That was the key.

  I still didn’t know why the tu’alan would have needed to create an inestar that allowed them to summon our people, but perhaps knowing that wasn’t necessary. All I needed to know was how to find our people. All I needed was a way to get to them.

  And all I needed was a way to reach for Coldan, along with the others.

  They approached slowly.

  It happened gradually, and as I looked into the distance, I noticed Coldan coming toward me first. There was no mistaking his massive size, but it wasn’t just that that revealed him to me. It was also the power that radiated from him. He blazed like the sun, as if he were commanding vast stores of elaron. I flicked my gaze up to the sky, and I wondered. Was it tied to the surging power here?

  As I looked around us, I didn’t see anything more.

  Others came. More of the Order. Shae. Erich. Jahor who had begun to use their power. All of them continued to approach, and all of them seemed to hold on to that faint glowing energy, though not as brightly as Coldan.

  Then there were the Hith.

  They followed behind my Jahor, and each of them had a trace of a glow through them. It was almost enough to make me smile, but I didn’t know what it meant or whether there was anything within that glowing energy I needed to be alarmed by.

  “I can feel them coming,” Nevii said.

  “Through the ne’rash?”

  “I haven’t dared use the ne’rash since we came here,” she said.

  “You used it on me.”

  “I haven’t used it the way that I typically do,” she said. “I have used it in a way to connect to you, mostly to help determine whether you were trying to tell me the truth.”

  Coldan approached.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I think this wasn’t here when we were here before,” he said. “Whatever you have done has pushed away some of the fog, and cleared it away so we can now see more of the city. You should see this, Hevith.”

  “What should I see?”

  Coldan motioned for me to follow. I went after him, trailing behind Coldan. The farther they went, the more certain I was that everything that had been done here had changed things. I could feel the energy, and it seemed almost freeing.

  “I think the Vicenz had created the fog around the city.”

  “You mean the fog when we were here before,” Coldan said.

  I nodded. “I thought it was just this place, but I think it was more. I think they were actively doing something to prevent us from being able to access the elaron we should.”

  “So they could harness it.” He glanced over to Nevii. “The same way they shifted things in the temple. They wanted to harness it.”

  “I think so.”

  “Why would they have had us in prison in the north, though?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We reached a courtyard. It was familiar to me, and I looked around, trying to gauge why it would be so. Then it dawned on me: this courtyard was the place where had been captured, held captive, and inside the tower that should be here but was no longer, had been where I had destroyed Morad.

  “What happened to it?” I asked.

  “It’s missing,” he said.

  I looked over, arching a brow. “I can tell that’s missing, but where did it go?”

  “I was hoping you could use some of your particular magic to figure that out,” Coldan said, waving his hand. “Can’t your connection to elaron tell you these things?”

  Unlike in Delinth, there was no debris here. Nothing remained that would provide us any answers. I stared, trying to gauge just what was here, and whether there was anything we might be able to determine from it, but I couldn’t tell. I focused on the elaron, probing with it, using everything in my power to delve across the ground, but even as I did, I couldn’t feel anything.

  It was a strange emptiness. As far as I could tell, there should be something here. Unfortunately, there was nothing. No answers. An emptiness. I switched, adding my elaron to the ne’rash, using that combination to see if I could uncover something more, but there was still that emptiness.

  I tried something different. Mingling the two powers together, I sent the ne’rash onto the ground, and swept the elaron outward. The two crackled in the air.

  As they did, something shifted. It was almost as if the air itself shimmered, taking on a bit of a shape. Within that was a kind of form, a figure of what had been here before. I looked, staring, trying to understand whether I was seeing exactly what I thought I was.

  “Look.” Coldan pointed, and as he did, I could see what he was directing my attention to. There was a fight. People dying. Then a ring of people surrounding the tower. With a flash, it disappeared. “Why would they have destroyed this tower?” he asked.

  I turned, and I held on to the ne’rash in the elaron in the way that I was, and power continued to sweep across the ground, focusing where I went, twisting and turning, and came across several other buildings that had once been there, but were not.

  All of this was imagery that shifted with the power I held.

  By the time I reached what was now a massive forest springing up out of the middle of the city, I swept elaron and ne’rash across it, and half expected there to have been an attack here, but there was none.

  I frowned.

  “I think they were looking for it,” I said to Coldan.

  “Looking, but they didn’t find it,” he said.

  “Which means they didn’t know that the temple was here.” I frowned. “Was that why they attacked in other places?”

  “Perhaps,” Coldan said. “But you’re giving them a lot of credit.”

  “I will try to give them the credit that they deserve, the credit that tells me they knew what they were doing, and they knew how they were trying to harm us.”

  It meant there would’ve been Vicenz here before I was present. It meant that they had refrained from attacking until after I had arrived.

  We still didn’t know what they were after, but I could feel that there was some answer near at hand.

  “I feel as if the answers are right there, but we just haven’t seen them,” I said. “It has to do with the Vicenz.”

  “Then why don’t we go back to where we first found the Vicenz? It’s not that I want to go back to the prison, but if we are looking for answers, then it seems to me that’s where we need to go.”

  “That’s also where we first came into contact with the ger’thin,” I said.

  “And they made it seem as if they were targeting you.”

  “The Trilan has always been after me.”

  “Why, though?”

  I didn’t know. I shook my head, wishing those answers were there.

  I turned, heading through the city, continuing to sweep the ne’rash in the elaron through, but still found nothing.

  We camped for the night. There was a somber air to everything. Most people ate and drank and talked softly, the Hith staying in their camp and the Jahor staying in theirs, and by morning, I was ready to get moving again. I hadn’t slept all that long, finding myself staring at the forest that had grown in the middle of the city, straining for something I could see and understand.

  Answers didn’t come to me.

  As we started north, I held on to the ne’rash within the elaron, searching for answers that were not there. Every so often, Nevii looked over in my direction, and I could swear she pushed out with power in order to try to detect what I was doing, but there was nothing.

  We rode for several days straight, pausing at night, camping and staying quiet. We didn’t encounter anybody else along the journey. By the time we entered the hilly countryside that suggested we were nearing the fortress, I started to slow, and I couldn’t shake the feeling we were close to answers, only that those answers were not at all what I expected them to be. I continued to stare into the distance, struggling with what we had been doing.

  By the time we reached the fortress, it was nighttime.

  Darkness covered everything, leaving it in a blanket of shadows. I looked along a road that I had traveled several times in my life, but each time that I had, there had been something troubling to me. This time it was a need for answers that I didn’t know if I possessed. This time I came with a different urgency.

  Last time, I had been looking for understanding about how I could reunite the Jahor, trying to find a way to protect my people against the Hith threat, but now that I was here with the Hith, it seemed as if I had done something different.

  It was not at all what I had expected.

  This journey was not at all what I had expected.

  I looked over to Coldan.

  “So much of our life has been around this place,” I said.

  “Do you feel it started here, or that it will end here?”

  I smiled sadly. “I wish that I could say that with any certainty,” I said. “Unfortunately, I don’t really know. All I know is that we have spent too much time here.”

  “There may not be anything here.”

  When I’d been here each time, I didn’t have control over the elaron the way I needed, and I certainly didn’t have control over the ne’rash. It seemed to me that the combination of the two was what we really needed in order for me to better understand things.

  We camped for the night.

  A small campfire glowed, and it surprised me that many of the Hith were sitting near many of the Jahor. I stood off to the side, leaning against one tree. I could feel the energy and recognized the way elaron flowed in front of me, though I couldn’t feel anything more from it. Only an ongoing sense of power. It was something that called to me, trying to draw toward me.

  Every so often, I noticed Coldan glancing toward it. He had a look of concern on his face, the same look that I had known from him in our journey to the fortress the last time. I turned away from him, and Nevii joined me as I wandered out into the forest.

  “You seem troubled by this place,” she said.

  “I’m troubled by the idea that there would be something here that might harm us,” I said. “I don’t know if it will or not, but what I do know is there is something here that is a problem for us.”

  “You have been here before,” she said.

  “I have,” I said.

  “When you were here, did you find anything that harmed you?”

  I smiled slightly. “Not at that time, but that doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be something that could,” I said.

  She ran her hands along the trunk one of the trees near us, a movement that reminded me of what she had done when we had been in Laranth, and when the forest had appeared. Ne’rash flowed from her, stretching out and down before looping into the tree. From there, I noticed how she sent that power away from her, mingling with the other trees, mixing in a way that would create a surge of energy.

  “The forest here is different,” she said. “There’s an energy here I detect.”

  “When I was here, there was an attack.” I wasn’t entirely sure how to phrase it, not in a way that would make much sense to her, but it had been an attack. Even though I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t know what it meant; I didn’t know that the attack that had been here had been meant for me.

  “You aren’t telling me something.”

  “Because I don’t know what to make of it,” I said. “The strangeness of this attack was such that a magic seemed to bind the people that were used together, trapping them in a place between living and dying, but doing neither. It wasn’t until I freed them that I started to realize there was something holding them in that place.”

  I could close my eyes and I could practically see that, though even now, I had no idea what it had been, nor why they would have targeted us in the way that they had.

  The only thing I knew was that we had been attacked. They had used our willingness to help others in a way that had been designed to try to get to us.

  “It would be helpful if I could see one of these things.”

  “We destroyed all of them,” I said.

  “Did you destroy them with the elaron?”

  I nodded.

  “Did you destroy them with the ne’rash?”

  I shook my head. “At the time, I wasn’t connecting to the ne’rash. I wouldn’t have used it in a way to destroy anything, mostly because I didn’t know how to do so and not lose control.”

  “There might be a memory that remains.” She stared at me for a moment. “It would be helpful if we had an opportunity to look into this. Isn’t that what you came here for?”

  “I came here for answers because this place seems to be tied to so many parts of my past,” I said.

  “Show me.”

  I glanced back to the trees, looking toward Coldan. It was late enough that he would stay by the fire with the other Jahor—and the Hith.

  Finding one of these places wouldn’t be all that difficult. We were near enough to the fortress that I suspected I could remember where to find another, but it would involve me taking a walk through the dark forest, risking whatever else might be out there.

  And perhaps that was what we needed to do.

  I did come for answers, and Nevii seemed interested in helping me find those answers. We set off, moving through the forest.

  “I never spent much time outside of Coynahl,” Nevii said. Her voice was soft, and didn’t carry very far in the forest. “There were others who wanted to leave, but I was determined to serve the ne’rash, which meant that I was determined to gain a better understanding of the power that might exist within the temple.”

  I looked over to her. “You wanted to serve your people. That is what you said.”

  “Serve my people. Serve something more. Sometimes, I think that I missed an opportunity.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Those who departed the city were often the ones who were favored by the highest.”

  I glanced over to her. “The Vicenz chose who went with them.” It made sense. Of course the Vicenz would want those who were willing to fight and die and destroy.

  “I was never one of the highest favored. Not because of lack of talent, but more because of lack of focus, according to what they told me.” She shook her head, and it was almost sadness that filled her. “I always served in the way I wanted, always served the ne’rash in a way that would bring us honor, but I did not serve in the way they wanted of me.”

  “I think that you served honorably,” I said.

  “You are the Volatar.”

  “And?”

  “And your opinion, unfortunately, cannot mean anything when it comes to how I served.”

  “My opinion is what it is,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to anger you.”

  “You have not.”

  “What else can you tell me about those who are selected by the Vicenz to leave?”

  “They found power,” she said, shrugging. “They were favored, so they were trained. They were given gifts the rest of us were not. We understood. We were connected to the ne’rash, but many of us sought to simply understand that power, not to use it in violence. We wanted to grow it, the way the temple had once grown, and the way that we could tell from the memories that we should still grow that power.”

  I smiled at her. We headed down a small embankment, and through a ravine. “It would’ve been helpful had the two of us met long before.”

  “Would it have changed anything?”

  I hesitated before answering. “Perhaps not. I don’t know if I would’ve been ready to have met you back then.”

  “I don’t know if I would’ve been ready to have met you, either.”

  We made our way through trees, and weaved ever closer toward the fortress. As we went, I could feel some of that energy within the fortress, something that almost pushed me back.

  That was new.

  Gradually, we came closer and closer to one of the locations of the bodies.

  It was a small clearing. I remembered how the bodies had been situated, the way they had been placed in a pattern, almost as if they were designed to hold something. I had worried that they were designed to hold me, and for a moment, they had, but I think that the presence of those bodies had a different purpose, as well. They were not only to hold me. They were to hold something. Power, possibly, though it might have been something else.

  “This was one of them,” I said.

  She closed her eyes, and she turned in place, power radiating out from her almost immediately. The ne’rash washed over, spreading down and through the ground before rolling back up.

  “I can feel something here,” she murmured.

  “Perhaps I can help,” I said.

  She had exquisite control over the ne’rash, more than what I did, along with the experience to go with it. I had experience and knowledge of the elaron. By combining the two, I wondered if we might be able to use that so we could understand what more might be here.

  I swept the elaron out, letting it flow through the ground, and then…

  I felt nothing.

  I recognized the ne’rash there, the way Nevii pressed her ne’rash out from her, but there was nothing else within the ground that seemed to call out to me. No answers were there. Nothing other than the flow of the ne’rash.

  I continued to press, pushing out power, forcing it into the ground, but that wasn’t how the elaron would work. What I needed was to mix it.

  It flowed across the ground.

  I withdrew the elaron and shifted it, moving it across the surface, using elaron in the same way that I had seen when I had been in what I now believed to be the elaron temple. As I did, I could feel something. Resistance, though I couldn’t tell if it was from the ne’rash or if it was from something more.

  “Keep doing what you’re doing,” I said.

  She pressed on the ne’rash, and it continued to flow up from her, sweeping out at the ground, where it met with the connection that I had to the elaron.

  An image began to form. It took me a moment to realize what that image was, but I could see the structure to it. It took on the shape of the scene we had found here.

  Nevii’s breath caught as she continued to push power out from her, and she gaped at it. “Is that it?”

 

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