The Shape of Fire Read online

  “Because there aren’t as many who can shape it,” Gary said.

  “Correct. There aren’t as many who can shape it. It makes those who are capable of shaping spirit valuable in a very different way.”

  “Inquisitors,” someone said softly.

  Tolan wasn’t able to tell who said it, though from the sudden sense of nervousness he detected across the room, he was able to pinpoint it. That was one advantage he had with spirit. Students weren’t going to be able to get away with anything in his class. He hadn’t considered that possibility when he had been a student. He also hadn’t studied under an instructor who was quite like him. His own instructor in spirit, such as it was, had been skilled—but had also been used. At that time, many people had been used.

  “The inquisitors once were the way all spirit shapers found themselves drawn.”

  “Is it true that you were subject to an Inquisition?”

  Tolan paused, smiling. It was a question that he got from each level that passed through, and he was surprised that it had taken this long for the students to come to him with it. “I was subject to an Inquisition.”

  “Why would a master shaper be subjected to one?”

  Tolan looked over at the person who’d asked the question. He shook his head. “I wasn’t a master shaper at the time. I was a student, much like yourself. I was believed to have done something I had not done.”

  It was difficult for him to acknowledge even now that the Inquisition might have been beneficial to him. There had been a time where he’d felt as if he had been targeted—and he had been. At the same time, having spent time in the Inquisition, he’d learned something about himself. He’d opened himself to spirit. It was because of that Inquisition that he’d recognized the power locked within him; power that had been shaped so he wouldn’t remember it. If not for the Inquisition, Tolan might not ever have learned what he was capable of doing.

  There was another series of murmurs.

  “Don’t worry. Students aren’t likely to be subjected to an Inquisition. It was a different time then. We had different fears.”

  “Is it true that you helped capture the Draasin Lord?”

  “The Draasin Lord is not what we believed him to be at the time.”

  “Is that true?” someone else asked.

  Tolan nodded. “I suppose that’s true.”

  “Where is he imprisoned?”

  “The Draasin Lord is not imprisoned.”

  “You killed him?”

  Tolan looked over at Rachel, the slightly older second-level student. She was slower to progress than her peers, which meant she had been held back in a sense. She had been a part of this discussion one other time, and having her make comments like that now disappointed him.

  “I didn’t kill him, but I wasn’t able to save him either.”

  He needed to get the conversation off this topic. The discussion about the so-called Draasin Lord, and the person who had once attacked the Academy, wasn’t beneficial. It was beneficial for the students to know that they were in no danger from the Draasin Lord. And they were not. There was nothing that would place them in any danger. Tolan had seen to that. Besides, they didn’t need to know that his mother had called herself the Draasin Lord. They didn’t need to know she had been spirit shaped and controlled. They didn’t need to know he had watched her remains burned by the draasin.

  “Why don’t we get back to understanding spirit? Everything comes back to the fact that we are all connected. You and me and everyone here. All of us have a sense of spirit. That is what makes us human.”

  “If we all have spirit, then why can’t we all shape spirit?” Clarice asked.

  “Who is to say we can’t?”

  Tolan swept his gaze around them. This was the part of the class he always tried to enforce. He wanted everyone to know that the possibility of shaping spirit existed, whether or not they would succeed in it. If they believed they were incapable of it, they would stop trying. It was a very different experience than the other elements. With the other elements, there was a bondar for them to borrow to see if there was any way to delve into the power of the element. Even when Tolan had no shaping ability, he’d been able to use bondars, and he had been able to find a way to recognize the power that existed in the world. Without the bondar, there would have been no way of touching the elements.

  “Again, I would like you to close your eyes and focus on what you sense of yourself. It’s only through knowing yourself that you can better understand the nature of spirit. Find that sense within you, and then you can see if you can use it outwardly.”

  Tolan stepped away, allowing the students the time to begin to work on their own. He wasn’t going to intervene. At this point, it was a matter of them attempting it. He went to the back of the room, taking a seat at the desk and shuffling papers around. Most of them were administrative tasks. As the Master of Spirit, there were tasks he was asked to do within the Academy and assignments that he needed to demand of the students. He had to work through them, ensuring the students were completing the work in the necessary fashion. It was mindless, and he didn’t really even need to work through these assignments in order to understand whether or not the students were succeeding in the task he had asked of them.

  Gradually, shapers began to depart. After they attempted what he asked of them enough times, they were not required to remain. Tolan had no interest in forcing them to stay here, especially as there wasn’t much that some of them would even be able to do. It was better for them to go when they felt as if they had tried enough.

  “Master Ethar?”

  He looked up and wasn’t surprised to see Clarice standing in front of him. “What is it, Shaper Elias?”

  “I’ve been thinking about what you were saying. How spirit is different.”

  “Good.”

  “Well, if spirit is different, and there aren’t nearly as many spirit shapers, is that because there is no spirit bond?”

  Tolan rested his arms on the table, leaning forward. It was unusual for a student at this level to make the connection. Not that he would be surprised by Clarice. She had proven she was clever. “What do you think?”

  “My experience with the other bonds is such that they can be reached by those with even a middling power. I remember when I was still learning, I was able to use a bondar and reach for earth. I don’t have much in the way of earth connection naturally, and so having the bondar allowed me to at least detect that there was more power there.”

  Tolan nodded. “The bondars are beneficial, even within the Academy.”

  “I try not to use them. They’re too easy to come to depend upon.”

  Tolan resisted the urge to smile. It was something Ferrah had said to him as well. Many of the stronger shapers within each level believed bondars were something of a crutch. Gaining an understanding of the power within the element bond, and of the element itself, was more advantageous than avoiding it and pretending that they were more powerful than they actually were.

  It was something Tolan didn’t argue with students over. There was no point in doing so. He wanted students to decide if what they wanted, and the shaping that they wanted to try to work on, would make a difference.

  “Is there a bondar for spirit?”

  Tolan nodded slowly. He held out his hand. On it was a small ring. His father had made it, engraving the markings for spirit, but the spirit bondar functioned in a way that was far more different than the other bondars. Clarice was right. There was no spirit bond, not the way there was for the other elements, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t a way to use spirit through the bondar.

  “How does it work if there’s no bond?”

  “Are you certain that there isn’t a bond?”

  “I’ve been paying attention to what the other instructors have been saying, and how your class is different.”

  “How is my class different?”

  “You speak of attempting to shape.”

  “Your other
instructors attempt to teach the students to shape as well.”

  “All of us come here with some shaping ability.”

  Tolan nodded. “Most do.”

  She frowned a moment but pushed forward. “The other classes work on shaping, but they also have other aspects to their instruction that are different. Aspects that we don’t gain when we are in the other shaping Academies.”

  She hesitated, almost as if she were afraid to say what was on her mind. Tolan, on the other hand, wanted her to press forward. It was important for her to make the connection he suspected she was about to make.

  “You don’t talk about elementals; not the way they do. The other instructors speak of them as a part of the bond. If there aren’t any elementals, then how are there any bonds?”

  Tolan smiled. “As far as we know, there are no spirit elementals.”

  “Is that why there’s no spirit bond?”

  “The elementals and the bonds have been linked together for centuries,” Tolan said. “The connection has bound us to the elementals in a way most people do not fully appreciate.”

  “Then how do you reach spirit?”

  “Spirit comes from within.”

  She paused, twisting her hands. Tolan waited, hoping that she would make the next leap. There were far too few students who even considered that possibility.

  “What about the other elements?”

  “What about them?”

  “Is there a way to reach them from within?”

  “Some can,” Tolan said.

  “They can?”

  “It is uncommon. I can’t explain to you why. The only thing I can speculate is that our reliance upon the element bonds has made it so any natural ability to reach the elements has faded. Over time, we developed a reliance upon the element bonds, which has made it so anyone who might once have been able to reach the elements on their own without using the element bonds has lost that potential.”

  There was another possibility that Tolan had considered, but it hadn’t been borne out. The shapers of considerable strength might also be the same shapers who had the ability to reach the element on their own. If they were separated from the element bonds, such as going out onto the waste and forcing themselves to experience that emptiness, there was the hope and the possibility that they might be able to develop the ability to shape without the bond.

  He had tried it with Ferrah. She was a powerful shaper, but despite that she still had not proven she was able to shape without access to the bondar while out on the waste. It was something Tolan wanted her to keep working on, but part of the task required Ferrah to believe that she was able to do so. That was always a part of it. Accomplishing what was deemed impossible was in fact impossible without belief in oneself.

  “How can I learn to do this?”

  “Do you think you could?”

  “I think…” Clarice glanced over her shoulder, but the classroom was otherwise empty. “I think there should be a way for me to do so. I feel like I’m getting close to reaching spirit.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “There are always a few within each level who have the potential to reach spirit. The challenge for them is doing so. Even if they are able to reach for spirit, there are some who never do—and whether that’s because of something within themselves that blocks that potential or they never truly believe, it is a loss nonetheless.”

  “How did you first reach spirit?”

  “I went through an Inquisition.”

  Her eyes widened.

  Tolan smiled, leaning back and glancing down at the pages. He had quite a bit of work left remaining, and none of it was all that intriguing. What he needed to do was to focus on what was necessary when it came to understanding the earth bond and what had happened with hashin, but in the time since they had returned to the Academy, Tolan had been preoccupied with his responsibilities. There hadn’t been time to try to understand it.

  “Is that what will be required for me if I want to reach spirit?”

  “As I said, the Inquisition was unusual. There are not many students who have been forced to go through one.”

  “How many have?”

  “I think I’m the only one.” He looked down at the table. “If you’re interested in understanding more, I would recommend that you find a place where you can acquire the knowledge you seek.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Where do you think?” Tolan had long taken the approach that it wasn’t his responsibility to force knowledge upon those who weren’t ready for it. And with something like this, something that involved a higher level of understanding, it was going to be necessary for her to find the information on her own and to figure out if it was something that she truly wanted to learn, or whether it was something that she only wanted to ask about.

  “I think I know what you mean.”

  “Good. Now, it’s time for you to be going. Your classmates will be concerned about the time you spent here.”

  She glanced behind her, shaking her head. “I doubt they’ll be concerned about anything.”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t always get along,” she said.

  “You don’t want to separate yourself from those who can help you learn. You might not always love your classmates, but you might be surprised at who you’ll be forced to work with over the years.”

  She nodded, heading away.

  Tolan sat in place for a long moment, staring at the pages in front of him, debating what he needed to do. The stack of papers near him demanded his attention, but every so often, his mind drifted. Even here, surrounded as he was, he could feel the energy upon him from the earth bond. He could feel the sense of it pressing in upon him, and he could feel the way that it was tugging at his sensation.

  He needed to find a way to dive into the bond and better understand what had taken place.

  What he really needed was a way to better understand what the Guardian had said.

  There was a place he could go, but perhaps he didn’t need to venture beyond Amitan in order to find those answers. Perhaps it was time for him to step back within the Convergence.

  14

  Tolan stood at the edge of the pool of silver liquid, focusing on what he was able to detect within it. There was a sense of power from the Convergence, much like there was a sense of power around every Convergence. Tolan had yet to learn how many were in the world, though there were at least seven throughout Terndahl. This one was situated within an enormous cavern, far beneath the Academy building itself in a place very few people within the Academy were aware of. More people now were aware of it, though that was out of necessity.

  He swept his gaze around the inside of the cavern and focused on the power he could feel. There was energy that rose up, drifting not just from the Convergence but drawn out of that pool and carried somewhere else. The runes on the Academy used the power of the Convergence, focusing it and allowing the master shapers who understood the runes to use it. It was this power that the rune within his spirit tower connected to.

  There was something to be said about coming here and experiencing the power that existed here and feeling the energy. Not only that, but stepping into the Convergence opened him to something more.

  Using a shaping of earth and wind, along with spirit, Tolan closed off the room. There would be a few shapers who would recognize what he did and would be able to slip past it, but the only ones likely to do so would be the Grand Master and Master Minden. He doubted they would even come down here. It wasn’t a place either of them visited that often.

  Taking his clothes off, he folded them and set them outside the Convergence. Going in fully dressed would only burn off his clothing, and Tolan had no interest in running through the Academy nude. It was bad enough when he’d been a student, but now that he was a master shaper—and the Master of Spirit—the rumors that would spread weren’t the kind he wanted to encourage.

  Tolan used
a shaping of wind to carry him up and over the center of the Convergence. Gradually, he lowered himself down, feeling the cool touch of the power of the Convergence as it swept up his legs, tingling through him and rising up through his body. He lowered himself slowly, though he struggled as the sense of power began to surge within him.

  The Convergence was power, and through it, he was able to reach for an incredible force. He tried not to think about just how much power was sweeping into him. For now, all he wanted was to be able to open himself up to it and grasp the nature of that power.

  When he settled fully into the pool of liquid, Tolan breathed in and out slowly. He embraced the power, letting it flow through him.

  He had visited the Convergence many times over the years. At first, when he had discovered the Convergence, Tolan had believed there was a need to avoid entering it unless it was an emergency. At that time, Tolan hadn’t fully understood the nature of the power, or the way that it connected to each of the elements. It was almost as if reaching into the Convergence allowed him to touch the elements directly.

  He held onto the sense of the Convergence and focused as he thought about the earth bond.

  This was the reason that he had come.

  The earth bond was there, flowing within him. Tolan held onto the awareness of the bond, focusing on it. Tolan pressed more out from inside him. There was power and understanding.

  He probed with earth. In doing so, he was able to reach for the sense of the various earth shapers all around him. He could feel them throughout Amitan. There were hundreds of them. Out beyond there, when he pushed farther, the sense of earth began to fade. Not from what existed around him but from the sense of the bond. There were other shapers, but they were not nearly as concentrated as they were within Amitan.

  The farther he pushed, the easier it was to detect more connections to earth. There was that of the elementals, a power that pressed upon him. The elementals wanted him to detect them and connect to them. It was a strange thing to feel and be aware of, but as he focused on that, he could feel the way the elementals practically drew the earth bond toward them.