The King's Craft (The Petralist Book 6)

by Frank Morin

  “You fool! Despite my warnings, you embrace the danger?”

  He no longer feared her.

  Connor-elfonnel reached down, extending one mighty, burning arm across the distance to snatch her off the ground. She attempted to push him away, but she had lost the ancient sculpted stone and for once her strength proved insufficient.

  He was fire now, and no mortal could overpower him. He smashed aside her will and surrounded her with the living flames of his hand and lifted her high. She beat against him, screaming obscenities in several languages, but the words were meaningless.

  Queen Dreokt attempted to strike him with other affinities, but accomplished little more than flickers. He exulted. He reigned supreme now. He was beyond chert, he was fire, and no water remained in the superheated air, which was far too distracted to give heed to a puny human.

  He saw fear in her eyes.

  So he ate her.

  He chomped down onto her tiny form with his enormous jaws, savoring the feeling of her body surrounded by the flames of his mouth. He’d never eaten anyone before, and the experience was disappointing.

  The queen tasted stale, like old bread, covered in dirt. Not very inspiring, but at least she didn’t taste like cabbage, or skunks.

  She didn’t melt, but screamed with rage, beating uselessly against the flames of his jaws. Swallowing her would not kill her. He must destroy her, then none would remain to challenge his dominance of his glorious birth.

  She was immune to normal heat, but he was wielding far more than any mortal could ever manage. He’d gathered such an enormous pool of pure heat, it strained against even his control. In his elfonnel vision, he saw heat like light. Through the shielding influence of Porphyry, the tiny Connor part of him could sense his other affinities and even managed to tap limestone. That sharpened his vision further.

  Amazing. Heat was boiling off the eruption in every spectrum, most of it invisible to the human eye but as clear to him as the rippling colors of a rainbow trout in the Wick. So Connor-elfonnel compressed all that heat, transforming it into higher-energy waves. They changed from yellow to red to purple, and eventually to pure white. The energy intensified until it held the power to rip air and matter apart.

  He unleashed all of it upon the queen struggling in his fiery maw. Tipping his head back to point his muzzle at the sky, he vomited out all of that energy, striking her with a concentrated blast that ripped through her like a cudgel tearing through a rotten melon.

  Queen Dreokt disintegrated.

  Her body erupted into bits that sprayed out of his mouth and far across the land. Even her bones melted, although most of her skull remained intact. It hurtled for miles, beyond the farthest reaches of the smaller peaks forming around the eruption.

  Connor-elfonnel exulted, trumpeting his thunderous laughter again. The tiny Connor part of him cheered the defeat of Queen Dreokt.

  She wasn’t that tough. She was only human, after all.

  He was now the force of nature, risen to stop her and become the one being powerful enough to end her reign and replace it with a monument for pure fire.

  “Ride the wave, spread our flames across the land,” Fire urged, his hunger to walk the earth and leave it a charred wasteland a tantalizing temptation for them. Connor-elfonnel leaned forward, on the verge of sweeping out of the volcano and leading the way.

  “No.”

  Connor struggled to retain his own mind within the monster. It was so hard, like trying to think clearly in a dream, but those visions of immolating every city scared him so much he managed to hold on.

  “We agreed to stop this eruption.”

  Connor-elfonnel growled, sending showers of fire cascading down the hot, rocky slope forming beneath him, but he could not ignore the will of the human who had called him forth.

  Connor rose to the forefront of the elfonnel’s mind, taking control, waking from the dream into glorious reality. He felt his enormous fiery body really clearly for the first time, and laughed with the wonder of it. He was the volcano. He was fire, but somehow he was still Connor.

  “This is unnatural,” Fire muttered. The elemental shared his fiery head, but Connor held the control position.

  Connor laughed, spraying flames a thousand feet into the air. That was awesome! He bet he could vomit flames for miles, if he wanted to. “Of course this is unnatural. We’re an elfonnel.”

  “But not a normal one.”

  “Stop moping. When’s the last time you got to play in a volcano like this?”

  That helped Fire perk up a bit, so Connor-elfonnel got to work.

  The mountain beneath his fiery form had risen thousands of feet higher, towering over any of the other peaks in Obrion, while the smaller ring of peaks had each risen to over eight thousand feet, their lower flanks joining together into a high ridge that ringed the outer limits of the disaster.

  Connor-elfonnel continued to drain heat away, casting it up into the sky as intense beams of high intensity energy that shot away so fast he expected them to keep flying until they hit a distant star. But he still couldn’t stop the rising of new lava.

  The disaster would continue unless he figured out how to deal with it. He tried to push back against the rising flames, tried drawing the heat away fast enough to create new earth, but he needed something more.

  He was surprised to feel Earth step into their shared mind. “You cannot control my element bound to Fire alone. You need my assistance for that.”

  “Is that possible?” Connor asked.

  From everything he knew about elfonnel, it shouldn’t be. Always elfonnel rose as a single element, and the Petralist could only ever escape if they were Dawnus. Earth was not his opposite.

  “For one who has stepped to the midpoint of the final bridge, it is,” Earth said.

  “He’s mine,” Fire objected. “You cannot transition him now while he’s walking with me without sundering his soul.”

  “Let’s definitely avoid that,” Connor said. He needed to stop the disaster, but soul sundering sounded very permanent and very painful.

  “I need not his entire being to grant a new degree of control,” Earth responded calmly, but his expression looked more eager than Connor had ever seen. He really wanted to join in, and maybe they needed him, but that whole soul sundering thing still worried Connor.

  Even more surprising, Water joined the conversation. Connor got a terrible headache as his shared mind fractured further. He blinked, and fell into a shared mindspace, sort of like that common area in Aifric’s mind. Had he created that, or had the elements?

  The location was small, some kind of old tavern with walls of rippling flame. The elements sat around a single polished wooden table in the center.

  “This is weird,” Connor commented, suddenly finding himself seated at the table with them on a chair made of lava, his torso human-shaped but made entirely of flames. His lower body melded with his volcano seat. Porphyry padded around the table, red eyes fixed on each of the elements in turn, a low growl rumbling in its thick chest. The elements made a point of not noticing it.

  “He’s going to crack,” Fire complained, looking really annoyed. He straddled his chair backward and was consuming an enormous plate of spice-root pepper cookies.

  Water gestured with her mug that frothed like all the waves of the sea. “Earth, you threaten to confuse him beyond repair.”

  Air leaned back in her chair, beyond the point where it should fall over, but a tiny whirlwind kept it in position. She raised a delicate wine glass made of faceted quartzite, filled with swirling clouds, and grinned at Connor. “Can I have part of him too?”

  “If we diffuse him too much, we will lose him,” Earth replied, banging his heavy, earthenware mug onto the table. His mug actually looked like it was filled with packed earth. How he could sip off of that made no sense.

  “You’re the one who brought it up. Why do you get to suck the joy out of everything?” Air muttered.

  “Take your part, but be qui
ck and do not damage him,” Water warned.

  Fire muttered, “Today was my turn.” He flung the tray across the room. It melted from the heat before it struck the wall.

  Connor tried to settle his thoughts, but he felt untethered, fractured. Was he losing it? The scene was so strange, the elements acting like he was a cake they were deciding how to split between them.

  “Um, guys, the volcano, remember?” he interjected.

  Earth pointed his mug at Connor, “You have not yet formed the lower half of your elfonnel. You have room for me to join the mix.”

  “Okay, as long as you don’t destroy me. We want to avoid that,” Connor said hesitantly.

  He reminded himself they weren’t human, so they probably didn’t intend anything by the strange conversation, and he focused on the fact that Earth seemed to want to try something new.

  That part he liked, as long as they avoided the whole death-by-fractured-mind-in-elfonnel-form bit. He was so powerful, but he couldn’t even enjoy that without having to push the limits beyond what even Kilian or Evander had ever done.

  He chuckled to himself when he realized he almost said, “If only I could just be an elfonnel.”

  “We cannot accomplish our goals without you, so it is in our best interest to preserve you,” Earth said. “What we propose has never been done, and the burden of cost would threaten the stability of your mind unless you cast that burden upon your final foundational bridge.”

  “You mean the one linking me back to my family in Alasdair?” Connor didn’t like the sound of that. He’d already cankered more of his family bridge during fleshcrafting than he wanted to.

  “Indeed. You may cast the burden of the melding of Fire and myself onto that bridge and survive,” Earth said.

  Connor was happy that there was an option besides personal destruction, but he hesitated. “When I cast the effects of fleshcrafting on that bridge, it was damaged.”

  “Indeed, a price must be paid,” Earth agreed.

  Water leaned forward, an encouraging smile on her lips. “Connor, this is the only way to save you and your dear friends and prevent a horrible disaster from sweeping across your country. The choice is yours.”

  Except, what choice did he have? He didn’t like damaging his family bridge, but it wasn’t like the bridge was real.

  Air placed a hand on his, and he felt through her touch the sense of a cool breeze, laughing along the face of a high mountain. “Connor, embrace your chance to take another step toward greatness. The burden may weaken that last bridge, but it represents nothing more than the weakness of your human condition.”

  Connor glanced at water. “I thought it represented the link back to my family.”

  “That is part of the same thing. We are sharing concepts that can be hard for you to understand, so we try different words at different times.”

  That made sense, but he wished he understood what his family bridge really meant, and what wrecking it would mean to him. He’d have to figure that out later. He didn’t have time to waste, and he was out of options.

  So he took a deep breath and nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  At least Porphyry did not object as Earth reached out and grabbed Connor’s amorphous fiery body at about where he should have a left knee. Connor didn’t need more affinity drama.

  With a strange wrenching feeling, an earthen leg grew out of his volcano chair and attached itself to his waist. Then it seemed to melt, and the earth flowed up into his torso. It was weird, like a fever chill racing up through him, and he shivered, feeling weird, like he was momentarily two people sitting in the same place.

  Then the two people merged, and he nearly swooned. Groaning, he swayed in his seat as bands of earth mingled with the flames forming his body, and together they transformed into molten rock.

  Was he becoming a lava elfonnel? Was that a thing?

  The elementals all stood up and cheered. Connor found it hard to focus. His mind felt hazy, and he fought a growing dizziness that threatened to bury his consciousness again. The shared mindscape faded and Connor blinked, returning to elfonnel form. He still stood atop the enormous volcano, but now he could feel the molten earth within it. He sensed the rumblings radiating out from the epicenter of the eruption. Evander’s will blanketed the area, struggling to ease the worst of the trembling, but accomplishing only a pitiful fraction of what he needed.

  His giant elfonnel body changed just as it had in the mindscape. The pure flames darkened as earth flowed up into him, transforming into bands of molten lava. That darker layer spread across his chest, arms, and face, bands of shadow interspersed with the white-hot ropes of living fire.

  He felt Evander’s surprise to feel him walking with earth too. Connor wanted to grin, but couldn’t seem to make the elfonnel-rampager mouth move in that direction, so he settled for spewing a stream of lava straight up into the air, then absorbing it again when it cascaded down over him. He wondered if the big man was confusing himself with a convoluted Sentry-speak question of how it was possible. He wished he could hear Evander’s thoughts, but didn’t dare try any other affinities. He was already feeling spread far too thin.

  His mind felt fractured in a really unpleasant way as he fought to manage the melded connections to both earth and fire. In his moment of distraction, the eruption intensified, pushing the limits of his control and threatening to fracture Connor’s attention beyond his ability to hold it together. His headache got worse.

  He wasn’t sure what a schizophrenic elfonnel might do, and didn’t want to be the test case to prove how bad the idea really was. So he held on, even though it felt like his mind was getting stretched and twisted like a cloth in a washerwoman’s hands. He was just glad Air didn’t decide to take any part of him. Adding another twist would snap him.

  Then he sensed that mind-bending pressure ease, and felt more than saw black, sludgy mist roll across his family bridge, as if someone had cast a giant bucket of filthy slop onto it. His agreement to the plan was enough to trigger the release, apparently.

  The nasty mixture splashed across the wooden planks, the stone supports, and the polished wooden handrail, spreading far down the bridge and seeping into everything. The wood blackened with rot, the stone chipped and cankered, and the handrail pitted.

  The damage was far more severe than he’d expected, and he feared he’d made a terrible mistake. He wasn’t sure what he’d just lost, but it wasn’t something meaningless like the elements had suggested.

  Unfortunately, it was too late to take back the choice, and the vision faded as his senses expanded through his lava body. He was there, a mixed elfonnel, and he’d already paid the price, so he’d better stop moping about it and get to work.

  Casting his combined elemental senses deep into the earth, Connor seized the ground around the break in the planet’s mantel. His will melded with the land all around. He was still fire, but he was also earth now, and it was marvelous.

  The land spread away in every direction, the entire continent mapped to his mind. He was surprised to feel his senses slide farther, beneath the Sea of Olcan. If he wanted to, he bet he could push his senses all the way across and get a glimpse of the next continent.

  He didn’t have time.

  So Connor seized the land of Obrion and quelled the tremors that threatened to cover the entire continent in destructive shaking. Then he focused on the biggest fissure, the one directly beneath him. And walking carefully with both Fire and Earth, he attacked it.

  With Fire, he bled away the heat, while with Earth he fused the newly forming stones to the existing ground, welding it all together.

  It wasn’t enough.

  The thin plug ripped asunder like a piece of cheesecloth trying to catch a huge, roasted ham. He redoubled his efforts, his enormous elfonnel form leaning into the struggle, crouching and slipping deeper into the bubbling lava.

  The soft bulk of the great mountain he’d formed threatened to explode under the pressure, and even though he was now
the living embodiment of two elements, he only barely held it all in check. If his attention wavered, if his control slipped, the mountain would explode in every direction, sweeping miles of Obrion away in fiery destruction. Would he simply explode too?

  Not the way he wanted this day to turn out.

  So he held on, his fiery form quivering from the strain, trying to work fast enough, to plug the hole in the planet.

  He couldn’t do it. The pressure was too great, the plug too fragile.

  “This isn’t working!”

  “Because you’re not surrendering completely to us,” Fire said.

  “I’m an elfonnel, aren’t I?”

  “Perhaps the greatest who ever rose,” Earth acknowledged. “But you try to change the course of the planet. It cannot be done without surrendering completely to us.”

  Porphyry appeared in his mind, across from Fire and Earth. They didn’t step into the shared mental space, but occupied parts of Connor’s mind. His headache blossomed and he groaned, fearing that he had pushed himself too far, even after casting so much onto his family bridge. Maybe people just weren’t made to walk with two elements at the same time.

  Porphyry growled, and Connor read its caution. It sensed danger in the route the elements suggested, but what else could Connor do?

  Fire beckoned him closer, and Connor felt his will beginning to slip. His headache intensified until it felt like his brain was on fire. That was so wrong when he was fire. All he had to do was agree, and he sensed that the pain would disappear.

  So would he.

  “Give up yourself, Connor. Isn’t that what human heroes are supposed to do? Surrender themselves? Only then could we hope to generate the back-pressure force necessary to stop the advance of the core,” Fire said, his voice gently tugging on to take that last step and surrender.

  Connor had nearly died for his family, his friends, and his country more than once. He bristled at Fire’s insinuation that he wasn’t trying hard enough. If he gave in, would the elementals really stop the eruption? He knew their temptation to ride it forever and sweep the land with destruction.