Darkness Rising (The Endless War Book 2)

by D. K. Holmberg

  —Lren Atunal, Cardinal of the College of Scholars

  Jasn stared out the window inside the massive tower of Atenas, looking at the city spread all around the base of the tower. From here, the buildings stretching away appeared like little more than an undulating gray wave. Movement in the five streets spreading out like spokes on a wheel appeared like little more than dark shapes.

  He should return to the barracks, but he still wasn’t ready. There were other questions he had, ones he might only be able to answer while in Atenas. Beyond that, he still wasn’t sure he was willing to return to the barracks. Whatever was taking place there was none of his concern, was it?

  Still, being back here, in this place, reminded him all too well of everything he’d thought to forget. In spite of all that time away, he still couldn’t shake the memories of Katya. At least he’d reached the point where he no longer felt he needed to forget her entirely. No, instead he tried doing anything that might bring him the silence of death. Wasn’t that why he’d taken Lachen’s assignment in the first place?

  “You’ve been away from Atenas for… well over a year, Jasn.” Oliver stood in the doorway, watching him with brown eyes that seemed both warm and welcoming and accusatory all at the same time. He wore a long gray robe that barely hid his bulk, the hem in front floating higher above the ground than in the back.

  Jasn forced a smile at his old mentor. “It can’t have been that long, Oliver.”

  “No?” Oliver swept into the room and stopped at a shelf lined with books. In some ways, the healer guild was nearly as bad as the scholars, taking such copious notes about technique and new healing skill that they often forgot there was an element of artistry in it. “My notes would say otherwise.” Oliver offered a thin notebook to him, and Jasn shook his head.

  “I don’t doubt your records.”

  “You could have told me how you struggled. You should have spoken of what you were thinking—”

  Jasn swallowed back the hard lump in his throat. The hurt in Oliver’s tone was almost more than he could bear, and he couldn’t even deny what Oliver said. He should have told Oliver what he planned rather than simply disappearing, joining the front, basically offering himself as a sacrifice. Warriors didn’t willingly serve on the front lines. They might lead and fight, but the lines were for shapers skilled in one element only, and never healers.

  “You would only have tried to stop me.”

  Oliver closed his eyes and breathed out so softly that Jasn strained to hear. A shaping built from him, one that was intended to wash over Jasn, but he pushed it away. Oliver opened his eyes and studied Jasn with a new interest.

  “I would have suggested that what you were feeling was natural. That pain is a part of living and that grieving—”

  “And I wouldn’t have listened. I wasn’t ready.”

  Oliver recalled the proffered notebook and placed it back on its shelf. “And now? Are you ready now?”

  Was he? That was a question that Lachen couldn’t answer for him. The time in the barracks hadn’t given him the answers, either. He’d hoped for a way to attack those who had hurt him, but he’d failed when given the opportunity. What did that make him?

  Jasn wasn’t certain anymore.

  “I don’t know,” he said softly.

  Oliver turned and made his way over to him, stopping a step in front. He smelled of salt and sweat, scents that Jasn had come to think of as healthy and safe scents when he’d studied here, but now the salt reminded him of all the tears he’d shed since losing Katya, and the sweat reminded him of men dying along the line.

  “Perhaps that is all the answer you need,” Oliver suggested.

  He built a shaping, and this time Jasn did nothing to stop it, not needing to interrupt it. There was nothing to it other than a gentle, soothing sense, and one that Jasn figured he could use.

  “You’ve changed,” Oliver said.

  “I’ve seen too many die not to.”

  “That’s not it, I don’t think. I’ve known many men who’ve lost those they care about and gone to risk everything, much as you did. Most die, which was the reason I would have done everything I could to stop you, had I only known. Those who make it back end up… broken,” he said, as if deciding what word he should use. “No healing can help.”

  “I was broken.” Maybe he still was. That could be the reason Lachen chose him—another sacrifice, though one he made willingly.

  “Hmm. Maybe. But not any longer, are you?”

  Oliver went to the hearth and crouched in front of it. He stacked logs into place and then used a thin shaping of fire—probably as much as Oliver was capable of drawing—to start the fire. When satisfied, he took a seat in one of the high-backed chairs sitting in front of the hearth. When Jasn settled across from him, he leaned forward, resting his bulk on his elbows as he studied Jasn.

  “Tell me, how were you able to do it?”

  “I’m not here for you to study, Oliver.”

  “No? Then why have you come? Do you want me to forget about how you abandoned your training and disappeared, and simply take you back?”

  Jasn suppressed a smile. It would be just like Oliver to think that he would want to come back to study, but Jasn had changed in the time he’d been away, possibly as much during his time in the barracks as while serving along the line. At least on the front line, he didn’t have time to think about what he’d gone through or what he intended for a future he wasn’t sure he wanted anymore. There, he’d been focused on fighting, and healing, and then fighting some more. Each day had been much the same. And each day, he thought it might be his last, that he’d finally return to Katya, but then each day he would return instead to the line.

  In that way, Lachen was wrong. He hadn’t been the greatest warrior on the front, not if he’d failed in the only thing he’d gone there to accomplish.

  But he was different now. Jasn hadn’t given much thought to why that should be, but it was the truth for him, at least for now. Maybe that wouldn’t always be the case, but now he wanted to find out what Lachen knew about the elementals and what Alena and Cheneth could show him, especially if they could explain the way he had been able to heal so well. Those answers might matter more than even ending the war.

  If he was honest with himself—which was rare these days—he wanted to know what Alena knew about Katya, as well.

  “I don’t think I can rejoin your training, Oliver,” he said. “The commander has a different assignment for me right now.”

  “Indeed. From what I hear, you’ve shown yourself to be quite the soldier.” He said it with distaste. Like most of the healers, Oliver didn’t understand why Ter continued to press the attack and why the commander seemed so motivated push into land that wanted nothing more than to exclude them and hadn’t done anything to attack in years.

  But that wasn’t entirely true. The people of Rens had attacked Ter, and they had used their own strange version of shaping to devastating effect. Then again, until studying in the barracks, he would have believed that Rens used the draasin, but now he wasn’t sure that was true. Perhaps none of what he thought about the attack with Rens was quite as he’d believed.

  “I did what I was asked,” Jasn said.

  “You did what you wanted. They are different. The commander would have left you alone, especially given your unique… gifts.” Oliver crossed his arms over his chest, resting them on his stomach. He took a deep breath. “You waste the talent you were given. Talent that should go to healing and learning mastery of water. Instead, you use it to keep yourself well, healing when injured so that you become a warrior of such fearsome ability that you cannot be killed.”

  Oliver stared at him, forcing Jasn to hold his gaze. Jasn refused to turn away. The point was a valid one, and something he did without even knowing most of the time. Water seemed to take control when he was injured, forcing healing upon him, as if the element itself decided it wasn’t his time. Once, he would have thought such a concept impossible,
but now that he’d learned of the existence of the elementals, he wondered if maybe they were the reason he’d survived.

  “That’s the reason I came,” Jasn said. Oliver’s eyes narrowed. “You often told me that I had a unique ability with healing. Why is that?”

  Oliver tipped his head to the side as if trying to determine whether Jasn really wanted to know. Then he sighed, and the tension in his shoulders eased. “You studied with the guild for how long?”

  “Probably three years.”

  “Three years. Could it really have been such a short time?” Oliver set his hands at his sides and raised a few fingers as he counted to himself. “Maybe it really was only three years. You were always so advanced, even from the beginning, that it’s hard to think of when you first came to us, how hesitant you were.”

  Jasn didn’t think he’d been hesitant. Cautious. Uncertain. Feeling as if he didn’t fit in, but hesitant? Maybe he had been.

  “Advanced as you were, you never saw what you did as unique. Few possess the ability to heal themselves, and never at such an early stage in their development with shaping, yet you demonstrated that nearly before you did anything else. It wasn’t until much later that you developed the ability to heal others with nearly the same capacity.”

  The healing of himself had been something he’d always possessed, and it wasn’t until Renis had come to their village and explained to him and Lachen about shaping and what it meant and how he could learn more about it that he’d understood what he’d been doing all along.

  Only, maybe that wasn’t what he’d been doing. Now he wondered if maybe he hadn’t somehow been reaching toward the elemental power, though he still didn’t know what that meant for him. How else to explain the nearly impossible shapings he still managed?

  “You always called it a gift,” Jasn said.

  The comment brought Oliver back out of his reverie, and he shook his head as he grabbed at the fabric of his robe, balling it into his fist. “A gift. Truly something like that can be nothing else, but you… you take a gift like that and you turn it, twist it, and taint it by the way you abuse it.”

  “There were days it was more of a curse than a gift,” Jasn said. When he’d wanted nothing so much as to be destroyed while on the front and had failed so often, what else could it have been but a curse?

  “Only because you fail to recognize what you’ve been given.” Oliver looked over his shoulder, glancing toward the door. He built a soft shaping that sealed them in the room together, and Jasn wondered why his old mentor would take the time to perform a shaping like that and what he might have to tell him that would need such privacy. Oliver slid forward on his chair and leaned forward. “Tell me, Jasn. What is the real reason for your visit? You’ve been gone over a year, time enough for me to hear that you’d survived along the battlefront and been summoned back to the city, yet you’ve not been seen, not before now.”

  “The commander summoned me.”

  “Yes. I imagine that he did. Otherwise you would not have returned.”

  That was truer than even Oliver knew. Few knew of the connection Jasn and Lachen shared, how they had come to Atenas together all those years ago or how they had grown up in the same village, had played together, or how they had once been nearly brothers. Jasn hadn’t seen Renis since the scholar had brought them to Atenas, and no one else in Atenas would know that secret.

  “When Katya died, I wanted nothing more than to join her,” Jasn said. “I went to the front thinking I could serve Ter. Even if it was only for a few days.”

  “You could not have really expected to last only a few days.”

  “No,” Jasn said. He knew that his ability would keep him alive for much longer than that. In fact, there was that part of him that expected to live long enough to reach deep into Rens, possibly even deep enough to meet one of the draasin, enact some form of revenge. That had been before he knew how powerful even the smallest of the draasin were and how poorly prepared shapers of the order really were when it came to the creatures.

  “Then tell me, Jasn Volth, if you went to the battlefront thinking to die, willing even, what would bring you back to Atenas? What could the commander have offered you, or said to you, that would change your mind?”

  Jasn frowned. He hadn’t realized how well-known his intent had been. Had Lachen known as well, and had that been the reason he’d chosen Jasn?

  “He offered me the chance to learn and serve Ter.”

  “That would have worked on you once.”

  “Once,” Jasn agreed.

  “What else?”

  Jasn sighed. “Vengeance. The commander knew what I wanted, even if I didn’t fully understand. He has a way for me to obtain the vengeance I seek.”

  Oliver studied him. Most within the healer guild were intelligent—using water shaping to heal required a certain knowledge of not only the human body but also how it would interact with the shapings used upon it that could only be obtained by those willing to study and devote the necessary time to understanding—but Oliver was one of the most gifted healers Ter had ever known, and he knew things. This was the reason Jasn risked coming back to him, even knowing that his old mentor was disappointed in what had become of him.

  “What sort of vengeance did you intend?”

  Did. Not do.

  “What do you know of how Katya died?” Jasn asked.

  “Is that why you came? You wish to learn about your beloved, well over a year after she was lost?”

  “I know what happened with her.”

  “Do you?”

  The way he said it suggested that Oliver knew about Katya, and Jasn didn’t think many knew about the barracks or what he studied while there. “I know she was offered much the same opportunity as I was. She died learning.”

  Oliver studied him for another moment, and his eyes narrowed. “Then you don’t know what happened with her.”

  “What do you mean?” This wasn’t the reason he had come to speak to Oliver. He’d wanted to know whether his mentor knew anything about the elementals. Given the way he knew about shaping, and the sometimes supernatural ability he had with healing, Jasn had immediately thought of Oliver when he’d learned of the elementals. What if Oliver could speak to them, much like Alena could speak to the draasin? And if he could, was there anything he could do to teach Jasn?

  Oliver stood and pushed his chair out of the way and turned to the hearth. “I think that you need to go. If you’ve gone where I suspect you have, I cannot condone what you learn. I wish you to find peace, Jasn. That’s all that I want for any student, but given what you’ve gone through, I want it for you most of all.”

  Jasn wasn’t ready to leave, not if Oliver really did know about the barracks, or if he knew about the elementals. “You don’t think I should learn to hunt the draasin?”

  Silence hung between them for long moments.

  “That you need to ask tells me how little you have learned from me.”

  Jasn stood and started toward the door. Maybe it had been a mistake for him to come here. How would he even have asked what he wanted to know? If he was wrong, Oliver would ask questions that Jasn wasn’t sure he had answers for. And if he was right… there might still be questions he didn’t have the answers for.

  “I’m sorry that I came here,” Jasn said, resting his hand on the door. He readied a shaping, peeling away the layer of protection Oliver had placed, still not certain why he had.

  Oliver turned to him. “Where did you learn that?”

  “Learn what?”

  “When you shaped, I felt almost nothing of it. Where did you learn it?”

  Damn. Alena had demonstrated the shaping, but he hadn’t really thought about what he was doing when he used it. Most of the time, he shaped instinctively, especially now that he’d become more skilled with the technique of masking. “I thought you knew where I had gone.”

  “Who’s your instructor?” Oliver asked again.

  “Alena.”

  Oliv
er closed his eyes and sighed. “That bastard. He knew and still he sent you there. How did he manage to pair you with her?”

  “The commander only suggested the pairing.” Cheneth had agreed, and Jasn suspected Alena still hadn’t forgiven him for assigning her another student.

  “I thought…”

  “Perhaps you don’t know all that you think you do,” Jasn said.

  Oliver slammed another shaping of water into place, sealing them once more in the room. Jasn readied another shaping to leave, but Oliver grabbed him by the shoulders and threw him back a step. He was stronger than Jasn would have expected, stronger than someone only able to weakly shape earth should be.

  “You can’t kill them,” Oliver said, pleading.

  Jasn frowned. “I can’t?”

  “I know what you think, but it’s wrong. The commander hasn’t told you everything. Chances are Alena hasn’t told you everything.”

  Jasn waited, feeling a thrill rising through him with the possibility that Oliver might share with him that he knew how to speak to the elementals, that he knew of the draasin and what they really were, maybe even that he knew of whatever secret war Lachen feared. What he said next was none of those.

  “She’s not dead, Jasn.”

  “Who?” he asked, but in his fluttering heart, he already knew who Oliver referred to.

  “Might be as good as dead, but Katya… She’s not dead.”

  5

  Ciara

  Darkness has escaped and grows stronger. Some think to control it, though I wonder if control is possible or only an illusion. Others are controlled by the darkness, attacking those who serve the Light.

  —Lren Atunal, Cardinal of the College of Scholars

  When the wind shifted, Ciara felt the drawing of sand as it brushed against her skin, a painful, raw sensation that her thin elouf did nothing to mask. She even kept her foul-smelling shaisa veil in place, keeping sand from blowing into her mouth and avoiding tasting the sand from the waste. The clothing did nothing to prevent it from creeping through the folds in the fabric, though, leaving her wanting nothing more than to remove the veil completely.