Breaking Step, CH 57 (Patreon)

Motes of lights filled Tibs’s sight as his heart slowed; no, small lightnings. He blinked to clear them, trying to understand what happened.

“You are here!” The words exploded like thunder within the lightning, the first on his left, the next on his right, and the last above him. “I am glad! I didn’t think you would! Few find me.” The volume lowered with each word until they no longer hurt, but they still had the thunder’s strength, and moved around with each one. It was as if a crowd with the same voice hid within the lightning and a random person spoke each word. Or, Tibs realized…

“You’re an element.”

“Yes!” This time, the word boomed so loudly Tibs was shoved back.

He kept blinking, knowing he wouldn’t help. These weren’t the spots looking at the sun and then away caused. They were the element.

“You’re… Lightning?”

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

“Not—” he rubbed his temple. Could he offend an element?

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

He remembered Mama’s warning, given to him as the sky turned gray, the winds picked up and they hurried to their shelter. Never stay out in the storm. Seek a low building. Hide under, lest it take you away from me.

His heart tightened. Why did she have to be taken from him so early? He wasn’t ready for the world. What other lessons could she have given him?

“It will pass,” the voice said with a gentleness that carried as the words danced around. “Nothing lasts.”

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

“To move, to dance, to flit and be.”

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

“Air is everywhere; ever changing, ever moving, never fixed.” The pause was filled with a crackling Tibs could imagine was laughter. “I am here, and here, and here. I stay, I go.”

The words jumped around, And Tibs gave up understanding what he meant. The elements weren’t people, so he couldn’t expect them to act or think like he did.

So. This was an audience. How had he gotten here? That didn’t matter at the moment. The goal of his audiences was to get the shadow of the element. It would be within Lightning, which was all around him.

“It is here!” the words had such joy in them, as they bounced, Tibs smiled.

He looked around, and it didn’t help. All he saw were the sparkles of lightning. He reached for some of the… darkness was the wrong word in this ever lit place. The lesser brightness that followed the flashes; one of them might be the shadow.

His hand closed over nothing.

Lightning didn’t laugh. Tibs wasn’t even sure he watched. There was something to the stretching silence that made him think the element was no longer aware he was there. But that couldn’t be right. Tibs was inside. Lightning had to know about it. So this was… him being ignored? That didn’t feel right. The element was distracted? What could distract him from what was within him?

Lightning chuckled, the sound dancing around and causing bursts of light and following lesser light.

Tibs tried to follow them, but they were too quick. One close, the other far. Ahead or back, up or down, left or right. There had to be something… a pattern that would let him work out where the voice would be. Where Lightning would be.

For that, Tibs needed to get him talking.

The only question that came to him was the one he didn’t think he had time for.

“How did I get here?”

“The way all come to me.” Up, left, right, up, down, behind. But not exactly. This wasn’t a puzzle, with only a few set moves. He had all around Tibs to move in.

“But I wasn’t having strong emotions. I was amused by the guard surrounding me. I was curious how their metal weapons would work while I was suffused. Then I was puzzled by the lighting on my fingers and there—” light, so much light he couldn’t breathe, so much the pain only registered with the thought this might—

He swallowed.

There had been too much for him to register the terror he felt. 

“You feel strongly, Child of human. I was there, and you came.” How was he supposed to work out some pattern when the words were never exactly in the same location?

“Okay, how were you there? There is lightning in the clouds, but it wasn’t hitting. It was dancing over my hand. Does metal make lightning?”

Laughter, sliding around this time in a way he thought he could follow, only for it to jump when he set his gaze on where he would have been next.

This wasn’t working.

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

Tibs stilled himself. He needed a different tactic.

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

“It is not? Metal and I are touched; as Air and Earth are. Connections are the same in that they are. The flavor of them does not make them false.”

Trying to understand Lighting was more of a distraction from what he needed to do than letting him learn anything useful.

“Then, that connection lets Metal make lighting?”

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

“But there’s light.” Tibs motioned around him.

“No. There is only me.”

Tibs sensed, and Lighting was right. There was no light essence anywhere here. So how was it do bright? Was what Lighting created another kind of light? The way cold came about differently depending on the element?

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

“Everything is either us or from us. We make it, or it echoes from what we make.” Tibs reached for a flash, knowing he was wasting the time, but at a loss for what else to do. “The kinship we share makes the rest.”

Tibs stopped in the process of reaching for another one. What was he doing? All he’d do was make himself out of breath with all this moving around.

He groaned.

He’d done it again.

He was treating this place the same as the world he came from. Acted like he had a body, when all he was was essence.

“You do like remaining locked in the way you think,” Lightning mused. “You are, then are not. And yet, you act as you will always be.” He meant all of them, people, Tibs realized.

Tibs pushed himself away from himself. Attentive to any attempt by Lighting to move away.

He didn’t.

“There is no away,” Lighting said, the words moving within Tibs. Too fast to get a sense of the accompanying flash, but the further he spread, the more the voice remained within ‘him’.

He made out nuances. Not every flash was there, then completely gone. Some slid from one location to the other instead. It happened so fast that even when it was within him, all he perceived was the faint trail the slide left behind.

Lightning didn’t so much flash and gather more of himself for a word, then was elsewhere. As if he caught his breath before each word and place. It only paused for it, then moved again. Could he stop at all? If Tibs forced him to pounder something, would he stay still long enough for him to make out the shadow?

“Can you stop moving?” Tibs asked.

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

“For a little while. Well, I don’t know about being. I think that happens when we die.”

“So can I.”

“And the words are how long you can stop, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“So, this isn’t you testing me to be sure I deserve the shadow. This is just you…being?”

“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 succeed. We seek for you to understand.”

“Understand you?”

“Me, us, you, all.”

The impression he got from Lightning was very much like what had moved over his hand. Strands in all directions from a trunk that jumped from place to place. Within that trunk, the intensity varied, causing the impression of shadows among it.

Except that one of them moved along a trunk, instead of changing intensity. It was carried along as Lightning moved. Tibs formed his essence around that region, making himself dense as he moved along with it until it melded within him.

His core reserve grew, although he could no longer tell by how much. A new reserve formed between air and purity, crackling with lighting. 

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

“Nothing is all there is. Everything is. It all moves, even once it stops.”

“That—” What else did he expect? Lightning was an element. He couldn’t hope to understand everything about it. “I guess that’s it then. I can go back.”

* * * * *

Tibs staggered, nearly slipped on the wet roof.

His legs shook with the need to move, to run. He giggled, lifting his face to the falling rain. 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 would never stop. Do, do, do, do, and do some more.

A woman groaned.

His gaze flitted around, from one thing to the next. A person, a lantern, a sword, something burned, a shield, another person, shard of glass, shards of pottery. Too much for him to understand what it meant.

Not that any of that mattered. He had too much to do. He needed to more and—

Stop!

The mental command he gave himself triggered such horror, it nearly sent him running. He couldn’t stop. To stop was to end. He had to move, always move. And do! How could he think of stopping?

Tibs kept himself in place; focused on the sound of the rain hitting the roof to fight the ever-growing terror.

He wasn’t the element.

And he realized he was suffused with Lightning. How? It had been metal before. Not important right now. Since that was the problem, the solution was simply to let go.

He dropped to his knees, panting. He felt like he’d run the city’s roof from one end to the other, even if he was still exactly where he’d been struck. The roof was charred around him in a pattern that match that of lighting, even seeming to shift as water flowed over it.

Seven bodies sprawled around him; singed and burned. Three were dead, their essence gone. The others were hurt, but their essence fully there and not leaking away. Not dying and no injuries that would cause them to die. But there was something to their essence.

Anytime someone’s essence wasn’t the usual thin sense of them, it indicated they were injured. It broke with the bone, leaked out when the injury bled, even inside them. Poisons corrupted it.

This was none of those. He’d never encountered this before. He applied purity, only to have it come undone when it touched the changed essence, as if a jagged knife shook quickly tearing a thin fabric as it touched the teeth. Or like dancing lighting, within the essence.

The charred marks spread from where he’d stood to each of the broken items, and person. However it had happened, lightning had struck him and spread through the roof and to the people. It had hurt him, caused pain. It could cause damage. He looked at one of the body without essence. Lightning could kill.

Mama had been right to warn him to hide from storms.

Light flashed, and thunder almost covered to the sound of crashing stone. It came from the side, so it wasn’t the Brokerage that had been hit.

He smoothed the jittering within the four’s essence as best as he could. This was all he could do, short of waking them, and he wasn’t risking that. Their sense of duty might be greater than any gratitude they felt, if they even believed Tibs had healed them.

He ran, the rain quickly stealing the roof from his view, and his sense, unless he focused there. He sensed the destroyed building jumped over it, making disks out of the rain as stepping stones. Exhaustion caught up to him faster than he expected, or far longer after it should, considering how he’d felt on letting go of lighting.

He slipped into an unoccupied room, dried himself, and sat at the desk. He considered suffusing himself with purity, but the act of being still, of not doing much, after the need to move that came with Lightning felt nice.

He untied the bag from his belt, surprised at how it still looked and felt mostly empty. The slight bulge could be from it being folded in on itself. He reached in, then deeper, groping around. His shoulder was in the bag’s mouth and still, he felt nothing. If not for Archer’s warning, he might have put his head in so see where it all was.

He didn’t have that problem with his hiding place. Or Jackal with his pouch. All they had to do was reach in and what he wanted was there.

Except. This time, he’d reached in wanting nothing. He’d expected to feel the coins and papers and pull that out. He envisioned a stack of the papers. There had been writing. They were bound by a leather strap.

He reached in and his fingers touched paper.

He unclasped the leather and spread the papers on the desk. They were fine, although the bag, along with his clothing and armor, was singed. The papers were the same size. Two of his hands side by side high, and three of them wide. The words were in letters he recognized, but arranged into words that meant nothing to him. Three lines of them in the center of the paper. The edge of the paper had decorative loops, knots, and flowing lines. At the top, two words with the sense of being a name in the way the first letter of each was taller.

Carina hadn’t been able to explain why the first letter of people’s name was written taller. One of those ‘it’s just how it’s done,’ she’d said.

There were too many of them for Tibs’s liking. 

At the bottom of the paper, four lines of smaller text, almost too small to make the words out.

The page below it had the same words in the same places, even the decorations around the page were the same. The one below that also the same. As far as he could tell, they all were; the two and seven pages in the stack. How and why this had been done baffled him. There was no weave in the paper, although he didn’t know if magic would leave something behind to indicate it had been used to make identical copies. What did anyone need so many of the same papers for?

He pulled every stack from the bag and lined them on the desk.

Two and two of them. Some weren’t as thick, some thicker.

The name at the top was the same on each stack. As were the words from the small text at the bottom, and the top two lines in the center. The third varied between bundles, but was always the same within it. He had five variations of that line, and no idea what that could mean.

These weren’t contracts. Darran had written one for him and the merchants, as well as the one between Don and the Corruption sorcerers. Contracts were lines after lines after lines of words explaining every detail until Tibs had wanted to gauge his eyes out.

So what were they? They had been in a safe with coins and metal bars of the same material. All valuable things, so these had to be too. The only person he had here who might know was Archer, but did Tibs trust him to tell the truth about it?

He didn’t trust the man at all.

He placed one of each variation back in the bag, then added the thinnest and thickest one. He figured it would seem odd that there had been one of each, exactly. The others he put in his hiding place, starting with the thicker and continuing, figuring he’d put what didn’t fit back in the bag.

Only they all fit.

Sto had warned him it couldn’t hold as much as Jackal’s pouch, and only smaller things. He added a bar of each of the metals, and they fit too. Maybe he should test just how much it could hold once he was back in Kragle Rock. And After he showed them to Darran. Whatever Archer said, the merchant would tell him the truth. He couldn’t even ask how Tibs had acquired them. Not that he’d care about them being stolen.

* * * * *

Water trailed on the floor of the tavern as Tibs hurried to the stairs. Once in the room and the door closed, he dried himself and dropped the bag before the archer.

“What…” the man looked him over. “Happened?”

Tibs looked down at himself. Right, everything was singed. “Things didn’t go according to plan, but I’m okay.” He dropped onto his pallet. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said as Archer grabbed the singed bag by the bottom. “There are a lot of coins in there.”

He weighed the bag in his hand. “How much?”

Tibs shrugged. “The room you sent me to had a safe taller than I am, and wider. I emptied it in there.”

Archer opened it and put his arm in to his elbow and came out with a handful of coins. He dropped them in with a whistle and pulled one of the bars out. “How many of these?”

“I didn’t count them. What are they?”

“They’re a way to carry more money than their equivalent weight in them. Did you take some?” he asked, glancing at Tibs as he put the bar back in.

“The deal was you get the coins. I get to not have to deal with the assassins anymore.” It wasn’t like Archer would know about the bars he kept.

The man nodded and pulled out a stack of papers.

Tibs kept from reacting at the ease he did it with. He couldn’t have known they were in there, and it had taken Tibs work to get one. The surprise on the man’s face confirmed that.

“What are they?”

Archer’s gaze flicked to Tibs, then back to the stack. “Didn’t you check them?”

“I don’t know those words.”

The man nodded. “They’re just accounts of what they’ve accumulated.” Tibs didn’t need the glow to tell him that was a lie. Ledgers didn’t look like that.

“Did you deal with the contracts, or just took the coins?”

“I burned them.”

“How did you know which ones to burn if you couldn’t read them?”

“I burned everything in the safes that were in that room.”

Archer stared at him. “All of them? Is the building even still standing?”

“It’s stone,” Tibs replied flatly. “And there’s a lot of fire essence in the weave protecting it. I don’t think it can burn. I just burned what was in the safes. The metal got hot, but nothing outside of them caught fire.” He stretched. “I’m going to sleep.”

The sound of coins knocking against each other accompanied his descent into darkness.

* * * * *

“Did you hear?” Sania asked, placing the bowl of stew and tankard before Tibs and Archer. “Someone tried to rob the Brokerage.”

Tibs had wanted to leave as soon as he woke, but Archer told him the person with the letter was on their way, so he had to remain. 

“Isn’t there always one?” Archer replied before digging into his food.

“But this one nearly got away. They say he made it to the roof before the guards caught up and killed him.”

“Good for them,” he said dismissively, and Sania returned to the bar. 

Tibs considered the lighting strike, the burns left behind, and the state of the surviving guards. “I guess it makes sense they think I’m dead.”

Archer looked up from his bowl, but Tibs didn’t elaborate. The archer didn’t need to know about his audience. He just hoped the roof wouldn’t be visited by someone with lightning as their element and senses the closeness of the element there. At least it wasn’t yet another place like that in Kragle Rock.

“They’re saying that so no one will think they were robbed. They can’t have anyone thinking it’s possible to steal from them.”

Tibs chuckled. “I don’t think that’s why they’re saying that.”

“Why?” this time, the tone said Archer wouldn’t take a non-answer.

Hopefully, he wouldn’t work out more than what Tibs said. “I was hit by lighting—”

“You what?” he snapped his mouth shut as others glanced in their direction.

“The guards were still unconscious when I left.”

Archer leaned in and lowered his voice. “How did you survive?”

“Magic.”

The archer opened his mouth, only to close it and look at Tibs with a lot of respect and a little bit of fear. He stayed quiet as he ate.

The letter was placed on the table by a man with a tube slung across his back. Archer handed him a token, and he left. The man pushed it to Tibs, who opened it and couldn’t read the words.

“Is this the only letter like this?” he asked.

“Yes.” No light.

“You don’t have another one hidden somewhere that says the same thing in different ways?”

“No, Tibs. I don’t. I said this was it. I’m a man of my words.”

No light on any of them. He had to be content with that, since he couldn’t know if the archer would change his mind one day. He stood. “Then, we’re done.”

“Tibs,” the man called as Tibs walked away.

He looked over his shoulder.

Archer hesitated, then shook his head.

Tibs left the tavern and went home.