Page 93 of The Dryad Storm

I’m looking into the past, Sparrow realizes as her gaze lowers to three figures in the small stone plaza beneath the tree she’s perched in.

Two of the men are muscular Urisk warriors of the blue-hued Uurok class, lines of blue stones strapped across their chests, blue geo-styluses encrusted with cerulean and indigo gems grasped in their fists. Before them stands a slender bald man with the golden hue of the most-revered priestly class—the Urielle—his form limned in the light-aura that only the most powerful Urisk Strafeling geomancers possess.

The priest’s yellow eyes are dramatically lined in sweeping silver, a circlet of tawny diamonds set in gold gracing his brow. A runic stylus of crystalline-gold apatite is grasped in his gem-encrusted hand, chain-linked squares of gleaming gold draped horizontally across his lean chest.

All the men’s expressions are stern as they glare at the rose-hued woman on her knees before them.

The woman is bound by glowing cords of golden geopower, her pale pink eyes fierce, the rose-white hue of her skin and hair that of the Urisk’s lowest servant class, the Uuril. A stylus made of pink amethyst lies on the ground before her, just out of reach.

“What would you have us do with her, High Priest Vyoor?” one of the soldiers growls, his sapphire-blue eyes aimed hatefully at the woman.

Stunned, Sparrow realizes that the priest she’s looking at is the Geo’din religion’s most revered prophet—High Priest Geo’duuth Vyoor.

“Speak, witch,” the high priest commands as he narrows his merciless golden gaze on the woman. “This is your last chance to repent and beg Geo’din on High for mercy.”

The woman gives him an acid glare, then draws back and spits at him.

Growling out their fury, the Uurok soldiers raise their blades and lunge toward her, but the high priest holds up a glittering hand and the Uurok halt.

“The Uuril will rise!” the woman growls at the high priest. “As will the Urol! Andallthe women of Uriskan! Your days are numbered!”

With merciless calm, the high priest angles his golden stylus at the woman.

Yellow light blasts from the stylus’s tip. Sparrow flinches as the woman’s instantly bound form is knocked to the ground, a golden gag forming over her mouth. She cries out her muffled rage, straining desperately against her bindings.

Ignoring the woman’s cries, one of the soldiers turns to the high priest. “A number of Uuril and Urol women have gotten hold of styluses, Your Eminence,” he cautions. “They’ve taken over the Geo’glyph Shrine to protest what they blasphemously call ‘the abuse of our lower classes and women.’?”

In a flash, Sparrow realizes what she’s witnessing.

The “Rebellion of the Demonic Women.” When the High Priest Vyoor crushed the “Evil Geo’witchlings” and ushered in the “Gleaming Holy Times.”

The High Priest Vyoor brings his hand to the linkage of golden squares draped across his chest and raises his geo-stylus as he begins to murmur spell after spell, his golden Strafeling-aura turning sun bright. Sparrow shudders against the sizzling rise of geopower in the air as she draws back into the shelter of the tree.

“I bind your geopower,” Vyoor intones as his golden aura intensifies, everything tinting to gold, the scene suddenly stripped of every other color. “In the name of Geo’din on High, I bind the power ofallcurrent and potential Geo’witchlings of Uriskan.”

A great flash of gold detonates, encompassing the entire city and the leagues around it. The golden blast soon fades, other colors streaming back into the world, the woman’s metallic bindings vanishing.

In a blur, the woman lunges for her stylus and levels it at the high priest, furiously reciting a spell,growlingit out, as the soldiers beside Vyoor combatively raise styluses of their own, only to be halted, once more, by the high priest’s upraised hand.

The world stills, save for the slight uptick of the high priest’s mouth.

Seeming confused, the woman looks down at the stylus and hastily snarls out the words to the spell once more to no effect, her pale rose hue going even paler, her hand starting to tremble.

“What have you done?” she rasps in a quavering voice, her expression filling with rising horror.

“I have bound all the women of Uriskan,” High Priest Vyoor calmly explains. “I have set down matrilineal runic magic to bind you all into a Blessed Submission.”

“You monstrous fool!” she lashes out in a shattered voice. “To create this binding, you’ve ruptured our geomancy’s link to theground. Our magic exists to protectLife. Not to bring youpower!”

Quick as an asp, the high priest raises his stylus and murmurs a spell. A slicing line of gold flashes out to impale the woman’s chest. Her blood sprays and her eyes bug out, her mouth flying open as she falls to the ground in a crumpled heap.

The scene flashes out of sight as Sparrow is hurtled back into the Tree’s purple-crystalline root-world. She swallows, trembling with horror from the desert tree’s remembrance. But there’s little time to make sense of it all as she’s suddenly pulled into another vision, now surrounded by a purple Eastern Realm Forest edged with fall’s riot of color.

Sparrow’s sensation of trapped geo-energy shimmers back to life, deep in her center, the purple magic possessing an undeniable directionalpull. But it’s not anywhere in the aboveground world that Sparrow is being urged toward. It’s not a pull toward trees or the sunlit sky that she feels everything inside her straining to reach.

It’s a pulldownward.

Sparrow lowers her gaze and feels herself abruptly shrinking and plummeting. The world around her telescopes outward, rapidly enlarging as she shrinks smaller and smaller, her microscopic essence drawn down into thesoil.

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