Page 178 of The Shadow Wand

“What are you reading in her?” Chi Nam asks Lukas.

Lukas sets his piercing gaze back on the sorceress. “They’ve tied her lines in a way that orients them toward her center.”

“Which meanswhat?” Valasca demands.

“If Elloren tries to work a spell using an affinity other than fire, her magic will double back and kill her.”

The terrible fact crystallizes in a light-headed rush. “Lukas,” I bite out, “how am I going to learn to control my power?”

“You can’t,” comes his stone-hard reply. “Not for the moment.”

Anger lights like blinding fire, the power inside me rearing.

Incensed and covered in soot, I bolt up and stalk over the red sands to the tree I felt the strongest pull radiating from—the large Baobab that stands before the Manzanita grove.

Teeth gritted in fury, I throw my wand hand’s palm out against the tree’s black ballooning trunk and hurl a wave of invisible affinity power out from my balled-up lines and straight into the massive tree.

The tree’s aura shudders all through its huge form down through its roots.

A fury roars into existence inside the tree to match my own, the Baobab tree’s rage soon mirrored by all the desert trees that surround us as I’m gripped by an acute awareness of how deep their taproots go down, and how all the trees’ roots tangle around each other.

Down...

Down...

And down...

Leagues and leagues of connected roots leading over the entire expanse of the desert and toward the denser forests of all the Realms.

Black Witch.

Black Witch.

Black Witch.

The words ring out clear in the back of my head. Echoing over and over and over from all of the trees with relentless accusation.

My anger heats to blistering rage.

“Do you want Vogel to win?” I cry at the tree, at all the trees, as I press my wand hand against the Baobab’s trunk and desperately struggle against their collective hold on my lines. “Is that what you want for the world?”

Suddenly, the image of rough trunk before me blinks out of sight to be replaced by an all-encompassing vision of trees screaming all around me.

Black fire raging through a forest.

Red smoking skies.

Leagues and leagues of forests being burned down.

And striding through the forest’s ashes is a cloaked and hooded Gardnerian priest, a wand made from compressed, roiling Shadow in his hand. His pale green eyes searching and searching, a steaming Shadow trailing in his wake.

Another figure moves in behind him, rapidly becoming visible through the haze of swirling darkness. A young woman dressed in Gardnerian blacks, a spiraling wand in her fist. Horns made of Shadow spiraling from her head.

Her eyes a solid mass of roiling gray.

It’s me.

Horror rises like bile in my throat as the corrupted image of myself vanishes.

---