Free Vesik 04 - This Broken World by Eric Asher Page B

much in the past year. I’m normally quite respectful.”
    “Uh huh,” I said.
    The Old Man chuckled quietly as I turned on the radio. I frowned and scanned the stations. Everything was static.
    “Storm’s moving in,” he said.
    “We’ll get a better signal closer to Fredericktown,” I said. I glanced up at the evening sky. “Looks pretty clear.”
    “Not the kind of storm I was referring to.”
    “Oh. You think the gathering powers are interfering?”
    We both fell silent. I was pretty damn sure we were both thinking about just how bad a storm was heading our way.
    I hit the accelerator a bit more than I needed to on the narrow turns and hills of highway 72. The Old Man braced his hands against the dashboard and laughed as I took a turn that would have been suicidal without the wide tires the old girl was wearing.
    It wasn’t much longer before we reached 21 and slowly turned off into the huge, oval-shaped parking lot of Elephant Rocks State Park. The last car was leaving as we pulled in. I’d never run into a ranger when I came to visit Aeros, so I wasn’t surprised when silence and emptiness greeted us.
    I threw my backpack over one shoulder. The Old Man grabbed another backpack and let the straps dangle from his hand. He tossed my staff to me and it smacked into my palm.
    We started up the parking lot, loose gravel and bits of torn up pavement crunching beneath our feet as we made our way to the short pavilion.
    My eyes wandered over the brown wood. “They painted it.”
    “And?” the Old Man asked.
    “The green was terrible.”
    We followed the path past the little pavilion. The woods closed over our heads and every sound became suspect in the dying light. I began striking the path in front of us with my staff. The ferrule clunked against the asphalt and made a satisfying echo.
    The granite boulders still drew my attention as we walked past. I’d never been anywhere else and seen anything quite like it. They weren’t as large or majestic as mountains, but seeing boulders the size of cars strewn through the woods was jarring.
    We rounded the large, central hill of the park and the trail began to ascend. We crested the rise a minute later and could see enormous granite boulders the size of houses sitting on a red granite plain.
    I’d come to think of Aeros as a friend, and it still threw me a bit, as we climbed, to see the names of his victims carved into the boulders beside the short wooden staircase. Most of the names were over a hundred years old.
    We turned left, passed the string of boulders for which I was fairly certain the park had been named, and weaved between a few standing pools of water. One pool in particular would never go dry. Smooth pebbles lined the bottom of the water.
    I smacked my staff on the granite surface beside the pool.
    “Hey, Aeros! You awake?”
    The Old Man actually laughed.
    I pounded my staff on the ground a few more times. “Come on. Do you really want me to make with the glowy lights?”
    Nothing happened. I sighed and kneeled down beside the pool.
    “I hope you know what you’re doing,” the Old Man said.
    “Don’t I always?”
    Judging by his expression, he didn’t think so.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
     
    A s soon as my hand neared the surface of the water, a dull, yellow-green glow rose between the pebbles. Gentle wisps of power brightened and waved from each stone, reaching out to the other wisps. The tiny fronds of light intertwined until a pattern emerged.
    “Ehwaz,” I said.
    The fronds twisted and shimmered until a glyph appeared within the pool—a rune, shaped like a jagged capital M and made of light. The glyph dissolved.
    “Uruz.”
    The light shifted as the fronds began to undulate and another rune rose between the pebbles. It looked like a lowercase n with the left edge higher than the right. A sharp line joined the top of each side.
    “Oh, good. You didn’t get us killed today,” the Old Man said.
    I’d seen Aeros step through the pool before, but