Cloud Warrior 05 - Forged in Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

moment, gathering his thoughts. How to put it to her in a way that she would listen to him? With her grey hair wound tightly behind her head, held in place by slender rods and the thin lines that stretched from her eyes – brighter than he’d seen in some time – she looked every bit the master shaper she was.
    “I think we must learn from what happened before,” Tan agreed. “But some lessons are dangerous.”
    She rested a hand gently on his leg. “What do you fear, Tannen?”
    “The same as you, Mother. I fear losing my bond, of having my connection to the draasin severed from me. Now that I’ve bonded wind, I fear losing him as well.” The connection to Honl didn’t go as deep as it did with Asboel, but that would likely come in time. Tan and Asboel had shared too much in too short a time to not have depth to their bond. It was much like what he shared with Amia. “I fear what Par-shon intends, knowing the lengths they went to try and trap the draasin before. Now that they know what I can do, now that they know what the kingdoms can do, what more will they try?”
    “You think you will lose your connections?”
    “I know how Par-shon severs bonds. And you’ve seen how they can do it without the room of separation.”
    Zephra sighed and thought for a moment. “You’re wrong about one thing, Tannen,” she said softly. “The ancients didn’t force bonds on the elementals.”
    Tan wasn’t so sure. There had to be a reason to hold the draasin confined as they were in the pens beneath the city, using golud and the nymid to trap them. What other reason than to force the bond, to gain the additional power that came with connecting to the elemental? And if the ancient shapers had done that, what made them so different from Par-shon?
    “This book,” Tan said, “describes the steps needed to trap the draasin. It describes how each shaper can use their talents to stop the draasin, and kill if needed. The entire book is like that. You really think that is the kind of knowledge that should still exist?”
    His mother stared at him for a moment before answering. “You have a unique perspective on the draasin, Tannen, one that I think would have been unique even then. The draasin that you know, the connection that you share, gives you understanding of them, but try to imagine what it must be like for those of us without such a connection. To us, they are massive and terrifying creatures capable of destroying with ease. To the shapers of that time, they would have been something else. Now, there are only a few draasin. Back then…”
    “The danger from the draasin is no different than udilm claiming people for the sea,” he said. “They are elemental powers.”
    “And we mean very little to them,” Zephra said.
    Tan shook his head. “You are bound to one of the elementals. You of all people know that is not true.”
    Zephra sighed. “My connection lets me know that I am important to ara, but I have never had the sense that others are as important to Aric as I am.”
    Tan picked up the book and set it on his lap. Whatever else the ancient shapers had been, they had not understood the elementals nearly as well as he thought they would have. The bond was not meant for control. It was meant for understanding. How much had he learned from Asboel simply by sharing the bond?
    For starters, he’d mastered the ability to sense and use fire with exquisite control. That was an amazing gift, but even more important was his understanding of the draasin, a way of knowing power greater than him, of connecting that much closer to the Great Mother. And maybe that ,more than anything else, was what the draasin got out of the bond: the chance to share with another what it meant to control fire with as much strength as they did.
    “I think of all the things the draasin has done since I first bonded,” Tan said. “There were many things done to help me, but I can’t expect the draasin to know the importance of the other