His body didn’t hurt.
That was good or bad, Tibs remembered the heat, the pain that was so much it disappeared. He was either hurt so badly his mind couldn’t comprehend it, or he wasn’t hurt. A dungeon had been involved, so either was possible.
He sensed within. His reserve was bright to him, the essence spilling out through his body. He sensed nothing different about the other four, the same small reserves on the surface of the larger one. He wondered what his essence did and pushed his awareness to see if it was around him.
He felt it in two parts of the room he was in, and unlike how water, earth, and air usually registered—as shapeless masses—this had form. That of a person. The arms and legs, torso, and the head. He grunted in surprise.
“I think he’s waking up,” Carina said, and one of the forms moved. He focused on her. The essence inside her body was different from that of his reserve. It registered to him with a blue-gray tint, like a paler version of her eyes. The other person approached. The essence through his body was slightly brown.
Tibs considered not doing anything. If he didn’t move, if he didn’t acknowledge he was awake, he didn’t have to find out if the lack of pain was good or back.
“Are you sure?” Jackal whispered, and the worry in his voice pushed Tibs to open an eye. The fighter quickly wiped at his eyes. “There you are. You know, if you wanted us to carry you out of the dungeon, you could have just asked.”
“How are you feeling?” Carina asked, looking at him with concern and taking his hand.
There was no pain. He felt her touch, not just the pressure, but the texture of her fingers. Why wasn’t there any pain?
“Where are we?” he asked to test his voice. The heat had eaten him from the inside, but he sounded fine. The room was spacious; one window with curtains, a large dresser.
“The inn,” Jackal said. “We were going to take you to our room, but word made it to Kro before we got there and he wouldn’t hear of you staying there. You do know I’ve never gotten a room to myself in this place, right? I always have to share.”
Tibs snorted. “Like you’d want to be only with Kroseph just a few doors away.”
Carina squeezed his hand. And again, there was no pain.
“What happened?” Tibs asked, unable to stop himself. He didn’t want to know what state he was in, but he wanted to know how it was they were back in the town, how it was he wasn’t dead.
“You mean besides you almost dying?” Jackal snapped and Carina glared at the fighter.
Tibs swallowed at the hurt in the man’s voice.
“Fuck Tibs,” Jackal whispered, looking at the ceiling. “I’m the one who does stupid stuff like that. You’re supposed to be the smart one.”
Tibs tried to say something. To play it off as a joke, to tell Jackal now he’d have to try harder, but he’d hurt his friends.
“I’m sorry.”
“You better damned be,” Carina said, although her tone was gentle. “What were you thinking, Tibs? That was a room filled with fire.”
“His element,” Jackal snapped. “Did it work at least?”
“Jackal,” Carina chided him.
“No, he’s the one going about not dying.” The fighter wiped at his eyes again. “He isn’t the only one for whom this team’s a family, okay? What the fuck am I going to do if he dies? I’m too stupid to function without his brains.”
Tibs snorted again.
“Don’t start Tibs, I’m not in the mood.”
“He didn’t die,” Carina said.
“That’s not the point.” Jackal walked to the window.
“I’m sorry,” Tibs said again. “And yes, it worked. What happened?”
“I think you owe us the explanation first, Tibs,” Carina said.
“I think it’s going to be quicker if you tell me your side.” He nodded to the door. “I’m going to have to do back pretty far for them.”
“It’s going to be awhile before they come back,” Jackal said, still looking outside.
“They’re on the other side of the door,” Tibs replied and realized he could sense them there. The essence was tinted red for Mez and black for Khumdar. He thought someone walked by them, but they were at the edge of what he could sense, or there was something else at play.
Jackal rolled his eyes at him and went to open the door. “What are you two doing here? I told you we’d find you to let you know how he was.”
“I understand we are latecomers to this team,” Khumdar answered. “But we are part of it. We wanted to be close in case we were needed.”
The fighter sighed. “You might as well come in, Tibs’s awake.”
Jackal sat on the dresser.
“How badly hurt am I?” Tibs asked. The way Khumdar and Mez avoided looking at him worried him.
“You’re fine,” Carina said, “although you’re going to have to explain how that is.”
Tibs looked down at himself and saw a bed sheet with intricate designs covering him. “My things?”
“Where do you think?” Jackal demanded. “You couldn’t leave the coins with me, could you? You had to take them in the fire.”
“I’m sorry.” He sat and looked under the sheet. His skin was pale but unblemished. “Wait, my shoes?”
“You were wearing them in the fire,” Carina said, “along with the pouch, containing the coins.”
“And my amulet,” Tibs groaned. Why hadn’t he left all that behind? He had been so stupid.
“Maybe next time you can listen to the greedy fighter when he yells at you about the wealth you’re going to destroy,” Jackal said, then sighed. “You really need to think about the rest of us you know.”
Mez squirmed in place.
“It’s okay,” Tibs said. “I deserve the tone, and he’s covering up that he cares with it?”
“I’m not covering up a damned thing,” Jackal protested. “I care; I’m just pissed.”
“Tell me what happened after I went in the fire.”
Jackal and Carina looked at him in horror.
“You screamed,” Khumdar said. “Until you stopped, which I believe was more frightening. The fire was so hot we could not approach.”
“I tried to turn it off,” Mez said, “but the essence in there was like nothing I’ve ever felt, trying to get close was like when I had my audience, only I had to decide I wanted to go in, instead of being forced. I couldn’t do it.”
“Then it extinguished by itself, or I suppose the dungeon did it since that is what controls everything there.” Khumdar looked like he had difficulty finding the words.
Carina squeezed his hand. “You were nothing more than a burnt husk, Tibs. All curled in on yourself.” She shuddered. “We thought you were dead, but you whimpered. We wanted to do something to help you, but we had nothing.” She wiped at her eyes. “I’ve never felt so helpless.”
“Then the golem showed up,” Mez said.
“Big Brute,” Tibs said.
Jackal snorted. “That’s a name for it. It took everything we threw at it, which included me so you know how tough that think had to be. We were regrouping, and it just stayed there couched next to you. I figured the dungeon considered you a goner since you were in such a bad shape, which is why it didn’t do anything to you, but then you touched it, and…” the fighter ran out of words too.
“It crumpled the way the other golems did when we beat them,” Khumdar said. “And you… got better.”
“You mean the golem did this?” Tibs motioned to his covered body.
“The cleric did that,” Carina said. “But whatever happened between you and the golem healed you enough we could take you out of the dungeon, and as much as she didn’t want to have to spend so much essence on you, the rules are that if you make it out of the dungeon, the clerics heal you. So she had to.”
“What about the loot?” Tibs asked.
“Carina kept the amulet,” Jackal said, “the rest was converted into coins.”
“The knife?”
“Sorry Tibs, you were still unconscious, I was more interested in having the coins to make sure we could afford whatever it took to fix that.” The fighter smiled. “Fortunately for me, you woke up by yourself, so no need to give away any of my coins. It amounted to a hundred silver and a handful of coppers, that’s—”
“Tibs?” Carina demanded, hand raised to silence Jackal. “How much silver each is that?”
Tibs stared at the sorceress. “I’m hurt, I don’t have to do numbers now.”
“You’re not hurt,” she replied, “and you will do numbers now, Tibs. Unlike Jackal, I can’t go out to hit anything or spend time with someone special to deal with my fear of losing you. You are going to do the numbers for me, or I am going to sit you before a book and not let you go until the next run.”
It wasn’t fair. He’d almost died. He so didn’t want to do numbers now. But he had scared them. He deserved some form of punishment.
He knew a hundred. It was the number after nine-nine. It started the sequence after the tens. He knew ten. There were five of them. So with ten, they would get two each. If he took that two and moved it one step higher.
“Two-zero,” he said.
She smiled at him.
“I still owe Darran two-eight for my armor.”
“I am willing to help with that,” Khumdar said, “if it comes with some explanation of what happened. If a bard had told me the story of what I have seen, I would have taken my money back from him.”
“I’ll explain it,” Tibs said, “but you don’t need to worry about my armor. It’s my responsibility.”
Jackal groaned. “We’re all going to help, Tibs. We’re a team and we need our Rogue to be in armor. Maybe Carina can lend you her amulet until—”
“No, It’s my fault mine was destroyed. I’ll find a way to deal with it until I get a new one.”
The cleric took an electrum piece out of his robe and placed it on the dresser.
“That isn’t from our loot,” Jackal pointed out.
“I was raised to be frugal. Being on the run for years only made that more important.”
“So you could have handed over more coins when we tried to get an earlier spot?”
“No, I could not. That is why I am frugal.”
“How about we move on to the explanations?” Mez asked. “I think I’d let a bard keep my coins, but I’d warn the next people to listen to him.”
Tibs nodded, trying to figure out where to start. He decided the obvious place was the one no one could contest. “I have more than one element.” He produced fire in one palm and water in the other.
“How?” Khumdar sputtered while Mez stared.
He closed both hands, pulling the essences back in. “That’s where things get complicated.” He crossed his legs under the covers. “Out of curiosity, when you had your audience, did you see something else with your element? Like the shadow of something there?”
“Not a shadow,” Khumdar said, as Mez shook his head. Tibs looked at Jackal and Carina, who also shook their heads. He hadn’t explained that part to them either.
Then what Khumdar said registered. “Really? What was it?”
“I do not know.” He closed his eyes. “You call what you saw a shadow, but I know them. Shadows are a thing of darkness. I remember being unsure of myself, of what I was going. I have been told ample stories of those who give themselves over to purity. It is all-encompassing, there is no doubt, only the purpose. I expected that in giving myself over to darkness.”
He looked at them. “When darkness addressed me, I sensed something within it. Something lighter than it. When I asked, Darkness told me it was something I could choose, that the right was mine, but that it would take me down a path away from it. That I would never be able to devote myself to both. I picked Darkness.”
“I picked the shadow,” Tibs said. “Water warned me that it would be a hard path. I guess because I wasn’t going to be a cleric, the devotion part didn’t matter; because she didn’t mention it. She said I’d have little until I had it all. That still doesn’t make sense. I still barely have any of the essences, but she said it was an element to, and that I would get that, but first I needed to get the same thing from Earth, Air, and Fire.”
Mez eyed them suspiciously. “Is that why I’m on the team?” he demanded. “You wanted me to perform some sort of introduction to fire?”
“That isn’t how it works,” Tibs said, but he recalled Fire’s comment about having broken some rule in how he had reached him. Was that it? Jackal and Carina had been part of how he’d reached their element. He’d kept Mez out of it for fire.
“We brought you on,” Jackal said, “because you’re good and we needed an archer.”
“More of a right place, right time situation,” Carina added.
Mez nodded. “Considering that place was me getting the life choked out by a teammate, I shouldn’t complain too much.”
“And all I would have asked was how it felt like to start the audience,” Tibs said. “When your teacher let go of you.”
“Like being consumed by fire,” Mez whispered.
“So the room was exactly what I needed.”
“Does that not seem peculiar?” Khumdar asked. “The dungeon happened to have a room constructed specifically for someone whose ability to have more than one element has never been heard of?”
“You don’t know it’s never been heard of,” Jackal said. “For all we know, there are places where every Runner has more than one element.”
“I am sorry, Jackal, but you are wrong. I have traveled beyond what used to be my world. Beyond my city and my kingdom. I had to if I wanted to advance. If there had been one other person in the world who is like Tibs, I would have heard whispers. That is what Darkness is.”
“The dungeon did it on purpose for me,” Tibs said, recalling the exchange between the two voiced, Sto and Ganymede.
“Sure, it looks like that Tibs,” Carina said, hesitating, “but that isn’t how dungeons work, they don’t know things like that.”
“You’re wrong.”
“The guild would know if—”
“They’re wrong too,” Tibs said. “I heard it, the dungeon.”
“It spoke to you?” Khumdar asked in disbelief.
“No, not to me. I don’t think it realized I could hear them.”
“Them?” Carina asked, looking at the others, worry on her face.
“Yes, before the golem showed up, they talked about how I shouldn’t have been hurt by fire, how my essence should help me using the golem.”
“Tibs,” Jackals said. “That’s when you were dying.”
“I know, but—”
“Maybe you imagined it?” Mez said. “Them? The voices?” he too was looking at Tibs with worry.
He knew he hadn’t imagined it, but the way they looked at him. “Look, I know it’s difficult to believe.”
“It isn’t difficult,” Jackal said. “It’s impossible.”
“The guild doesn’t know everything,” Tibs said in exasperation.
“I didn’t talk to the guild,” the fighter replied. “Saphina’s dad did his own research on dungeons. If there had been any mention of dungeons being able to talk, let alone in two voices, he would have come across it. Tibs, you were nearly burned to death, you had some new element no one ever heard of, I think you just needed something to help you understand and you made up the voices.”
Tibs swallowed his protest. Jackal had just admitted there was something no one had ever heard of that was real, but two of them were too much it seemed.
“I almost want to believe Tibs,” Khumdar said. “The idea that this was a coincidence is almost too much.”
“But only almost,” Mez said.
“Dungeons are strange places,” Carina said. “They’re cunning enough to out-think us in certain aspects.”
Luck, Alistair had told him, was a thing the dungeons had caused countless sages to believe was real. Enough that universities did research to prove it was an element.
Could that be it? Was it just dungeon made luck that had allowed him to have his audience and he’d invented the voices like Jackal said because he was dying and his essence was pushing him to survive?
He didn’t want to believe that, but what was more likely?
What was more likely? Tibs ending up as a Dungeon Runner after being caught picking the wrong pocket, or that he should have been with his hand on the chopping block?
And yet, here he was.
“Then why the golem?” Mez asked. “Or do we think the dungeon didn’t send the golem?”
“He sent it there to kill us,” Jackal stated. “We probably did enough damage to it, it had to rest like we did, and Tibs did his thing on it, whatever that is.”
He watched his team argue about how everything that had happened had been accidental, or the work of nothing more than cunning. They wouldn’t believe him.
Which was fair. The only reason they believed him about his element was that he could show he had more than one, which Khumdar had said couldn’t happen. Unless he could show to them the dungeon could speak, there was nothing he could say to convince them.
They were looking at him, expression expectant.
“I guess you’re right,” he said. “I have to have imagined it.”
Khumdar was the only one whose expression didn’t show relief, but the cleric could tell he was hiding something. It was something Darkness did, after all. The cleric shrugged and relaxed. Unlike Bardik, it seemed he could live with his friends having secrets.
“So how did you do the thing to the golem?” Mez asked.
Tibs shrugged. “I don’t know. It had my element in it, and I pulled it into me to fill my reserve. I didn’t know what I was going, I just did it.”
“And it healed you,” Khumdar mused. “Could your element be purity?”
“No,” Carina stated. “I mean, you can’t have that from multiple elements. To be purity, he’d have to go to the dungeon of purity.”
“That is a fair point,” Khumdar said, sounding amused. “I asked because that is the only element I am aware which can cause healing.”
“But it doesn’t do it by destroying something else, does it?” Jackal asked.
“Maybe the golem crumbling as Tibs touched it is another coincidence, we had damaged it greatly.”
“I did pull the essence it had into me,” Tibs pointed out.
“True. Then I am at a loss. If we look at what happened, I would say that you took its life force and used it to heal yourself. In which case the damage we caused may be why you didn’t heal fully, but I would like to think that if life force was an essence, someone would have known about it.”
Tibs shrugged
“Wait, isn’t Light the element opposite of Darkness?” Jackal asked. “You kill, so shouldn’t Light heal?”
“Darkness is not about death.”
“But you do kill,” Jackal insisted.
“As do you, as does anyone,” the cleric replied. “Death is no more an element than Life is.”
“I’m confused,” Mez said, running a hand over his face. “I thought purity was about life. Isn’t that what the clerics do to heal?”
Khumdar looked at Carina, who sighed.
“It isn’t how I’ve heard it described,” she said. “They heal by purifying the injuries. I guess it deals with life in some way, but all they really do is clean it. It’s the best way I can describe it.”
“Then I’m confused,” Jackal said. “What do Darkness clerics do?”
“Whatever Darkness requires of me. But to answer what you are asking. I suppress and hide. I didn’t steal the golem’s strength. I suppressed it.”
“Okay, stop,” Mez said as Jackal looked ready to argue with the cleric. “Does it really matter what Tibs’s essence is? Isn’t the more important question, what we’re going to do about it? What he can do is important, isn’t it? He’s like the first-ever.”
He wasn’t. Water had mentioned a predecessor when talking with Tibs.
Khumdar chuckled darkly. “Being the first is rarely the good thing the bards want you to believe it is. What do you think the guild will do if they find out? The purity families?”
“We weren’t going to tell anyone anyway,” Jackal said. “Loyalty to the team before anyone else. Tibs is on our team, so we’re going to protect him.”
Mez and Khumdar nodded. Carina was slower.
“Carina?” Tibs asked.
“I don’t know,” She answered. “I mean, yes, the team comes first, but purity clerics could help you, and there are some right here.”
“Who work for the guild,” Khumdar pointed out.
“They wouldn’t tell them,” she replied. “Their loyalties are to the element, not the guilt.”
The cleric snorted and headed for the door. “I was under the impression you had started to understand that wasn’t the good thing you were indoctrinated to believe.”
“What does that mean?” she demanded.
“It means that you have no right to be this naïve, Whiteblood,” the cleric spat. “Not after what you have experienced here.” He slammed the door behind him.
Carina was pale. Jackal eyed the door speculatively, and Mez looked as confused as Tibs felt.
His body didn’t hurt.
That was good or bad, Tibs remembered the heat, the pain that was so much it disappeared. He was either hurt so badly his mind couldn’t comprehend it, or he wasn’t hurt. A dungeon had been involved, so either was possible.
He sensed within. His reserve was bright to him, the essence spilling out through his body. He sensed nothing different about the other four, the same small reserves on the surface of the larger one. He wondered what his essence did and pushed his awareness to see if it was around him.
He felt it in two parts of the room he was in, and unlike how water, earth, and air usually registered—as shapeless masses—this had form. That of a person. The arms and legs, torso, and the head. He grunted in surprise.
“I think he’s waking up,” Carina said, and one of the forms moved. He focused on her. The essence inside her body was different from that of his reserve. It registered to him with a blue-gray tint, like a paler version of her eyes. The other person approached. The essence through his body was slightly brown.
Tibs considered not doing anything. If he didn’t move, if he didn’t acknowledge he was awake, he didn’t have to find out if the lack of pain was good or back.
“Are you sure?” Jackal whispered, and the worry in his voice pushed Tibs to open an eye. The fighter quickly wiped at his eyes. “There you are. You know, if you wanted us to carry you out of the dungeon, you could have just asked.”
“How are you feeling?” Carina asked, looking at him with concern and taking his hand.
There was no pain. He felt her touch, not just the pressure, but the texture of her fingers. Why wasn’t there any pain?
“Where are we?” he asked to test his voice. The heat had eaten him from the inside, but he sounded fine. The room was spacious; one window with curtains, a large dresser.
“The inn,” Jackal said. “We were going to take you to our room, but word made it to Kro before we got there and he wouldn’t hear of you staying there. You do know I’ve never gotten a room to myself in this place, right? I always have to share.”
Tibs snorted. “Like you’d want to be only with Kroseph just a few doors away.”
Carina squeezed his hand. And again, there was no pain.
“What happened?” Tibs asked, unable to stop himself. He didn’t want to know what state he was in, but he wanted to know how it was they were back in the town, how it was he wasn’t dead.
“You mean besides you almost dying?” Jackal snapped and Carina glared at the fighter.
Tibs swallowed at the hurt in the man’s voice.
“Fuck Tibs,” Jackal whispered, looking at the ceiling. “I’m the one who does stupid stuff like that. You’re supposed to be the smart one.”
Tibs tried to say something. To play it off as a joke, to tell Jackal now he’d have to try harder, but he’d hurt his friends.
“I’m sorry.”
“You better damned be,” Carina said, although her tone was gentle. “What were you thinking, Tibs? That was a room filled with fire.”
“His element,” Jackal snapped. “Did it work at least?”
“Jackal,” Carina chided him.
“No, he’s the one going about not dying.” The fighter wiped at his eyes again. “He isn’t the only one for whom this team’s a family, okay? What the fuck am I going to do if he dies? I’m too stupid to function without his brains.”
Tibs snorted again.
“Don’t start Tibs, I’m not in the mood.”
“He didn’t die,” Carina said.
“That’s not the point.” Jackal walked to the window.
“I’m sorry,” Tibs said again. “And yes, it worked. What happened?”
“I think you owe us the explanation first, Tibs,” Carina said.
“I think it’s going to be quicker if you tell me your side.” He nodded to the door. “I’m going to have to do back pretty far for them.”
“It’s going to be awhile before they come back,” Jackal said, still looking outside.
“They’re on the other side of the door,” Tibs replied and realized he could sense them there. The essence was tinted red for Mez and black for Khumdar. He thought someone walked by them, but they were at the edge of what he could sense, or there was something else at play.
Jackal rolled his eyes at him and went to open the door. “What are you two doing here? I told you we’d find you to let you know how he was.”
“I understand we are latecomers to this team,” Khumdar answered. “But we are part of it. We wanted to be close in case we were needed.”
The fighter sighed. “You might as well come in, Tibs’s awake.”
Jackal sat on the dresser.
“How badly hurt am I?” Tibs asked. The way Khumdar and Mez avoided looking at him worried him.
“You’re fine,” Carina said, “although you’re going to have to explain how that is.”
Tibs looked down at himself and saw a bed sheet with intricate designs covering him. “My things?”
“Where do you think?” Jackal demanded. “You couldn’t leave the coins with me, could you? You had to take them in the fire.”
“I’m sorry.” He sat and looked under the sheet. His skin was pale but unblemished. “Wait, my shoes?”
“You were wearing them in the fire,” Carina said, “along with the pouch, containing the coins.”
“And my amulet,” Tibs groaned. Why hadn’t he left all that behind? He had been so stupid.
“Maybe next time you can listen to the greedy fighter when he yells at you about the wealth you’re going to destroy,” Jackal said, then sighed. “You really need to think about the rest of us you know.”
Mez squirmed in place.
“It’s okay,” Tibs said. “I deserve the tone, and he’s covering up that he cares with it?”
“I’m not covering up a damned thing,” Jackal protested. “I care; I’m just pissed.”
“Tell me what happened after I went in the fire.”
Jackal and Carina looked at him in horror.
“You screamed,” Khumdar said. “Until you stopped, which I believe was more frightening. The fire was so hot we could not approach.”
“I tried to turn it off,” Mez said, “but the essence in there was like nothing I’ve ever felt, trying to get close was like when I had my audience, only I had to decide I wanted to go in, instead of being forced. I couldn’t do it.”
“Then it extinguished by itself, or I suppose the dungeon did it since that is what controls everything there.” Khumdar looked like he had difficulty finding the words.
Carina squeezed his hand. “You were nothing more than a burnt husk, Tibs. All curled in on yourself.” She shuddered. “We thought you were dead, but you whimpered. We wanted to do something to help you, but we had nothing.” She wiped at her eyes. “I’ve never felt so helpless.”
“Then the golem showed up,” Mez said.
“Big Brute,” Tibs said.
Jackal snorted. “That’s a name for it. It took everything we threw at it, which included me so you know how tough that think had to be. We were regrouping, and it just stayed there couched next to you. I figured the dungeon considered you a goner since you were in such a bad shape, which is why it didn’t do anything to you, but then you touched it, and…” the fighter ran out of words too.
“It crumpled the way the other golems did when we beat them,” Khumdar said. “And you… got better.”
“You mean the golem did this?” Tibs motioned to his covered body.
“The cleric did that,” Carina said. “But whatever happened between you and the golem healed you enough we could take you out of the dungeon, and as much as she didn’t want to have to spend so much essence on you, the rules are that if you make it out of the dungeon, the clerics heal you. So she had to.”
“What about the loot?” Tibs asked.
“Carina kept the amulet,” Jackal said, “the rest was converted into coins.”
“The knife?”
“Sorry Tibs, you were still unconscious, I was more interested in having the coins to make sure we could afford whatever it took to fix that.” The fighter smiled. “Fortunately for me, you woke up by yourself, so no need to give away any of my coins. It amounted to a hundred silver and a handful of coppers, that’s—”
“Tibs?” Carina demanded, hand raised to silence Jackal. “How much silver each is that?”
Tibs stared at the sorceress. “I’m hurt, I don’t have to do numbers now.”
“You’re not hurt,” she replied, “and you will do numbers now, Tibs. Unlike Jackal, I can’t go out to hit anything or spend time with someone special to deal with my fear of losing you. You are going to do the numbers for me, or I am going to sit you before a book and not let you go until the next run.”
It wasn’t fair. He’d almost died. He so didn’t want to do numbers now. But he had scared them. He deserved some form of punishment.
He knew a hundred. It was the number after nine-nine. It started the sequence after the tens. He knew ten. There were five of them. So with ten, they would get two each. If he took that two and moved it one step higher.
“Two-zero,” he said.
She smiled at him.
“I still owe Darran two-eight for my armor.”
“I am willing to help with that,” Khumdar said, “if it comes with some explanation of what happened. If a bard had told me the story of what I have seen, I would have taken my money back from him.”
“I’ll explain it,” Tibs said, “but you don’t need to worry about my armor. It’s my responsibility.”
Jackal groaned. “We’re all going to help, Tibs. We’re a team and we need our Rogue to be in armor. Maybe Carina can lend you her amulet until—”
“No, It’s my fault mine was destroyed. I’ll find a way to deal with it until I get a new one.”
The cleric took an electrum piece out of his robe and placed it on the dresser.
“That isn’t from our loot,” Jackal pointed out.
“I was raised to be frugal. Being on the run for years only made that more important.”
“So you could have handed over more coins when we tried to get an earlier spot?”
“No, I could not. That is why I am frugal.”
“How about we move on to the explanations?” Mez asked. “I think I’d let a bard keep my coins, but I’d warn the next people to listen to him.”
Tibs nodded, trying to figure out where to start. He decided the obvious place was the one no one could contest. “I have more than one element.” He produced fire in one palm and water in the other.
“How?” Khumdar sputtered while Mez stared.
He closed both hands, pulling the essences back in. “That’s where things get complicated.” He crossed his legs under the covers. “Out of curiosity, when you had your audience, did you see something else with your element? Like the shadow of something there?”
“Not a shadow,” Khumdar said, as Mez shook his head. Tibs looked at Jackal and Carina, who also shook their heads. He hadn’t explained that part to them either.
Then what Khumdar said registered. “Really? What was it?”
“I do not know.” He closed his eyes. “You call what you saw a shadow, but I know them. Shadows are a thing of darkness. I remember being unsure of myself, of what I was going. I have been told ample stories of those who give themselves over to purity. It is all-encompassing, there is no doubt, only the purpose. I expected that in giving myself over to darkness.”
He looked at them. “When darkness addressed me, I sensed something within it. Something lighter than it. When I asked, Darkness told me it was something I could choose, that the right was mine, but that it would take me down a path away from it. That I would never be able to devote myself to both. I picked Darkness.”
“I picked the shadow,” Tibs said. “Water warned me that it would be a hard path. I guess because I wasn’t going to be a cleric, the devotion part didn’t matter; because she didn’t mention it. She said I’d have little until I had it all. That still doesn’t make sense. I still barely have any of the essences, but she said it was an element to, and that I would get that, but first I needed to get the same thing from Earth, Air, and Fire.”
Mez eyed them suspiciously. “Is that why I’m on the team?” he demanded. “You wanted me to perform some sort of introduction to fire?”
“That isn’t how it works,” Tibs said, but he recalled Fire’s comment about having broken some rule in how he had reached him. Was that it? Jackal and Carina had been part of how he’d reached their element. He’d kept Mez out of it for fire.
“We brought you on,” Jackal said, “because you’re good and we needed an archer.”
“More of a right place, right time situation,” Carina added.
Mez nodded. “Considering that place was me getting the life choked out by a teammate, I shouldn’t complain too much.”
“And all I would have asked was how it felt like to start the audience,” Tibs said. “When your teacher let go of you.”
“Like being consumed by fire,” Mez whispered.
“So the room was exactly what I needed.”
“Does that not seem peculiar?” Khumdar asked. “The dungeon happened to have a room constructed specifically for someone whose ability to have more than one element has never been heard of?”
“You don’t know it’s never been heard of,” Jackal said. “For all we know, there are places where every Runner has more than one element.”
“I am sorry, Jackal, but you are wrong. I have traveled beyond what used to be my world. Beyond my city and my kingdom. I had to if I wanted to advance. If there had been one other person in the world who is like Tibs, I would have heard whispers. That is what Darkness is.”
“The dungeon did it on purpose for me,” Tibs said, recalling the exchange between the two voiced, Sto and Ganymede.
“Sure, it looks like that Tibs,” Carina said, hesitating, “but that isn’t how dungeons work, they don’t know things like that.”
“You’re wrong.”
“The guild would know if—”
“They’re wrong too,” Tibs said. “I heard it, the dungeon.”
“It spoke to you?” Khumdar asked in disbelief.
“No, not to me. I don’t think it realized I could hear them.”
“Them?” Carina asked, looking at the others, worry on her face.
“Yes, before the golem showed up, they talked about how I shouldn’t have been hurt by fire, how my essence should help me using the golem.”
“Tibs,” Jackals said. “That’s when you were dying.”
“I know, but—”
“Maybe you imagined it?” Mez said. “Them? The voices?” he too was looking at Tibs with worry.
He knew he hadn’t imagined it, but the way they looked at him. “Look, I know it’s difficult to believe.”
“It isn’t difficult,” Jackal said. “It’s impossible.”
“The guild doesn’t know everything,” Tibs said in exasperation.
“I didn’t talk to the guild,” the fighter replied. “Saphina’s dad did his own research on dungeons. If there had been any mention of dungeons being able to talk, let alone in two voices, he would have come across it. Tibs, you were nearly burned to death, you had some new element no one ever heard of, I think you just needed something to help you understand and you made up the voices.”
Tibs swallowed his protest. Jackal had just admitted there was something no one had ever heard of that was real, but two of them were too much it seemed.
“I almost want to believe Tibs,” Khumdar said. “The idea that this was a coincidence is almost too much.”
“But only almost,” Mez said.
“Dungeons are strange places,” Carina said. “They’re cunning enough to out-think us in certain aspects.”
Luck, Alistair had told him, was a thing the dungeons had caused countless sages to believe was real. Enough that universities did research to prove it was an element.
Could that be it? Was it just dungeon made luck that had allowed him to have his audience and he’d invented the voices like Jackal said because he was dying and his essence was pushing him to survive?
He didn’t want to believe that, but what was more likely?
What was more likely? Tibs ending up as a Dungeon Runner after being caught picking the wrong pocket, or that he should have been with his hand on the chopping block?
And yet, here he was.
“Then why the golem?” Mez asked. “Or do we think the dungeon didn’t send the golem?”
“He sent it there to kill us,” Jackal stated. “We probably did enough damage to it, it had to rest like we did, and Tibs did his thing on it, whatever that is.”
He watched his team argue about how everything that had happened had been accidental, or the work of nothing more than cunning. They wouldn’t believe him.
Which was fair. The only reason they believed him about his element was that he could show he had more than one, which Khumdar had said couldn’t happen. Unless he could show to them the dungeon could speak, there was nothing he could say to convince them.
They were looking at him, expression expectant.
“I guess you’re right,” he said. “I have to have imagined it.”
Khumdar was the only one whose expression didn’t show relief, but the cleric could tell he was hiding something. It was something Darkness did, after all. The cleric shrugged and relaxed. Unlike Bardik, it seemed he could live with his friends having secrets.
“So how did you do the thing to the golem?” Mez asked.
Tibs shrugged. “I don’t know. It had my element in it, and I pulled it into me to fill my reserve. I didn’t know what I was going, I just did it.”
“And it healed you,” Khumdar mused. “Could your element be purity?”
“No,” Carina stated. “I mean, you can’t have that from multiple elements. To be purity, he’d have to go to the dungeon of purity.”
“That is a fair point,” Khumdar said, sounding amused. “I asked because that is the only element I am aware which can cause healing.”
“But it doesn’t do it by destroying something else, does it?” Jackal asked.
“Maybe the golem crumbling as Tibs touched it is another coincidence, we had damaged it greatly.”
“I did pull the essence it had into me,” Tibs pointed out.
“True. Then I am at a loss. If we look at what happened, I would say that you took its life force and used it to heal yourself. In which case the damage we caused may be why you didn’t heal fully, but I would like to think that if life force was an essence, someone would have known about it.”
Tibs shrugged
“Wait, isn’t Light the element opposite of Darkness?” Jackal asked. “You kill, so shouldn’t Light heal?”
“Darkness is not about death.”
“But you do kill,” Jackal insisted.
“As do you, as does anyone,” the cleric replied. “Death is no more an element than Life is.”
“I’m confused,” Mez said, running a hand over his face. “I thought purity was about life. Isn’t that what the clerics do to heal?”
Khumdar looked at Carina, who sighed.
“It isn’t how I’ve heard it described,” she said. “They heal by purifying the injuries. I guess it deals with life in some way, but all they really do is clean it. It’s the best way I can describe it.”
“Then I’m confused,” Jackal said. “What do Darkness clerics do?”
“Whatever Darkness requires of me. But to answer what you are asking. I suppress and hide. I didn’t steal the golem’s strength. I suppressed it.”
“Okay, stop,” Mez said as Jackal looked ready to argue with the cleric. “Does it really matter what Tibs’s essence is? Isn’t the more important question, what we’re going to do about it? What he can do is important, isn’t it? He’s like the first-ever.”
He wasn’t. Water had mentioned a predecessor when talking with Tibs.
Khumdar chuckled darkly. “Being the first is rarely the good thing the bards want you to believe it is. What do you think the guild will do if they find out? The purity families?”
“We weren’t going to tell anyone anyway,” Jackal said. “Loyalty to the team before anyone else. Tibs is on our team, so we’re going to protect him.”
Mez and Khumdar nodded. Carina was slower.
“Carina?” Tibs asked.
“I don’t know,” She answered. “I mean, yes, the team comes first, but purity clerics could help you, and there are some right here.”
“Who work for the guild,” Khumdar pointed out.
“They wouldn’t tell them,” she replied. “Their loyalties are to the element, not the guilt.”
The cleric snorted and headed for the door. “I was under the impression you had started to understand that wasn’t the good thing you were indoctrinated to believe.”
“What does that mean?” she demanded.
“It means that you have no right to be this naïve, Whiteblood,” the cleric spat. “Not after what you have experienced here.” He slammed the door behind him.
Carina was pale. Jackal eyed the door speculatively, and Mez looked as confused as Tibs felt.
