Page 211 of The Demon Tide

He’s picking up an invading force.

Lightning flashes across the ocean and the scene blinks out of sight to be replaced by scene after horrifying scene. The Wand in the hand of a Keltish king with glowing gray eyes astride a multi-eyed horse. An army of gray-eyed Keltish Shadow soldiers massing around the king as they advance on a city.

Death everywhere.

Screaming children and families. Slaughtered animals. Visions of the fall of the forests and the mutilation of the wilds as the Shadow’s demon tide rolls in like a toxic fog and collapses the living world. Destroys the farms. Poisons the water. Corrupts the air.

I’m accosted by images of famine as food runs out and every element turns to Shadow. Great floods of Void water. Great storms of Void wind, dark lightning pulsing through it. Void fire consuming everything in its path and tunneling down to cause great rifts in Erthia, only a few Kelts managing to escape in ships, bound for the Western Realm.

Finally, as the last of the ships depart, the great Nothing descends.

A charred landscape cools to gray. Blackened trees hold up smoking branches, as if in supplication, toward an ashen sky.

Horror bears down on my mind.

Because I know, deep within me, that this is not just a vision of what happened in some distant realm beyond the sea—it’s a foreshadowing of what iscoming for the Western and Eastern Realms.

The vision fades, and I’m in the quiet dark once again, caught up in overwhelming despair over what has happened...and what could so easily happen again. Only this time, there are no more Realms to flee to.

But then...an invitation touches down.

Unspoken, but I can feel it hanging in the air around me, coursing gently through the branches that cradle my body. A spiraling green form shimmers into view in the back of my mind where the vision of horror once was.

The Wand of Myth.

The Wand present in all the stories of all the Realms’ religions, suspended and shining as if lit from within. A darker, more vibrant green springs to life through its spiraling handle, and I watch as the deeply verdant hue circles up to the Wand’s tip.

Branches burst forth from the spirals, leaves breaking out and multicolored flowers blooming on them as a living, breathing tree takes over my field of vision and I realize that the Wand of Myth was merely dormant all this time.

Verdyllion.

The Forest Wand.

Its true name sings in my mind, in my rootlines.

The vision telescopes backward, the Wand morphing into the shape of III surrounded by countless people from every group on Erthia, each of them holding up a palm imprinted with III’s own image. And then I’m swooping up and up until I’m above III’s huge canopy, over the Ironwood forest, as my gaze sweeps out and I’m engulfed by a stinging rush of horror.

A wall of Shadow encircles the Forest, leagues of dead trees behind the Shadow tide’s advancing corruption, the Void trees’ charred branches twining poisonous smoke into a gray sky. I’m filled with the overpowering sense that the collective power of the people encircling III is the only thing that can keep this great Shadow at bay.

Crystalline clarity descends, bright and shining, as the invitation hovering in the air gains potency. I can feel its world-shifting power inside my very soul.

It’s an invitation to join with the power of life. With the fragile and whole and complex magic that runs through III and the Forest and every living thing. And it’s a call to welcome others into the fold. To link the Forest to more than just the Dryads.

To link the Forest to us all.

Birds made of starlight shudder to life, perching in the Wand-tree’s hollows. They turn, as one, toward me. Watching. Waiting. As Ironflowers open their blossoms all over III and my heart fills with an inexplicable joy.

And hope.

Slender as a thread. But it’s there, even as the threat of the Shadow presses in and the certainty gains ground that it holds no guarantee but one—

The story is not yet over.

The silent invitation shimmers in the air, like a hand held palm up, outstretched to me in gentle offering.

A lifeline.

A chance.

---