Page 272 of The Dryad Storm

A small ember of purple-hued hope now lit deep in his chest, Wrenfir stands, his kitten in his pocket, his other two cats trailing behind him, and makes his way back to the complicated, awful, beautiful purple chaos of Voloi.

Chapter Six

Xishlon Hope

Elloren Guryev

Noilaan

Xishlon night

The purple moon above shines its light down on me as I stare past the Eastern Realm’s translucent dome into its luminous depths. My heart is so full of love that it feels like an ache, my sleeping baby, Tessla, wrapped in my arms, my child named for my late mother. The two of us are poised by the railing that lines the edge of Voloi’s newly restored Voling Gardens, the city’s docks and Tierney and Or’myr’s beloved Vo River spread out before us, suffused with every shade of violet.

The Great Tree, IV, sheltering it all.

Tessla shifts in her slumber, her velvety soft wings wrapped around her, and I can’t suppress my besotted smile. I stroke her midnight-black hair, admiring the small horn nubs nestled amidst her tousled curls, her hue my same shimmering, Dryad green. She stirs and opens her eyes then breaks into an adoring smile, and my heart swells as it always does. Because her coloring might reflect mine, but her features are all Yvan, the vivid Lasair green of her eyes ringed with purple fire. I breathe deeply, filled with a sense of the rootlines strengthening inside her, including her powerful line of prismatic light.

Amidst a potent core of Icaral fire.

Two young girls beside us giggle, drawing my attention to the golden-haired Issani girl as she breaks her purple moon cookie and hands half to her Dryad Fae friend before the two of them happily stride off, hand in hand, as they munch on the traditional sweets meant for sharing with those you love.

Emotion cinches my throat. It feels like an eternity ago that I was a naive girl breaking wings off Icaral cookies and believing everything that my culture fed me,these moon cookies such avastimprovement.

Hugging Tessla close, I look at the Xishlon moon once more and send up a small prayer of thanks that my naivete was smashed to pieces, following that with a prayer of gratitude for everyone who challenged me along the way, my heart filling with a fiery love for Yvan, Lukas, and so many others.

Tears pooling in my eyes, I feel Tessla snuggling back into sleep, and I kiss her warm head. The smell of loamy, upturned soil is rich in the surrounding air as a vastly diverse crowd of people continue with the tree plantings that have been happening all day, the surviving Xishlon Wisterias and the new saplings raining down glowing lavender tresses of flowers.

For months now, Dryad’khin have planted trees and other plants in every spare space throughout the cities and villages of Noilaan, their soil and weather-stabilizing effect incrementally weaving a slice of Erthia’s Natural Matrix back together.

It’s a start.

A start in rebuilding the fragile Natural Balance, enough to aid the Deathkin in holding off the Reckoning.

But grief tightens my gut when I consider what’s been lost, not even the Xishlon moon above able to blot it out. The majority of the continent has been stripped of Forest and riddled with Shadow-polluted waters and poisoned air, demonic creatures roaming the destroyed land.

I glance West, toward the Vo Mountain Range that was blown up to half its former height last Xishlon, memories of Lukas constricting my heart—his sacrifice making every good thing now surrounding Tessla and me possible.

Even the Vo Mountain Range Lukas had to explode is making a comeback, Or’myr, Sparrow, and a host of other geomancers working with Dryad Fae and Gwynn and Mavrik to rebuild and rewild the mountaintop. An obsidian statue Wynter crafted of a piece of music Lukas wrote for me marks the mountain range’s base in honor of what he did for us all. I’ve journeyed there, to the mountain’s newly Snow Oak–forested side, a Noi violin in hand, to play the stone-carved notes of the song we played together so long ago, swept up in a sense of Lukas smiling down on me as I caught a brief flash of Watchers in the trees, a bittersweet memory of the Snow Oak pendant he once gave me suffusing my mind.

Resurgent tears burn in my eyes, my chest crushed in a love- and grief-constricted vise. I press my palm to the bark of the Wisteria beside me and am engulfed in a swirl of the tree’s affection and a wispy, dreamlike sense of Lukas’s love embracingme, as I so often am when I share a quiet moment with the Forest. His Dryad energy infuseseverything, along with that of my Errilor kindreds.

“Thank you, Lukas,” I whisper through quivering lips, a tear streaking my cheek.And thank you, my Deathkin. For giving us a chance.

I peer up at IV’s distant canopy, Noilaan’s protective dome just beyond. Sliding my gaze west, I’m acutely aware of the Shadow pollution ceaselessly pressing against the western side of our shielding, threatening my daughter’s future.

Threatening every child’s future.

Valasca, Ni Vin, and Alder have ventured to the West with a small pioneering army and Alder’s flock of giant eagles, all of them intent on fighting their way through the Shadow filth and its multi-eyed creatures to regenerate what used to be Amazakaraan’s Caledonian Mountain Range—Alder’s first kindred Forest.

To wrest it back from the Shadow and reclaim Amazakaraan for the Natural World.

“Iwillsee you again, Black Witch,” Valasca insisted after we bade each other a tearful farewell and I promised to care for her goat kindreds while Andras took in Ni Vin’s midnight-hued mare.

I send up another prayer for their safety as I gently rock Tessla, hoping against hope that we’ll all see each other again someday.

Someone steps up beside me, and I glance over and see Jules Kristian leaning on the railing and studying the Xishlon moon, his silver kestrel perched on his shoulder. It’s clear he’s pausing in the planting of trees, a soil-encrusted shovel in his hand. Noilaan’s surviving Vo mystics have declared the rewilding of land a new sacred Xishlon tradition, like so many other traditions being created or rewritten to support the Natural World, along with love and connection and Life. It’s a welcome change.

But why did it have to come so late?

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