Page 26 of The Dryad Storm

Heart in her throat, Marina watches as Gareth lifts his mangrove root, his body now covered in crackling lightning. An explosion of lightning blasts from Gareth’s root at the same time that the whales shoot great bolts of it from their blowholes, thebolts of power forking toward Vogel’s Shadow demons.

The demons explode in bursts of starlight white, and Marina’s heart thunders as Gareth and his pod dive underwater. They soon resurface past the Vu Trin naval ships and blast out a huge wall of crackling lightning toward Vogel’s Shadow sea.

The lightning wall collides with the Shadow sea’s leading edge in a seismicCRACK.

The Shadow sea skids backward as a sheet of storm clouds shot through with lightning rises before it, rapidly forming a dome that encases a huge expanse of Ocean and the entirety of Southern Noilaan.

Walling out the Shadow sea.

Gareth and the entire pod of whales dive underwater, disappearing beneath the waves. Marina waits, pulse pounding, knowing she’s witnessing a myth come to life. That the foretold fight against the Great Unbalancing ishere.

Now.

Marina absently grips the slim mangrove root under the water beside her, and it breaks off in her hand. Her eyes snap toward it as she’s flooded by a sense of the mangroves flowing their collective power into her via the root, which feels soalive... as if, through her lines, it maintains its living connection to the trees. As if she’s become an extension of the grove itself.

Show me what to do, she implores the mangroves, opening herself up to them like she opens herself up to her beloved Ocean’s tides.

Her octopuses, some jellyfish, and a whole riot of other bioluminescent animals are suddenly swimming around her in urgent swirls, prisms of color pulsing over their surfaces.

Astonishment streaks through Marina as all her color-shifting octopuses and other luminous creatures morph to a glowing mangrove purple.

Marina can feel the mangroves’ underwater roots drawing energy from the burst of color. They take on a violet glow, newly luminous with magic, the sea surrounding them illuminated by the bright purple light.

Power crackles through Marina’s lines toward the living root in her hand, the mangroves’ elemental energy coursing through it.

I can draw on my kindreds’ light power, Marina realizes in a shocked rush. Following the mangroves’ pull on her lines, she thrusts her root toward the sky.

Beams of purple light burst from it, raying up and over the grove’s canopy toform a translucent purple dome, like the inside of a jellyfish’s mantle, that soon encases the entire mangrove forest.

Euphoria rising, Marina glances at her bioluminescent allies—Ocean life and land life united against the Shadow.

I’m a bridge, Marina realizes in a world-upending wave.Linking the light power of the Ocean to Land power. Just like Gareth is a bridge from Forest to Water.

A conch shell horn sounds, powerfully loud, and Marina’s gaze jerks toward it, the sound coming from the surviving Vu Trin naval ships.

Before she can react to the distant figures leaping from the water to scale their way onto the ships, tethers of silvery power fly toward her from the direction of the vessels and slap around her wrists, ankles, and waist.

Marina snarls in protest as her living mangrove root falls from her hand and she’s yanked into the Ocean, then sped away from her octopuses toward the ship, streaming past the two ships that were reduced to scattered, flaming debris. Her invisible bindings tighten, and a breath is forced from her gills as she’s yanked into the air, flown through the sky in an arc then thrown down onto a surviving ship’s black-lacquered deck.

She doesn’t quite believe the sight she’s met with.

Selkie soldiers in blue-shell armor surround her, deadly cone-snail spears raised and fury in their eyes as they circle Marina’s bound form.

Chapter Six

Verdyllion

Gwynnifer Croft Sykes

Western Sublands

Ten days after Xishlon

Gwynn’s stunned gaze rivets onto the Icaral Elf staring at her. Wynter Eirrlyn’s hair is like newly fallen snow, her sleek black wings fanned out, her eyes alight with silver fire, a translucent Watcher perched on her shoulder.

A Smaragdalfar army surrounds the Icaral, about a hundred strong, but Gwynn’s shock is so great, the martial threat and the green-geode Subland world surrounding them seem to blur into pure, verdant light.

Gwynn focuses on the glowing Wand of Myth in Wynter’s pale hand—the Wand the glamoured pyrr-demons so desperately want. A familiar image flashes into the back of Gwynn’s mind—the Wand of Myth superimposed over a Great Ironwood Tree made of multihued starlight.

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