Page 22 of Elemental Hall: Nautica
“I’m not alone. I’m here with you.”
That isn’t the same, and I’m sure he knows it.
“Why did you leave Umbrae?” I ask.
He tilts his head to one side. “What do you know about it as a place?”
“Only what’s in books.” Even then, the history of the conflict between the two great lands has not been my main focus in thelibrary. I’ve been busy trying to find things that will let me catch up with the training of the other students.
“Books won’t tell you what Umbrae is really like,” Darius says. “It won’t tell you the way life barely clings to the soil, how every day there is a battle to survive. It won’t tell you that it is a land without mercy, where if you are weak for a moment, you might find yourself killed or enslaved. My family was poor. When it was found that I had a talent to connect to the elements, the emperor’s men came and took me to one of the schools. When my mother dared to protest…” He shakes his head. “I have not seen my family since that day. I do not know if they are alive or dead. I was trained to fight, trained to obey, and they didn’t care if I hated them, because they knew I would not escape.”
“Until you did,” I say.
“I was on a scout ship. Umbrae is always looking for weak points in the veil of storms. I saw my chance to steal a small boat. I piloted it into the storms, not caring if I lived or died. The last I remember is going into the water… then you found me.”
I can’t imagine what he went through. Darius falls silent, his eyes heavy-lidded with a pain that has nothing to do with the storm all around us. I want to know more, but I also don’t want to hurt him by asking.
Instead, I sit there in silence, holding the shield around us with him. I can feel my body aching from being still for so long. I can feel tiredness seeping into my bones, but somehow I keep going. We both do. The storm shuts out the rest of the world so completely that Darius and I might as well be the only two people in existence. We sit there, staring into each other’s eyes, each other’s souls, holding our shield against everything the sky can throw at us.
I lose track of time. I feel myself starting to fall asleep, but Darius shakes me awake. I feel myself growing thirsty and hungry, but I ignore it. I have to. It is just the two of us here, fartoo close together, close enough that it would be easy to lean in and kiss him if that wouldn’t make the whole situation still more complicated. Not that I want to. At least I don’t think so. Do I?
The storm seems to go on forever. Locked into the magic with Darius, I have no sense of how much time is passing, only that eventually, the fury of the storm seems to have lessened against the shield. Even then, we keep holding it. We keep up the shield until the storm fades, its power finally spent. I feel the rain go from all consuming to heavy, to almost nothing. The wind stops howling, drifting down to a mere breeze.
Finally, it seems that the storm is over.
Even then, it takes minutes longer for us to risk lowering the shield, losing contact with each other’s hands, the dark of the night sky still around us. Exhaustion hits me in that moment, utter and total, impossible to ignore. I see Darius all but collapse opposite me.
“We did it,” I say. “We actually did it.”
“Did you doubt that we would?” Darius asks, with a trace of an arrogant smile that would work better if he didn’t look so utterly wiped out.
The truth is that I had no idea if we would make it through this storm or not. I want to tell Darius that, want to thank him for what he has just done, but I’m too tired even for that. I lie down without even realizing that I’m doing it, and in mere seconds, exhausted sleep claims me.
I dream of things in the depths of the ocean, of the seraphin and the leviathans, of kraken stalking the dark places, huge and deadly. I do not fear them because I am not a creature for them to prey upon. I am the water itself, and the water is even more powerful than they could ever be.
It is light when I wake. There is a blanket over me and I realize that Darius must have put it there, not that he is ever likely to admit to such a kindness. He is standing a little wayaway, looking out from the edge of the rise we are on. I stand and walk toward him. My body still feels tired, aching with the aftereffects of our ordeal, but I also feel refreshed. We survived, and that counts for something.
When I reach Darius, I see what he’s looking at. The island around us is devastated, utterly ruined. Fallen trees litter the ground. There are rocks at the base of the slope showing where a whole section of it has fallen away. There are scorched areas where the lightning burned trees and plants. I don’t know if there were other students on this small island last night. I hope not. Anything living here is unlikely to have survived.
But we survived, and so, I hope, did everyone else. All my friends assigned to other spots, other islands. All the students who might have died otherwise.
“We should head back to the main island,” Darius says.
I nod. I want to head back. I want to find Ash and hit him until there’s nothing left of him. I want to kick Sybil from one side of the island to the other. I want to see them both thrown out of the Elemental Hall for what they tried to do.
Of course, to do that, we need to get back, and there’s one problem with that:
The bridge we crossed to get here is gone.
Chapter TWELVE
“We’ll have to swim back,” I say.
Darius doesn’t look happy about it. “Easy for you to say when you spend all your time in the water. The currents down there will probably kill us. Especially after a storm. There’s a bridge between these two islands for a reason.”
“It’s our only way back,” I point out. “If we don’t, then we’re stuck here until we’re rescued, and that would mean failing.”
I can see the determination on his face as I say that. He doesn’t want to fail any more than I do. He can’t afford to. Like me, he has nowhere else to go. Neither of us are Luminan nobles. We don’t go back to a comfortable life if we wash out of our training. Either we become elementalists, or there’s nothing.
