Danie Ware - Ecko Rising

He growled at her pleasure, drank it in through his skin. Beneath her, around her, the rock was alive, burning with the heat in the chamber. She was caught between flesh and stone...

As she crested the wave – hips high, back arched, colours flashing through her vision – she was vaguely, oddly, aware of intense sensation in her feet. Maugrim came moments after she did, head back, eyes closed, teeth bared. Then his relieved weight fell forwards on top of her, strangely comforting, secure. For a moment, she rested under him, feeling the stone beneath her slowly cooling.

The thrum faded from her bones.

After a minute, he propped himself upright, looked down at her with an odd smile. He looked – young, almost confused.

She had no idea what to say, what to do – no idea what had just happened. The stone was only warm; it was hard under her shoulder blades.

And her feet...

...her feet felt strange, like she’d been sat on them too long and they’d gone to sleep. She tried to move them – half expecting the pin-ripple of returning feeling...

...and couldn’t.

Sudden alarm pushed the languor from her body. She pushed him back, tried to sit up. There was tearing across her shoulders, a rush of ripping skin and fabric, a sudden flash of pain.

Warm ooze down her spine.

Maugrim tried to roll sideways, but her knee was in his way. She could move her leg, but her blood flow felt cut off mid-calf, her feet were weird, distant – somehow not her own. Her shoulders hurt like she’d shredded her skin; torn bits of her top were stuck to her.

In increasing desperation, she craned to see past Maugrim’s body. She tried, really tried...

They still wouldn’t move.

“Maugrim...?” she said. “My feet...”

“Thea.” The word was almost gentle. Frowning, he sat back on his heels and stared.

Then he started to laugh.

* * *

“Vice!” Massively jubilant, Maugrim raced through the entranceway to the chamber he’d humorously named his “lock-up”. “ Vice! ”

The Kartian had gone – his latest failure was a broken heap, glittering under the rocklights. Once again, the melding of flesh and metal had yielded only death. Maugrim dismissed it and cast his eyes over the bike, the stuff he’d stashed here, waiting.

Now useless.

Aftershocks of pleasure danced sparks in his blood. How could he have missed something so obvious?

His old life had gone – the van a blackened carcass of steel. He’d been in the back – heard only the angry squeal of pressure brakes, shouting, the hoverdrone rebroadcasting orders.

Then gunfire. The spang-spang-spang of rounds chewing metal.

And the note changing as they penetrated the plating.

He was untouched by enhancement – he’d spent his career treating too many messed-up fashion-icon wannabes. In that split second before the tank went, he’d just had time to wish –

Mind and metal and flesh. He’d been trying to create, to re -create...!

Metal’s lifeless.

The intensity of his abandonment, the shuddering, osmotic feedback of pleasure... The alchemical fusion he’d been busting his balls to find wasn’t flesh and metal – it was flesh and stone. He wanted to bang his own head into the wall for being so bloody dumb. The time he’d wasted! He wasn’t sure what he’d done – not yet – but he did know the bloody teacher had managed to attune herself to the cycling of Elemental Powerflux, to the south, to fire. She’d managed what only existed in myth... she...

...Exultance. Vast might and passion. Overwhelming sensation – drowning in it. The sheer power of what lay beneath him...!

...had attuned herself to the Powerflux...?

No, that couldn’t be right.

Tightly controlling his thinking, he kicked at an old spray can. It was empty. It skittered across the floor scattering washers as it went.

He had to focus!

Stone. In the midst of her orgasm, her feet had turned to stone.

Maugrim had uncovered the long-forgotten lore – the Elementalists, the priests of the people, were no more, their skills forgotten and abandoned like everything else. A few of them still lurked, way out in the farmlands and the ribbon-towns, but they wielded little more than herb lore and trickery. The Powerflux, the flowing of the elements through the grass and across the world’s surface, once the quintessential lifeblood, revered and trusted, had long since passed into humorous folklore – like fairies.

But he, Maugrim, knew it was there. He knew that he could reach it, and he knew he could channel the sheer glory of what he found.

No, the stone had grown through her flesh.

This was the nexus, the Flux’s central point – the plug socket, if you like. Down here, beneath the Monument, real elemental energy was tangible: it hummed through the stone, he could taste it in the air. Here, an Elementalist could find and learn what this world hadn’t bothered to remember – how to take that strength and channel it, how to perform miracles.

If he were strong enough to be a living capacitor – to stand the charge that surged in his blood.

With sudden insight, he realised something fundamental.

Metal’s lifeless!

Maugrim was the world’s only Elementalist, as far as he was aware, the only true wielder of this forgotten and unseen might. He could attune himself to the great, electrical web of the Powerflux, the cyclic flow of the four compass-elements that controlled wave and weather and growth and season – the flow and balance of light and darkness, ice and fire. The energy he drew was a rush – heat and chill and lightning and thunderclouds. He’d always thought of the Powerflux like a matrix of taser wires, shocks constantly running from end to end...

But this world was metal-poor, ferrous metal almost non-existent.

As far as he could tell, the Powerflux existed in the very grass. Somehow, they were one and the same thing.

He picked up a washer, held it on the tip of one dirt-ingrained index finger. The rocklights gleamed from the surface.

The Powerflux’s energy was constant. It moved continuously between the four compass directions – the anchor points, the elements’ “souls”. In spite of the loss of lore, the knowledge was deep rooted – that everything from sunrise to weather to personal illness was caused by elemental cycling or imbalance.

And so he’d begun to study.

Flesh could harbour energy, like a capacitor – a properly trained Elementalist could attune himself to the Flux and he could, literally, charge himself up. The term “Elementalism” described the pure, raw energy – fire, darkness, light, cold... There were varying degrees of potence and skill that were largely encompassed by the word “focus”. The better your attunement, the more power you could absorb; the better your focus, the more discipline you had when throwing it about.

His eyes went to the rocklight, gleaming smugly in the corner.

Its illumination laughed at him. Like flesh, it was a capacitor – it absorbed and held sunlight, then slowly released it when in darkness.

He couldn’t believe he’d never realised something so simple.

Stone and flesh; flesh and stone. Both capacitor, both conductor. Metal’s lifeless! His fire – his strength and power! The attunement he had been taught, attunement that no other mortal human had access to – his attunement had called the elemental current from the site, through stone and through skin – that bloody teacher had conducted like a gold bar. Somehow, he’d called to the very core of the Powerflux.

And it had answered him.

Amethea had been his fuse – his dead man switch. She’d absorbed and taken the damage of the supercharge he’d summoned.