Page 22 of The Shadow Wand

Pools of inky water with no reflection. Shadowy fire that burrows down, not up. A wall of otherworldly fog creeping in, washing away all color.

A void. Dark and impenetrable, beginning its spread through the natural elements.

A shadow.

Wynter takes a deep, quavering breath and opens her empathic mind to her wingeds, willingly falling off a cliff’s edge into an abyss as she surrenders herself to the birds’ collective vision.

She’s immediately swept into another world, crouched low on an ashen ground, her gaze furtively darting all around a nightmare landscape.

Dead trees surround her, their twisted, charred branches reaching toward a bloodred sky. And there’s a wall of shadow slowly and silently closing in on the dead forest.

In her vision, Wynter rises on shaking legs and walks just past the trees into a small clearing to meet with dense, gray mist, as she pulls her wings protectively tight around herself, waiting to see what the birds are so terrified of.

A hazy figure emerges from the roiling wall of shadow—the outline of a young Gardnerian woman.

There’s a steel-gray wand clenched in her hand, shadow smoke trailing from both the woman and the wand.

The woman draws closer, and a stunned recognition lights in Wynter as the birds’ primal screams of warning blare through her along with a remembrance of power sensed so long ago. An astounding level of power, read in just one fleeting touch of Elloren Gardner’s arm. Just as Wynter was able to read Yvan Guriel’s hidden Icaral wings so many months ago in one touch of his hand.

“No,”Wynter rasps to the birds, shaking her head against their nightmare image, her threadbare wings drawing in more tightly. “It can’t be Elloren.”

Wynter can sense the multitude of avian bodies and thoughts pressing themselves insistently toward her, keeping her locked in the scene as certainty rips through Wynter and tears fill her eyes.

“The Shadow is coming for you,” Wynter whispers to the terrible Elloren-image before her, grief-stricken for her friend as she reads the birds, the forest. “It’s going to come for you with all its might.”

Because it knows. This Shadow thing knows. And so does its enemy, the forest.

The Prophecy is here and there’s no escaping it.

The Icaral has risen...and the Black Witch is back.

Part One

MAGE COUNCIL

RULING

#366

All Icarals in the Western and Eastern Realms of Erthia

are to be hunted down and executed.

Assisting in the concealment or escape of Icarals is

hereby declared as one of the worst possible crimes

against the Holy Magedom of Gardneria.

It shall be punished without mercy.

VU TRIN MILITARY

INTERNAL MANDATE

Sent to Runemaster Chi Nam

Issued by Commander Vang Troi

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