Page 204 of The Shadow Wand

That evening, I take a walk outside the Vonor’s shielded ledge, needing to stretch my legs and clear my head. My mind is swimming with runic shapes and combinations, the Ash’rion sheathed at my side along with my Wand.

The crimson moon is high in the sky, ruby stars strewn all over the heavens. The stormwall that limns the horizon flashes with puffs of muted white light, its thunder a soft, disjointed rhythm.

For a moment, I’m filled with the melancholy desire to have my violin with me. To sound out a melody over this vast, otherworldly landscape.

I walk along the flat, curving ledge that seems to encircle the Vonor’s rocky mountain. The night air is cool against my skin as I take in the translucent dome-shield that Chi Nam has cast over her Vonor’sentire mountain exterior, including this ledge. Faint blue runes rotate slowly against the shield’s entire surface, the motion soothing.

Feeling momentarily safe here, I continue walking, curious about this strange, new place I’ve landed in. The world darkens as I move away from both the Vonor’s lantern-lit entrance and the adjacent portal’s bright blue glow.

I pause as I round a sharp curve.

Ruby moonlight spills over the scene before me, glinting purple off the edges of the Vonor’s shield runes. Countless gigantic rock formations arc over the desert, as if some god has drawn the cascading curves with an enormous brush, the sweeps of crimson paint turned to stone.

The horizon’s stormwall has begun flashing a gauzy amber light, and in the closer distance, a moonlit herd of some type of huge, lumbering beast is lazily moving away across the desert’s ruddy sands.

I crane my neck toward the gem-like splash of garnet stars, a feeling of unreality washing over me, and not just from being in the middle of this dreamlike desert landscape, clear out of the Western Realm.

A small cinder of possibility has lit inside me.

I have power. True power that I can access. Because I can amplify elemental runes with the aura of my affinity magic, even though the trees have bound my lines.

My gaze falls to the dark silhouettes of the treetops that rise past my elevated ledge.

Agolith Mesquite trees.

The grove’s branches writhe upward toward the starry sky, and I’ve an intrinsic sense of how the taproots of all these desert trees burrow down deep for water, tangle, then extend outward for leagues and leagues, bringing them into communion with the distant forests of all the lands.

An amorphous sense of unease begins to prick at my skin.

They’re watching me.

Closely.

Black Witch.

The whisper brushes me on the slight breeze coming from the desert, and it sends a chill down my spine. I can feel the trees’ sharpened focus hovering in the air.

Tension burrows under my skin.

It’s like they’re waiting for something.

Something that’s coming for me.

I take a reflexive step back as I peer into the trees’ dark hollows and my eyes catch on a hulking black shape hidden there.

My heart flies into my throat, terror piercing me as I take another reflexive step away.

Perched on a branch and camouflaged by the dark of night is a horrific bat-like beast. Big as a panther, hunched and muscular and black as the darkest mahogany wood, its gleaming dark eyes slitted like a lizard’s. Leathery wings, no neck. Just huge jaws, silently grinding its teeth.

And there isn’t just one.

There’s a whole flock of them just past the shield, hidden inside the tree canopy.

All of their focus set on me.

I move to flee and back into a warm, hard person whose hands reach up to take hold of my arms. I whip my head around, my heartbeat slamming against my chest.

“Lukas...” I can barely get the words out as I point toward the canopy. “In the trees.”

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