Page 106 of The Dryad Storm

Gray vines bolt from its tip to lash around my wrists. I yank against them to no avail as he stretches my arms out from my sides and magically tethers my wrists’ bindings to stone.

He falls to one knee before me, grips tight hold of my face and jerks my chin up. “What have youdone?” he hisses.

Quivering with rage, I bare my sharpened Dryad teeth at him.

Vogel recoils as he takes in my pointed ears and the branching purple pattern covering my grayed skin, his invisible fire aura spearing out steely, corrupted Wyvern flame at me. Baring his own teeth, he reaches up and takes cruel hold of one of my newly pointed ears, his grip so crushingly hard I have to bite back a yelp of pain. He releases my ear and lowers his hand, his pale green lips sneering as he grips my tunic’s collar and gives it a hard, downward yank.

I growl out my outrage as my tunic tears to reveal the faint image of a giant, purple pine tree emblazoned across my chest and abdomen. It catches me off guard, a trace of glimmering violet pulsing through it.

Yvan’s fire-loving Zhilaan Forest. The great Eastern Realm Forest of Nightwood Pines...

Vogel’s gaze slowly meets mine, his eyes filled with flat, chilling hatred. In an arcing blur, he draws his hand back then swipes it toward me.

His blow hits the side of my head with brutal force, a strangled cry ripping out of me. Pain shears through my head, my body thrust sideways, stretching the bindings around my right wrist as Yvan’s desperate rage to reach me fires through our bond.

“You Faebeast,” Vogel snarls, his upper lip quivering with a fury that’s so out of control, panic strikes through me. His head draws sharply back, his nostrils flaring. “You let the winged demonkiss you. I can sense his fire bond running through you.Again.”

Anger takes hold of me in a cresting wave, obliterating all fear as I lunge toward Vogel and bare my teeth, straining against my bonds. “I’ll bond to him in every way possible,Marcus.”

For a moment, our killing glares war against each other before Vogel’s silver aura of stolen Wyvernfire tightens into a molten ball, deep in his core. “I could have saved you, Elloren,” he rues, his eyes flicking over me with almost bereaved disappointment before his gaze hardens with a look of terrifying finality. “We could have saved and purified each other along with Erthia.”

Vogel rises to his feet, a merciless look on his face as he calmly backs away.

With a jolt of apprehension, I realize that Vogel has made a full mental shift, marking me as irredeemably evil, a lethal target rapidly solidifying on my point-eared form. Pulse spiking, I take advantage of my loosened binding to angle my side away from Vogel so I can grip hold of the branch sheathed at my side without detection, my mind desperately whirling—my rootlines are depleted, and I don’t know Dryad spells. I don’t knowanythingabout my Dryad abilities.

Please, I beg the Ancient One, the Forest, anyone or anything that will hear me.Help!

A single word flutters through me, like a breeze sent toward me from the East.

Dryad’kin.

That’s not a spell!I want to scream at the Dyoi Forest.It’s just a word in Dryadin!

An amorphous recognition lights, stilling the breath in my chest as I’m filled with the sudden sense of the entire Dyoi and Zhilaan Forests stilling, as well.

A word in Dryadin.

The words to the candle-lighting spell flow into my mind. Words in the Magedom’s Ancient Tongue, which, I realize in a flash, is just poorly pronounced Dryadin.

Light-headedness almost brings me to the ground as I realize what Alder andthen the Dyoi and Zhilaan Forests have been trying to tell me as Vogel lifts the Shadow Wand and begins murmuring spells, filling the evil tool with killing power.

I already have a route to Dryad spells and magic.

I just need to accept a direct Forest connection to access them.

Remembering how Alder and my Dryad’kin forged a new linkage to the Dyoi Forest, I thrust myself sideways, further stretching the binding around my right wrist, and manage to bring the living branch in contact with my naked chest, right over my heart.

The Dyoi Forest’s power instantly floods my rootlines, root linking to root. A tingle prickles over me, the deep-green Dryad hue to my skin reasserting itself while the Dyoi Forest’s purple energy races over my faint Zhilaan branching pattern, filling it with more robust coloration as purple leaf garb snaps into being on my body, my torn tunic and my pants falling away.

A spell sounds through my lines as I grip my branch tight.

“Abolish bindings and repel attack!”I cry out in Dryadin as both Vogel and I thrust our weapons forward, his vine bolt spearing toward me.

Energy explodes from my branch in rays of purple light, Vogel’s vine bolt exploding as my bindings dissolve into purple mist and wick away.

Vogel’s eyes widen, my own surprise swiftly overcome by a fierce rush of warrior energy through my faint link to the Zhilaan Forest. A vision of huge, black-trunked, violet-needled Zhilaan Pines rises in the back of my mind like an incoming army as both the Dyoi Forest’s and a trace of the Zhilaan’s power floods my rootlines, a Dryadin spell breezing through me.

“Shheer’ith’ruush’hhhiir!”I scream, seizing on my split-second advantage as I thrust my branch toward Vogel once more, suffused by the sense of every tree in the Dyoi and Zhilaan Forests bending their will toward mine.

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