Chapter Four

Storming Rainbow

Gwynnifer Croft

Northern Forest Sublands

Sixteen days after Xishlon

Gwynn sweeps through the portal in a color-flashing blur, hurled at the speed of light from the Agolith Desert Sublands toward the southern underground edge of the Northern Forest.

She stumbles from the portal, knees hitting stone. Wynter, Sparrow, Valasca, and most of the others stagger to their feet before her. Gwynn blinks, and the multihued crystalline cavern surrounding her triggers a hail of chromatic sparks through her vision at the same time that she’s assailed by a stretching agony in her Magelines, her body jerked painfully toward the portal at her back.

“Mavrik!”

she cries, multicolored light strobing across her vision as she skids backward over rough stone toward the portal, her twinned lines desperate to get closer to Mavrik before they stretch to the breaking point. In a flash of dread, Gwynn realizes that if Mavrik doesn’t exit the portal soon, their lines will snap and they’ll both die.

“Gwynn, what’s happening?”

Mynx cries, the willowy Elf rushing toward her along with Cael, Valasca, and Wynter, just as Mavrik bursts through the portal’s golden mist.

He falls to his hands and knees, and their eyes lock in an explosion of color. A strangled cry escapes Gwynn as they lunge toward each other and grab desperate hold, the agonizing stretch of their twinned lines releasing with a swoop of vertigo. Hugging each other close, they breathe in staggered gasps as their magic re-fuses, the pain strafing through Gwynn’s lines replaced by a rippling surge of relief.

“Let’s not try that again,”

Mavrik rasps against the base of her neck, his magic twining around her with such covetous fervor that it sends a shock wave of emotion through her. Because everything in her is surging toward him just as intensely.

Including her heart.

Swept into upheaval over the power of their connection, Gwynn draws away from him and glances around. She pulls in a deep breath, color strobing through their twinned power in raying blasts as they take in the surrounding scene along with their traveling companions.

They’re on a large, flat bridge of stone spanning the center of a huge, crystalline geode-cavern, an expansive river rushing by far below. The geode’s luminous crystals are a mosaic of every color in the rainbow, the river’s reflection of the iridescent hues brilliantly marbling the swirling waters streaming beneath them. Huge dark roots undulate through the cavern’s ceiling, and a vision of the Great Ironwood Tree pulses through Gwynn’s mind.

A reflexive ecstasy takes hold of Gwynn as the translucent images of hundreds of Watchers, perched on the largest roots, appear and then vanish just as quickly.

Gwynn looks to Wynter, shocked into continued silence as they both take in how the Verdyllion Wand in Wynter’s hand has turned fully prismatic, as if drawing on the explosion of color surrounding them. The Agolith Flame Hawks are perched on Wynter’s shoulders, their eyes intent on Gwynn and Mavrik, a number of Wynter’s other bird kindreds winging around the mammoth geode’s interior in joyful arcs.

“Mavrik . . . the color,”

Gwynn barely manages. She meets his golden eyes to find them fired up with almost as much emotion as they were after they . . .

A flush sears Gwynn’s skin, and she averts her eyes only to be swept up anew in the gorgeous barrage of forbidden Fae hues. Awe tumbles to life inside her as she remembers what she’s read and overheard about the Smaragdalfar religious myths that speak of the Goddess Oo’na’s Sacred Roots—roots anchored in all the Light of the world and suffusing the root systems and Sublands around them with their light power for leagues and leagues.

Roots that feed and anchor all of life.

“The Smaragdalfar myths,”

Gwynn marvels, looking to Mynx’lia’luure as she and Mavrik rise to their feet, “they’re true in this.”

Yyzz’ra, Gavryyl, and Valkyr all scowl at Gwynn.

“Our ‘myths’ are true in all things, Crow,”

Yyzz’ra snipes. “Did you really think your pious Mage delusions defined Erthia?”

She draws back, a mocking look overtaking her expression. “You did,”

she spits out with a disgusted laugh. “You actually thought your Book of the Ancients ruled above all else.”

Yyzz’ra’s words are an unmooring blow, and Gwynn feels the chastising sting of them, so much so that she barely hears Valasca and Mynx’lia’luure as they, pointing upward, comment on the broad reach of Mavrik and Gwynn’s Subland shielding.

Gwynn looks up and can just make out their shimmering net-shield beyond the network of roots as she’s overtaken by the implosion of her lifelong religious beliefs. No solid ground to land on anywhere. Nothing but a storming swirl of forbidden color and a forbidden heart-pull to Mavrik Glass.

“Do the Alfsigr myths speak of a Great Tree filled with light power?”

Gwynn asks Wynter, meeting the Icaral’s serene, silver gaze.

“They do,”

Wynter says.

“The Amaz, Noi, and Urisk myths do, as well,”

Valasca offers.

Gwynn nods in dazed agreement even as she struggles against the damning sense of being hopelessly, irredeemably lost to sacrilege.

Wynter peers closely at Gwynn. “All of Erthia’s myths speak of the Watchers as well, in some form or other.”

She glances meaningfully around the cavern, where the multitudes of Watchers were just perched, before lifting the Wand-Stylus in her hand. “And they all speak of the Verdyllion.”

“How will we find Oo’na’s Tree once we get past the Dryad wards?”

Mynx wonders.

As if in answer, the Verdyllion pulses out a flash of color.

Everyone’s gaze flies toward it, Rhys’s, Wynter’s, and Cael’s bone-white features briefly suffused with the Verdyllion’s chromatic light.

Wynter lifts the Verdyllion, and a stronger burst of multihued light fans out from it, rapidly coalescing into a gigantic, translucent compass that fills the huge geode’s center, the lines of its chromatic design passing harmlessly through anything it touches, including Gwynnifer and her companions. The compass’s suspended circular form is divided into seven sections, each colored with one of the seven colors of prism-diffracted light.

Gwynn passes her hand through the golden section of the compass, awestruck as she takes in how its huge, silvery needle is not pointed toward any of a compass’s usual directional points, but toward the image of a color-flashing Ironwood tree.

“How did you conjure this compass?”

Yyzz’ra demands of Wynter, seeming shaken as the compass contracts inward until it’s the size of a small plate, hovering around the Verdyllion’s tip.

“I’m finding that this Wand-Stylus is many things,”

Wynter answers. “Things dangerous to the Shadow. It breaks cruel bonds—”

Wynter’s silver-fire eyes pass over everyone gathered, a small smile lifting her pale lips “—and brings unlikely people together.”

“And it’s a compass,”

Gwynn breathes out.

Wynter’s serene smile widens. “It’s a compass,”

she agrees. “So, let’s follow it.”

Compassion lights the Icaral’s gaze. “Have faith, Light Mage.”

Faith in what? Gwynn agonizes, her religious bulwark a swirl of broken beliefs. Shattered in a matter of months.

As if sensing her disquiet, Mavrik’s hand comes to her shoulder, his magic a warm caress. Color stings to life on Gwynn’s lips as she fights the urge to embrace him. Flustered, she gently shrugs off his hand and steps away from him, cursing the revealing riot of color flashing over her mouth. And now his. She’s barely able to meet his impassioned, questioning gaze.

“Let’s keep a fast pace,”

Valasca commands, cutting through Gwynn’s color thrall. Valasca’s eyes flick probingly from Gwynn to Mavrik, clearly noting the color flashing over their mouths. “Now that we know the way forward,”

she says, “we’ve got a Prophecy to intercept.”

She levels her runic blade at Gwynn and Mavrik, grinning rakishly. “And you two have some Dryad wards to get us past with all that fully twinned power.”

Guided by the Verdyllion, they journey through the day and into the night, the Varg time-keeping runes marked on the Subland Elves’ wrists tracking the passage of hours.

Gwynn follows Mavrik and the others through a narrow black opal tunnel, the stone veined with every color of Erthia, the color’s iridescence so vivid it sends dizzying flash after flash of forbidden color through Gwynn and Mavrik’s connected lines, her physical draw to him difficult to think around.

“The Great Tree’s Subland light magic,”

she murmurs to him, “it’s intensifying our twinning.”

Mavrik casts her a glance over his shoulder, and just that brief eye contact sends another spangled rush of color through Gwynn’s lines, along with that unforgivable sting of heated color over her lips and everywhere they touched last night.

“I feel it too,”

Mavrik states tersely, his gaze snapping away from hers as their magic clamors to fuse.

From the slight tightening of his shoulders and the tensing of his neck, she can tell he’s struggling with this just as intensely. Heat blooms on Gwynn’s face as she’s overtaken by the memory of Mavrik’s multihued explosion of passion when they took hold of the Sealing spell, and how much she loved being with him in that way, the surrounding riot of color making her crave it now.

Mavrik turns again and gives her a heated look, his lips so intensely suffused with color that she averts her gaze, upended by having such strong feelings for him in so short a time.

It’s just your twinned magic, she chastises herself, her throat tight with longing. You can’t be falling in love with him . . .

As conflict knifes through her, they all soldier on, rounding bend after bend of opal-veined tunnel while Gwynn is increasingly swept up in the sense that she’s forever cast out of the Ancient One’s favor, not only for so egregiously betraying her fasting, but for wresting hold of the Magedom’s most sacred of spells and wrestling them into submission.

Going up against the Ancient One Himself.

And now . . . she’s following an Alfsigr Icaral wielding the Ancient One’s Wand toward the Subland roots of Oo’na’s Tree to tap into the Great Tree’s vast elemental power. It’s such a roiling ball of blasphemy upon blasphemy, Gwynn can feel herself skidding straight toward every last one of the Ancient One’s punishing hells.

Her tortuous thoughts break off as they round another bend, spill into a larger opal cavern and come to an abrupt halt.

The underground river slowly streams in front of them, a dark opal bridge spanning it. Beyond the bridge, there’s a broad area of flat stone with a line of huge, forest green Dryad runes suspended above it. A translucent, shimmering green wall emanates from the runes, flowing upward through their multihued Subland barrier above and downward through the cavern’s stone floor below, a larger, vividly emerald Varg rune hovering before the Dryad barrier.

They cross the bridge, and Mynx and Cael step toward the Varg rune. Mynx touches the air around it, her nails clinking against an invisible, glass-like barrier.

“This is a primordial Varg’plith’nile rune,”

Mynx says, her tone awestruck as she reaches up to press her index finger’s tip to the center of the rune. Green light rays out from her touch, illuminating both her and Cael beside her, their hands interlaced, and Gwynn is struck once more by how the two of them have stubbornly decided to display their feelings for each other despite the fierce censure Yyzz’ra, Valkyr, and Gavryyl continue to throw their way.

“It is a Varg’uuth’nile,”

Yyzz’ra sharply affirms, with a cutting look toward Cael. “To protect Oo’na’s Sacred Subland Rooting from Varg’plith.”

Sunland heathen filth. Gwynn inwardly flinches in response to the Smaragdalfar slur, and Mynx’lia’luure’s silver eyes fill with outrage.

Gwynn recalls how the term Varg’plith is spoken about in the Smaragdalfar’s Holy Texts. Heathen filth that, in primordial times, let loose a Shadow pollution to crawl all over Erthia’s surface, throwing the world off-balance, the Righteous Children of Oo’na called to rise up against the Evil Shadowed Ones. To cleanse the Blessed Sublands of their unholy taint.

Gwynn is clear, from Yyzz’ra’s condemning glare, that Varg’plith includes not only Mynx and Cael, but herself, Mavrik, Wynter, Valasca, Rhys, and Sparrow. Gwynn tenses, finding it jarring to be cast as an Evil One in someone else’s religious story, the uncomforable questions ringing out, refusing to be silenced—

Who are the true Evil Ones?

Which religious story is true?

Mavrik draws close to the Varg’uuth’nile rune and studies it along with Mynx as Gwynn wonders, uneasily, what will happen when they reach the Great Tree’s roots with such clashing religious beliefs at play amongst their small group. She glances at Yyzz’ra, remembering the conversation she overheard when Yyzz’ra outlined her desire to wrest the Verdyllion from Wynter once they arrived at “Oo’na’s Roots.”

Are they about to go to war with each other?

“Are you able to cut a path through this Varg wardage?”

Mavrik asks Yyzz’ra.

Yyzz’ra shoots him another glare and shakes her head. “The magic is densely layered and impenetrable.”

“Gwynnifer,”

Wynter murmurs, and Gwynn turns to find Wynter holding the Verdyllion out to her.

Gwynn’s disquiet intensifies. Swallowing, she reaches out and takes hold of the Verdyllion.

A shockingly potent sizzle of color flashes from the Verdyllion and courses through her and Mavrik’s twinned power. Gwynn stiffens, their magic giving a taut pull toward each other.

“Shall we have a go at it?”

Mavrik gently prods as she meets his intent gaze.

Gwynn nods stiffly and forcibly presses back her rising pull toward him. She and Mavrik draw nearer to the primordial rune. There’s a metallic tang of sorcery emanating from it—sorcery she can taste on the back of her tongue. Tracing the tip of the Verdyllion over the rune, Gwynn murmurs the Varg structure spell.

A translucent echo of the rune’s imprint telescopes toward her, an astonished breath escaping quiet Sparrow. Gwynn’s eyes remain pinned on the rune as she takes in each component, her mind separating them into their interlocking elemental building blocks.

“It’s an ancient version of a barrier rune woven into three different magic-repelling runes,”

she states, tracing the Verdyllion’s tip over the emerald lines. “We need to locate the place they’re locked together.”

“Right here,”

Mavrik says, pointing toward one of the rune’s sections, his hand brushing against hers.

Gwynn’s pulse leaps, and sparks race over her skin as power sizzles through her lines. Rattled, she jerks her hand away from his touch. Mavrik shoots her an intense look, and a flash of unsettled indigo shudders through their twinned power.

Gwynn confers stiltedly with Mavrik, careful not to touch him again as they plot out their magical approach. Struggling to keep her bucking magic from breaking loose to embrace his, she raises the Verdyllion at the same time that he raises his Varg-marked wand, the two of them murmuring a Varg spell in unison.

Streams of emerald light bolt from their wands, the bolts colliding with two different runic sections in an explosion of gem-green sparks, the locked sections bulging out almost to the point of breaking.

But it’s not enough power, and the locked sections spring back into place, refusing to give.

Gwynn and Mavrik work straight through the night and the next day, the two of them soon encircled by a suspended rainstorm of amplification runes from every runic system on Erthia. But still, the primordial Varg barrier rune refuses to give way, their every combined magical effort repelled.

Evening descends, the others eventually moving off into side caverns to grab some sleep. Gwynn steps back, sweat beading her brow, her chest tight with frustration bordering on desperation.

Mavrik sheathes his wand and rounds on her, intensity firing in his eyes. “I’ve finally parsed out what’s going on. You’re fighting our connection. Gwynnifer. We’re twinned. If you fight it, neither of us can fully utilize our magic.”

Gwynn’s heart twists, every suppressed emotion rearing, her magic straining to pull the emotion through it. And thrust it out toward him. “I don’t know how to stop fighting it,”

she admits, her voice breaking, her eyes burning. “I . . . I’ve developed strong feelings for you in such a short time and . . . I don’t know how to handle that.”

Mavrik narrows his eyes at her, his magic suddenly sweeping around her in an ardent embrace. “Come with me,”

he says, offering her his hand.

Gwynn follows him toward a small side cavern, her lightlines storming with every hue of distress—ashen dark blues, bruise blacks, turmoil-laden maroons. She falls back against a wall and tightly closes her eyes, wrestling with her uncontainable longing for him.

“Gwynnifer.”

She opens her eyes to meet his, the static in their fused lightlines like a storming rainbow, Mavrik’s golden irises flashing with impassioned brightness. But his magic . . . it’s held back, only a trace of its turbulent flow palpable against hers.

“What are we going to do about this?”

he asks, the storming color firing even more intensely through their twinned magic as he motions between them.

Gwynn can barely pull in a breath, her heartbeat thudding against her ribs. “It’s wrong for me to feel this way about you,”

she manages. “We’ve known each other for a matter of days—”

“During which we’ve permanetly fused our magic and have become intimate with each other,”

Mavrik emphatically interjects. “Gwynn, I can sense your every emotion. Even though you’re trying to keep us separate.”

“I can sense yours, as well,”

she admits, lips trembling.

“We complement each other,”

Mavrik says. “And not just because you gave me a line of light power I lacked. Gwynn, it’s increasingly clear that we’re perfectly compatible in every single way. Do you sense it, as well?”

She blinks back the tears stinging her eyes as she clings to the understanding in his gaze and the affection he’s flowing around her magic—understanding the likes of which she’s never experienced with anyone else.

“I sense it too,”

Gwynn whispers. “And, Ancient One help me, I want to give in to this.”

“Then we should,”

Mavrik offers. “Gwynn, for so many reasons.”

He holds out his golden-fastline-marked hand to her, a look of resolve in his eyes. “I can’t fight it. I want you. In every way.”

The deep-hued storm of conflict knifing through Gwynn’s lines intensifies, her heart knotting, painfully tight, and she knows he can feel all of it.

“I’ve fallen in love with you,”

Mavrik admits, voice rough, his magic holding steady against hers, tears sheening his eyes. “For the first time in my life, I’m truly in love. And it’s not just our magical or physical draw. I have never met someone I can be so honest with. You understand me in a way no one else can. Like I understand you. And I love every last thing I feel about you through our linked magic.”

Gwynn can barely hold his gaze, the intensity of the feelings running through his magic shearing straight through her heart, mirroring exactly the emotions igniting in her own lines.

“Ancient One, Mavrik,”

she manages, her eyes glassing over as invisible sparks of color crackle through the space between them. “I broke a sacred fasting. With someone I’ve known for an incredibly short amount of time.”

She holds up her fastmarked hand. “I don’t want to feel this guilt, but it’s ripping my heart in two.”

“Yes,”

he fires back. “And in that short time, we’ve forged a stronger connection than I have with people I’ve known my whole life.”

A sob almost breaks free from Gwynn’s throat because it’s true for her, as well. She knows it’s devastatingly true.

“If you had never fasted to anyone,”

he presses, his whole body coiled with tension, “what would you do? What would you want?”

Pain shears through her heart. “But I did fast to someone . . .”

“But if you hadn’t.”

“I’d want this,”

she admits, trembling. “I’d want to embrace this fasting. But it’s impossible to get past everything I’ve ever been taught my whole life about virtually everything.”

“We didn’t get to choose,”

Mavrik insists, his acid bitterness jolting through their power. “We didn’t get to choose our fastings at thirteen—”

“I chose—”

“No, Gwynn, you didn’t,”

he harshly counters. “You were friends with Geoffrey, and that’s a damned sight better than being dragged into a fasting with someone you didn’t care for, I’ll give you that. But it was still coercion into a magically powerful binding at too young an age.”

Gwynn grows quiet, biting the inside of her cheek as she wrestles with an onslaught of guilt and grief and flashing magic.

“I loved him,”

she finally manages in a strangled voice.

Mavrik pulls in a shaky breath. “I know you did. I can feel your grief over it. And I wish I could take it away from you. But, Gwynn, when Geoffrey was tested, he chose the Shadow of his own free will. He saw the full horror the Mages are raining down on the world, and he stayed. But you . . . the moment you saw—”

he gives her a pained, loving smile “—you sought out the Resistance and went all in.”

An ache slices through her. Because his words are true. She’s seen too much, and it’s over. She can never go back to Geoffrey. She wouldn’t want to. But there’s no solid ground in this confusing, tumultuous new world she’s found herself in.

“I’m lost,”

she admits in a shredded voice, tears blurring her eyes. “Following an Alfsigr Icaral toward a Smaragdalfar goddess tree, the whole thing mixed up with a Gardnerian wand myth . . . everything in our religion, absolutely everything, forbidding this type of mixing and confusion. And now I’m falling in love with you, which is unforgivable. Mavrik, I’m lost.”

He moves closer and reaches down to gently take her hands in his. “Sometimes you have to get lost,”

he insists, his voice hitching with emotion. “Sometimes you have to get thoroughly, horribly, horrifically lost. Or you can never, ever find your true way. Don’t you think I felt lost when I was confronted by what our people are doing to the Fae? The Fae, who aren’t the monsters of our myths, but just people? People we’re abusing and slaughtering? I grew up Styvian, just like you. With that inflexible religion of ours shoved down my throat.”

His magic’s a firestorm as he tenses his jaw, his breathing uneven. “But I’ve finally found my true way, Gwynn. And it’s led me to you. And to the Great Tree of all the myths, which most of the Smaragdalfar here don’t want us anywhere near.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know what I believe about the Ancient One or Oo’na or the Shining Ones or any religion anymore. But I think there’s a hell of a good chance that maybe, just maybe, the Ancient One is leading us together, not apart. All of us.”

“None of the holy books say that—”

“Then the holy books be thoroughly damned! This is my holy book.”

He motions emphatically between them. “This, right here. This thing growing between us. And freed Smaragdalfar and Urisk and Fae children. And smiting Vogel’s Shadow. The fight for all of us, Gwynn. All of us, no exceptions. Not Yyzz’ra’s way. Wynter’s way. Mynx and Cael’s way. That’s my holy book. The rigid lines be fully damned.”

“I am falling in love with you,”

she blurts out, her voice thick with both passion and pain and mind-bending confusion as she holds his equally impassioned stare. “Ancient One help me, Mavrik, but I am.”

“Then choose,”

he raggedly states. “Choose your mate of your own free will. As a tested adult. As your true, strong self who goes all in. Because I want to go all in. Say the word, Gwynn. Say it, and I’m yours.”

Her pulse thuds hot and hard as she holds his incediary stare. A tear escapes, and her magic and feelings break loose and stream toward him, her voice fracturing. “Mavrik, I’m already all in.”

He’s there in an instant, embracing her, choking out an emotional sound as they pull each other close. She can feel his silent tears on her neck as he kisses its nape, murmuring “I love you”

over and over, her own tears fully giving way.

And then his lips are on hers, salt-coated and warm.

Then hotly insistent.

She kisses him back eagerly, and their magic fully releases, surging toward and through each other. She groans against his mouth as he deepens the kiss, an explosion of color detonating, the motion of his tongue swirling a luxurious scarlet craving through her every lightline. Then he’s yanking off his cloak, throwing it to the ground, and pulling her down onto it, the two of them hastily drawing off clothing and weapons. She pulls his body onto hers, the surging flow of their magic desperate for connection, desperate for this fully and freely chosen Sealing to each other.

“Is the contraception rune still charged?”

Mavrik raggedly asks.

“It is,”

she answers, aware of the slight sting of the rune on her hip, caught up in the pleasure of his body pressed against hers.

Mavrik brings his lips back to hers, and Gwynn gasps as he pushes forward, joining their bodies. She tightens her thighs around his, and can feel his magic reading her consent in a rippling rush before they take each other more intensely. Thrilling to his passion, his hard maleness, and stunned by the whirling rise of pleasure where they’re joined, she hugs him close to get more of him, splaying her fingers over his muscular back.

Pleasure floods their entwined power in an almost unbearable rush. She arches her head back just before Mavrik lets out a groan against her shoulder and their magic shatters against each other in a raying explosion of light power, a shock wave of ecstasy flashing through their joined bodies and merged lines.

They still, hearts pounding, both of them breathing hard.

Mavrik presses his lips to her shoulder, and Gwynn shivers, their twinned magic looping around their joined forms in a swirling, delirious embrace, their bodies lit up with every color on Erthia.

“I love you, Gwynnifer,”

Mavrik says against her shoulder, the words rough and impassioned.

She reaches up to sift her fingers through his hair as tears pool in her eyes, her old life fully gone, but a new one just beginning. He raises his head, a profound look of love in his golden gaze as his eyes meet hers, light magery crackling over his lips.

“I love you too,”

she murmurs as she opens her heart to both him and all of life’s confusion and gives in to their binding fully. Gives in to it all.

Mavrik slides his warm palm over her cheek, and Gwynn’s breath shudders as he threads his fingers deftly through her hair, then leans in to kiss her color-singed lips, his kiss intoxicatingly slow and deep, a kaleidoscope of affection flooding their twinned magic.

“My beautiful Light Mage,”

he murmurs against her lips before drawing back a fraction, the edge of his light-sparking mouth lifting into a seditious smile. “Now that we have all that established, let’s go strike down that Varg rune and open a path through the Dryad barrier behind it.”