160 - Speck

Speck waited for the dead of the night to stir. Alexandra was snoring. Strange noise.

The room was pitch-dark, and Speck liked that, so the elemental slipped out of her body and slithered toward the window.

No moon. Good.

Inside Alexandra was dark. A different darkness than the one Speck had experienced all its life underground. But the darkness of the night was also different, and perhaps the best.

There was something about darkness covering places that belonged to light. Something profound. Something Speck couldn’t quite place in its understanding of the conceptual truth of darkness.

But Speck wanted to try.

Speck crawled on the wall around the window, looking for a gap. When Speck found it, it pushed its source through it, and Speck was outside.

Cold wind blew from the mountains. The night was cold. To Speck, this was just a sensation among many others. It wasn’t uncomfortable like light. In fact, it was the opposite. Cold was comfortable. Darkness was cold.

Speck gave itself a mental nod. Another step toward the truth.

On the roof of the inn, Speck took in the darkness. It was deep, but fragile. Fighting against remnants of solar energy and artificial lights flickering in some windows.

But it was strong.

In a way, it was stronger than the darkness of the underground. There, darkness was uncontested. Nothing was there to fight it. It made it weak.

It made Speck weak. Weaker than Speck should have been.

Speck sensed the snoring woman in the room below the roof. It had lost to her.

Yes. Lost.

She may consider it a draw. Speck didn’t.

Speck was Silver. She was Bronze. A draw was her victory.

So Speck had agreed to follow her. Speck wanted to see why she could jump not one, but two ranks.

Speck wasn’t disappointed.

There were no darkness elemental sources to consume up here. Its brethren rarely left the safety of the caves.

Fools.

Speck had made more headway toward Gold in the past few days than in the eternity of its life. New types of darkness suffused through its source, fed it, expanded it in a way consuming its foes never did.

New concepts flowed through Speck like water quenched thirst.

Speck shifted on the roof, hiding between cracks. It had to be careful. Humans could be friends, but most weren’t, and there were a lot of them here.

Many humans. Few rocks, cleared out to avoid issues with the stone elementals.

This town lacked appreciation for the finer things in life.

Speck moved off the roof and onto the hill.

It was smooth. No cut stone, no steps, just packed earth worn by the weather. The inn sat built into its base, and above that the hill rose all the way to a rounded top. Speck went up.

Halfway up the hill, a hollow opened in the slope with a door leading inside the hill. A man was kneeling over a chest, pressing his ear to the wood, one hand flat against the lid. He wore no coat despite the cold. Fog came out of his mouth.

Interesting.

Speck settled into a crack and watched, drawn by a hint of darkness, though it didn’t know what it was.

Stolen story; please report.

The man spoke to the chest. Low. Too low for Speck to recognize the words. He straightened, looked back down toward the town, and left the chest where it sat, taking nothing with him as he entered the hill through the door.

Speck did not follow him. The elemental was confused.

When the man had left, Speck moved closer to the chest. It found the lock and sneaked inside through the keyhole.

Inside was dark. That was good. But the chest was empty.

Strange.

Speck moved on.

Further up, another opening in the hillside revealed two women who argued without raising their voices.

One held a knife loosely, blade down. The other counted coins onto a flat stone between them, slow. One, two, three.

At fifteen, the knife went back into the first woman’s sleeve.

Speck looked at both women and found darkness. A little. Not too much. Barely anything for a being such as a darkness elemental. The one who wielded the knife was afraid. The one who counted the coins was lying.

Speck tasted both, and found the lie had more texture to it.

Fear was too evident. Too flashy. But what was lying if not dissimulation? Obscuring the truth was no less important than hiding its source.

So Speck followed the liar inside the hill. It was dark. But the corridors of the complex were littered with artificial light.

Uncomfortable? Yes, but Speck looked past the pain and into the tamed darkness of Izrum. A warning. A smaller battle in the endless war between dark and light. Light had the upper hand here, and that was fine.

The liar walked deep into the hill until she found a stronger liar. The stronger liar was a man. He lied to her. She knew it was a lie, but she didn’t fight back.

Speck followed the man, then a boy, then a rat, all carrying different strands of darkness. The elemental did that all night, jumping from one subject to another, watching the lives of those who didn’t sleep.

Sunrise was soon. Speck had to return. It was tracing its way back to the surface when it felt it.

Darkness unlike anything it had felt before.

Speck turned toward it.

The pull came from a shopfront near the base of the hill, shutters closed. No light showed through the cracks. Speck went to the door, found the gap beneath it, and poured itself through.

Shelves, a counter, a scale with brass weights lined up smallest to largest.

Following the trail of darkness, it crossed the counter and found the door to the back.

The back was a tunnel cut straight into the hill. Storage rooms opened off it on both sides, and Speck paused at each one to look.

Speck had seen its kind rendered down before. Not in jars, but it made little difference. It felt nothing about that. It passed door after door, each leading to a storage room dedicated to a specific type of elemental source.

The rooms with the most stock were the ones dedicated to lower sources. Slime, wood, stone, sand, water, common elements. Speck wondered why humans cared to gather them.

When Speck reached the darkness source room, it stopped. It was tempting, so Speck was tempted. It could eat it all, have a feast, grow. But the overwhelming sensation of darkness wasn’t coming from this place, but from behind a door at the very end of the tunnel.

Speck hesitated, but decided to follow its instinct. It went under the door.

The room beyond was small, cut round like the inside of an egg. There was a table, a chair, a stone basin sunk into the floor, full to the rim. A man relaxed in the water, back to the archway, eyes closed, head bowed.

Speck had seen some humans perform this strange ritual. Nara, Kam, Willow, and plenty of people in Balrum.

Not Alexandra, for some reason.

Speck hid in a crack and watched.

Did the man think himself a water elemental? That seeping in water would increase his powers? Bring him closer to an elemental truth.

It made little sense to the elemental.

The darkness was coming from the man. It was different from all the darkness it had felt before. Like the liars’, it came from the heart. But where even the worst person Speck had observed today had but a few dark stains on an otherwise neutral canvas, this man’s darkness was so deep that Speck almost lost itself in it.

It was like the darkness was asking for worship, trying to convince anyone that would listen that it was the truth, and that not listening would be akin to blasphemy.

The elemental forced its attention away. The conceptual truth behind that darkness felt dangerous. It wasn’t something Speck could grapple with yet.

As it shifted its focus to the rest of the room, Speck found something better.

A rock.

Not just any rock. The smoothest, most spherical rock Speck had ever seen sat on a small pedestal on the table. As if charmed by the sight, Speck materialized a shadow limb and stretched toward it. It brushed the rock. Soft. Smooth.

The most beautiful rock it had ever seen.

The mana inside the rock was strange, almost unnatural. Speck wondered why. Perhaps Alexandra would know. That, and why the man was sitting in water.

Speck snatched it into its darkness dimension, adding it to its collection as its most prized element.

The man shifted inside the basin. Speck almost flinched. It couldn’t afford to lose that rock.

Speck slithered back under the door, ready to make its escape. But it was stopped by the sight of the storage room filled with darkness elemental sources.

Surely, it should be fine for Speck to taste-test them.