Free Sudden Storm [Tales of the Cidatel 21] by Viola Grace

 
     
     
    Chapter One
     
     
    The desert world of Ki was the last place Burn thought to find a lost Ichadra goddess, but the tracking was as accurate as one-thousand-year-old records by a dead race could be. If the Elemental was here, he was going to find her.
    The sand was eerily quiet. No sound, no touch of wind broke the harsh beating of the sunlight on his skin. It was a good thing that he was affiliated with fire, or he would be dead by now.
    He kept his skimmer humming along the surface of the sand and looked for the sign of the temple.
    The Ichadrans must have been mad to design their own goddesses. Their actions got worse when they sold one of those goddesses to the Ki and the Ichadra disappeared off the surface of their world generations after.
    If it were not for the surviving goddess, the Destroyer, they never would have thought to look for the other two custom clones that had carried the power of an entire planet in their cells.
    Burn’s assignment was to search this inhospitable surface and find traces of the woman who had been purchased to watch over Ki. It was not the most achievable mission that he had been sent on in his three years with the Arcani Citadel, but he was going to give it his all.
    He paused and ran the scanners again. He was at the right coordinates based on the original maps, and if there was any power beneath the sands, he should be able to detect it.
    Burn fiddled with the monitors for a few seconds before he felt something. The air was starting to move.
    “Damn.” Something was awake on Ki, and it was starting a row of dust devils on the sand dune half a kilometre away.
    He inhaled and concentrated, looking for body heat. Heat was his thing, and body heat was impossible to hide unless you had a talent to do it. There.
    He fixated on the point where he felt the body heat and sent the skimmer toward it. He was racing the cyclones of sand that were coming down on him, and time was a factor.
    A small piece of stone was projecting out of the sand and he leapt from the skimmer, sealed it against the sand and started digging the doorway out of its sliding protection. When he saw the glyphs on the door, he remembered what he had been told and simply knocked on the door. A moment later, he was inside the tunnel with the wind whirling outside screaming to get in.
    The muffled sound made him glad that he was within the tunnels. He could feel the heat of the storm coming off the walls, and without another moment’s hesitation, he walked further into the darkness.
    He lit a ball of fire in his palm and held it in front of him to light his way. The tunnels twisted and turned underground, but he eventually found his way to a strange chamber.
    To his surprise, a woman was sitting on the edge of a fountain, idly trailing her fingers in the water. She looked up in surprise as he entered. Her brow furrowed in confusion.
    “Hello, miss.”
    “Greetings, visitor.” She continued trailing one hand in the water. Her blonde hair gleamed in the light, it cascading down over the shoulders of her bodysuit, giving an air of innocence to her features.
    When Burn met her gaze, it was obvious that she was far older than she looked. Her eyes showed every one of her seventeen hundred years.
    “Elemental, I have come to you with an offer to leave this place if you wish it.”
    She rose to her feet and glided toward him with an unsettling grace. “What? You wish me to make another planet uninhabitable?”
    He shook his head, catching hints of her scent as she walked around him with that peculiar stride. “I wish you to leave this place and find another use for your talents.”
    “What of those who hired me?”
    “They have released you from your contract. They released you nine hundred years ago, but the communications systems on Ki were dead by then.”
    He slowly removed a document and extended it to her. “Here is the release.”
    She took it from him and lifted it to the light, examining it closely. She ran