Journey of Fire and Night (The Endless War Book 1)

by D. K. Holmberg

  “What does Cheneth think to learn from them?” he asked.

  “The same as the rest of us.”

  Jasn grunted. “Not me. I only want to learn to kill them.”

  The draasin jerked on the chain, and Bayan let it go. The creature snapped its head to the side, as if trying to reach for her, but Bayan danced back, its long fangs barely missing her side.

  Bayan held her hand up, shaping as she did, but the creature grew more agitated. Heat surged from it, billowing away and turning the air to steam. Jasn wrapped a shaping of water around himself for protection but wondered if it would be enough.

  “We should go,” Bayan said, taking a step back.

  Jasn stared at the draasin, and it almost seemed to stare back at him, as if it knew what he’d said and understood. “I thought you said we could be here.”

  “We can, but this one seems to think we’ve been here long enough.” Bayan backed away, making a point of keeping her focus on the draasin even though it was chained to the wall and shouldn’t be able to go anywhere. “We’ll come back again. When you get comfortable with being around the draasin, you’ll have better luck with Alena, I think.”

  They stepped back out of the pen and the cool air hit him, layering mist all around. Jasn breathed it in, not certain that he would ever have any luck with Alena and wondering when he would face the first test that Bayan mentioned.

  He had an answer to the second part immediately. Alena waited for them outside the pen, eyes moving from Bayan to Jasn. “Good. Since you’re here, we’ll begin your testing.”

  15

  Jasn

  The Order of Warrior in Ter view themselves as peerless shapers. While few doubt their skill, I have witnessed other shapers with greater control than what exists in Atenas. Had they faced Rens with more strength, the war might have ended years before.

  —Lren Atunal, Cardinal of the College of Scholars

  Jasn kept his eyes closed as he reached out with a mixture of earth and fire sensing to find the draasin. The damn creature was near him. He could practically smell the bitter stink of it, but why couldn’t he sense it? He couldn’t figure it out, but if he failed finding it again, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t get another chance.

  Without opening his eyes, he took a dozen steps. Towering oaks rose on either side of him, and earth sensing guided him so that he was able to move past without worrying about running into them. Smaller scrub bushes tried to grab at his feet or catch his leather pants with their thorns, but he managed to avoid them as well. His foot splashed through a shallow stream, and he grimaced. Drying the boot would take more shaping control than he possessed.

  The air temperature didn’t change.

  Jasn opened his eyes with a sigh. That was the one thing he expected, the one way he would know the draasin were near, if not for earth sensing and fire sensing. The creatures were too powerful to not affect the air temperature.

  “Still can’t find it?”

  He spun, his hand going to his sword. Alena leaned against one of the oaks, her own sword, a narrow blade inscribed with markers for each of the elements, held casually in her hand. A sweep of brownish blond hair hung across her round face, masking one eye, leaving the other piercing blue eye staring at him.

  “Don’t worry. I will find it.”

  “Prove it.”

  “I can practically smell it, so why can’t I sense it?”

  Alena pushed away from the tree and sheathed her sword. “Are you sure that isn’t you?”

  Jasn ignored the comment. “Earth sensing shows me nothing, and neither does fire.”

  Alena tilted her head to look up into the trees. “You have to use all your abilities. If you survived a year in Rens, you’re clearly a powerful shaper, but to find the draasin requires more than strength in shaping.”

  Jasn followed the direction of her gaze. Tied high overhead was the creature, stone-infused leather wrapped around its jaws. The creature watched him, golden eyes trailing him as if he were the hunted rather than the other way around.

  She leapt to the air on a controlled shaping of wind and, with a swipe of her sword so fast that he barely saw it, cut the stone rope suspending it in the tree, letting it drop back to the ground. As the creature fell, it never once took its eyes off him.

  Alena lowered herself back to the ground and motioned to him. “See the way she watches you?”

  “It’s a she?”

  Alena sighed. “You should respect these creatures.”

  “I respect them enough. I’ve seen the destruction caused by them. I faced attacks for nearly a year in Rens. Don’t think that I don’t respect them.” He wouldn’t share with her how Katya died. How they had taken her from him before they really had a chance to be together.

  “And still you’ve failed with all three trials today. None have been particularly difficult, yet you still struggle even to find the draasin. What happens when you’re faced with one of the creatures not bound by stone rope and gagged?”

  He suppressed a frustrated sigh. “I kill it.”

  The draasin shook and the stone rope binding her wings flung free. In an instant, the creature jerked her head toward him, slammed the spike of her snout into his stomach, and drove him back.

  Alena grabbed the remains of the stone rope and pulled it back, getting the creature under control, but the damage had been done.

  Jasn grunted and fell, losing control of his shaping as he did. His sword dropped from his grip and he reached for his belly. Blood poured from the wound. He staggered back, a smile coming to his face. Could this be it? After all the time he’d spent in Rens, would he finally die here in Ter because of a controlled draasin? The irony would have made him laugh if his stomach had allowed it.

  Even as he sat there, the blood flowing from him eased, a water shaping that he didn’t intend—and didn’t control—already healing him. It was as if his body refused to die.

  Alena looked over at him, eyes narrowing as she saw the way the blood had eased. “We need to get you to a healer. The barracks has one who—”

  “I’ll be fine.” He stood, peeking beneath his shirt to see the blood already dried, the skin already mended.

  “Fine? You were gouged—”

  Jasn laughed more bitterly than he intended. “Do you think that’s the first time?” He slammed his sword back into his sheath. “You know how long I spent in Rens. You don’t last long in Rens, at least that deep in Rens, unless you’ve got some way of healing.”

  She studied him and shook her head. “You’re more foolish than I realized, aren’t you?”

  “What does that mean?”

  She sighed, glancing at the creature, her head tipped to the side as if hearing something. After healing himself, Jasn didn’t have the strength needed to listen, nor did he have the interest.

  They weaved through the forest, Alena somehow managing to keep from turning her back to the draasin. The rope circled her waist, and she gripped it tightly with her right hand as she pulled. When they reached the barracks, Alena waved him off as she pulled it back to the pen. Jasn stared after her, unable to take his eyes off the way she effortlessly pulled the creature across the yard. A faint sheen of sweat beaded along her brow, catching the light of the sun before it reflected off her hair.

  “Careful how you look at her. I think she knows.”

  Jasn turned to see Wyath standing behind him, staring at the beast. “The draasin already had a chance with me,” he said, rubbing his stomach.

  Wyath grunted as he glanced at the blood soaking Jasn’s shirt. “I didn’t mean the draasin.”

  “Alena? She’d as soon stab me herself,” Jasn said.

  Wyath’s eyes narrowed as Alena sealed the door to the pen with a shaping of stone before starting toward them, back rigid. “How did it go?”

  “He failed three trials today. Is that enough?”

  Wyath glanced at Jasn and mouthed the word, “Three?”

  Jasn could only shake his head.
r />   “Then he managed to let her attack.”

  “Does he need a healer?” Wyath asked.

  “Said he doesn’t.”

  “Good. Then you’re both to report to Cheneth.”

  Alena eyed Jasn a moment. “If Cheneth wants to talk, then it’s time to tell him what happened today.”

  How would Cheneth react to the fact that Jasn had not only failed to find the draasin during each of his three attempts, but that he’d been stupid enough to let the damn thing spear him?

  “There is no shame in washing out,” Alena said as they made their way through the barracks, almost as if reading his thoughts.

  “No,” Jasn agreed.

  She glanced over. “You don’t care?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll return to Rens either way. What difference does it make?”

  “You continue to make mistakes, don’t you?”

  Jasn sighed. He was in no mood to deal with more of Alena’s annoyance. “It seems that I do. Why don’t you tell me what mistake you mean this time? Was it failing to find the draasin or letting it strike me?”

  “Neither. Your mistake was thinking that the draasin deserved whatever fate you have in mind.”

  With that, she pushed open the door and left him standing outside, wondering whether he really understood what Alena had just said. Could she really believe the creature didn’t deserve to be hunted?

  The inside of the stone building would be dark if not for the shaped light glowing brightly from two lanterns. Alena already sat in front of a long desk, resting her hands comfortably on her knees, her sword hanging at her side and barely brushing the ground.

  A soft cough, little more than a clearing of a throat, pulled his attention to Cheneth, who sat behind the desk. One of the lanterns in the room rested on his desk, giving light to the stacks of papers and pile of books atop it. The old scholar leaned back in his chair, eyeing Jasn through the thick lenses of his spectacles. Cheneth had a wrinkled face, his skin pale from all the time he spent out of the sun, either reading his copious notes or sending missives to others about what he might have discovered.

  He twisted the ends of his thick mustache as he waited. “You don’t have to stand in the doorway.” His voice was too soft for someone who led, especially considering what they trained for here, but Jasn found himself leaning forward to ensure that he heard. Maybe that was the old scholar’s intent.

  “Alena was giving me a report of the day,” Cheneth said. He pulled a blank page in front of him and dipped his pen into a small bottle of blood-red ink at the corner of the desk, holding the pen above the page as if waiting to begin until Jasn spoke.

  “Then you have already heard all that you need.”

  Cheneth scrawled a few quick words across the page. From his angle, Jasn couldn’t tell what he wrote, but he likely wouldn’t be able to read it anyway. The scholars used a language only they would understand, almost as if writing in code.

  “Tell me how the draasin hid from you,” Cheneth said.

  Jasn glanced at Alena, thinking she would be getting far too much enjoyment out of this. “For the first attempt, the beast hid near the water,” Jasn said. “The water… it shielded the creature. Almost like an earth shaper shielding themselves.”

  Jasn hadn’t expected the draasin to manage to hide itself in that way. Water wasn’t necessarily the opposite element to fire—that was why the draasin were bound in stone—but it shouldn’t have been able to hide quite so well within the water.

  “Interesting,” Cheneth said, scrawling a few notes. “Alena knew that it could do this?”

  Jasn glanced at her again. “She was the one who placed it.”

  Cheneth set his pen down and glanced up, meeting Alena’s eyes. “Indeed? You knew that they could use water to hide?”

  “They have used water to hide in the past,” she said carefully, avoiding looking over at Jasn. “It is not a shielding, at least not the same way earth shapers manage.”

  Cheneth scrawled a few more lines across the page and then looked up at Jasn. “The first hid in water. What of the second?”

  Jasn twisted his hands together, suppressing the irritation that he felt. The second challenge had been nearly as frustrating as the first, almost as if Alena were determined to show him how very little he knew. “A cave along the edge of the mountains,” he started. “The creature hid within the cave, and the stone made it… difficult… for me to detect.” Like with water, it had somehow blended into the stone. He had thought himself strong with earth, but it was almost as if Alena had been determined to show him how little he knew.

  Cheneth scratched a few additional marks. “I presume she used the links around the wings and the snout to hide the creature there?”

  Honestly, Jasn didn’t know how Alena had hidden the draasin there. When he’d failed, she’d simply strolled into the cave and pulled the creature out, making a show about how little he knew about earth sensing.

  Alena nodded.

  Cheneth looked at her through the spectacles drifting down on his nose. He tapped the pen atop the ink bottle and a small droplet of blood-red ink dripped from the shaped tip back into the bottle, and then he made a few more notes without looking up. Each scratch of his pen scraping across the paper sounded like some creature trying to free itself from the desk, clawing at it from below. Jasn shook his head to rid himself of the image.

  “And the third?” Cheneth said.

  “A tree,” Jasn said simply. There was no point in elaborating any more than necessary.

  Cheneth looked up, taking in both Jasn and Alena. “A tree?” he repeated. “You hid the creature in a tree and he didn’t manage to find it?”

  “It was a big tree,” Jasn said.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he could swear he saw the hint of a smile tug at Cheneth’s mouth. “Now that your testing is over, you are needed to the south,” he said to Alena. “Calan has already departed—”

  Alena stood quickly and nodded before hurrying to the door.

  Jasn started to follow but was cut short as Cheneth cleared his throat. “A word, Warrior Volth.”

  The door closed as Alena departed, sealing him in the room alone with Cheneth. The scholar leaned forward and set his pen and page aside, his attention fully focused on Jasn for the first time.

  “Tell me, Warrior Volth, of your experience here. How does this compare to what you were told to expect?”

  “I was told nothing.”

  “Nothing? The commander sent you here without any instruction?”

  “I think my time in Rens made him think it would be unnecessary.”

  Cheneth sniffed. “And has Rens prepared you?”

  Jasn glanced around the scholar’s room. Rens had prepared him to fight the draasin, but he’d never learned how to kill them. That was what he wanted here. “Apparently not. You think to control the draasin much like Rens, but I’ve not seen any evidence that anyone knows enough to control them.”

  Cheneth clasped his hands behind his back. “Control? Is that what you think? Our shapers learn to hunt the draasin.”

  “From what I’ve seen, the draasin are captured.”

  The scholar smiled. “Only to study.”

  Jasn grunted. “Study? If Lachen wanted me to study them, he wouldn’t have brought me here, would he? He wants to hunt them. To keep our shapers safe. To push back the draasin before they destroy any more warriors.”

  “That might be part of it,” Cheneth said. He glanced at Jasn’s shirt. “You were injured. How did you recover so quickly?”

  Jasn touched his shirt still crusted with blood. “Water heals.”

  “Indeed it does. That, I presume, is why you’re the man who cannot die?”

  He let go of his shirt and shook his head. “I don’t know why I can’t, but I intend to keep trying.”

  “Perhaps we can teach you enough to change your mind.”

  Jasn glanced back at the door, thinking of Alena off hunting the draasin. That was where he
would prefer to be. The draasin needed to be destroyed. They were the reason for the damned Endless War, and if Ter could stop the draasin, they could stop the war.

  Even that wouldn’t matter if he succeeded in his other goal. “I doubt that.”

  16

  Ciara

  The draasin are not native to either Rens or Ter. For years, they were reclusive, rarely seen. The start of the war changed much, not the least the frequency of draasin sightings in both lands.

  —Lren Atunal, Cardinal of the College of Scholars

  Heat shimmered from the expanse of the waste, rising up like some massive cloud, leaving a haze that was more than simply dust hanging in the hot, stagnant wind. Ciara glanced over at Fas, checking to determine how he handled the crossing, but saw nothing on his face that gave her worry. Only his fluttering pulse told her that he wasn’t as well as he claimed.

  She shifted her shaisa veil, making sure to create a tighter seal over her mouth. Already, she struggled to keep the dust from filling the veil and the sand from creeping down through her elouf, no matter how tightly she might cinch it closed.

  Fas took another quick swig from his waterskin. Ciara noted how little water remained in the skin and knew that she’d need to conserve her water in case he needed it. She felt the steady increase in her pulse and the dry flush that worked up her neck. If she started sweating, they would need to turn back. Continuing forward when she already showed signs of the heat would only put them at risk.

  “I still don’t sense it,” Fas said. In spite of all the water he’d drunk, his voice was hoarse, and he coughed to clear it. He might claim that he felt better, but Ciara knew how hard he struggled.

  “We can return to the others,” she suggested.

  “Not without making certain that we’re leading the people in the right direction.”

  They had been sent to scout ahead. Ciara had volunteered, thinking to protect Fas from this, but he had stubbornly made it clear that he would go with her. As nya’shin, he had the right to demand to go with her; only, he wasn’t well enough yet. Still, Ciara had been thankful for his presence as they made their way across the shifting dunes. The sand made it difficult to gauge direction, and Fas seemed to have a compass burned into his mind, always guiding them.