Breaking Step (Dungeon Runner 3)

Breaking Step, Chapter 57

For that, Tibs needed to get him talking.

The only question that came to him was the one he didn't think he had time for.

"How did I get here?"

"The way all come to me." Up, left, right, up, down, behind. But not exactly. This wasn't a puzzle, with only a few set moves. He had all around Tibs to move in.

"But I wasn't having strong emotions. I was amused by the guard surrounding me. I was curious how their metal weapons would work while I was suffused. Then I was puzzled by the lighting on my fingers and there—" light, so much light he couldn't breathe, so much the pain only registered with the thought this might—

He swallowed.

There had been too much for him to register the terror he felt.

"You feel strongly, Child of human. I was there, and you came." How was he supposed to work out some pattern when the words were never exactly in the same location?

"Okay, how were you there? There is lightning in the clouds, but it wasn't hitting. It was dancing over my hand. Does metal make lightning?"

Laughter, sliding around this time in a way he thought he could follow, only for it to jump when he set his gaze on where he would have been next.

This wasn't working.

"Metal and I have a kinship. The way Air and Earth dislike each other."

Tibs stilled himself. He needed a different tactic.

"That doesn't make sense. Not liking someone isn't the same as having a kinship."

"It is not? Metal and I are touched; as Air and Earth are. Connections are the same in that they are. The flavor of them does not make them false."

Trying to understand Lighting was more of a distraction from what he needed to do than letting him learn anything useful.

"Then, that connection lets Metal make lighting?"

Laughter again. "Metal can not make me anymore than I make Earth, Corruption, Light."

"But there's light." Tibs motioned around him.

"No. There is only me."

Tibs sensed, and Lighting was right. There was no light essence anywhere here. So how was it so bright? Was what Lighting created another kind of light? The way cold came about differently depending on the element?

"Can something act like an element, but not be that element?"

"Everything is either us or from us. We make it, or it echoes from what we make." Tibs reached for a flash, knowing he was wasting the time, but at a loss for what else to do. "The kinship we share makes the rest."

Tibs stopped in the process of reaching for another one. What was he doing? All he'd do was make himself out of breath with all this moving around.

He groaned.

He'd done it again.

He was treating this place the same as the world he came from. Acted like he had a body, when all he was was essence.

"You do like remaining locked in the way you think," Lightning mused. "You are, then are not. And yet, you act as you will always be." He meant all of them, people, Tibs realized.

Tibs pushed himself away from himself. Attentive to any attempt by Lighting to move away.

He didn't.

"There is no away," Lighting said, the words moving within Tibs. Too fast to get a sense of the accompanying flash, but the further he spread, the more the voice remained within 'him'.