Lynn had expected a sleepless night—haunted by doubt, dread, and the weight of too many revelations—but instead, he was pulled from a rare, dreamless slumber by the soft warmth of morning light brushing the trees above their hidden shelter.
“We need to start moving,” Adan unceremoniously prompted, handing him a piece of bread. “Eat up and get dressed.”
Still a bit dazed, Lynn followed Adan with his gaze as the young woman moved around their small impromptu camp, collecting up the stored gear and getting ready to leave. Looking at her now, in the morning light and aware that she was a woman, Lynn couldn’t help but wonder why he hadn’t realized her gender before. She might have a strong jaw line and a muscular build but apart from that, her features where quite feminine.
He had perhaps just assumed that Adan was like himself – looking more feminine than he actually was due to lean muscles and a fairly androgynous face. However, when he saw her back yesterday he had realized that there was nothing lean about her muscle structure. Her body was smaller than his for sure but it had been trained for explosive strength.
‘I was too blinded by her fire mark to notice.’ Lynn couldn’t help but admit that Adan was actually quite beautiful. Her brown skin tone was warm, almost golden. Reflected light danced in her bright blonde hair, making it seem to glow with luster. As Adan looked over at him and slimed, the green flecks in her golden eyes shone like spring leaves.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked and it took a second for Lynn to realize that he had been staring. His heart stuttered traitorously, and he hated that it did. Now wasn’t the time for tangled thoughts or lingering gazes. His father and brother were imprisoned. His kingdom in crisis. So why did the sight of her—alive, bright, maddening—make everything else quiet for a moment?
He coughed and looked away, feeling a bit embraced.
“Nothing, I- uh, I’m just adapting to the fact that you’re a woman.”
Adan laughed, her voice melodious.
“I’m still me, princess,” she said playfully and, frustrated, Lynn tossed the bread he had forgotten to eat at her face.
“Stop calling me princess!” he hissed but Adan just laughed more and handed him back the piece of bread that she had, annoyingly, caught with ease.
“Now, now. Don’t go wasting food, Lynn.”
Still feeling frustrated, Lynn gobbled down the bread and quickly put on the clothes Adan had prepared for him. At this moment, he just wanted to get moving and not think about how pretty Adan was. Nor her sectets.
As if she could read his mind, Adan just continued to chuckle and handed him one of the backpacks before turning around and picking up her own gear.
Lynn’s gaze lingered on her back for a moment. Her damaged back was hidden under the spare clothes that had been prepared in advance, but the sight of her bloody wounds were still clear in his mind.
“How is you back?”
“Hmm?” Adan turned her head, looking at him with some slight confusion in her eyes before smiling dismissively. “Oh, my injuries? Don’t worry about it, they are just flesh wounds and will heal quickly.”
“I meant, does it hurt?” Lynn stepped forward, aiming to take over the second bag as well. “You should avoid carrying stuff on your back for now.”
Adan smiled a crooked smile and pulled the bag away from Lynn’s reach. “I wouldn’t be much of a bodyguard if I let my ward carry all the gear. Besides, we are not going very far and I can have it over one shoulder so it won’t push against any wounds.”
Lynn frowned, not entirely convinced but his attention was caught by another point. “Not going far? You have a plan?”
Adan nodded. “Yes, before the fighting broke out yesterday, I asked Duke Kimba to leave the city with as many of his people as possible and meet us in the western end of these woods. If we keep a moderate pace, we should be able to walk there in little over two days, while still keeping a low profile. It would also be good if we could take the time to practice our newly gained powers along the way.”
“. . . .” Lynn stared at Adan for a moment before stepping closer and grabbing her bag firmly. “Your idea of ‘not very far’ is skewed. Give me your bag.”
“If you insist,” Adan replied, still smiling as she let go and Lynn was shocked to find that the bag she had been holding probably weighed at least twice as much as the one she had given him. Lynn frowned.
“Have you forgotten that I’m really not some fragile princess?” He put both bags down and started to even out the weight between the two bags. “If anything, you should have given me the heavier bag. . . .”
“Wanna arm wrestle it out?” she chuckled and while Lynn hadn’t heard of the game she mentioned he understood what Adan wanted to say; she is the stronger one, female or not.
“Yeah, yeah, Madam Muscle, but you are still hurt!” Lynn strapped the two bags together and put them on his back. “I’ll carry these for now.”
Adan raised her hands in a sign of surrender. “Okay, thank you.”
Seemingly unbothered by her wounds, Adan sprung out the hole that had functioned as their makeshift camp and held out a hand to Lynn from above.
“Shall we?”
The pair started walking west through the dense forest. It was not an easy walk as the combination of dense trees and natural pitfalls everywhere made the forest had to traverse, but at least it also made them hard to spot from a distance.
“Status report,” Adan requested her A.I. as she ducked under a fallen tree.
“The distance to the island is now too far for Sai to be able to get any data transfers from the dispatched sentinels in the capital. Sai does pick up on quite some activity in the surrounding forest but none of them are currently headed for us.”
“Keep track of any human activity within 5 kilometers and alert me if we need to change our course.”
“Affirmative.”
“Adan,” Lynn who had been quite for a while suddenly spoke up. “Can you tell me a bit more about what happened to my family and to the King? I fear what will happen to them while we search for Duke Kimba.”
Adan glanced back at Lynn, the worry clear in his eyes.
“Well, everything happened so fast that I don’t have much details but from what I could see when I stormed the convent, your father and brother had been captured and King Fenix lay in a pool of his own blood by their feet.”
Lynn hissed as he drew a sharp breath behind her.
“I must say, it looked like quite a convincing assassination plot not stopped on time. On the surface, at least.”
“On the surface?”
“Yes, well, at least when I ran past them, the King still had a pulse but Emberon and the guards acted as if the body was already cold and lifeless. If they truly cared about King Fenix, they would have been clamoring to get him medical care, not waving and shouting at your father.”
Lynn was silent for a moment, perhaps considering how Adan could possibly have known that the King had a pulse when she simply ran past them. At least, Adan hoped he was. She was tiered of lying but couldn’t say more directly.
However, when Lynn spoke again, his focus was still on his family.
“Do . . . do you think they are still alive?”
Adan paused for a moment, reflecting on her own conversation with her A.I. and the intel she had gathered previously. There was also those rooms she couldn’t enter at the palace, as well as the presence of technology that is way too advanced for this planet. All of it was suspicious.
“To be honest, I would be surprised if even the King is truly dead. We already know that Emberon is looking for something. If I were him, I would keep your family locked up, undergoing some pre-arranged fake trial, while I secretly torture the King for whatever information I’m after.”
“You would torture the King?” Lynn asked, clearly sounding surprise.
Adan smiled. “I said, if I was him. Naturally, if it was me, I would take a more . . . sophisticated approach.”
She gave Lynn a suggestive wink and judging by his slightly pinker ears, she wondered if he was thinking of how she had enticed the first assassin to speak, back in Prayer Village. For some reason, she hoped he was even more.
“Don’t worry to much, I think your family is relatively safe for now,” she said with a softer smile.
Lynn nodded solemnly, seemingly convinced. Adan did not mention that if she was Emberon, she would also torture Lynn’s family in hopes of learning where Lynn might have run off to. Judging by Lynn’s solemn expression, she guessed that he might have thought of it too.
The journey continued westward. They mostly travelled during the day as the treacherous ground made it hard to walk safely in the dark and they didn’t wish to risk using something like a torch to light the way. Only when hidden in the dark hollows in the ground did they risk a small flame to heat some food.
Evenings became quiet moments of practice—two awakened elemental benders chasing control over elements that refused to obey easily. On the second night, hidden in a deeper ground hollow than usual, Adan and Lynn sat cross legged in front of each other breathing steadily. With every breath, a small flame would appear in Adan’s left hand as she breathed out before flying flying over to her left where is was reabsorbed as she breathed in.
The flames movement had been erratic at first but now it moved quite gracefully from hand to hand, burning a little bit brighter with each iteration.
“Gah!”
A grown of frustration pulled Adan out of her meditative state. Lynn had gotten up and was pacing the narrow space annoyingly.
“I don’t get it,” he almost growled. “I’m doing what my mother told me to do, but the ice just won’t form. Not even a little drop of water!”
Adan gave Lynn a sympathetic look. Her own ease with controlling the flame in her hand was in part thanks to Lynn’s descriptions of how his father and his soldiers described how to control it. He had narrated the process to her very patiently, guiding her to imagine a warmth gathering in her chest and spreading through her body with every breath.
But that was only part of it. As she did the exercises, her A.I. had been closely observing the now thick membrane around here cells and could detect traces of building resonance. It was like ripples on a lake; at first, the membrane moved as if hundreds of stones had been tossed into a lake in odd places and random times, but as she practiced the ripples became more unified, as if created by fewer and more rhythmically tossed stones. As the ripples got more in-sync and their frequency sped up, the flame grew brighter and warmer .
Her A.I. was still upset that it couldn’t figure out how the fire bending worked, but at least it had started to gather more intel on it.
Lynn, on the other hand, had yet to produce any actual evidence of his powers since he left the lake around Fire Island. He too had gotten breathing exercises from his mother but for some reason it didn’t seem to work as well for him. He had managed to boost their speed in the water when swimming, but now his powers where silent.
“Perhaps it had to do with the inert difference between producing water and producing ice,” she speculated with her A.I. but Sai couldn’t really help as she had been forced to remove the nanobots in Lynn’s body so as to not block his awakening.
“You could always kiss him again,” her A.I. suggested as nonchalantly as an only an A.I. can, “Sai believes the comparison between your two membranes’ behavior could help analyze what is going wrong for the boy.”
“I can’t,” Adan cleanly refused.
“Clearly you can, you have done it on three occasions already. Sai can help distract him from the memory once the nanobots are inside, if that is your concern.”
“Ok, correction; I don’t want to,” Adan muttered as she mentally rolled her eyes. “I’ve imposed enough on him without his consent.” Her gaze followed the pacing young man with softening eyes. “Besides, it’s starting to get dangerous for me.”
“. . .”
Adan wasn’t sure if her A.I. understood what she meant but she didn’t feel like explaining. Instead she left their inner dialog and spoke up to Lynn.
“Can you walk me through the techniques your mother taught you?”
Lynn grunted, clearly annoyed and not really feeling up to it.
“It is easy to overlook the most simple solutions when you are trying too hard to follow someone else’s path. As an outsider, I might notice something you didn’t,” Adan pushed gently.
The look she got told her that Lynn knew she was right but that it didn’t make him any less frustrated.
“It should be the same as for you but instead of envisioning a growing heat, Mother instructed me to think of removing the heat from me.”
“Is that how your mother does it or how she thought you should do it?”
“Huh?” Lynn blinked, confused.
“Well, your mother is a water bender, not an ice bender,” Adan spoke slowly, looking pensive. “Does she really manifest water by envisioning herself turning into a popsicle?”
“A what?” Lynn looked even more confused for a moment but before Adan had a chance to explain again, it seemed like he got her meaning. “Actually, mother said she more focuses on the sensation of her blood flow, feeling how it moves through her. . . . Maybe she just guessed it would be different for me?”
Adan nodded. “It’s been a while since there was an ice bender around after all and what is ice if not really, really still water? I suggest you start with trying bending water and go from there. “
Lynn stopped his pacing and sat down abruptly. He closed his eyes and started to breathe deep, slow breaths. In the dim glow from the fire, Adan started to see a slight shimmer in the crystal in Lynn’s chest. Slowly, a week stream of water appeared above Lynn’s right hand before suddenly and erratically flying over to his left hand before disappearing again.
“Ha! I did it!” Lynn yelled out happily before promptly reaching out and grasping Adan’s shoulders in a warm embrace. The fresh scent of mint and ceder enveloped her in an instant.
Adan’s eyes widened in surprise just as fast as Lynn’s body stiffened around her. Awkwardly, Lynn pulled back from the embrace and coughed, his pale ears looking a shade redder even in the dim light.
“Sai detects a 42% increase in your heart rate,” the A.I. stated flatly.
Adan smiled, complex emotions hidden in her eyes. “As I said, dangerous.”
Snowy Publications 