Choosing What Matters (Pivot Lab Chronicles Book 2) by Michael Anderle

Author:Michael Anderle [Anderle, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LMBPN Publishing
Published: 2020-07-18T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Forty-Five

Dahti woke the next morning to a bucket of seawater that was colder than it had any right to be. She sat up, spluttered, and swung at Rashat, who stood several feet away.

Of course, he didn’t need to hold a bucket to pour seawater on someone.

She glared at him. “One of those twelve hells is filled with people like you.”

“Up.” He didn’t seem to particularly care that she hated him. “And don’t bother to change. You’ll merely get soaked again.”

“What a fantastic day,” she managed to say. She retrieved her staff and followed him into the predawn stillness. He had already begun to stride quickly toward the ocean. “It’s still dark.”

Now, he favored her with a smile over one shoulder. “You’re the one who said forty years was long enough.”

“Okay, maybe forty years and a few extra hours.”

“Will you complain the whole time we do this?”

Dahti shut up, but she sensed that Rashat didn’t exactly dislike the banter. He seemed oddly smaller today, for some reason. Not that he wasn’t still absurdly tall and broad-shouldered—especially for a man in his seventies or eighties—but he didn’t seem to carry as much with him.

The speed of the change was a little unsettling.

“Are you sure…” she said tentatively.

“Yes?”

“That everything is okay? Yesterday was a day of rather large revelations.”

“Maybe for you,” he said. “There was only one for me.”

“Oh?” They had arrived at the shore and she looked briefly at him. The view of the ocean was astoundingly black, completely unrelieved by moonlight or cities along the coast. In fact, she couldn’t tell where the coast was.

“I hated them for placing the burden of saving them on my shoulders alone,” Rashat told her simply and linked his hands behind his back. He wore new robes, she saw now, not the tattered old shirt and pants he’d worn the day before. “And I hated myself for failing. It galled me to know that every little child in the village learned of that failure. I told myself I deserved it, that a lifetime of pain might even the ledger before the gods called me home. But I still wondered why any true god would do what this one did, and I wondered why it was fair to say I was the only one who failed that day.”

She nodded.

“And so it was a revelation,” he said quietly, “to find out that another person thought the same. It was as if a weight had been lifted from me. The thoughts were not simply mine.”

“No,” she said. “They are not only yours. Many shamans have thought as you do. I think your kind have long been deceived by the dragons, and you will triumph against them together.”

“Perhaps we will.” He had withdrawn within himself again, but the mask he wore now was only of the teacher, not one to hide pain. “It depends whether you can master these techniques, doesn’t it? Come this way. Now sit.”

“In the water?” Dahti asked.

“Yes. That’s the point.” He waited and the

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