Naomi

Well, if she wasn’t going anywhere for a while anyway, Naomi might as well see what this place remembered. She could figure out how to get unstuck later. First she let herself be swept back into the vision by the glittering residue of the past.

Rain pounded the earth, turning a field to brown mud, as a young boy ran towards Naomi in obvious terror. His hair was black, his eyes were red, and his skin a golden brown. He might have been the same person as the Rispara in the vision back in Sulair, or he might not have been; Naomi couldn’t tell.

The landscape here had been very different when this boy made his desperate flight. The land had been cleared for cultivation, and there was no deep gash in the ground. It quickly became apparent just what this boy was running away from. Hundreds of soldiers—an entire army—chased after him. They were so far behind that she wondered why they even bothered, until a couple of runners burst through the ranks, outstripping the others and gaining ground on the boy.

Naomi flinched when the boy tripped and fell, something flying from his hand before he landed, sprawling face down on the mud just shy of where she was currently anchored in the vision. She saw the red of fresh blood running down his arm as he pushed himself back up, caked in mud, rain drumming against his legs and back. He could be hurt, just as she had been when she was a child. Perhaps a Rispara’s abilities only fully manifested when a person grew up. Was this little boy helpless until he grew into his power? But then, why send an entire army after him?

The boy looked around for the thing he’d dropped, then found it in a puddle a short distance away. Naomi could see that it was a knife, a pathetically small weapon compared to the arsenal carried by the army that was after him.

The boy stood still, breathing heavily, letting the rain rinse the mud from his face. Was he badly hurt? Naomi couldn’t tell, there wasn’t anything obviously wrong with him except for a few scrapes that stung to look at. He turned to face his pursuers just as one of them hurled an odd projectile at him from some sort of device. It didn’t seem to hold one shape, but shifted and crackled like lightning as he dodged it, letting it fly between him and Naomi.

“Turn back!” the boy screamed into the downpour. “I warned you!”

Another one of the shapeless, crackling things missed him by a few feet. More of the odd weapons were aimed in his direction. There was something so pathetic and yet so noble about the little boy’s last stand. Naomi felt such a kinship to him, even more than she’d felt for the man in the previous vision. She didn’t want to watch him be captured, or worse—

The ground rumbled and broke in front of him, opening a rift that swallowed the soldiers that had been closing in on him. The earth tore quickly in both directions, and the front ranks plummeted, their momentum making it impossible to stop in time. The look on the boy’s face was that of a child who’d just done something he knew would get him into trouble. It would have been funny, if it weren’t causing scores of people to fall to their deaths before her eyes. Whatever he’d done had gotten out of his control, and the rift continued to spread, one side from the other, stretching longer and longer and deeper into the earth. Those who could turned and ran to avoid being swallowed by the chasm.

“I did warn you,” the boy muttered. Naomi could hear him clearly in spite of the pouring rain. He turned his back on the gorge he’d created, then paused.

Something was bounding forward on four legs, leaping between the fleeing soldiers to close the distance between it and the boy. It was a construct shaped something like a tiger, but its body was all black with an iridescent sheen, and its neck was too long. It had an uncanny gait, its strides not quite matching with the speed at which it moved, and occasionally parts of it seemed to phase out into black dust before returning to their original shape.

Naomi almost screamed at the boy to look out, but he had already turned to face the creature. The construct gathered speed and leapt over the chasm the boy had created, its landing strangely quiet for something so large. The little boy stood facing it, tiny in comparison to the enormous beast, but the construct seemed to hesitate.

“You again,” said the boy disdainfully, holding out his knife. The construct tiger’s head dissolved into a cloud of black dust, then resolved back into the shape of a head. “This time I’ll finish you.”

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The tiger lunged, and the boy jumped up into the air and didn’t come back down. The construct looked around itself, apparently not prepared to face an opponent that could fly.

“Where are you hiding it?” the boy asked, hovering over the tiger. A piece of the construct phased out, revealing a glimpse of the core. The boy dove towards it, knife first, to bury his weapon in the creature’s back.

Then Naomi was back in her own time, her heart pounding, her hand still stuck inside a rock, just a bit north of a seal she hadn’t noticed before. The forest had reclaimed it, leaving only a few spots of smooth obsidian visible beneath the growth of roots and fallen leaves.

What the hell was that? Why had an army and a construct been sent after that boy? What was he running away from, something horrible enough that the pursuers had deserved their terrible fate? Their deaths hadn’t even disturbed the boy, he seemed to think them justified. Was anything terrible enough to justify that?

Maybe Esar would know something about who the boy was, or what she’d just seen. But to ask him about it, she was going to have to escape her rocky prison first. Naomi looked up and sure enough, that giant raven was still perched nearby, still watching her. Maybe it’s a carrion eater, waiting to peck my eyes out after I die here. That boy in her vision had caused a giant earthquake that split the ground asunder. What had Naomi done with the same phenomenal powers? Gotten herself defeated by a rock.

But she’d gotten herself into this mess, and surely she could find a way out of it. Preferably without gnawing her hand off at the wrist.

It felt like hours before Naomi stumbled on the right sort of magical twist-and-snap that melted the rock again, but in all honesty it was probably closer to thirty minutes. Her hand came free, clean and unharmed, and she did a little dance of joy and relief before she realized that the stone hadn’t stopped slumping. It wasn’t flowing quickly, but it was definitely losing its shape.

“Stop it,” she said, as if a stern admonition was going to help. The process of deformation slowed and finally stopped, to her great relief. She turned to leave, but thought she saw a little sparkle of light on the half-melted boulder that hadn’t been there before. It vanished when she turned to look at it straight on, but it would, wouldn’t it? No time to ponder that, she’d wasted too much time here already.

Naomi knelt to examine the seal more closely and found something strange. The boy’s knife was still embedded in the seal. So that’s why it never broke out, she thought. That could be important. She tried to memorize the way that it looked so she could describe it to Adrin and Zafrys that night.

She had time to think on her way back to the road about whether or not to tell Esar about her mishap with the stone. He would probably be angry with her, but really, he had no right to be surprised. She needed to learn how to control that other power, the power that had turned the boulder into putty. Jumping through the trees was nice and all, but that had been amazing.

She was planning to only tell Esar about the vision and leave out the part with the boulder, but guilt nagged at her and forced her to confess.

“So you got yourself stuck in a rock,” Esar said with complete composure. Jason snickered.

“It . . . was an accident,” Naomi said sheepishly.

“I should be glad you didn’t open another canyon in the ground like your forbearer, I suppose,” Esar said. He was taking it pretty well, considering. “Please don’t attempt to melt any more objects until we’ve had a chance to work on learning how to control this power a bit better, Naomi. I would hate for you to be stuck in a rock forever.”

“I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” Naomi said. “You’re not mad?”

“I was expecting something strange to happen,” Esar sighed. “This is you we’re talking about, after all. I was bracing for you to come back saying you’d fought a construct.”

“But I promised if the construct was there I wouldn’t fight it!” Naomi said.

“I’m sure you wouldn’t have done it on purpose,” Esar said.

“But you will teach me how to control the melting?” Naomi asked.

Esar sighed. “I’ll do my best. So far, you’ve been applying the same kind of vitricial energy that normal people use, just in greater quantity. Normal people, however, can’t melt rocks.”

“And neither can you?” Naomi said.

“Yes. In that respect, at least, I am normal.”

Kelsam laughed, but Naomi wasn’t sure if Esar was trying to make a joke or not.

“I don’t know whether to be pleased that you’re making such rapid progress, or terrified,” Esar went on.

“I still can’t fly,” Naomi said sadly.

“Oh, you poor baby,” Jason said. “I can’t even do the vitricity stuff normal people can do, remember?” He looked pointedly at Esar.

“Yeah, but you . . . um . . .” Naomi didn’t know how to finish the sentence. She felt sorry for Jason, but didn’t know what she could offer to make him feel better.

“Don’t bother,” Jason said. “Let’s just keep moving.”