.”

  He looked around the waste. What was there to understand? He recognized the elementals were dangerous. How could he recognize anything else? He had been around them enough that he knew they wanted to help. They wanted their freedom. They didn’t want to be trapped within the bond.

  And that might be the most compelling reason.

  “I can believe the elementals don’t want to be trapped within the bond and also believe the Draasin Lord would like to harm them.”

  “That’s where the Academy influence reveals itself. The Academy fears the elementals, but for reasons different than you know. If the elementals are pulled from the bonds, they are weakened.”

  “The elementals are weakened?”

  “The bonds. The shapers. Everyone is weakened. Everyone other than the elementals.”

  “Why do you believe that?”

  “Look there,” his father said, motioning toward Terndahl. At the edge of the waste, everything began to change, shifting from deep green grasses and trees to the barren and unlivable rock. It was an abrupt line, a clear demarcation between the boundary of Terndahl and that of the waste. He had always thought it strange. It was more than just a separation. It was a distinction, a point where power shifted, and it was where there was nothing beyond it. “You can see the effect of the element bonds. You can see the power that having access to shaping grants the people of Terndahl.” He turned and motioned to the waste. “And you can see what happens when the elementals are pulled free from the land.”

  “The elementals are pulled free in Terndahl, too.”

  “No. They want you to believe they are, but there are places where the elementals are trapped. They aren’t held within the bond so much as held within the land, confined so they can’t escape. It keeps Terndahl from looking like the waste.”