Page 275 of The Dryad Storm

The scene cuts out, and a vision of a starlight bird flashes through Valen’s panicked vision as he hurtles, limbs flailing, through the silvery mist.

Valen lands with a thud and vomits onto brushy soil. His gaze whips around, the surrounding Forest bizarrely prismatic, some of the mostly gray-tinged leaves colored blue and purple along with the more familiar colors of fall. A cold rain batters his skinny frame and thunder rumbles, drawing his gaze skyward. Far overhead, he can make out a translucent dome marked with faintly visible prismatic runes.

So terrified he can barely pull a breath, Valen breaks into heaving sobs, all alone in the oddly colored forest.

“Mamma!” he chokes out.

An onyx-hued woman withhorns!andwings!anddragon eyes!bursts from the woods and runs toward him, a Lupine wolf-monster woman with wild amber eyes and flaxen hair racing beside her, a rush of terror shooting down his spine.

A Wyvern monster and Lupine monster! Just like his scariest toys!

Out to kill and eat Mage children!

Valen screams, fright turning him into a wild thing. He grabs hold of the closest branch, struggling to remember the words to the candle-lighting spell his mamma taught him to use if Evil Ones got hold of him—the same spell he learned for his wandtesting, when he blasted out a huge column of fire and blew a burning hole through the room’s wall. The priests’ eyes had widened, all the surrounding adults murmuring and exclaiming as the wand was wrested from his hand and they’d grouped around the wall’s smoking wreckage, eyeing him in a strange way that made Valen feel scared.

Calling him “the next Great Mage.”

Faced with the incoming Wyvern and Lupine monsters, Valen shrieks out the candle-lighting spell once more, screaming his vengeance at the monsters, along with his fear over not being able to find his mamma, his wand hand trembling.

A huge bolt of fire explodes from the branch and blasts toward the Evil Ones.

The Lupine monster throws up her forearm, and the firebolt glances off it, the flames quickly pulled toward the Wyvern monster and sucked into her outstretched palm.

Before Valen can blast out another column of Magefire, the Lupine monster reaches him in a blur, wrests the branch from his grip, and grabs him in her frightfully strong arms. Valen thrashes against her, snarling, his fire power searing through him, his ferocious magic desperate for release.

The Wyvern monster narrows her slit-pupiled eyes at him, her nostrils flaring. “Kill him, Diana,” she urges.

The scary wolf woman keeps an iron hold on Valen’s writhing, screaming form as she growls at the Wyvern monster, low in her throat. “No, Voor’nile. He’s achild.”

“Do you sense the level of power coming off thatchild?” the Wyvern monster growls back. “That’s no normal Mage child. That child is at least a Level Five, with the potential for Great Mage power. He should be destroyed before he can grow into it.”

Another growl cuts through the woods, low and scarily resonant.

Valen freezes as another Lupine monster, a tall male, strides out of the forest. Confusion rips through Valen. Because this Lupine monster is aMage, with the same green-hued skin and night-black hair as Valen’s own.

“Diana’s right,” the Lupine Mage man states, his stance powerful. “We’re placing him under the pack’s protection.”

The Wyvern monster spits out what sounds like a hissing curse as Valen devolves into wailing misery, screaming,“Mamma, Mamma, Mamma!”

And then he’s in motion, the forest around him a blur as he screams and screams and is carried through the trees by the Lupine monster woman, the scary Lupine Mage man keeping pace at her side.

Eventually, Valen’s earsplitting wails slow then stop, exhaustion overtaking him. A tremor kicks up as he finds himself able to manage only an exhausted, soul-destroyed whimper. The Wolf monsters reduce their tree-blurring pace, the Lupine woman gently shushing Valen as she rubs his back.

He goes limp in her arms. There’s something so warmly kind in her tone... something that seems, as her voice catches with what feels like kindred grief, like she understands on some heart-deep level his rageful, slashing grief and terror. And so, completely spent, Valen allows the Lupine monster to hug his limp form. Allowsher to talk and murmur softly to him. And later, after they reach a small dwelling in the purple woods, he allows her to tuck a blanket around him before enveloping him in her strong arms and gently murmuring him to sleep.

Valen spends the next night falling asleep beside the Wolf monster woman.

And the night after that.

But days are a different thing.

Valen screams and rages and tries to hit and bite any of the Evil Ones who come near. He finds wood in an attempt to hurt them with fire. As he screams for his family. Screams out his terror and pain and trauma.

“He’s no good,” passing monsters say. Elf monsters and Noi monsters and Fae monsters and others.

“That Crow child has too much power,” they say.

“You’re playing with fire, there, Diana.”

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