The Chaos Rises (Elemental Academy Book 6) Read online

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you do this? Why did you use my father? Me?”

  Those were questions that had troubled him the longest, and the more he thought about his mother and her role in all this, the harder it was to know what she had done to him, and why she had been willing to use them. Use him.

  It took a cold and callous individual to be willing to do that. It was almost as if she was completely heartless, and yet there were so many of his memories where he had a sense of warmth, affection, and caring.

  Could all that have been an act?

  In his mind, he wanted to believe she had come to chaos later and had been changed, but he wasn’t entirely sure if that was the case. It was possible she had become this person, that she was filled with that chaos and darkness, and she had pursued it long before she’d ever had him.

  And if that was the case, this was who she was.

  If that was who she was, then anything else he thought he might learn, anything else he thought she might be, was only in his mind.

  Could those all have been shaped visions?

  As much as he wanted to believe they weren’t, he no longer knew.

  It was difficult to know if he’d been touched by her shaping, if she had somehow influenced him, but when he revisited those memories, when he had those visions, he couldn’t help but feel as if there was some aspect to them that was real, that if all he could do was dig into that, to find that depth of knowledge, he might be able to know just what she had been doing to him.

  And the longer he worked at it, the more he was uncertain.

  “You were needed,” she said.

  “I was needed?”

  She got to her feet, and Tolan took a step back. He pressed up against the door, ready to step outside, but even in that, he didn’t think it was necessary. Better yet would be to perform a shaping, holding onto it, being ready for the possibility she might do something else to him.

  “I was shown the future. In that future, one was needed. You, Tolan.”

  He shook his head. “You’re going to try to convince me you did all of this because of some benevolent purpose.”

  “Benevolent?” She cocked her head to the side, watching him. As she did, a hint of darkness swirled behind her eyes and Tolan realized that despite everything he had attempted, despite having brought her into the Convergence and having it wash through her, there was still some part of her that was altered.

  As much as he hated to admit it, it might always be that way.

  She was this person.

  It was probable she had never been any other person.

  He took a deep breath, readying a shaping, planning on holding her back as he stepped out into the hallway. There was nothing productive about this conversation, and all it did was upset him even more.

  He suspected that was her purpose. She wanted to try to trouble him, to get to him, to make him question. And in that, she was succeeding.

  “I was not benevolent. I understand my role, just as you must understand your role. And when you do, you might be able to serve.”

  “Who would I serve?” he asked.

  She took another step toward him and he pushed out with a shaping, holding onto each of the elements, creating a barrier she wouldn’t be able to easily overpower. At least in this place. In other places, tied to her bondars, she was far more than a match for him.

  “Why, you would serve chaos.”

  Tolan stared at her and finally, shaking his head, he backed out of the room, turning away from her.

  There was nothing else he thought he might be able to understand.

  While his hand still rested on the door, she called after him, “You might think you can escape this fate, Tolan, but I know better. I know you must serve. It was shown to me.”

  “You don’t know anything,” he said.

  “I know far more than you can ever understand,” she said.

  When he stepped through the door, he closed it and used his shaping to seal it shut again. As he did, he couldn’t help but feel a trembling of fear.

  What if she was right? What if he was destined to serve in some way?

  He didn’t think he was destined to serve chaos, but with everything he’d done, everything he had seen, he couldn’t help but feel as if there was something different about him. It was more than just his connection to the elements and the way he shaped. It was his understanding of the elementals, and his desire to see them freed.

  That didn’t fit with what he knew of the Academy, and it was possible he didn’t fit with the Academy. As hard as it was for him to admit, it was possible he couldn’t be anything other than a servant of chaos.

  2

  The long hallway stretched on beyond Tolan who stood looking at the portraits hanging on the wall. He had been here several times before, and each time, he tried to understand the nature of the paintings depicted here. Some of them were easy; the more he looked at them, the more detail began to emerge. There was something about them that formed a test, and yet as he looked at them, he had no idea what purpose that test served or what they were trying to accomplish by allowing him to see what he was able to see.

  In the picture he looked at now, a dark-haired man stood with his sword pointing down. A sense of shadows permeated the background, and in that shadowed sense, he picked up a certain feeling of movement. The painter must’ve been incredibly gifted in order to depict that type of skill, but in the foreground were other details he was able to make out. They seemed to be elementals, and yet they were not elementals he recognized. Having spent as much time as he had looking through the books Master Minden had lent him, he thought he understood the elementals as well as anyone.

  He moved on to the next portrait, studying it the same way he did the last. With each one he stared at, he still didn’t gain any increased understanding. There had to be something here he might be able to find, but the more he stared, the harder it was to know if there was anything.

  Looking along the length of the hall, he saw dozens upon dozens of different portraits, all of them with some other imagery. Most shared an aspect of the elementals.

  As he stared at the next one, again depicting some shaper, there was no sense of the shadows. In this one, he saw a draasin. When he’d been here before, there had been no sign of the draasin, and it was only recently he’d begun to make out the outline of the creature. As he studied it, he could almost see the faint form of the wings. And there was something else there as well, but the more he studied it, the harder it was to know whether or not he was able to detect anything. There were spikes leading off the draasin, but there was something else as well.

  “What do you discover?”

  Tolan turned carefully and frowned at Master Minden. She was watching from the end of the hall, her milky eyes seeming to see him beyond what they should be able to do.

  “I’m not discovering anything. I’m just trying to understand.”

  “That’s all any of us can do.”

  “I see the draasin in this one.”

  “I expected you would,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you have seen the Draasin Lord.”

  Tolan stared at the draasin, wondering if this was the same draasin as the Draasin Lord. Given what he knew about the Draasin Lord, and the fact the Draasin Lord had lived over a thousand years ago at the time when the elementals had been shoved into the element bonds, it was possible it was depicting the same individual. The Draasin Lord had known those people, had known that power, and had been there. Tolan had been shown those images and had a sense of the power the Draasin Lord had known. He had a sense of the sadness that had filled the Draasin Lord as well.

  “Is this the Draasin Lord?”

  Master Minden stopped next to him. She had a hint of a spicy aroma to her, and she clasped her hands in front of her, staring at the portrait. Her face was wrinkled and lined, and her deep gray hair had been brought back into a bun. “It’s difficult to know whe
ther this is the Draasin Lord. As I imagine you understand, the Draasin Lord is incredibly old, and yet, at the time when he lived and flew freely, there were many draasin.”

  “Why doesn’t he fly freely now?”

  “It’s dangerous for him.”

  “Isn’t it more dangerous for him not to fly freely?”

  Master Minden glanced over at him, and she smiled. “What do you think would happen if the Draasin Lord would reveal his presence?”

  “I suppose shapers in the Academy would try to force him into the element bond.”

  “Did you believe the Draasin Lord would allow such a thing to happen?”

  Tolan considered what he knew about the Draasin Lord, and what he’d experienced when he’d been around the draasin. He could easily imagine the draasin would fight, but more than that, he had a hard time thinking the draasin would be able to be pushed into any element bond. Unlike some of the other elementals, the draasin seemed far more physical and tangible. Trying to force something like that into something as nebulous as the element bond seemed not only impossible, but cruel.

  “I don’t think he would.”

  “Knowing what he does, I don’t believe the Draasin Lord would allow such a thing to happen.”

  “How well do you know him?”

  Master Minden stared at the portrait but then she moved on, heading to the next. After a moment, she shook her head. “I don’t know him as well as I would’ve liked,” she said.

  “I thought I would see him again.”

  “You would see him only in the time of need,” she said.

  “What sort of need?”

  “I’m not so sure I can answer that. It’s not my place to be able to determine what the draasin would view as a time of need. He has incredible knowledge and understanding, and because of that, he is bound into the world in a way few others are. He recognizes what the elements in the element bonds have gone through, and he understands just what has been required and the sacrifices made over the years in order for others to survive.”

  Tolan thought about the visions the Draasin Lord had shown him. In those visions, memories had flashed to him. Some of those were faint and faded, almost as if the Draasin Lord had not given them to him for a lasting memory, but others stuck within his mind, and they rolled through his head.

  “I think he wanted me to see that,” he said.

  “I’m sure he did,” she said, moving onto the next portrait.

  Tolan studied this one. It was one that had always been faint for him, and the more he stared at it now, the harder it was to know if there was anything he might be able to determine. The more he studied it, the more he saw what looked to be a child. Behind the child was something looking like a lizard, and that lizard glowed softly, wrapping around the child. They seemed to be seated in some sort of cave, but beyond that, Tolan wasn’t able to see anything.

  “What is this one?”

  “This one is special to me,” Master Minden said.

  “Why?”

  “I’ve always wondered about this one,” she said softly.

  “What have you wondered about it?”

  “What of the child? Look at the expression on her face. And look at the creature behind her.”

  “Is that an elemental?”

  “Not like any we have ever experienced, is it?”

  Tolan searched through his memories of the elementals and tried to come up with any that might fit with what he saw there, but there weren’t any that matched.

  “I don’t know of any elementals like that,” he said.

  “Neither do I,” she said softly.

  “Then what is it?”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t know that I can answer that for you, Shaper Ethar. There is something about this I think we could understand, but the longer I study it and the more I think I can understand, the harder it is for me to know whether there is anything there I may be able to learn. And yet, when I look at the child, I see an understanding in her eyes. She’s far too young for such understanding, yet it seems almost as if she looks back at me—as if she knows me.”

  Tolan stared, studying the portrait, trying to get the same impression Master Minden did. The longer he looked, the less he saw what she did.

  His attention was drawn to the lizard behind the child. Something about that creature struck him, and yet he wasn’t entirely sure why there should be anything that caught his attention. Maybe it was nothing more than his imagination, but it seemed as if the lizard was looking at him, as if the lizard knew something about him, and the more he studied it, the more certain he was there was something there.

  He turned to the side, and the lizard seemed to follow him. He turned to the other side, and again it seemed as if the lizard followed him.

  There was no sense of anything else in that portrait, no sense of darkness, the chaos he had seen in some of the other portraits; in this one, it seemed almost as if the person looking at it was supposed to see the child and the lizard and nothing else. Why, then, did he have a feeling there was something more in the portrait than he was able to see?

  The more he focused, the harder it was to determine anything else. And it might just be his imagination. Tolan didn’t know whether there was anything more in it. It was possible more might come to him over time. The other portraits worked like that. The longer he stared at them, studying them, the more they began to reveal themselves.

  “Why am I not able to see them all clearly at first?”

  “I can‘t tell you why the portraits reveal themselves over time,” she said.

  “Does it has something to do with shaping?”

  “If it had something to do with shaping, there would be others who had the ability to see them. There are plenty of powerful shapers in the world, and the longer you study at the Academy, the more you begin to realize that shaping prowess doesn’t always mean you are gifted with the same potential as others.”

  “But there are other types of shaping,” he said.

  She turned to him and smiled. There was something unsettling about the way she looked at him, the way her eyes locked onto him, and she nodded slowly.

  “You begin to understand.”

  “I’ve known there were different types of shaping ever since you showed it to me,” he said.

  “And what did I show you?”

  He had come to the Academy as a sensor and had used the bondars to help reach the element bond, but it was his own studies that had brought him to the elementals. And beyond that, his connection to whatever it had taken to reach for a different type of shaping had come from within him as well.

  “I suppose you didn’t teach me anything.”

  “If that’s the case, I have not been doing my job well.”

  “You have provided me access to information.”

  “That I have.”

  “And I have to find those answers for myself,” he said.

  She turned to him again, and she locked eyes with him. For a moment, it seemed as if the milky film over her eyes began to clear, but then it thickened, solidifying.

  It was almost as if Master Minden was fighting something happening to her, as if she was trying to work through it but was unable to do so completely.

  “The answers you find for yourself are often the most rewarding. As much as I might be able to help you, there are certain things you can only find yourself. When you find those answers on your own, you begin to understand them in a different way.”

  “But knowledge can be cumulative. You can teach what you know, and then I can add to it.”

  “Which is what I have done. I have shown you what we know about the elementals, and you have gone out and experienced on your own with them.”

  He supposed she was right. He’d had the opportunity to work with the elementals, and because of that, he had come to his own opinions and had begun to understand them in a way others did not. Because of that, he recognized the elementals weren’t as dangerous as the Academy had taught.

>   They were powerful, and when they escaped from the bond, there was an anger and violence to them, but he recognized both these traits could be tempered. And the more he worked with them and the more he understood the nature of that elemental attack, the more he thought he understood what they were going through was not of their doing.

  The elementals didn’t want to attack. They didn’t want to be violent. They didn’t want to be trapped, confined to the bond. Even though the Draasin Lord had shown him they had gone willingly, he had the sense from the elementals that they no longer wanted to be there. They wanted nothing more than to just be a part of the world.

  “What would happen if the elementals were freed?”

  “I don’t know,” she said softly.

  “You wonder, don’t you?”

  “When I see these portraits, when I begin to understand that many of them show us a time when the elementals were free, when the elementals no longer had to fear the trappings of the element bonds, I can’t help but wonder. What would the world have been like? What sort of power existed at that time?” She closed her eyes, shaking her head. Shaping built from her, spreading outward; a diffuse sort of shaping, it wrapped various aspects of each of the elements in it as it washed over Tolan.

  He resisted at first, but then stopped, curious as to what she was doing.

  There was something in the shaping he thought he recognized, but he wasn’t entirely sure what it was. An aspect of her shaping carried spirit with it, and when it rolled over him, he had a hint of a vision, a stirring of memories. They came to him almost as if he was meant to know what she was knowing, as if he was able to see what she was seeing.

  Everything around him changed.

  It was as if the ground had shifted, as if they’d been pulled out of the Academy and stood on a vast expanse of an open plain.

  It was the most impressive shaping he had ever experienced.

  And still, he had the sense this wasn’t entirely difficult for Master Minden. The nature of her shaping, the nature of power, suggested she had enough power and control that she was able to use this shaping in a way granting her the ability to cast these images to him.