Breaking Step, Draft 1, CH 51 (Patreon)

Motes of light filled Tibs’s sight; no, small lightnings. He blinked to clear them and tried to understand what had happened.

“You are here!” the words exploded like thunder within the lightning, the first on his left, the next to the right and above him. “I am glad you came. I didn’t think you would. Few find their way to me.” The volume lowered with each word until they no longer hurt, but each had the strength of thunder, and came from a different location. As if a crowd with the same voice hit within the lightning, and a random person spoke each word.

Or, Tibs realized…

“You’re an element.”

“Yes!” this time the word had enough strength Tibs felt pushed back.

He kept blinking, even knowing it wouldn’t help. These weren’t the effect of looking at the sun and then away. The surrounding light, the lightning, was the element.

“You’re… Lightning?”

“Well, of course. You came to me, did you not, Child of Human?”

Tibs rubbed his temple. “Not…” he stopped. Could he offend an element?

Laughter boomed around him. “It has been a time since one came to me unplanned.”

Tibs remembered a warning Mama gave him. Never stay out in the storm. Seek shelter under a low building. He’d never left her side then, so this had been so he’d be prepared for later, when she was no longer than to protect him from the world.

His heart tightened. She shouldn’t have left him so early. He wasn’t ready. What other lessons could she had given him so he’d have been better prepared for the word?

“It will pass,” the voice said, the words dancing around him. “Nothing lasts.”

“That doesn’t help,” Tibs replied bitterly. “What do you want?”

“To move, to dance, to flit and to be.”

Tibs took a breath and ignored he wasn’t breathing. There was no air here. Only lightning. “That sounds like something Air does. I thought you were all different.”

“Air is everywhere. Ever changing, ever moving, never being fixed.” The pause was filled with crackling. “I am here, and here, and here. I stay, then I go.”

Each word was, again, in a different location. Tibs stopped trying to understand what Lightning meant. They weren’t people, so he couldn’t expect them to act or think like he did.

Alright. This was an audience. The goal of his audience was to get the shadow of the element. That would be within Lightning, but Lightning was all around him. He was within them.

“It is here!” the words had such joy in it, Tibs was smiling.

Looking around didn’t do any good. He saw nothing other than the sparkles of lightning. He reached for some, the… darkness was the wrong word in this ever lit place, but the lesser light that followed a flash might be the shadow he sought. His hand closed over nothing.

The Element didn’t laugh. Tibs wasn’t even sure it was watching him. There was something in the stretching silence that made him think it wasn’t aware he was there. No, that couldn’t be right. He was within it, so it had to know he was there. Only it was what, ignoring him? No, that didn’t feel right either. It was distracted? That felt closer, but what could distract an element within itself?

Now it chuckled. The sound dancing around him.

He attempted to use that to locate it, but it jumped all over the place, close and far, ahead and back, up and down, left and right. There had to be something there. A pattern he could work out and know where the voice would be.

He needed to get it to talk for that.

And for one of the rare time in his life, Tibs found he couldn’t think of a question to ask. He already knew what it was. It has said what it wanted. Tibs knew why he was here, even of how…

“How did I get here?”

“The way all come to us.”

“But I didn’t have strong emotions. I was surrounded by guards; I got ready to fight them by suffusing Metal. I was calm, amused, then…” lightning danced around his fingers. He’d been curious about that, how it happened, but not emotional about it.

Then the flash of light, the explosion, the pain.

It hadn’t lasted long, but the pain had been intense, more than anyone could endure.

“So pain counts?”

“You feel strongly enough,” it said, “and if one of us he there, you come.”

“Then how were you there? Why the lightning on my hand? Does Metal make lightning?”

Laughter all around him, bouncing around so quickly he couldn’t follow. This wasn’t going to work.

“Metal and I have a kinship, the way Air and Earth dislike each other.”

Since trying to keep up with the voice didn’t help, Tibs stopped. He looked ahead and let the words bounce around him.

“That doesn’t make sense. Not liking someone isn’t the same had having a kinship.”

“Is it not? Metal and I are touched, the way Air and Earth are too. Connections are the same in that they are there. The flavor of them does not make them false.”

He stopped trying to understand was Lightning meant. He didn’t think it was on purpose, but it was a distraction from what he needed to do to return to the city.

“So that connection let Metal make lightning?”

The laughter again. “Metal can not make me, anymore than I make Earth, Corruption, Light.”

“But there’s light here.”

“No, there is only me.”

Tibs frowned and sensed. Lightning was right. He couldn’t sense and light. Then how was it bright? Did Lightning create a different kind of light, the way cold came about differently depending on the element?

He cursed himself. He’d gotten distracted and lost track of the voice.

“Can something act like an element, but not be that element?”

“Everything either is us, or comes from us. We make it, or it echoes from what we make.” With each word, there was a stronger flash of lightning from its direction. “The kinship we share makes the rest.”

Tibs reached, but the flash was already gone. The word in a different location. He reached again and again. But he couldn’t move quickly enough. Lightning kept talking, but Tibs stopped listening to the words. They simply marked the place the flash took place. He’d find the pattern.

There was always a pattern.

Tibs stopped. No matter how fast he moved, how he tried to anticipate where the flash would appear, he just wasn’t fast enough. It was a wonder he wasn’t out of breath at this point.

The voice stopped in time with Tibs groaning.

He’d done it again.

He’d treated this place as if it was the world he came from. Acted like he had a body, when all he was was essence.

“Your kind does like remaining locked in the way they think,” Lightning mused, and that sounded odd to Tibs, with each word in a different place. “You are, then you are not, and yet, you act as you will always be.”

Tibs spread himself, wary of the voice and the flash trying to avoid him. 

It didn’t.

The voice moved in and out of Tibs with the words, too fast for him to get a sense of the flash that accompanied it, but the more he spread, the longer the voice remained within ‘him’, and he made out nuances in the flash. The way it didn’t disappear and appear in the other location, but moved there, so fast that even when it happened within Tibs, all he was left with was the faint trail it took.

It wasn’t so much a flash as the concentration becoming noticeable before it moved on to the next location. As if it caught its breath before the next word and place. It zipped around him, never stopping.

Tibs wondered what he might do to make it stop. If he forced it to ponder an answer, would it remain in place long enough for him to make out where the shadow was?

Only now that he sensed it moving, it kept doing so even when silent. Zapping from place to place silently.

“Are you able to stop moving?” Tibs asked.

“Can a human stop breathing? Can it stop eating? Can it stop being?”

“We can do it for a little while. Well, I don’t know about being. I think that’s when we die.”

“So can I.”

“And this is how long you can stop, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“So this isn’t because you are testing me to be sure I deserve the shadow. This is just you… existing.”

“You deserve what comes by achieving it. We do not test; the way the word exists in your mind. We do not seek for you to fail or to succeed. We seek for you to understand.”

“Understand you?”

“Us, you, all.”

The sense he got of the element was very much that of the lightning that had sparked over his hand. Strands moving in many directions along a trunk that jumped from place to place. And within that trunk, the intensity varied, causing brightness and shadows, and there, he saw the one that didn’t vary like the others. It was simply carried along as Lightning moved.

Tibs concentrated his essence around it, and it melted within him. His core reserve grew, although he could no longer tell by how much. A new reserve formed, crackling with Lightning.

“So that’s all this is?” Tibs asked. “Me, understanding what you are so I can get the shadow.”

“Nothing is all there is. Everything is. It all continues to move, even once it stops.”

“That…” What else did he expect. Lightning was an element. Not everything would make sense. “I guess that’s it, then. I can go back now.”

* * * * *

Tibs staggered. His legs shook with the need to move, to run. He giggled. There was so much to do; that he could do. Where to start?

Here? No, there? No, of course not. Why bother with starting here, or there? He should start both, and all the others. Oh, he could do so much now. And he’d never stop. Do, do, do, and do some more.

A woman groaned.

He looked around, his gazed flitting from one thing to the next, a person, a lantern, a sword, something burned, a shield. Another person, broken glass and pottery. He couldn’t understand what he was seeing. It was all around him; he was in the middle of them, but he couldn’t get what it meant.

Did it matter?

No, of course not. He had too much to do; he needed to move and—

Stop!

The horror the mental command he gave himself caused nearly sent Tibs running. He couldn’t stop. To stop was the end. He needed to move, always move, and do! How could he think of stopping?

Tibs kept himself in place. Fought the growing terror.

He wasn’t the element.

With that understanding came the realization he was suffused with Lightning. How? That wasn’t important. Knowing that, it was simple to let it go.

He nearly collapsed from the loss of energy. He panted. Channeling Lighting had left him feeling like he’d run the city’s roofs from one end to the other, even if he was still where he’d stood when the lightning struck him.

Seven bodies were sprawled around him. Each singed and burned. Three were dead, their essence fading beyond Tibs’s ability to pull it back as he sensed them. The others were hurt, but their essence didn’t fade. They weren’t dying. They had no bleeding injuries, and their essence felt… he tried to work out what was different.

Each time someone’s essence wasn’t normal, it indicated an injury. It broke with the bones or something else inside. Tibs wasn’t interested in opening a body to find what matched to the essence then. It leaked out for something bleeding. It became corrupted with poison.

This was none of those. So it was an injury he’d never encountered before. He adjusted the essence, removing the… it was like Lighting has slipped within the essence, causing the edges to turn frazzled. He smoothed the essence.

Lightning hurt, and pain meant it caused damage. He looked at the three no longer breathing. It could kill.

The flash of light and explosion of sound shook him. His vision cleared quickly and stone debris fell. All he could tell was that it wasn’t the Brokerage that had been hit.

He’d done what he could for the injured, short of getting them to wake. He wasn’t risking that. A guard might consider doing their job more important than letting the person who’d heal them go.

Running through the rain, he found the building that had been hit when he had to detour around the shattered tower. Halfway to the tavern, Tibs slipped into an unoccupied room, dried himself, and lit the lantern on the desk. 

He reached into the bag, then reached deeper, groping around. When his shoulder was nearly in the bag and not touching anything, he considered putting his head in, to see where everything was, but remember Sto’s admonition against doing that.

He didn’t have that problem with his pouch. All he had to do was reached in and what he wanted was there. The only difference here was that he didn’t know what he wanted. He’d counted on the feel of the paper to be enough. He envisioned a stack of them. There had been writing, and they had been bound by a leather strip.

His fingers touched something, and he pulled one bundle out.

He sat and unclasped the leather. The paper was undamaged, although the bag, as with what Tibs wore, was singed. It was the size of his two hands side by side. He couldn’t read the words in the center of the papers, written over three lines. The edge of the page was decorated with loops and flowing lines. The page under it was the same as was the next and the next. The stack had two and seven pages.

He studied two of the pages side by side, looking for differences, and found none. There was no weave within the pages, but would magic used to make them leave such a trace? When Tibs filled a bowl with water, there was no weave within it, only the water. Could the same be done with something as complex as papers someone wrote on? And why so many copies?

He reached into the bag and pulled out two and two more. Some had a few pages less. And the third line varied from one bundle to the other, while always being the same within the bundle. In total, there were five variations on the third line. And of each, all but one bundle had two and seven pages in it. That lone bundle for each went from seven pages up to two and five.

Tibs had no idea what that meant, but it was curious.

Did he trust Archer to explain them to him?

He didn’t trust the man at all.

Tibs hid one of each bundle of two and seven in his pouch, and put the rest back in the bag. Archer hadn’t mentioned papers before, so he couldn’t expect Tibs would take them, or how many he did.

Darran would tell him what they were once he was back in Kragle Rock. And the merchant wouldn’t question how Tibs had acquired them. Not that he’d care about them being stolen.