Page 14 of The Serpent’s Shadow

I wanted to learn more. I’d been patient as I said I would be, up until this point. Now, I stared at two rocks slanted on their sides in front of me, ten feet away. They were tall and skinny, with two feet of space between them.

“You are going to topple those stones into each other,” Corym commanded.

“Sounds easy enough,” I answered.

“Then you’re going to break them and combine them into a single stone.”

I turned my head to blink at him. “Excuse me? How in Hel am I supposed to do that?”

One side of his lips curled. “Use your ingenuity.”

I scratched my head, running my fingers through my wavy silver. “I’ll need some sort of binding property or element.” I saidit out loud, hoping for a hint from him, to know if I was on the right track.

“Good.” He nodded firmly. “Do you know the rune for binding, and the Shape?”

“Yes.”

He gestured forward. “Let’s see what you can do. Remember,lunis’ai, your magic feeds you. Not the other way around.”

I didn’t know what that really meant, and it was frustrating every time he said it—which had been more than a handful during my stay at the elf encampment.

Corym explained it again as I started to concentrate and close myself off to the sunny morning around me. “You are different than others. You don’t feed your powers like humans do—you are able to tap into the inherent magic within you. Draw on the essence within yourself. If you’re lost,thenfall back to your studies and training.”

I had all of two weeks since my runeshaping powers had miraculously come alive. Not much to fall back on.

Yet Corym seemed to have abundantly more confidence in me than I did. I wondered why, and then stuffed the thought aside for another time as I concentrated on the two stones in front of me.

First, I crouched, kneeling on one knee. My palms caressed the earth, feeling the grass and soil beneath them. The tiny tickling of the grass sent shivers down my arms as I closed my eyes and tried to look within myself as Corym had instructed me.

It was like becoming locked in a cave. In my mind, a small light shone ahead of me. I needed to wrap my hand around that bright essence. Yet I could only reach the light by maneuvering through the labyrinthine walls and deterrents of my own mind, which took some finagling.

Rooting my hands to the earth helped me navigate the treacherous path. It was an out-of-body experience—pullingaway from myself, becoming lost in the haze of magic now swirling inside my body and begging to be used.

All I needed to do was access it.

Sometimes, that was easier said than done.

When I opened my eyes, I was no closer to the light—the “essence”—but now I was sweating. A droplet burned my eyes, and I breathed heavily.

“If you can’t find the thread, fall back to your human roots if your elven ones fail you,” Corym said, essentially repeating what he had said earlier, except now more urgently when he noticed the focused, sweaty look on my face. “Your tether will not be as strong. Continue to use the element as your anchor before you draw the Shape. There you go.”

Without thinking, my right hand lifted from the grass. I sketched the air with a few quick finger movements and the marks lit up white and red like a blacksmith’s forge. Pure power was embedded in the runic Shape.

Under my left palm, the earth began to tremble from the energy transference. The directive. It was a slow murmur, hardly able to be heard or felt if you weren’t looking for it.

I directed the source of my power—the grass and soil—to move and twist and change toward the two stones in front of me.

The trembling heightened and grew louder, with the earth itself groaning from the sudden shift in movement. Worms and other insects emerged from the disrupted soil as I created a path through it with shallow grooves.

I was bending the earth. With a small smile, I locked in, drawing another Shape to enhance the first rune because I was getting impatient.

Source and directive,I thought, remembering the teachings of Hersir Greta Selken. Even though I hadn’t been able to Shape in my Runeshaping Basics class, I had taken notes and listened, for when this moment finally came to fruition.

I just hadn’t expected the moment to come to fruition while in the midst of the legendary light elves.

The two stones swayed as the ground around me shook. The small tremor I caused made the stones topple inward, closing the two-foot gap between them until they crashed together with a rockythudand stood tip-to-tip, forming the shape of a triangle.

“Now, Shape their destruction,” Corym said.

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