Cycle of Fire (The Cloud Warrior Saga Book 11) Read online

  He’s not only destruction, he wants to end everything that we are, Asgar.

  I know.

  Tan sighed. Asgar had been tainted by the darkness, if only briefly. Long enough for him to fear it happening again. If the draasin could be tainted, what prevented others from being tainted, other than his binding to spirit?

  It was one more thing that he had changed. The bond—something that he had not even really known about until a year ago—had changed because of him. The elements connecting to the bond didn’t seem like they’d been changed, but could he be certain?

  That was something else he’d watched for. He owed it to the elementals to observe and see if there was anything that changed because of what he’d done, and so far he couldn’t tell. The draasin and the hounds had always been visible, but now he was beginning to think that the wind elementals were becoming visible as well. Tan didn’t know if that were true, or whether it was his imagination or fear. No others seemed able to see them, so maybe it really was only his connection to the bonds.

  Where is she?

  Tan sent the connection to wyln. The wind elemental was more common in Xsa, stronger in much the way saa was stronger in Par. He asked the question through the wind bond, not bothering to send it on the wind as he once would have. Spending a year practicing had made his connection to the bond much easier than it had been. Now he remained connected most of the time. There had to be a danger to doing so, but so far he had only experienced fatigue, and even that began to fade.

  Maelen.

  It came like a breath, nothing more than a whisper, but with a distinct voice. Not ara—that was cold and strong—and not ashi—that was hot and breathy. Wyln had always been weaker, quiet and hard for him to fully understand, except here.

  I search for the Mistress of Darkness.

  That was how the elementals referred to Marin, and Tan figured it made the most sense. She was no longer the Mistress of Souls, not as she had been in Par-shon. Mistress of Darkness gave her a more ominous feel, but it was well deserved.

  She is here.

  Can you hold her?

  It is dangerous, Maelen. She can control the darkness. If we intervene, she destroys.

  Spirit should protect them, but why wouldn’t the elementals believe that they would be safe? I have connected wind to spirit. She can’t corrupt you the way that she did before.

  She can still destroy.

  That was the first that he’d heard of that.

  Asgar?

  The elemental seemed to ignore his call.

  What does it mean that she could destroy?

  Asgar snorted, steam spewing from his nostrils. There is the possibility that she can use the connection to the darkness to destroy. The Mother cannot, but Voidan can use its power to undo what the Mother created.

  That was something he hadn’t considered, but the elementals must have. Was that what they were keeping from him? If so, then the threat of not only Marin, but of all of this darkness, was much greater than he’d realized.

  I think you’ve been holding back on me.

  Only because we know what you will do if you know the truth.

  Which is? She needs to be stopped. The darkness needs to be confined. Knowing how dangerous it is only makes me more motivated to see that it cannot harm any others.

  That is my fear, Maelen.

  They circled an island that was set aside from some of the others. On one end of the island, Tan noted a pile of rubble, debris that he suspected had once been a building of some sort. The air here had a stink to it. Not the foul odor of rot or of decay, but a slimy sort of odor, one that he couldn’t quite put his finger on why it bothered him so much.

  What is it? he asked Asgar.

  That is the scent of Undoing.

  The way he said it made it sound like something more than a simple description. What do you mean by Undoing?

  It is why you must be careful, Maelen. She has grown more tightly connected to Voidan. If she has discovered the secret to Undoing, then all that the Mother created is in danger.

  How can I stop her?

  You are chosen by the Mother. You are the Shaper of Light. You are the only one who can.

  He sensed there was something more than what Asgar was telling him. You cannot come closer, can you?

  The Undoing.

  That was no answer, at least, not one that made any sort of sense to him, but Asgar said it in such an emphatic way that Tan knew he couldn’t ask the draasin to risk himself and get too close to the island.

  And he understood why wyln didn’t want to help him.

  There was something the draasin could do.

  If she escaped, do what you can to confine her. You can form a binding—

  The elementals cannot do such a thing.

  Tan had had this argument with them before. He suspected that were he able to get the elementals themselves to help form the binding, they would be more powerful than even what the shapers were able to create. The elementals had helped stave off the attack from the darkness, but using them in the actual creation of the binding seemed like something else, something that would be far more effective.

  Asgar. You have to try. If she escapes me, we will be in real danger. If we know where she is, you and the other hatchlings—Tan looked over at them, flying alongside him and mostly silent during the flight—need to confine her. The other elementals need to participate in the binding. They know the pattern.

  You know what you ask?

  Tan swallowed. He suspected the price it would require of the elementals. As with so many bonds, it would likely confine them and hold them in place. It would be the end of those elementals. For Asgar, it meant a loss of freedom. It meant he would be lost. The other hatchlings. Whatever wind, earth, and water elementals were involved. But it would hold Marin. Tan prayed that it would.

  I know.

  Then we will do this for you, Maelen.

  He jumped from Asgar, pulling on the wind and shaping his way toward the island.

  As he traveled, he felt the pull of the wind against his hair, the salt spray of the sea, and even the tug of earth on his senses. Tan ignored all of it, focused on the absence of spirit—of everything—on the island. That would be Marin.

  She was there. He felt her, and shaped himself to her.

  Wind whipped around him, brutal in some ways. Tan didn’t add spirit to his shaping as he would when traveling by lightning, jumping from the clouds the way the warriors of old once had. Doing so gave him less of a sense of movement and less control over where he appeared. This way, he was able to use his connection to the elements—and even to the bond—and sense where to find Marin.

  The landscape felt as awful as it smelled. There was a foulness to it, one that he’d detected before when facing the darkness in Norilan. This was a sort of blackness, something that came across as simply wrong. There was no other way to describe it.

  Bleak black rock piled around him. Once there had been trees, but now there were only the husks of the trunks, nothing more than towering black twisted fingers, rising from the ground as if a taunt to the Mother. Even the grass that once must have grown here had been changed, less grass and more a dark gray, as if life itself had been sucked from here.

  How long had Marin been here?

  If this was the Undoing, then Tan needed to intervene, but was there anything that he could do? Pulling on the energy of the bonds, reaching for each of the elements, and through them reaching for spirit as well to bind them, he sent a shaping through the ground, through a clump of grass. Where his shaping struck, life bloomed again, the grass taking on color and brightness. Some of the foul, slippery evil faded.

  And then it was gone.

  When he’d released his shaping, everything else had gone out with it. The Undoing pushed back, removing what he’d done, taking on something of a life of its own.

  Would it spread?

  What would happen if the Undoing reached the sea? Would it spread across the wat
er, reaching toward the next isle, and the next? Would it be able to reach Par and then the kingdoms?

  Tan probed through his connection to water and discovered the sea itself contained the Undoing. Water, an element of healing, did what it could to prevent the spread of the Undoing. Tan couldn’t tell how long it would last and whether it would remain indefinitely, but for now it held.

  There was something else he could try.

  Reaching for the shaping, he created the binding, layering it in the air above the dried grasses, twisting it together, forging it in such a way that the binding itself gained strength. When the twisting shape formed, Tan began to settle it upon the grass, pressing it into the ground, and forcing the binding deeper. As he did, the shaping pushed back the darkness, doing what his other shaping had been unable to do.

  Life returned.

  Green began to spread out from the binding. Tan waited, wondering how far his shaping would affect, and was disappointed to see that it spread in a circle only a hundred feet or so around him. To really help this land, he would have to layer the binding over and over, pressing back the Undoing. At least there was something that he could do.

  Where was Marin?

  He’d allowed himself to be taken by the intrigue of trying to discover a way to thwart the Undoing, enough that he ignored the very reason that he’d come in the first place.

  The Undoing itself was like a void upon his ability to sense, but through it, he searched for a flicker of anything that would indicate life. The elementals had detected her here, and Tan could sense her, but wasn’t certain quite where.

  Now that he was here, he was impressed that the elementals had been willing to search. With the Undoing, he didn’t know what effect it would have on the wind as it blew through. If the unnatural stillness around him was any indication, the impact was not good. Would it destroy even the wind?

  Before leaving this place, he would need to create as much of a buffer as he could. He would need to layer protections around the outer edge of the island, use them to prevent the Undoing from damaging the water elementals, and from risking harm to the wind. He would need to take the time to restore what Marin had done, heal the land from her touch. If he could—

  There came a flicker.

  That was all the notice Tan was given.

  He looked up. Had he not, the finger of darkness streaking toward him would have struck him and caught him unaware. As strong as he might be with the elements, he doubted his ability to withstand a direct attack, especially with the Undoing that surrounded him.

  Tan pressed back with a shaping that called on each of the elements. He’d fought Marin before, and in the time since they had last encountered each other, his strength had grown.

  So had hers.

  She no longer looked the way she had when he’d first met her. Black hair fell limp around her head. Her eyes were sunken pools of a starless night. A heavy black cloak hung motionless from her. Even the smile on her face bore menace and no warmth, no life.

  The finger of blackness streaking toward him had more force, and more control, than she’d possessed when they had last faced each other. Maybe it was this place, the fact that he couldn’t draw upon life and the elementals to aid his shaping, but she pressed him back, meeting his shaping with an equal strength.

  “Maelen,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. It hung on the air, a taunt that she would use the term the elementals had for him.

  “It ends now, Marin.”

  Tan twisted the shaping and began cutting her off from the blackness, using the element bonds to form the binding that he knew would contain even the darkness. As he did, he twisted it, settling it toward her.

  She shot a streamer of blackness from her palm and obliterated his shaping.

  Tan was thrown back by the force of it.

  “You will see that I have learned a few things in my time away.”

  “Is that what you’ve been doing?”

  She smiled and wagged a finger at him. Even the skin of her hands had taken on a blackish hue. Darkness seemed to ooze from her skin and poured out of her mouth when she opened it to speak.

  “You can’t begin to understand what I’ve been doing, Maelen.”

  Tan surveyed the darkened landscape around him. “I think I understand enough.”

  “Is this all that you think I’ve done?”

  “The elementals call it the Undoing. You realized the harm you’re causing?”

  “I realize more than you can understand.”

  She sent a lancing bolt of darkness at him. Tan deflected it, but found that it was more difficult than the last time. He had to focus on the element bonds, but the more that he was here, the more that they remained in this place of Undoing, the harder it became for him to reach the bonds as he should be able to.

  Was that what this was about?

  Did she think to separate him from the bonds? Without them, he would have no way of defeating the darkness. Tan could use the elementals, and he could shape, but pushing that back required a strength that only came from reaching the source, from tapping into that which made him a Shaper of Light.

  Marin seemed to recognize the dilemma playing out in his mind. She smiled, a dark flash of teeth, and stepped toward him.

  It was more than stepping toward him, it was as if she oozed forward. With it came the effect of the power she could shape, the dark power of the creature the elementals called Voidan, that which those who preceded him called Nightfall or Tenebeth. She was powered by a dark god, and she was stronger than Tan.

  Tan summoned all the strength that he could.

  As he reached into the bonds, as he pulled on the elements, he could barely detect the elementals. Even his connection to shaping was weakened, taken from him. It was there, but faint and faded. The only connection that remained strong was his ability to reach the bonds… and even that was starting to fade.

  She was Undoing him.

  He didn’t know how she did, and didn’t know if there was anything short of leaving that he could do to resist.

  There had to be something that he could try.

  It would require a level of desperation, but he felt desperate now.

  With a deep breath, he sent the shaping down and all around him. At the same time, he forced it up, creating a barrier of sorts, a wall that kept the rest of the Undoing away from him. The ground turned green once more, the shaping that he used bringing back life that he hadn’t realized had been missing.

  The connections returned to him. Power of the bonds flooded into him, strength coming with it. The elementals spoke through the bonds, their voices a steady murmuring within his mind. Even his sense of shaping began to return.

  Tan sighed, breathing it in.

  The barrier that he’d created exploded away from him.

  Marin had destroyed it, the darkness overcoming his ability to shape.

  But he’d been given enough of a reprieve that he could reach the bonds once more. The connections had returned, and strength still filled him.

  Tan knew what he had to do.

  It wasn’t that he had to destroy Marin. That would come. It had to come, though the elementals didn’t believe that he could or should. But he needed to restore. That would be what kept him stronger here.

  Power pulsed from him, a shaping that he sent deep within the ground.

  It called to the elementals.

  The murmuring in his mind increased and became something of a steady roar. The voices understood what he asked.

  Power surged into the island, pounding into it. There was no real binding, not like what Tan suspected he would need to do in order to suppress the Undoing for long, but it was something different. It was life, in a place where it had been removed.

  Marin jerked her head around.

  Tan slammed a shaping into her, power of each of the bonds, adding what he could draw of spirit into it.

  She screamed.

  And then disappeared in a flash.
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br />   Tan sighed and sank to the ground, fatigue overwhelming him.

  3

  Maelen’s Ask

  Tan awoke to wetness and heat. Asgar rested nearby, his tail wrapped completely around Tan, his nose pressed close to his head so that the steam coming from his snout filtered around Tan, leaving him damp and hot. It was not entirely unpleasant, only an odd sensation.

  Lifting his head, Tan saw that the island had changed in the time that he’d been asleep. Grass once again had life. Flowers bloomed somewhere, though he wasn’t able to detect quite where. The trees, still twisted husks of what they had once been, now had color to their bark and a sort of pride to them.

  What happened? he asked Asgar.

  You sent the Mistress of Darkness away.

  He remembered that, but didn’t like the fact that he had fallen after doing it. What would have happened had there not been a draasin to watch over him? What would have happened had Marin returned with others able to pull on the dark, those the archivists had taken to calling the Disciples of the Dark? Tan had destroyed most of the disciples during the attack on Norilan, but given Marin’s connection to spirit and the way that she could use it to force others to do her bidding, it wouldn’t take her long to develop new disciples.

  She was nearly too much for me. She has learned much in her time hidden.

  Tan dusted himself off as he stood, drawing on power around him for strength. He no longer knew whether that power came from the element bonds or from the elementals. There had been a time when that distinction mattered, but it no longer did, not in the same way that it once had. Connected to the bonds, he could tell that the power was essentially the same. Shapers reached the bonds the same way the elementals did. Reaching the power of the bonds directly only bypassed the help of the element bonds but gave Tan a direct access to the source of power.

  Was that what Marin did with the darkness?

  It might explain why she had been so able to nearly overcome him. Tan hadn’t effectively managed to reach the spirit bond the same way. It was there, and he knew that he had tapped into it in the past, but touching upon spirit might be the only way for him to finally stop Marin and the darkness.