Page 72 of The Dryad Storm

And Mavrik’s.

Terror constricts her chest and she meets Mavrik’s equally horrified gaze. “Ancient One,” she rasps, “Vogel’s coming after our fasting spellsright now.”

“Then we need to wrest hold of the spell,” he snarls.“Right now.”

“How?” Gwynn challenges, trembling now as she forces herself to mentally flip through every remembered runic grimoire, spells flying through her mind.

“I’m working on a hunch...” Mavrik says, grabbing his midnight-black Noi rune–marked wand from the floor before taking her free hand and bringing hiswand’s tip to her palm. “The runes of our Issani twinning spell and the wand motions needed to craft the fasting spell... they’re based on a similar sequence of primordial linking glyphs. We could use a Noi weaving spell—”

“—to pull our twinning linkage straight through our fastings,” Gwynn murmurs, her mind rapidly assembling his plan as gray pulses alarmingly through her vision.

Mavrik nods. “The fasting spell can’t be broken... but we might be able toovertake it.”

“We’ll need to cast the magic at the same time,” Gwynn cautions. Mavrik nods once more as Gwynn grabs up her wand and they point their wands at each other’s Shadow-smoking fastlines just as the scene around them abruptly cuts out.

Gwynn pulls in a hard gasp, the two of them thrust into a vision of an aboveground, Shadowed world. Huge arches of stone tinted a steely hue surround them, Shadow mist smoking up from grayed sands, the images wavering and dreamlike at the edges.

The Agolith Desert above us, Gwynn realizes,but completely stripped of its ruddy coloration by Vogel’s Shadow.

Her pulse pounds out a panicked rhythm, and she turns to find Mavrik crouched beside her on the Shadow-smoking sand, a combative look in his eyes.

Vogel appears in the mist before them, swiftly closing in, his dark cloak flowing out behind him and a multi-eyed raven perched on his shoulder.

Gwynn recoils, fear striking through her. Vogel’s upper face is a grotesque mass of glowing gray eyes, his darkened teeth bizarrely elongated, the Shadow Wand gripped in his glimmering gray hand.

He’s here with us, she realizes, staring at the true nature of what Vogel has become, all of them drawn inside his Shadow Wand’s link to their fastlines.

“Cast the spell!” Mavrik cries as he grabs hold of her free hand and presses his wand’s tip to her fastlines. Battling back her fear, Gwynn brings her wand’s tip to Mavrik’s fastlines at the same moment Vogel levels his Shadow Wand and blasts a bolt of wind at them.

Before either of them can get a spell out, the wind slams into Gwynn and the breath is crushed from her lungs as both she and Mavrik are hurled apart and through the air, their wands blown from their hands.

Gwynn slams down onto the vision’s smoking sand, crying out as her shoulder and hip painfully absorb the blow. Nightmare-swift, Vogel lunges forward andgrabs hold of her arm with a clawed hand, gnashing his too-long teeth close to her face. “You little staen’enwhore,” he snarls, every glowing eye boring into her as he bares sharp, gray teeth. “I willbitemy Shadow into you!”

Out of the corner of her eye, Gwynn catches Mavrik leaping toward his wand, and the primal will to live sparks. Yanking herself from Vogel’s grip, she lunges for her own wand, just as Vogel springs for it, bizarrely fast, his bootheel slamming down on the golden weapon as he angles the Shadow Wand toward Mavrik and bolts more wind at him, blasting his wand from his grip again and punching Mavrik back to the ground.

Smiling, Vogel thrusts his Wand skyward.

A giant tree of Shadow blasts up from the ground behind him, and Gwynn’s eyes widen with fear. It’s taller than the tallest desert arch, its smoking canopy rising higher than the clouds and rapidly branching out to cover the whole desert scene. A grotesquerie of Shadow roots emerges in arcs beneath it, giving the gigantic tree a spiderlike appearance, a small root cage at the end of each appendage.

Thousands upon thousands of cages.

Most cages hold dazed-looking Mage soldiers, with ropey lines of Shadow extending from the root bars to their fastlines, with a few scattered cages enclosing shirtless Alfsigr soldiers, connected to them via their Zalyn’or imprints.

Prickles of fear shoot down Gwynn’s spine as she realizes she’s looking directly into Vogel’s growing network of Shadow power.

Desperate to fight back, Gwynn lunges for her wand under Vogel’s heel at the same time Mavrik races toward his wand. Two of the Shadow tree’s roots whip up and slam root cages down around each of them and Gwynn cries out and falls, both she and Mavrik now pinned, backs to sand, several paces apart.

“You cannot defeat the Ancient One’s Holy Will,” Vogel intones, his grotesque, multi-eyed appearance giving way to that of a normal-looking Mage as Gwynn senses his anger abating, something akin to twisted compassion gleaming in his green eyes. “My control over you both will be your salvation.”

Gwynn meets Mavrik’s gaze through the root bars, a blazingly poignant look in it, as if he’s desperately trying to convey something. His covert intention flashes through their twinning spell as he curls their internal light magery into a golden shape—an Issani power-blast rune.

An obscure memory lights in Gwynn’s mind, a footnote in the back of one of the armory volumes on Issani military-grade sorcery detailing how twinned sorcerers can manifest runes on their palms without styluses.

Gwynn draws in a harsh breath, a look of understanding passing between her and Mavrik. Drawing power from their twinned lines at the same time Mavrik does, Gwynn mentally draws the rune on the palm of her wand hand, the lines of magic sizzling over her skin.

With a quick nod to Mavrik, she thrusts her rune-marked palm toward Vogel at the same time he does. Their twinned power surges as, in unison, they slide their thumbs over the runes’ central triggers.

A pulse of golden energy detonates from their palms and collides with their cages. The bars light up gold then explode in earsplittingcracks before the power rushes forward to slam into Vogel, hurling him backward.

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