Free Born of Fire (The Cloud Warrior Saga Book 8) by D.K. Holmberg Page B

enough, but his mother preferred to leave him alone. Or maybe she didn’t care for the reminder of the archivists. Tan had never learned.
    But it wasn’t his mother.
    A dark shape coalesced in the chair across from him, taking on the shape of a man about his age, with jet black hair and a cloak that hung limp in spite of the wind. Honl looked at Tan with enough clarity to his features that Tan believed him real.
    “You are no longer across the sea,” Honl said. His voice had deepened but still had something of an airy quality to it. The wind around them settled, and Honl leaned back in the chair, trying to take on a casual stance.
    “I came here for answers,” Tan said.
    “You think you will find answers here that you cannot in that place?”
    Tan swept his arms around him. “There is a thousand years of knowledge here, Honl. There is value in learning what I can from here.”
    “What of the land across the sea? How many years of knowledge are stored there?”
    Tan shrugged. Par-shon didn’t strike him as older than the kingdoms, and certainly the buildings that he’d seen didn’t appear any older than the kingdoms, but those with elemental support might be more ancient than he realized. The connection to the elementals would make them stouter than any others without, perhaps stout enough that they could survive a thousand years or more without falling.
    Hadn’t the archives lasted that long? Even when everything else within the city fell, the archives remained. With the elemental’s influence, the ancient structure had stood tall.
    Tan set the book to the side and leaned forward as he considered Honl. The elemental had changed much in the months since he and Tan first met, and since they first bonded. Honl claimed that he had been there when Tan first used wind to defeat Althem, and then had helped when he needed the assistance of wind to reach Asboel. That had been the start of learning about the Utu Tonah. Without Honl, Tan might not have managed to reach the draasin, and he doubted that he would have escaped from Par-shon. In many ways, he owed everything to the wind elemental.
    But the connection to him was different than the other elementals. Each was unique, as they should be, but Honl in particular had been hesitant at first, not wanting Tan to pull him into the attack with Par-shon. Once Honl had overcome that resistance, he had become useful in ways that even Asboel had not been able to expect.
    And now… now Honl had become something else. The wind elemental regarded Tan with curiosity, and his dark eyes took on a scholarly appraisal as he stared at Tan.
    “What do you know, Honl?” Tan asked. “What have you learned in the time since we last saw each other?”
    “We have never truly been apart, Maelen.” Wind still circled him, touching the bottom of his cloak and making it undulate softly. The cloak itself was no more real than the form Honl had taken. He had once demonstrated that he could take any form he chose and, for some reason, preferred this figure. Each time Tan saw him, his features were more distinct, almost as if Honl were becoming this figure. “The bond connects us even when we are not physically together. It is much the same with the Daughter.”
    Tan smiled. “Not truly apart, but distant enough, don’t you think, Honl? I haven’t seen you since…” He thought about how long it had been, and how much had changed. “It must have been since we defeated the Utu Tonah.”
    “You have not needed me.”
    “And I do now?”
    Honl sat, studying Tan for long moments. When he spoke, he did it with a smile. “Like me, you are… unique… among your people, are you not, Maelen?”
    “I’m the only one I know of who can speak to all of the elementals. Is that what you mean?”
    “That, but you do more than simply speak to the elementals. You can borrow strength as well, draw strength and focus it. Without that ability, you would have failed countless times by now.”
    “I