Page 231 of The Dryad Storm

“How are you manifesting so much power?” Yvan asks once we break the kiss, that spark of prismatic fire within me burning through our Wyvernbond with the force of a star, our power merging with the Zhilaan-bonded new life taking root inside me.

Tears sheen my eyes as I hold Yvan’s gaze, love for him expanding my heart to the point where the surge of joy is almost too painful to endure as the rest of our horde draws in around us. “I’m pregnant,” I tell him, my hand sliding over my abdomen, “with our baby, who happens to be an Icaralandan incredibly powerful Light Mage.”

Yvan’s eyes widen, and I watch everything falling into place in his astonished gaze. A blaze of echoing joy shudders through his power, our multihued flame now whipping around not only each other but the new life growing inside me—new life so intimately linked to the Zhilaan Forest, it was able to anchor Yvan’s and my power with enough strength to hold fast against the Shadow.

Concern cuts through our joy as I remember our need to unite the Shadow Wand to the Verdyllion so we can free everyone imprisoned by Shadow power.

My gaze darts toward the Shadow Wand, my concern surging into wildfire alarm as I catch its fog-obscured form sinking into the ground.

“The Wand!” I cry just as Ariel and Raz’zor pounce on the area in a blur only tofind the Wand disappeared into the poisoned earth.

Ariel and Raz’zor scrabble at the soil with their claws as I’m filled with the awful sense of the Wandmoving.

“It’s going toward the storm band!” I cry as I leap toward it, but my words come too late.

A crack of Erthia-cleaving thunder punches through my ears, just before a demon I’ve seen only in mythological texts rapidly emerges from the ground—a demon my allies warned us about.

Dark lightning flashes around the V’yexwraith’s pale gray, stretched-out form as it unfurls up from the Shadowed ground, rising higher and higher. Spiky horns emerge from its flat head and bubbling eyes form all over its upper face, gray mist cycloning around where its legs should be.

In its long-fingered hand, it holds the Shadow Wand, their poisonous energy one and the same.

With a screeching cry the V’yexwraith thrusts the Wand upward and absorbs Vogel’s entire storm band, the demon growing tall as the clouds as it does so.

Vogel’s huge army revealed, massed in the far distance.

I realize, in a devastating jolt, that Vogel and the Magedom have been pawns of a larger battle all along, and this evil we’re still facing has taken on a life of its own.

TheShadow Wandhas gained enough power to take on a life of its own.

The V’yexwraith opens its sharp-toothed maw, lets out a bone-jarring, continent-shakingATCH ATCH ATCH, and surges toward us, along with its Shadow-possessed army, every Mage’s skin morphed to gray.

Chapter Five

Void Moons

Elloren Guryev

Shadow wasteland

I level my branch at the advancing V’yexwraith demon and incoming Shadow army as Yvan raises his palms, both of us drawing on the power of the Zhilaan Forest via the spark of our child in my womb.

By land and air, the distant army surges toward us in a huge gray tide, their thunderous chorus of snarls and shrieks building as they near, while our horde readies the fire Yvan has blazed out to them.

The V’yexwraith grows even taller than the clouds, its slender legs taking form. It booms forward, each step rattling the earth, then sets its many-eyed gaze on me with a terrible focus, my heart striking into a wilder rhythm. New eyes are bubbling to life on the demon’s upper face, the Shadow Wand gripped in its long-fingered hand, the Wand’s Void tree pulsing into my mind with disastrously burgeoning power.

Arm draped protectively over my womb, I thrust my branch forward at the same time that Yvan deploys power from his glowing palms.

Bolts of multihued flame blast from both Yvan’s palms and my branch at the same moment that Naga and my horde mates blaze chromatic fire at the V’yexwraith, while the demon thrusts the Shadow Wand straight up into the air.

A pulse of translucent gray power bursts from the Wand’s tip and snaps outward to form a translucent Shadow orb shield around the demon’s torso.

Our fiery attack collides with the V’yexwraith’s protective orb and splits into unfocused chaos, swirling around the demon’s shielding in a chromatic, spark-spitting tempest before our magic grays and the Shadow Wand begins to siphon it up.

The image of my kindred raven, Errilith, flashes through my mind. The world seems to pulse Dark as a spell whispers through my mind, through my very bones, the whispers soon joined by leafy-utterances of complementary spells sent out by the Zhilaan, the path forward crystallizing.

“Form another wall of Wyvernfire between the V’yexwraith and its forces!” I cry out to Yvan and our horde, galvanized.

“The demon will just consume it!” Ariel hisses as the V’yexwraith siphons up the last of our grayed fire into the Wand and the Shadow army roars closer.

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