Page 23 of The Dryad Storm

Another booming punch slams against the first shield, wiping out its flame, but the second shield remains standing.

Launching back into motion, Mavrik leads Gwynn and the children toward the alley’s end, all of them skidding to a halt before a pile of broken-down crates.

After setting down a sobbing Ee’vee, Mavrik hurls aside the crates and levels his wand at the ground as Gwynn draws both girls close.

A shattering explosion sounds to their side, all of them flinching as the translucent shield Mavrik cast erupts into gray flame at the same moment that a wheel-size emerald Varg rune appears at their feet. The rune rapidly sizzles away to reveal a hole with a metal ladder leading into eerily greenlit depths.

The Sublands, Gwynn registers, heart pounding. The supposedly hellish lair of the vicious Smaragdalfar Elves. Are they about to trade one hell for another?

“Go!”Mavrik growls at Gwynn as their shield falls and the glamoured pyrr-demons, backed by countless Mage soldiers, launch themselves forward.

Clear out of options, Gwynn reaches in her tunic pocket and thrusts her last Varg rune stone into Mavrik’s grip before prodding a shivering Bloom’ilya down the ladder.

Mavrik presses the stone to his wand and conjures another shield, the demons’ and Mages’ magic punching hard against it as Gwynn grabs a hysterical Ee’vee and swiftly follows Bloom’ilya down the ladder, her legs shaking, the ball of her foot almost slipping off a metal rung.

Gwynn and the girls touch down inside a narrow tunnel around the ladder’s base, and she quickly scans her surroundings. Black rough-cut stone encircles them, lit sporadically with luminous Varg runes, a second tunnel’s entrance before them.

Scared for Mavrik, Gwynn turns just as he lands beside them with a heavythud, springs up, and points his wand toward the hole above them. An emerald rune shimmers to life over the circular entrance and sizzles into a barrier of crystalline green stone.

“We need tomove,” Mavrik urges as he scoops up Ee’vee and urges Gwynn and Bloom’ilya forward.

Taking hold of Bloom’ilya’s trembling hand, Gwynn sprints into the tunnel and down a sharp, rocky incline, Mavrik’s bootheels thudding behind her. He prods her down a series of ladders, then through two curving tunnels, muffled explosions booming to their rear, louder and louder...

They spill into a huge cavern, and Gwynn skids to a halt, her breath seizing in her chest. It’s like they’ve been shrunk down and set inside the center of a giant green geode. Huge, jutting crystals surround them, their glittering majesty overtaking Gwynnifer’s trapped light magery, large tree roots above them winding around the geode’s mammoth crystals along with a net of Varg runes. The crystals’ verdant color flashes into Gwynn’s vision and races through her lightlines, surprise sparking as her vision clears and she takes in the Smaragdalfar army standing before them. Lethal Varg swords made from interlocking emerald runes are gripped in every Smaragdalfar Elf’s hand, and three Noi portals pulse a short distance behind the army.

All the swords are raised and leveled in their direction.

Gwynn’s shock is a war hammer to her chest. Because there, in the center of the Smaragdalfar Elf army between two male Alfsigr Elf archers, stands the Icaral Elf demon from the Wanted posters—Wynter Eirllyn.

There’s a Watcher perched on the Icaral’s shoulder, and her dark wings are fanned out behind her, silver fire burning in her eyes.

The image of the huge Ironwood tree made of starlight bursts into Gwynnifer’s mind, and she gasps, the tree-vision’s glow fracturing into prismatic light as Gwynn’s whole world contracts toward the spiraling, green-glowing Wand gripped in Wynter Eirllyn’s hand.

Chapter Five

Mangrove Bond

Marina Song Spinner

Salish Ocean, Salishen Isles, Noilaan

Xishlon night

Marina steels herself, battling back the undertow of horror as she takes in Vogel’s incoming wall of Shadow sea. Her arms arc through the salty water in rapid, rhythmic strokes, her sealskin tied firmly around her shoulders, as she and Gareth swim toward the Vu Trin navy’s ships moving toward the dark mass. Gareth’s mangrove root is clenched in his teeth, both of them ready to join with the Vu Trin to do battle with the Shadow sea. Above them, the purple moon has morphed to gray, its loving light snuffed out.

A sense of the mangroves trying to draw her back to them tugs at Marina’s newly forming energy lines, the strange feeling like phantom tethers struggling to reel her in.

Thrown by the sensation, Marina resists the mangroves’ pull as her thoughts storm.

Vogel’s mass of corruption got here soquickly, the incoming tidal wave of gray chaos roaring straight toward Southern Noilaan’s translucent dome-shield. Marina’s thoughts careen to her people. The last time she was allowed in their territory, there was talk of all of them fleeing East to escape the Shadow sea’s killing path.

Panic grips hold.

Where are they? Were they overtaken by the Shadow sea?

She was shunned by her people when she professed her love for Gareth and refused to forsake him, but even so, nearly everyone she loves was potentially in the path of that Shadow sea.

“Our Selkie’kin,” Marina cries out to Gareth as they swim, her gills so tensewith fear she’s unable to get the words out clearly. But she can tell, by the stark look Gareth flashes toward her, that he understands.

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