“Maybe,” I said. “Thankfully, I have you here with me.”
Chapter Four
The sun was already starting to rise, so I stood up and wiped my jeans off before wrapping up my blanket. I looked at the plants around us, covered in a light layer of frost. I was glad we had our warmers. I pulled the small square out of my pocket. Gary had given them to us when we were on Gangkhar Puensum looking for the air elementals. They kept us warm no matter what the temperature was. Without them, we wouldn’t have been able to stay here without a fire.
We hiked toward the area I thought the eagle had taken me. Everything looked different from the ground. We came to a few different clearings. Each time I thought it was the right one, but we couldn’t find the handprint. As we neared the next clearing, I heard voices. We crouched behind the trees, trying to listen to what they were saying.
I couldn’t understand them, so I crept forward, moving from tree to tree. Abby followed. When we were close enough, my heart plummeted. It was the Pulhu. They had noticed several different energies coming from this area. I moved closer until I could peek into the clearing. I immediately knew this was the place. I could even see the boulder I needed to place my hand on. I backed away until they wouldn’t be able to hear us and told Abby.
“What do we do?” she asked. “We can’t let them get into the fire elemental realm.”
“We need to get them away from this area,” I said.
“How?”
“We need them to think the portal is in a different spot. We will have to trick them. We can use the invisibility potion so they don’t see us, and I can use a small amount of fire magic to draw their attention. If I spread it out enough, they won’t know where the magic is coming from.”
“Let’s do it. We only have a few hours left.”
We moved to a small area that we checked yesterday. The Pulhu hadn’t bothered with this area, so it was perfect for our plan. I took a potion and handed the last one to Abby. As soon as we thought we were invisible, I let out a small burst of fire. The flame hit the ground and burned for a few seconds before going out.
I stopped and listened, waiting for the Pulhu to sense it, but they didn’t come. I tried again, this time with a bigger flame. They still didn’t notice.
“They should be able to sense my fire,” I told Abby. “I’m not sure why they aren’t coming?”
“They probably think it’s their own people using fire magic.”
“Oh yeah. I didn’t think about that. They have been burning a lot of the craters. I don’t think this is going to work after all.”
I felt Sievroth uncurl from my neck. He leaned over my shoulder and blew a stream of fire onto a small group of rocks. As his fire faded, I glanced at the rocks. They were glowing a deep red and had slightly melted together. Shouts came from further up the path and from the trees behind us.
We quickly ran down the path and off to the side as the Pulhu came running in from everywhere.
“What is it?” one of them asked.
“That was it, what we’ve been looking for. That was a fire elemental.”
“Are you sure? I didn’t see anything.”
“I’m sure, and look at those rocks. One of them was definitely here. Spread out and find him. You three stay here and figure out where he came from,” a lady said, pointing at the group that had been near the portal. I breathed a sigh of relief. We stopped them from looking too closely at the portal. Hopefully, this would keep them busy for a few weeks. At least long enough for me to get into the fire elemental realm and get their help.
After they all separated, I headed back to our pickup point with Abby. We weren’t there long when Jordan materialized in front of us.
“Are you ready to go?” he asked.
“Yes,” I told him.
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Not quite, but we are close.” I didn’t want him to know what we had found.
“Let’s get out of here then. The Pulhu are all over this mountain. I hope you stopped them from finding whatever they are after. It must be important.”
“It is,” I said as we grabbed hands, and the world fell away. As soon as we landed on solid ground, I opened my eyes and stepped onto school property. As we walked to Mrs. Sullivan’s office, I reached out to Richard and told him to meet us there.
We were already seated in her office, and she was thanking Jordan when Richard, Tider, and Adam walked in. After Jordan left, I explained what happened at Mount Etna with Abby jumping in to explain some of the things I forgot. When we told them Mr. Damon was there, Mrs. Sullivan’s lips thinned in anger.
“This is bad,” she said. “I’ve called a few contacts in the council to see if they know why the Pulhu are searching for the true fire elementals. There have been rumors that they are searching for the true elementals to get them to join their side willingly or with force.”
“How do they plan on forcing them? The true elementals are extremely powerful.”
“You beat them,” Adam said to me.
“Yes, but only five water elementals were fighting us, and it was still hard.”
“Sally almost died,” Abby said.
“I remember,” Richard said, “but if we could do it, the Pulhu probably can too.”
“The rumors say Mr. Damon has a secret weapon that can make a group of elementals powerless. Supposedly he can drain their magic.”
My friends gasped, but I thought back to when I was fighting him. He put his hand on my shield, and it immediately started to turn gray and disintegrate. “I bet he was draining my shield’s magic, and that’s why it failed so fast in our last fight,” I said.
“That would make sense. But he wasn’t able to steal your energy.”
“Maybe he found a way.”
“You need to stay far away from him,” Mrs. Sullivan said. “If he can make you powerless, we won’t have a chance to defeat the Pulhu.”
“I plan on staying away from him,” I assured her.
We headed back to the common room for dinner before heading to bed. Once I was in my room, I touched one of the marbles on my desk and said, “Seal.” Immediately a sheet of air sealed my door shut. I had spent a lot of time putting this spell into about twenty marbles. Every night I sealed my door to keep everyone out.
I wasn’t taking chances. Mr. Merrem had told me to use a spell instead of sealing the door every night with my own energy after he found out what happened. It didn’t use any of my energy. If anything did happen, I would be at full strength instead of weak from sustaining a shield all night.
Fluttering noises around my ear and shrieks woke me up, causing me to jump out of bed. Sievroth was flying around the room, trying to catch Mauevene.
“Stop it,” I yelled, grabbing Sievroth. “You can’t eat her. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
I held him closely as Mauevene fluttered over to my desk to land.
“Is everything ok?” I asked her. She never woke me up in the middle of the night.
“Yes, but we need to go to the south wing. Send Sievroth to the forest, or he can stay in your room. I don’t want him trying to eat me.”
“Why are we going to the south wing?” I asked.
“It’s time for you to learn how to do a few things that only true water elementals can do.”
“Then how can I do them? I’m not a true elemental.”
“When the king gave you some of his power, you became a true elemental in a sense. You should be able to do anything that the true elementals are capable of. With Mr. Damon after the fire elementals, you need to learn some new defensive magic that I can teach you.”
We snuck down to the south wing, making sure not to wake anyone. Mauevene flew around the room, chanting in the ancient language. She spoke too fast for me to understand. When she stopped, a light glow covered the whole room.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I put up something similar to the domes outside that you practic
e in. Now you can practice without anyone sensing you. It also blocks all sound, so no one will hear you. It will only stay up for an hour. I don’t have the strength to hold it any longer.”
“Can you teach me how to do that?”
“I will, but that’s not important right now. We are here for you to learn how to save yourself if Mr. Damon gets to you. You can already win against most of the Pulhu as long as they don’t overpower you, and you have your friends with you. The two spells I’m going to teach you require a lot of effort and even more energy. You have enough to do them, but you will need to practice a lot. We are going to start small.”
She held her hand out, and a ladybug appeared in it. She put it gently down on a desk and wove a small box of water, caging it.
“This seems like a simple spell, but look closer at the box,” Mauevene said.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on the box so I could see the magic clearly. It was a water box, but woven throughout it were bars of deep blue magic. They held everything together. I reached out a finger to touch the box, but Mauevene flew over and pushed my hand away. My eyes flew open.
“Don’t touch it. This is a tiny box, so it won’t hurt you, but it will take a lot of your energy.”
“Wait. The cage steals energy.”
“Yes, it’s why very few can escape it. It starts stealing their energy as soon as they are trapped. The cage releases once all of their energy is gone. It won’t kill them, but whoever is inside of it will be powerless for days afterward.”
“Wow. This is awesome. I could use this on the Pulhu, and they wouldn’t be able to hurt me. Thanks for teaching me, Mauevene.”
She laughed. “You still have to learn it. I bet Mr. Damon has figured out how to do something like this. It would explain how he can steal energy.”
Mauevene said something, and the cage disappeared. The ladybug didn’t look hurt at all. I smiled. I was going to like this new spell. Mauevene explained that all true elementals could use their element as pure magic if they were strong enough. Many learned only a few spells because of how hard they were to use.
“You need to find pure water magic inside you,” Mauevene explained. When I didn’t understand what she was talking about, she tried again. “You need to look deep inside yourself and open yourself up to the magic. Follow the path of the water magic until you reach pure magic. Pure magic for an elemental is stronger and possibly brighter in color to you. It will feel incredibly powerful, like holding a live wire.”
I concentrated on my water magic and tried to find pure magic, but I wasn’t having any luck. After twenty minutes, Mauevene called a halt. She looked at me questioningly.
“Can you feel the king’s power still?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Let that magic out. Follow that magic to its center.”
I still wasn’t sure what she meant by following the magic. I could call on water magic and see the color of the magic in my hands, but there was nothing else. It was just there. It didn’t connect to anything.
I called on the king’s magic and felt my chest swell. The power was incredible. The king had given it to me when I saved him from a curse. Now I could call on him whenever I needed, and if anything hurt him, I would know and could help.
I closed my eyes, watching his magic swirl down my arm as I called a small ball of water into my hands. I gasped in surprise. I could see a trail of magic snaking its way to my chest. I looked closer. The magic was buried deep in my chest in a swirling ball. I could see threads of the pure magic spinning in it. I told Mauevene what I found, and she smiled at me.
“Use those threads to create the water trap.”
Keeping my eyes closed, I pulled gently on one of the threads, weaving it through my regular water magic. I struggled with it. It wanted to stay tucked into the ball of magic. Every time I started to get control of it, it would slip away. Eventually, I gave up, panting.
“I don’t know if I can do this, Mauevene. It doesn’t want to work with me.”
“That is normal. It takes a lot of practice to use pure magic. You will need to work on it often until you can control it. It will be difficult, but it may save your life one day.”
I promised her I would continue to work on it. I knew I needed to learn as much as I could if I was going to fight Mr. Damon and the darkness. After practicing for another thirty minutes without much progress, Mauevene had me stop for the night. We made our way back to my room silently. It was going to take me a while to figure this new magic out.
When we got to my room, Mauevene reminded me not to tell anyone what she was teaching me, not even my friends. I didn’t like it, but I agreed. We spent the next two nights working on it with little success. Mauevene told me to take a few nights off, and then we would try again.
During lunch the next day, we tried to decide what we needed to do before going into the fire elemental realm. We would have to leave soon, or the Pulhu would find their way in first. Mrs. Sullivan had a few people taking turns watching the Pulhu on Mount Etna. So far, they were still working in the same area where Sievroth melted the rocks, but they were starting to get agitated and spread out more.
We needed to find more information on the fire elemental realm before we could go. It was too dangerous to go through the portal with such a small amount of knowledge. So far, the water elementals had lived surrounded by water, and the air elementals had lived in a valley on a mountain covered in snow. You had to fly to get down to their palace. We knew the fire elementals entrance was on a volcano. The chance of their realm having a lot of heat and even fire wasn’t too far fetched.
We needed to be prepared for it. Not to mention, we needed to find out if it was guarded by anything like the air elementals were. There was very little information in the books we found on the library shelves. It was mostly about what they could do, not where they lived. By the end of lunch, we decided we would need to go back into the south wing and look around more. Each time we went in there to look around, we found something that could help us.
We met up a few nights later in the common room to sneak into the south wing. I wanted to look at the room where we saw light coming from under the door. Once we made sure nobody was watching, we snuck through the door and into the dark hallway. Immediately, I turned my phone on for light. Everyone else did the same.
“What are we looking for?” Abby asked.
“Anything that looks out of place,” I told her. “There must be a reason why the south wing was shut down magically. We need to find out what.”
“Let’s head down the hall to the room that had the light on the other night,” Richard said.
“We need to be quiet until we make sure no one else is in here with us.”
We crept along the hallway, listening for any sign that someone else was here, but I didn’t hear anything. I remembered exactly where the door was and led us to it quickly. There was no light coming from beneath the door, but it was shut. I put my hand against the door first and closed my eyes. I didn’t sense any magic, so I gripped the doorknob and slowly turned it.
I pushed the door open a few inches, listening for sounds inside the room. When I didn’t hear anything, I pushed the door open the rest of the way and stepped inside. There was nothing unusual in the room at first glance. It was set up like an office with a desk and multiple chairs on one side and one large chair on the other.
In the corner, across the room, was a small fireplace with a table in front of it. I stepped closer to it, trying to see what was sitting on the top. A pad of paper and a pen were neatly set up. Next to them was a cork coaster. I slowly dragged my finger along the surface of the table.
“No dust,” I murmured.
“What did you say?” Tider asked.
“There’s no dust. This table has been used recently.” I looked down at the pen and pad again.
“Isn’t there a way to find out what was written on this last?” I asked.
“Here, let me,” Adam said, grabb
ing the pad of paper. He grabbed a pencil out of his backpack and started to lightly color the paper. I could see letters forming.
“I’ve done this with my grandpa at some of the ancient sites. Usually on a rock, but even on paper, an impression is left behind.”
We watched as words formed. When Adam finished, we waited impatiently for him to read it out loud. He cleared his throat before speaking.
“Beware the chosen and the imposter. Both sides are equal. Do not interfere until a side has been picked. If the imposter wins, protect yourself. Only the true chosen can defeat Helerium.”
“What’s Helerium?” Richard asked.
“I don’t know, but it’s capitalized, so maybe a name of someone or something. It must be important.”
“Who is the imposter? What does it mean?”
“I have no idea, but it sounds like more trouble for us.”
“Maybe we need to talk to the cloaked figure and find out what this means exactly. We could use more help,” I said.
“I don’t think so. They obviously don’t want us knowing who they are. If we try to force them to talk, they might cause trouble for us. Right now, it looks like they may help us at some point as long as they don’t think you are the imposter,” Tider said, looking at me. After a minute, I nodded. For now we would leave the cloaked figure alone.
What if I was the imposter, and there was a different chosen out there? I voiced my concerns to my friends, but none of them agreed with me. They all thought I was the chosen, which meant someone out there was going to pretend to be the one in the prophecy, or maybe they were told they were the chosen one and believed it. When we met this other person, we would have to figure out what to do and if they were really the enemy.
Chapter Five
The next day classes started out fine. By period three, kids were whispering to each other in hushed voices. I looked at Abby, but she shrugged. She didn’t know what was going on either. I looked over at Richard as he took a quick peek at his phone. His eyes widened, and I felt him reaching out for me through our connection.
Buried Embers (Elemental Seekers Book 3) Page 4
