Chapter Seven

Purple Geomancer

Sparrow Trillium

Deep inside III

Sparrow’s heart accelerates into a hammering panic as she hurtles through the Great Tree’s all-encompassing darkness. Her center fills with aching pressure, as if the Tree is trying to join her very core to its terrifying, endless depths.

Abruptly, she slows to a suspended halt.

Fear and disorientation firing through her in comet-like surges, Sparrow rues how impulsively she went to the Great Tree, mesmerized by what felt like a heart-pull that intensified as she took in the ethereal Geo’din messenger birds of the Urisk pantheon perched all over its roots.

Birds who seemed to be calling to the very center of her being.

Filled with what suddenly felt like glistening, trapped power.

Her fear devolving into throat-clenching anguish, Sparrow startles as violet light flashes through her vision and violet crystals emerge from the darkness all around her, big as the Tree’s huge roots.

Bigger.

Her eyes widen as she gapes at the crystals, her suspended form but a speck in the face of these colossal, geometric formations, their shimmering purple rapidly overtaking the darkness. She pulls in a shuddering breath as she’s swept up in the overpowering feeling that the giant crystals surrounding her are benevolently watching.

And waiting.

As if the Tree is making a startling offering to her, like she’s some powerful Urisk geomancer ready to wield these mammoth crystals suffused with her kindred Urisk’viil color, the Great Tree not realizing she’s a mere seamstress, lacking the geomancy power only Urisk males are gifted with.

Sorrow grips Sparrow as everything in her strains to connect to the gigantic crystals.

Strains to merge with them.

I’ve no power, she agonizes to the Great Tree as the crystals continue to form all around, some of the smaller formations crystalizing toward her, made up of every variety of the purple-hued stones she’s especially drawn to as a member of the violet Urisk’viil class.

A memory of Noilaan’s dockside gem market enters Sparrow’s mind, how she could afford only a select few purple stones. Her hands were shaking as she purchased then pocketed them, feeling like she was committing a crime, the keeping of kindred-Urisk’viil geomancy stones forbidden to women by the Urisk religion.

I’m in love with a Mage, Sparrow had rebelliously thought in that moment as she brushed her fingers over the taboo stones. Why not own kindred stones as a man would?

Thoughts of Thierren constrict Sparrow’s throat with a longing so intense, she can barely pull in a breath, her mind swinging to that last, agonizing collision of their gazes as she was flown away on dragonback by demonic Tilor while Vogel’s demon tide rippled over Voloi, cutting Thierren from sight as she screamed his name.

Thierren, my beloved, where are you?

Her heart squeezes tighter as the face of her other loved one surfaces in her thoughts—Effrey. Did the child survive Vogel’s siege of Voloi?

Thierren’s and Effrey’s names ring out in Sparrow’s mind with heart-shredding force as a formation of iris-hued charoite and deep-violet jasper crystallize toward her. A sizzle of yearning is suddenly tingling against the underside of her skin. Not just to be reunited with Thierren and Effrey, but to wield geopower.

Her whole being fills with the certainty that the Great Tree is trying to link this stone world to her in some way. But it’s completely misguided.

“I’m female!”

she cries out to the Great Tree, railing against fate. “Urisk females have no geomancy!”

Sparrow is abruptly flooded with the core-warming sense of the Great Tree smiling—a smile of such vast-rooted kindness, tears sheen Sparrow’s eyes, blurring the purple-crystalline sparkle of the world surrounding her.

And then the entire purple scene around her contracts, and she’s cast into another vision.

Head spinning, Sparrow finds herself peering down from the twisted golden branches of a bulbous desert tree, a yellow desert landscape spread out before her. A golden city with gleaming domed structures shines in the distance, great mountains of yellow stone just beyond, everything appearing to waver from the battering-ram heat of a white-hot sun.

Surprise overtakes Sparrow.

Urisk’hiir. A city she’s heard about in tales from Uriskan’s past. She recognizes it by the three fabled golden stars hanging over the mountains, bright as dragon eyes even in day’s full light. The city before her—along with the entire country of Uriskan—destroyed during the last Realm War by Gardneria’s Black Witch, Carnissa Gardner.

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! And all the 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 of all current 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, growling it 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 the ground. Our magic exists to protect Life. Not to bring you power!”

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 directional pull. 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 pull downward.

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 the soil.

Awe consumes her as she takes in the huge, magnified rocks surrounding her and feeding geo-energy into the Forest floor, working in concert with tendriling lines of black twining around the stones to break down rotted debris and feed Life-supporting minerals into the Forest.

To spark the reemergence of Life.

Tendrils of gray Shadow begin to flow into Sparrow’s microscopic world from all sides. Dread overtakes her as the gray tendrils siphon up the regenerative black lines, their power leaching away until there is nothing but Shadowed stone and gray filth, all of it devoid of geopower.

Devoid of Balance.

Sparrow’s gut clenches, the purple energy ignited within her sputtering as she recoils and finds herself suspended, once more, inside III’s root-world of giant crystals, a palpable urgency vibrating through the Great Tree.

Sparrow gives a small start as a constellation of Erthia’s most beautiful violet stones blink into being, palm-size, and begin to slowly orbit around her: amethyst, charoite, sugilite, tanzanite, iolite, grape agate.

Grape agate.

Sparrow’s heart stretches toward the kindred pull of this stone, which is stronger than all the others. She reaches for it, her fingers hungrily wrapping around the grape agate’s bumpy exterior.

Rays of purple light scythe out from Sparrow’s clenched hand, all the other stones absorbed into the stone in her hand as Sparrow draws in the deepest breath of her entire life. Geo-bindings of metallic gold are suddenly shivering out of her form like tight twine giving way, twine she never knew she was imprisoned by. Geo’din’s Watcher birds spring to life, perched on the huge purple crystals around her, the birds’ translucent, multihued forms shimmering.

Sparrow’s mind whirls with confusion as she looks at the prismatic Watchers of the Uriskal faith, the vision of High Priest Vyoor’s murder of the woman resurging, the story of the murder dressed up in holy language and enshrined in her people’s holy text.

Cast into turmoil over this religion she has prayed to all her life, Sparrow looks pleadingly at Geo’din’s messenger birds.

What is true and what isn’t? she agonizes to them and to the Great Tree.

A warmth pulses in the center of her heart—a warmth she knows is her answer from the birds and the Tree, an energy building in the central Geo’light of her soul.

Waiting to be unleashed.

The grape agate in Sparrow’s hand contracts, drawing her gaze toward the newly slender purple rod of fused, spherical stones, energy tingling through it. She pulls in a surprised breath, relaxing her fingers slightly. A stylus. There’s an image of the Great Tree marked on her palm beneath it, the Tree’s true name pulsing through her mind—III.

Joy fills Sparrow as the Great Tree’s rush of love floods her, invigorating her very soul with the energy of invitation to revolution.

On behalf of Erthia’s Life-nourishing soil.

Sparrow’s fingers tighten around the stylus . . . and she accepts the call.

Thierren, she thinks as tears mist her eyes, wishing she could send a message to him through the Tree. Thierren, my love. We’re not done breaking boundaries. A crooked grin is suddenly lifting Sparrow’s mouth, her life falling into place all around her like a garment being stitched together. I’m going to reclaim my geomancy power. And help all the Urisk women of Erthia reclaim it, as well . . .

A large BOOM shakes the world.

A hard sting flashes through the image of III marked on Sparrow’s palm, and she’s filled with a sense of the entire Tree recoiling. The giant crystals surrounding her begin to tint gray, poisonous tendrils of the gray seeping in from all sides.

Sparrow can tell, from the pulsing sting in her palm, that it’s not a vision this time.

It’s the true Shadow. Coming for III.

Sparrow grits her teeth and raises her stylus. “Shield me!”

she snarls out in Uriskal.

Violet light flashes from her stylus, and a translucent violet shield rushes around her in a great orb just as the last of the surrounding purple cuts out and she’s hit by the agonizing sense of trees screaming. Sparrow stiffens, her terror mounting as Marcus Vogel’s image shivers into being in the back of her mind, his pale green eyes lit with silver fire.

“I’m coming for you,”

he croons, his expression viper calm as he lifts the Shadow Wand and points it at the stylus in her hand. “I see what you’ve done, and I’m coming for you, Urisk Witch. I will consume every last speck of Erthia’s geopower. And you along with it.”

I’m trapped, Sparrow realizes as her terror flares higher, an intuitive sense of the Shadow power’s every line of attack filling her.

Vogel is attacking the Northern Forest along with its soil, she realizes, her dread surging.

And I’m trapped inside III’s power.