Page 270 of The Dryad Storm

Xishlon night

Wrenfir glares at the purple moon.

The moon that’s wrenching his heart from his chest as he strides through the Mage-refugee encampment on the northern edge of Voloi’s docks. A bag containing his apothecary supplies is slung over his shoulder, IV’s great canopy spread high above it all.

Day after day, a steady stream of sickly, half-starved Gardnerian refugees stumble out of Verdyllion portals, haunted looks in their eyes. All of them seeming thunderstruck to have made it to the East before they either collapsed from illness or were slain by Shadow creatures.

The Red Grippe has been as cruel to them as their own Shadowed Magedom, all medical care in Gardneria having broken down, along with the Natural World.

Two of Wrenfir’s rescued cats flank him, a gentle purple calico and a sleek silver shorthair. A sickly fluffy black kitten rides in his pocket, but his kindred bobcat hangs back in the Forest just north of here so as not to frighten the Mage children and the skittish adult Gardnerians who have yet to embrace the Forest.

Music kicks up not far ahead, its origin seeming to be one of the pockets of Forest that have been established throughout the city, trees planted in every available space to fight the Shadow and help stabilize the East’s devasted weather system.

Wrenfir scowls and glares at Voloi’s purple-laden tiers as purple fireworks flash over the city. Because he has no use for Xishlon love and romance. No use for the sliver of hope that arises with every new link to the Forest.

Because it’s too damned late.

The weather beyond Noilaan’s protective Great Tree and dome-shield is out of control, much of the continent a Shadowed wasteland.

Wrenfir blinks back the sting of emotion in his eyes, every muscle tensing against his firestorm of anger. Because Hazel is forever lost to him, all the Death Fae absorbed into Nature to hold off a Reckoning, their sacrifice having made this whole gods-damned purple idiocy possible.

Wrenfir experienced Nature’s terror firsthand as a child, almost lost to the cursed Red Grippe. His throat tightens at the memories of those wildly frightening nights when he briefly lost the ability to pull in even a single, rasping breath.

His turmoil blazing hotter, he glares at the city once more and snarls an epithet under his breath. They’re deluding themselves with this asinine revelry. Forgetting what the Death Fae did for them all. What Hazel and Viger, Sylla and Vesper, and all the Death Fae creatures staved off.

A nightmare as terrible as anything Vogel could have ever rained down.

And it’s highly likely that their sacrifice will have been for naught. Just like the terrible deaths of his sister Tessla, his brother-in-law Vale, and Edwin Gardner were for naught.

Because the Dryad’khin have sorely underestimated the power of fracture.

That will usher in the eventual triumph of the Shadow.

The sound of a child’s hacking cough snaps through Wrenfir’s tortured thoughts, yanking his attention back to the task at hand. Forcing aside his grief, he strides toward the tent the sound is coming from, a painfully thin Gardnerian woman standing in front of the tent’s entrance.

“Are... are you the medic?” she stammers as he approaches, clearly scared of his Death Fae spider tattoos, his pointed ears and deep-green hue. Her look of fright takes a turn toward confusion as her eyes slide to the midnight-hued kitten peeking out of his pocket.

Her gaze slides back to his with a look of wary concern, as if he’s planning on eating the kitten whole. A kitten he’s spent most of last night nursing and crooning to. A kitten now glued to his side after Wrenfir empathically read, with his new Dryad’kin abilities, images of the little feline’s terror and grief, memories of its mother and littermates being murdered by grayed Shadowfire, this small one consumed with a trauma that Wrenfir understands on a bone-deep level.

He’s all too acquainted with soul-shearing grief, having lost Tessla, Vale, and Edwin to the Magedom’s cruelty, as well as his beloved childhood pet, a cat named Patches.

He’s named the kitten in his pocket Deathling as tribute to the Death Fae, in an attempt to infuse the little animal with some of the strength and courage that managed to fight off a Reckoning.

Wrenfir draws a bottle of Norfure tincture from his sack and holds it out to the Mage woman. “This will cure your child,” he offers tersely as his eyes flick over her conservative garb, her unchanged fastmarks.

She’s likely stubbornly glued to Mage dogma, even after connecting with the Forest.

Anger rises in Wrenfir as he and the woman stare each other down and she makes no move to accept the medicine. He struggles to bite back the harsh words burning for release.

“Mamma,” a small, constricted voice chirps from behind the woman, drawing both his attention and the woman’s. A little boy slips into view from behind her skirts and looks worriedly up at Wrenfir before breaking into a spasming cough.

Wrenfir’s gut tightens as he notes that the child’s entire mouth is ringed with red sores, his eyes reddened to a flame hue by the cruel disease.

The end stages of the Grippe.

He can feel it in his own lungs once more, a muscle memory of those childhood nights gasping for breath, his sister, Tessla, and his grandfather too poor to afford expensive medicine, until Vale Gardner and Fain Quillen intervened...

“Here,” he says, adamantly holding out the Norfure tincture to the woman—medicine he spent the entire night fabricating from the flowers Elloren had sourced from the distant Zhilaan Forest, his eyes bleary with fatigue.

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