Chapter Seven

Zonor Transformation

Vothendrile Xanthile

Northern Zonor River

Light blasts into being around Vothe as he’s thrust from the Forest’s inner darkness in a rush of elemental power, sure he’s been pulled a distance away from where he entered the trees. He looks around, finding himself on the bank of the Zonor River, the leaves of the riverbank trees edged in a mosaic of every color in the rainbow, everything washed in late afternoon’s amber light.

The waves of the Zonor shimmer before Vothe, the river’s aura of water power flowing out to him in a powerful wave before catching him up in a kindred embrace that has Vothe gasping from a returning upswell of joy. He can sense how much magic it took for the Forest to bring him here, knows deep in his core that the trees must have some compelling reason for marshalling so much might to bring him this distance.

A sense of power crackling into being to his south draws Vothe’s gaze just as Trystan emerges from the broad trunk of a Dyoi River Oak a short span away. Vothe is instantly overtaken by a sense of the Zonor River sweeping Trystan into the same kindred embrace. An embrace that’s pulling them joyfully toward each other.

Trystan’s eyes meet his in a shock of lightning, a jolt of forking energy leaping between the two of them that sizzles over Vothe’s skin, his breath catching tight over Trystan’s altered appearance and the feel of his foliage-amplified power.

Holding Vothe’s gaze, Trystan throws off his tunic, his lean, muscular chest glimmering a deeper, brighter forest green than ever before, a branching purple pattern tracing over it, his Vo’lon faith necklace looped around his neck, the starlight Vo dragon goddess in its center. Trystan’s sapphire dragon tattoo seems lit up by the amplified magic racing across his form in forking threads of blue lightning. And Trystan’s eyes and hair—they’re darkened to a deep-river blue, his ears now coming to points like Vothe’s.

Trystan strides toward Vothe, an emotional tension mounting between them, Vothe’s throat going dry with a sudden river-amplified desire for Trystan, a current of the Zonor’s formidable power swirling around them both.

Vothe’s pulse pounds hard through his veins as Trystan stills before him and opens his palm. The image of the Great Tree III that Vothe saw inside the Forest is imprinted there, the image the same wavering steel blue hue as Trystan’s eyes and hair.

Vothe realizes what this transformed color mirrors as he glances toward the huge river beside them. Zonor blue. The river that’s marked them both as its kindreds.

Trembling slightly, Vothe unfurls his own palm, the same defiant III image emblazoned there, shot through with an identical rippling Zonor blue, traceries of his white lightning threading over his onyx skin.

“I’m forever changed,”

Trystan marvels in the Dryadin language . . . a language that Vothe, too, can now understand.

“I’m changed too,”

Vothe responds in Dryadin, his heart full to bursting with Trystan and the Waters and the Forest and the Air above. “I was always so anchored to the Sky,”

he roughly states, “but cut off from the Forest and the Waters. Now I’m anchored to it all.”

Trystan nods, and his expression takes on a pained look, his aura of blue lightning flashing ardently around Vothe. “I feel truly different, Vothe. I don’t know if . . .”

Trystan pauses, and Vothe can scent the sudden fear storming through him.

Passion rises hot in Vothe’s chest, and a wild incredulity rises. “Are you asking me if I still love you?”

A more intense pain slashes through Trystan’s power as he stands there, rigid, all the lightning in the world balling up in him, and also balling up inside of Vothe. All of it for this man.

“Trystan,”

Vothe growls, the name ripped from the center of his chest as his lightning aura cuts loose, exploding toward Trystan’s power. “Always. More.”

And then they’re closing the distance between them, Trystan’s lips crashing down on his, their lightning igniting against each other’s in an incandescent firestorm, lighting up the surrounding air with forking white and blue power.

“I love you,”

Trystan says in a gasp between electric kisses. “I love you, Vothe. I love you so much.”

“Be my mate,”

Vothe growls against Trystan’s lightning-coated lips. “Be mine with the Zonor. With all of Erthia. But be mine, Trystan Gardner.”

“Not on land,”

Trystan insists, gripping the sides of Vothe’s pants, holding Vothe against himself, so tight Vothe feels as if he’ll lose his mind if they don’t take each other fully. “You can conjure air around me.”

Nodding, Vothe pulls Trystan into another kiss, their lips meeting in an explosion of lightning as Vothe flies them into the center of the huge Zonor, Trystan’s mouth hot on Vothe’s.

Vothe pivots his wings and arrows them down toward the river’s rushing surface. They hit the cool water and bolt into it, multihued lightning illuminating their descent as Vothe conjures a bubble of air around Trystan’s head.

Trystan pulls Vothe into another kiss as they reach the riverbed, Vothe’s hands sliding over Trystan’s slick, muscular form, the two of them desperately pulling at and yanking off each other’s clothing until there’s nothing separating them from each other, nothing separating them from the Life-giving waters of the Zonor.

Nothing separating them from the power of the river merging with the power in their bodies.

Capturing each other’s mouths in a deep, tongue-twining kiss that comes close to turning them both into pure lightning, they slide around each other in the churning waters and powerfully join with a crack of lightning, Vothe’s mouth clamping down on Trystan’s shoulder, Trystan’s skin hot against Vothe’s lips.

Storming magic sizzles over them both with the power to cleave worlds as Vothe sinks his teeth into Trystan’s shoulder and sends his full lightning into him.

The entire Natural Matrix of the river explodes in blue light, merging with them both as they’re swept into a wave of Erthia-tilting ecstasy and love and merged Wyvern-Dryad power.

“Are you ready?”

Trystan asks from where they later stand, hand in hand, on the riverbank’s outcropping of flat, obsidian stone, both of them clothed in pants made of melded deep-purple leaves that Trystan fashioned with a swipe of the branch in his hand.

A steady breeze kisses Vothe’s skin, and he can read that Trystan isn’t chilled by it, Trystan’s physical connection to the world transformed by the Forest and the Zonor and their full Wyvernbonding. More shifter-like than he was before, as a result of their mating bond.

Just like Vothe has become more Dryad Fae.

Vothe pulls in an ecstatic breath, both of them suffused with the warm, shimmering aura of their merged lightning, a bit stunned by their effect on each other, Vothe’s emotions and power still swept up in Trystan, his hold on Trystan’s hand firm.

Vothe looks to the half-moon Wyvernbond mark on Trystan’s shoulder. It glows lightning bright, small threads of silvery lightning crackling from it. A besotted ache constricts Vothe’s chest, the Eastern Wyvern mating mark’s glow as incandescent as their love for each other and for their kindred river. Their merged power amplified by it all.

“I’m ready,”

Vothe affirms.

Trystan raises the branch in his hand at the same time that Vothe raises his palm to the heavens, and they summon that love-fused power.

Bolts of their fused blue-and-white lightning flash from Trystan’s branch and Vothe’s palm and merge as they soar upward and fan out to form a domed net of pulsing, forking magic over the entire Zonor River and its bracketing Forest, the Forest’s energy joining in to guide the net-barrier’s flow in perfect sync with the trajectory of Trystan and Vothe’s magic.

Vothe and Trystan continue to feed power into their lightning barrier until they’re tapped out, their bonded magic needing time to recharge. But this shield, Vothe considers as they survey it, side by side, it feels strong enough to protect this second largest body of water in the Eastern Realm from anything containing Vogel’s Shadow.

“My great-aunt Sithendrile told me to go back to the Zonor,”

Vothe confides in Trystan. They’re sitting on the upraised rocky embankment by the Zonor’s edge, their fingers interlaced. “Back when you had that first day’s leave from the Wyvernguard, and we went to Voloi,”

he adds, glancing at Trystan, feeling both lovestruck and dazed as he slides his gaze back toward the river and takes in what they’ve wrought.

A paintbrush twilight has descended, large swaths of pastel hues brightening the western sky, their net-shield of blue-and-white lightning flashing across the Zonor and its forested banks.

“She told me,”

Vothe continues, caressing the side of Trystan’s thumb with his own, “that’s where you’ll find your transformation.”

Trystan seems to ponder this before he draws Vothe into a close embrace and kisses him long and slow and deep, feeding lightning into Vothe in a way that speeds Vothe’s pulse and makes him want to pull Trystan down to the bottom of the Zonor once more.

“Do you feel transformed, Vothendrile?”

Trystan asks, giving him a slight, wry smile, his eyes lit with blue-and-white lightning, with the sheer thrill of their combined power.

And their unleashed love.

Vothe bares his teeth in a hungry grin before an upswell of emotion clenches his heart—for this Mage he initially tried to drive away. This Mage who is now his everything.

“I do, Trystan,”

Vothe confides. “Our power . . . it’s completely intermingled now. Can you feel it?”

Trystan draws in a deep breath before leaning in to touch his forehead to Vothe’s while caressing the side of his face.

“I can feel it,”

Trystan hisses in Wyvern. He inhales fast, seeming just as shocked as Vothe is to hear the Wyvern tongue sliding through his lips. “I can draw on your power and language now,”

Trystan marvels, curling his mouth around the sibilant Wyvern words, the motion of his pierced lip so sexy that Vothe wants to eat his words whole. “I feel . . . merged to you,”

Trystan admits.

An ardent spark ignites between them, and Vothe moves to draw him into a closer embrace just as the feel of an incoming storm aura barreling toward them from the East wrests his attention. Alarm crackling through their merged power, they bolt to their feet.

“What is it?”

Trystan asks as he takes hold of the branch sheathed at his side, their merged power coiling and readying to strike.

A dark, winged figure soars out of the clouds jutting out over the half-leveled Vo Mountain Range in the distance. Surprise lights through Vothe as he reads the figure’s energy, recognizing his great-aunt’s power before she soars into closer view above their shielding, alarm forking through her magic.

“It’s my great-aunt,”

Vothe cautions Trystan, his hand coming to Trystan’s wrist to halt a defensive attack. “We need to let her through.”

They open a gap in their lightning dome, and Sithendrile swoops through it and lands before them. Her dark eyes spit gold lightning, and her horns are up, her claws out, a look of urgency on her crimson-tattooed onyx face.

Her shrewd gaze slides over them, missing no detail, including the lightning-filled mating mark newly emblazoned on Trystan’s shoulder, their linked hands, and Trystan’s transformed state—his newly pointed ears, deep-green hue and Zonor-blue eyes and river-hued hair—as well as the blue-and-white lightning forking over Vothe’s onyx skin.

Sithendrile’s eyes meet Vothe’s, power zapping between them as her wings snap in. “Zhilaan is sending out a storm force of Zhilaan’whuur to take hold of the power of this river and the Dyoi Forest,”

she warns.

Vothe gapes at her, rapidly comprehending the full gravity of this.

The Zhilaan’whuur—Elite Weather Forces of the Zhilaan military.

“I felt your energy from a full league away,”

Sithendrile bites out, her eyes flicking toward Trystan with a conflicted look. “I soared ahead to warn you both to draw down your magic and get out of the way. The Zhilaan’whuur are going to send a huge storm band through here at dawn. The largest storm band they’ve ever created. To wrest hold of the elemental power of the Zonor River and Dyoi Forest and use it to battle back Vogel’s Shadow storms in the continent’s central lands.”

A charged ripple of shock flashes through Trystan and Vothe, the ramifications of this detonating like a runic explosive—to build a storm band that holds enough elemental energy to drive back Vogel’s Shadow storms . . . it will require drawing way too much power from the Natural World. Both the Zonor River and Dyoi Forest will be destroyed.

“How far away are they?”

Trystan demands.

Vothe’s great-aunt narrows her eyes at Trystan, and every hackle in Vothe rises. Because he can sense, through the conflict streaking through her power, that she’s warring with herself, what she knows of Trystan pitted against what his Black Witch sister almost succeeded in doing to the entire East. But it’s what Vogel nearly did to the entire East.

“You’ve half a day at most,”

Sithendrile bites out, baring her teeth at Trystan. “So get out of Zhilaan’s way.”

The storm churning to life inside both Vothe and Trystan surges. Without warning, Trystan grabs tight hold of Vothe’s empathic aunt’s wrist. Instantly comprehending Trystan’s intention, Vothe lunges forward to grab hold of her, as well.

She hisses, elongating teeth flashing at them both.

“Please! Listen!”

Vothe implores, desperate for her to use her empathic powers to read them both.

Sithendrile’s brow furrows as her empathic senses connect and read every last thing the Forest showed Vothe and Trystan, as well as everything that’s happened to them and their allies since they flew west to find Elloren and Yvan.

Sithendrile’s eyes meet Vothe’s, a look of pure, unadulterated shock in them. “Holy Vo,”

she hisses in Wyvern. “Can this all be true?”

Trystan nods emphatically. “If the Dyoi Forest and the Zonor fall, the Natural World falls apart,”

he hisses back in Wyvern, Sithendrile visibly startling at Trystan’s new ability to speak their language fluently. “Destroy the Natural World, and there is no East,”

Trystan continues to hiss. “No water. No crops. The descent of weather so violent even your Zhilaan’whuur will not be able to control it. Then, the complete breakdown of the Living World as the Shadow rolls in.”

“Come to the Forest,”

Vothe begs of her, urgency crackling around them all.

Seeming dazed, Vothe’s great-aunt nods and lets them lead her to the riverbank’s tree line. Lets them guide her palms to a River Oak’s rough, deep-purple trunk.

Sithendrile stiffens and gasps as the golden lightning crackling over her skin flashes to brighter life and she’s pulled into the tree.

Vothe whooshes out a shuddering breath, his palm to the bark, turmoil slashing through him. “My brother, Geth,”

he forces out, “he leads the Zhilaan’whuur.”

He looks at Trystan, desperate. “We can’t let the Zonor and Dyoi Forest fall . . . but how can I fight my own brother?”

“You won’t,”

Trystan rejoins, his hand coming to Vothe’s shoulder in an unflinching show of support. “We’ll keep the Zhilaan’whuur walled off from both our Waters and our Forest.”

Vothe’s skin shivers in response to the bolstering feel of Trystan’s touch as they stand there for what seems like an eternity, waiting.

Night has descended by the time Vothe’s great-aunt emerges, completely encased in dark purple bark, her form softly illuminated by the lightning crackling over the dome-net above.

Vothe and Trystan step back as Sithendrile rapidly morphs back into herself, both gold and Zonor-blue lightning now sizzling over her skin and dark wings as she fans them powerfully out.

“I see,”

Sithendrile raggedly manages, her eyes wide. She raises her III-marked palm, Zonor-blue coursing through the image. “We need all of Zhilaan with us in this fight—”

Her words cut off as a lightning-spitting storm band suddenly appears above what’s left of the Vo Mountain Range.

“Holy Vo,”

Sithendrile hisses. “They’re sending a portion of their power out now!”

Alarm explodes through all three of them as the storm band begins to avalanche toward the Zonor. Guttural growls escaping them all, they thrust branches and palms forward, lashing their storming power into their shield and tethering it there before sending a wall of energy high up from its apex to prevent flight over their dome-shield’s expanse.

The storm band crashes into their shielding with a concussive BOOM, then draws back and hits it again, then again, each Zhilaan’whuur blow sending a frisson of potent energy down Vothe’s spine. But their shield holds, keeping the powerful storm band at bay.

The sky begins to clear, the dense lightning-spitting clouds parting and then dissipating. Three Zhilaan’whuur fly in, illuminated by the lightning dome, and Vothe immediately senses his brother’s energy.

“That’s Geth in the lead,”

he tells Trystan, every hackle rising. “I’m going to let him through.”

Trystan nods, and they cast a defensive barrier over themselves and Sithendrile before opening a hole in their shield.

Geth feels like a barely contained storm as he soars in and lands before them, his white-flashing eyes blazing with a violence Vothe has rarely witnessed in his thoughtful, measured brother’s expression. Geth’s gaze rakes over the mating mark on Trystan’s shoulder with a look of combative fury, his face twisting into an expression of open confusion over Trystan’s altered appearance before he takes in the blue-and-white lightning coursing over Vothe’s skin and the blue-and-gold power forking over Sithendrile’s.

He gives them both spearing looks of disgust. “What in all the hells have you done?”

“Hear us out, Geth,”

Vothe implores, grasping for every shred of their history of closeness. “Please, my brother—”

Geth snaps his teeth at Vothe. “Get. Out. Of. Our. Way,”

he hisses, his eyes flicking damningly toward Trystan.

“No, Geth,”

Vothe snarls back. “We can’t lose any more of the Natural World—Vogel’s already destroyed too much of it. If you bring your full power through here, you’ll destroy both the Zonor and the Dyoi Forest, and the Natural Matrix will fall. Its very tether on the weather will fall. It will be weather chaos. And even the Zhilann’whuur will not be able to rein it back in!”

“What are you talking about?”

Geth growls back, his eyes flashing with rage. “We control the weather! Vogel is at our doorstep! And you speak of protecting rivers and trees?”

“I speak of staving off the end of the entire Balance of Nature,”

Vothe throws back, incensed, desperate. “The old ways of warfare won’t work anymore. We might as well wage war on ourselves!”

“Gethindrile,”

Trystan tries, firm and unrelenting, “just hear us out.”

Geth shoots Trystan a murderous look. “Silence, Fae Crow!”

“Silence yourself, Geth,”

Sithendrile fires back, a circle of gold-and-blue lightning crackling up from the ground to surround her. “They are trying to tell you something vital.”

Geth glares at both her and Vothe, rage sheening his eyes. “You’re proving yourselves to be traitors to the entire East. Is that what you want? Am I supposed to take down my own family?”

His voice splinters, his power infused with an upsurge of tortured conflict. “If you don’t relent, I will wage war on you both!”

Trystan’s power rises, dwarfing even Sithendrile’s and Geth’s, Vothe’s hair prickling from the static spitting from his aura’s edges. “This is what Vogel wants,”

Trystan levels at Geth, his voice low and adamant. “This fracture between us—”

he motions between Geth and himself “—and between everyone who needs to stand together with the Natural World. It will be our undoing.”

Geth gives Trystan a look of blazing incredulity. “You have corrupted my brother. You have brought him and now my great-aunt down a path of ruin. I will kill you myself when we sweep through here in storm and fury.”

And then Geth takes flight, bolting into the air before pausing to hover just above them as he points a damning finger. “Vothendrile, you are my brother,”

he grits out, his voice breaking with emotion, “but I will mow you down in a heartbeat if you stand in my way of protecting the entire East. You have been fully warned.”

He glares at their great-aunt. “And you . . . you are dead to me.”

And then he flies off, leaving a trail of lightning in his wake.

They close the gap in their shield and watch him soar away, a tense quiet descending before Vothe’s great-aunt breaks it with a hissing stream of Wyvern epithets.

“Well, that went well,”

Vothe snarls, staring toward the top of the Vo Mountain Range.

“Your brother always was a stubborn fool,”

she growls.

Vothe levels a glare at her. “You were ready to incinerate my mate or bite his head off when you first landed.”

Sithendrile returns Vothe’s glare in spades. “Yes, and I’m the open-minded one of the family.”

She lets out a long, teeth-gritted growl. “Please tell me you two have a larger force on your side.”

Trystan brings one hand to his hip and rakes the other through his Vo-blue hair before leveling a hard look at her. “All of our potential allies are fighting with each other.”

Sithendrile looks to the heavens and curses again before visibly gathering herself, jaw set tight. Her eyes fix on Trystan once more, an edge of apology entering their fierce depths. “Welcome to the family, Dryad’kin.”

Pained emotion shivers through Trystan’s power before he reins it in, and Vothe is swept up in the almost unfightable urge to kiss away any doubt left in Trystan that his place is by Vothe’s side. Then Trystan gives Sithendrile a returning jaded look, coolly collected once more as his eyes flash power.

Sithendrile smirks as she holds Trystan’s gaze, her eyes crackling with obvious approval. “Well, then,”

she hisses in Wyvern as she lifts her hands and gathers gold-and-blue lighting around them, her fingers and wrists flashing bright with it, “we’ll just pray to Vo on High for a miracle. And, in the meantime, we’ll find out just how much power we can throw into our shielding.”