The Shape of Fire Read online

  Not that he needed to. With Thoren roaming as he did, Tolan had memories of the elemental’s travels. He had that connection to the elemental, which gave him an understanding of places he wouldn’t be able to visit otherwise. The bond worked both ways, though. The elemental knew what he knew and was able to experience much of what Tolan experienced.

  “I found hashin.”

  “You should leave him.”

  “You knew there was a free hashin?”

  “Not free.”

  “Then the runes are holding him.”

  “They may be.”

  “Should I free him from the runes?”

  “Hashin has never wanted to be confined in the way that he has.”

  “He isn’t in the bond, though.”

  “He chose to stay free of it.”

  “All of the hashin?”

  “All of hashin is connected.”

  “Connected? As you are connected to the fire and earth bond?”

  “Connected as in they are joined.”

  A sense of knowledge flowed through him. It came to him from the elemental, and he was able to see the way hashin flowed.

  The buildings in this village took on a different understanding.

  They were isolated, separated from much of the rest of Terndahl. Here, where very few shapers had to come to visit, and a place where the people of the village didn’t fear the elementals, there was a sense of power.

  They would have not feared the elementals regardless of what had been changing. These people understood the elementals and embraced their power.

  Tolan went to another door of another house, holding his hand above it.

  He focused on the sense of earth, pushing the door open.

  The other side was a small home. It was tidy, comfortable appearing, and the two people within both lay at awkward angles, both completely asleep. He could feel the sense of them, the sense of spirit rolling through them. If he were to focus on it, Tolan thought he might be able to use that sense and reach into their minds to find their experience with hashin.

  Inside the home was the same sort of pit as he’d seen in the other home.

  “What is it?” Master Minden asked, staying behind him.

  “Something hyza told me.”

  “He told you to come in here?”

  “He said hashin is connected.”

  Tolan went to the pit, making a circle around it. Unlike the other one, there was a low row of stones circling it. On each of the stones circling it, there was a small marking, or rune. Those runes were designed to contain power.

  They were designed to hold onto hashin.

  Tolan crouched down, running his hand around the circle before getting to his feet and hurrying back out the door and across the small street. He prepared to hold onto earth, drawing energy through hyza. Holding onto that connection to the elemental allowed him to reach for more of the earth sense than he would’ve otherwise.

  He let power fill him, and when he stepped forward he pushed outward with earth before shifting it, adding a hint of fire. Fire was an opposite to earth, countering its effects. He added wind, sending it spiraling through the room and swirling with the flames in order to confine the sense of hashin.

  Gradually, he was able to push the elemental back.

  When he reached the pit, he found the stones had been disrupted.

  Jersan and Kelvin would’ve had to have known that moving the stones was dangerous.

  Unless they hadn’t.

  That didn’t make sense either.

  He had the sense from Jersan that he had a significant understanding of the nature of the elementals. The younger man would have recognized the danger in releasing hashin in that way.

  His willingness to leave the elemental alone suggested either they didn’t really understand the purpose of their pits, or he had wanted them to be freed.

  Tolan set the stones back around the pit, holding onto the elemental as he did, forcing him down. He used considerable power, drawing it through his warrior sword, using the bondar to squeeze the sense of hashin back into the pit. It connected with the others.

  When it was done, Tolan took a step back, testing the energy within the room. He had no idea if he had been fully effective.

  “Interesting,” Master Minden said, standing at the door.

  “What is it?”

  “Before you did that, I detected something uneasy about the village.” She turned and looked behind her, frowning as she pushed out with a sense of spirit. “I wasn’t sure what it was, only that I was able to detect something out there. Even now, I’m still not entirely sure what it is I detect.”

  “Could it be hashin?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “What do you detect now?”

  “Now I detect a calming.”

  Tolan used a shaping of spirit, letting it sweep out from him. There was a mingling of earth and water, using the two aspects of hashin in order to delve into what might be out there. He probed, searching for whether there was anything he might be able to uncover.

  Now that he was here and understood the way the stones formed some sort of confinement for the elemental, a way of helping hold it in the earth, he didn’t know whether this helped or harmed hashin.

  “Both.”

  “How can it be both?” Tolan asked Thoren.

  “Hashin does not know how to be free.”

  “How can it not know how to be free?”

  “There is agitation within it. You have experienced something like that before.”

  Tolan nodded slowly. It had been a long time, but a memory of an elemental—elementals—came back to him. They were unlike any other elemental he’d ever experienced before, and within them was a mixture of one of the elements and spirit.

  Could hashin have a hint of spirit within it as well?

  When he’d attempted to probe the elemental, he’d detected both element bonds, earth and water, but he hadn’t gone digging to see if there was some sense of spirit.

  Tolan crouched at the edge of the pit, holding his hands on the other side of the stones that surrounded it, feeling the runes that were there. As he focused on the pit, holding onto the energy, he let that sense wash away from him and down into the pit, and then e probed for hashin.

  The elemental was buried deep in the ground now.

  That was strange. It was almost as if these stones pushed it deeper underground, holding it there.

  “Did you detect any spirit from hashin?”

  “Spirit?” Master Minden asked.

  Tolan glanced up at her, nodding. “I never tested to see whether there was a sense of spirit from it.”

  “There are no spirit elementals any longer,” Master Minden said.

  “There has to be a spirit elemental. There are elementals for each of the other elements, so it only makes sense that there would be one for spirit.”

  “The ancient shapers spoke of spirit that comes in a time of great need. It’s possible they knew if this was a spirit elemental. They were far more connected to the elementals than we are, and there’s no record from anything they left us of spirit elementals. Think about what you’ve seen within the hall of portraits. There’s nothing there that would suggest spirit.”

  Tolan thought about the hall of portraits, thinking about the images he’d seen depicted there. Within all of the paintings, there were only elementals of the other elements. Other than the strange lizard, though the glowing in the room left him suspecting it was one for fire, especially considering that it was a lizard.

  Tolan breathed out, focusing on what he could detect of hashin. He needed to release the elemental again in order to know with any certainty whether there was any sense of spirit there, but as there was considerable agitation, perhaps it was best if he let hashin calm before he attempted to unleash him again. It might be better if he took more time before doing so.

  There came an increasing sense of energy; a pressure upon spirit.

  Tolan looked up. The
village was coming back around.

  They could use another shaping of spirit to incapacitate the village again, but Tolan had to wonder if they should. The use of spirit like that, repeatedly using it to incapacitate the village, had some risks.

  “We should get going,” he said to Master Minden.

  “We don’t have to go just yet,” she said.

  “We do if we don’t want the village to come back around.”

  “The village isn’t quite coming back,” she said.

  Tolan focused on spirit, letting it wash away from him. He could feel the village and the way the people within it were starting to awaken. Could she not? Master Minden was powerful with her connection to spirit, and that she had been able to do this in the first place, that she’d used spirit to give them an opportunity to explore without others interfering, suggested she had control. It was possible she simply couldn’t feel the same things that Tolan could feel.

  He continued to focus on the sense of earth and water, probing outward. He gave them a moment, little more than that, and let that probe out from him. He couldn’t feel anything more than hashin buried deep beneath the ground.

  He didn’t have any feeling of it being connected the way the hyza had suggested, but perhaps there was a connection Tolan wasn’t able to feel. He could use his connection over the elements to better understand the nature of it, but the connection he felt was scattered.

  After a moment, he relaxed, leaning back.

  “I don’t detect anything else,” he said.

  “There might be something different we can try,” Master Minden said.

  She began to pull on a shaping, probing outward.

  It was the same shaping she’d used on the portrait. When it washed into the earth, there was a fluttering sense. Tolan felt it deep within himself. There was a reaction, almost as if hashin was responding.

  Or the element bond itself.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m only trying to see…”

  She sank to her knees.

  Master Minden leaned back, starting to fall, and Tolan was there, scooping her up and cradling her against him.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was weakened, and there was real worry in it. He’d never heard that worry from her before.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “I don’t think so. Just my pride.”

  He helped her to stand and pushed through her, using the same shaping she’d used to detect injury—water and spirit. When he did, he felt a reverberation, but nothing more than that.

  “We should go,” Tolan said.

  The village was coming around. He could feel how they were waking up; the nature of that alertness. Strangely, there was something to hashin Tolan would have to investigate again, but first he needed to get Master Minden out of here. He would need to return prepared for what they’d encountered. Maybe he would have a chance to better research hashin.

  Letting out a heavy breath, he stepped outside.

  A door across from them started to open.

  Tolan reached for each of the elements, wrapping them together, binding them. He added spirit, and with a blast from the warrior shaping, they were carried up and away on a bolt of lightning back toward Amitan.

  10

  The top of the Academy had served as Tolan’s return point. In the time since he’d learned about the warrior shaping, he’d used it to find a way to return safely, shaping himself back here so nothing would be damaged. He’d fortified the stone, trying to ensure that using the warrior shaping wouldn’t cause any damage to anything else. When he returned this time, the shaping power was significant, and there was a stirring up of the stone.

  Tolan stepped away and used a hint of earth to smooth back the shaping. He looked over at Master Minden, checking on her. She seemed a little bit slow, as if whatever she’d just encountered when she was shaping for hashin had been almost too much.

  “I’m fine, Master Ethar. I see the concern in your eyes.”

  “Shouldn’t there be concern?”

  “I’m not so old as to merit that level of concern.”

  He grinned at her, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead. “How old are you?”

  She glared at him through her milky eyes. “Another question I will not answer.”

  Tolan chuckled. It was one he’d long wondered about, and one to which he doubted he would ever find the answer. Master Minden kept that from him—and from everyone. She’d been in the Academy for as long as anyone remembered, and she’d served as a master librarian for all that time.

  “I just wanted to make sure you are unharmed.”

  “And you have.”

  Tolan watched her for a moment. “I’m going to visit the library for a while, and—”

  “There’s no need for you to spend your time researching this. You have other obligations that need your time. I can look into hashin for you.”

  “Who said I was going to look into hashin?”

  She frowned as she studied him. “You don’t need to hide your interest in the elemental, Master Ethar.”

  “I wanted to look into the interconnectedness of hashin. There might be others like it.” It was more than that, though. Master Minden wasn’t sharing everything with him. She’d been affected more than she let on. Was it hashin—or the bond? He’d felt something off. Maybe what he’d felt was only that of hashin.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “There was something hyza said. The elemental decided not to enter the bond, but it was also that hashin was different. I can look into that.”

  “I think you need to return to your instruction.”

  Master Minden started off the top of the tower and headed back down, weaving through the hall of portraits. Tolan paused there again, casting a glance along the length of the hallway. In the past, when he’d experienced strange and new experiences, what he could see in the paintings changed. He’d seen how the nature of the paintings would shift, almost as if the experience had unlocked something within him. As he looked along the hall, they were no different than before he and Master Minden had gone.

  “It doesn’t change quite as quickly as it once did,” he said.

  “No. Once you begin to see, you find there isn’t nearly as much that changes.”

  Tolan headed down the staircase and into the main hallway. He walked quickly, not paying attention to anything around him, his thoughts wandering, lost in what he’d seen and experienced, thinking only about the nature of elementals. As he did, he nearly collided with someone.

  “You need to watch where you’re… Ethar.”

  Tolan looked up to see Draln and Carson, though there was another Inquisitor standing beside Carson who Tolan didn’t recognize. For a moment, he had a vague spirit shaping, then it failed.

  “Draln.” He turned to Carson. “Did your Selection have any unusual features to it?”

  Carson watched him, frowning. “Unusual?”

  “I am just trying to understand if there has been anything different.”

  Carson grunted. “Other than how you brought two shapers into the Academy who had no business being here?”

  “They both passed the Selection,” Tolan said.

  Carson watched him. “Don’t you have a class to get to?”

  Tolan sighed. “I know you would rather be the Master of Spirit, but the Grand Master chose me.”

  “And you can be unchosen as well.” With that, Carson pushed past him, leading Draln and the other Inquisitor away.

  Tolan reached the entrance to the spirit tower and paused. Velthan was there. Was it a day for encounters that were meant to unsettle him?

  “Velthan. Can I help you with anything?”

  Velthan looked past him, pressing his lips together in a thin line before shaking his head. “I just wanted to let you know that the two students that we brought from Telfair have settled in.”

  Tolan blinked. That wasn’t what he had expecte
d out of Velthan. “Have the instructors been treating them well?”

  “I don’t get the sense that the master instructors are all that concerned about their presence,” Velthan said. “Especially since you were the one to have brought them here. They have settled in about as well as can be expected. Kelvin seems to enjoy wandering the Academy grounds. He’s even asked when he gets the opportunity to learn spirit.” Velthan shook his head. “Were we also eager when we were that level?”

  Tolan chuckled. “I think that the master shapers say the same thing about all of us.”

  “Perhaps they do.” Velthan glanced up at the spirit tower. “Will you be teaching again soon?”

  It took Tolan a moment to realize what he was getting at. “I will be.”

  “Good. I guess…” Velthan shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Tolan started to prepare his shaping. “I will be there for the next lesson.”

  Using wind and fire, the invisible power carried him up to the spirit tower. He looked down at a massive symbol etched on the ground within the spirit tower. The rune was a series of interlocking lines that twisted together in a wavy triangular shape, forming the traditional symbol for spirit. He’d studied it for years, trying to better understand the nature of the rune and whether there was anything he might be able to master, though the power of the rune wasn’t the easiest to reach.

  He pushed power through the rune in a practiced shaping. It allowed him to detect much of what happened throughout the Academy. Every time that he returned, Tolan pressed power out through that rune, letting it flow away through the Academy and out through the city itself. It was a habit now, but when he’d first started doing it, Tolan had wanted to see if there was anything he might be able to uncover in the city; whether there was any danger here.