Chapter Twelve Shadow Dragon Rising

Chapter Twelve Shadow Dragon Rising

Elloren Guryev

Zhilaan Forest

I’m wrapped around Yvan, lying on the mossy soil of the Zhilaan Forest’s western edge, our limbs entangled. In his sleep,

Yvan’s fire flows through mine with steady force, more intimately than I could have ever imagined, his wing draped over my

shoulder, his strong arms embracing me.

His love for me burning bright through our merged fire power.

I glance at the Wyvernbond mark emblazoned on the inner edge of my shoulder. It burns violet bright against the night, the

Forest’s approving affection swirling through it.

Love swelling in my breast, my gaze slides over Yvan, tracing his handsome face, his normally serious angular features softened

by sleep. He put his pants back on at some point, and his crimson hair is tousled charmingly around his dark horns, his chest

rising and falling against mine, his heartbeat reassuringly strong, the Varg iron-protection rune marked in the center of

his chest glowing emerald bright.

My smile wavers, and tears warm my eyes, the real world intruding on my idyllic moment. The battle with the Magedom looms

tomorrow eve. I slide a protective arm around Yvan, wanting to hold on to this precious, suspended moment.

Yvan smiles slightly in response to my caress, his eyelids fluttering in sleep as he nestles me closer. My heart twists with

a surge of feeling for him, just as a knot of glowing milk white flowers past him in the distance snag my attention.

Norfure blossoms.

My heartbeat quickens.

The essential ingredient in Norfure tincture, one of the only formulations able to cure the vicious Red Grippe, and desperately needed by the refugees streaming into the East. I look past the small knot of blossoms and can just make out a larger patch of hazy glowing white. My pulse jumps into an even faster rhythm. Norfure blossoms are a touchy night-blooming flower, exceedingly rare and difficult to grow in captivity.

And there just might be enough here to cure hundreds of people.

I gently disentangle myself from Yvan.

“Elloren,” he murmurs, his voice thick with sleep, eyes half opening. His gaze zeroes in on my Wyvernbond mark, glowing as

bright as the violet fire overtaking his eyes.

“I’ve spotted Norfure flowers,” I tell him as I pull on my melded-leaf garb. “I think there’s a larger patch of blossoms just

ahead. They’re difficult to spot during the day because they curl into themselves.”

“Stay close,” he urges.

“I will,” I promise, pointedly lifting my living branch and giving Yvan a significant look as I sheathe it at my side. He

nods, caressing me with an encircling rush of heat before he closes his eyes once more.

Darkness washes over the world, save for the green glimmer of my skin, my Wyvernbond mark, horde mark, and the edges of a

few runes, which prove to be enough to illuminate the area surrounding me.

I step around brush and move toward the blossoms’ dim white glow, the air chilly, several Winter Dark Fireflies zooming in

to encircle me in their constellation of butter yellow light.

I can sense these autumn-loving fireflies’ activity throughout the Forest, the other species of fireflies already settled

in for the coming winter, burrowed underground or nestled under tree bark, only these fiery ones able to withstand autumn’s

cooling temperatures.

I huff out an elated breath as the Norfure patch comes into sharper view, anticipation sparking, a larger carpet of the blossoms

spread out before me than I had anticipated.

Enough to make thousands of vials of medicine.

A low animal groan sounds somewhere farther ahead, drawing my focus, a sense of the Zhilaan Forest’s call to the sound filling

the air.

Taking hold of the branch sheathed at my side, I make a mental note of the Norfure flowers’ location before pushing forward through a dense thicket. I emerge in a small clearing beside a sizable bog, the fireflies swirling out to whirl over the wetland and a deep-purple bull moose that looks to be struggling to free himself from the bog’s dense mud, the rear half of his body submerged.

The large animal’s eyes meet mine, a pleading fear in them that sets my Dryad heart lurching into a faster rhythm.

“I’ll help you,” I vow, raising my branch hand. I murmur the Dryadin words drawn from Oaklyyn’s spell-link rune and thrust

my branch forward.

A thick vine bursts from the branch’s tip and bolts past the moose before lashing around one of the huge Zhilaan Cypress trees

edging the bog. The vine slingshots around the cypress’s slender trunk then whips around the moose’s body, creating a magic-wrought

pulley.

“Draw him out,” I murmur in Dryadin, digging my heels into the soil. I pull in a deep breath, keeping my wand aloft as I’m

filled with a sense of the Zhilaan Forest’s elemental force rippling in to work with me. The vine tethered to my branch draws

back into its tip with mighty power, snapping tight around the distant trunk and yanking the moose forward.

The bog groans, a pop of released suction snapping through the air as the moose springs free of the mud and shambles onto

denser soil. Euphoric triumph leaps in my breast as the huge creature pauses and sets its gaze on me, a rush of palpable gratitude

overtaking me before the moose lollops away. I watch him go, expecting the tension shivering on the Forest air to evaporate.

But it lingers.

Strengthens.

Growing uneasy, I turn to make my way back to Yvan as a raven I recognize lights on a nearby branch—Ariel’s raven.

“Hello there,” I say, then glance around for Ariel.

“Elloren.”

I turn and find Yvan behind me, his fire contained, a concerning tension in his voice, his eyes cooled to green.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, gripping my branch, the tension on the Forest’s air turning so pungent I can scent its pine-sharp unease.

“I don’t know,” Yvan says, glancing around at the trees as Ariel’s raven takes flight, soaring toward the West. “Something’s...

off ,” he says, an odd tightness to his voice.

“I’m picking up a sense of warning and confusion,” I tell him, “coming from the Forest.”

“We should take to the air,” he offers. “And see what’s spooking the trees. If we need to, we can alert everyone.”

I nod and step toward him, then throw my arms around his neck, his power disquietingly constrained. Before I can comment on

it, he throws down his powerful wings, and we shoot into the air, his chest Wyvern hot against mine.

The Forest’s aura of tension abruptly surges to ballistic heights— Danger! Danger! Danger! riding on the air.

“There’s an incoming threat,” I warn Yvan as we soar southwest, my gaze darting everywhere for some sign of it. “The Forest’s

sense of danger... it just exploded into what feels like panic .”

“I can read it too,” he grimly agrees.

We approach the western edge of the Zhilaan Mountain Range and soar out of the Forest and over its peaks, the Shadow- and

storm-decimated land just beyond Zhilaan’s dome-shield a punch to the gut.

The East’s Unbalanced storms have moved southward, and I can just make out Vogel’s huge stormwall looming in the distant West.

Unnaturally deep thunder rumbles through the gigantic band, curling black lightning crackling through it. But there’s no sign

of Vogel’s forces.

So, what is the Zhilaan Forest trying to warn us about?

Yvan lands on a broad, stony ledge recessed between two peaks, a panoramic view surrounding us of both the Zhilaan to the

East and the Shadowed lands to the West. He sets me down, and it takes me a moment to fully find my balance, an odd tension

pulling at our Wyvernbond.

“Our bond,” I say. “It’s yanking us back toward the Zhilaan Forest.”

“I feel it too,” he says, seeming equally thrown as he peers in the direction from which we came. “It’s as if the Forest holds

our bond instead of us.” He sets his gaze back on me. “Are you armed?”

I hold up the branch in my hand. “I am.”

“Do you have any other weapons?” he presses.

“No,” I say, confused. “Why?”

Yvan darts forward in a blur, wrests the branch from my hand and hurls it away. Before I can fully register my shock, he pulls

swiftly back, a dark wand suddenly in his hand. He thrusts it toward me.

Confusion explodes into alarm as vines shoot from his wand’s tip and slap around my wrists and ankles, binding them tight and yanking me to the ground, my back colliding painfully with stone. Yvan’s eyes erupt into silver flame, his fire aura releasing from his tight hold on it.

A shock of terror lances through me as a dark Void tree punches into the back of my mind, an aura of steel-bright flame burning

against my rootlines. I’ve felt this fire before. In a horrific binding kiss...

My horror turns cataclysmic as Ariel’s raven lights on Yvan’s shoulder and morphs into a Shadow-rune-marked raven with multiple

eyes. Yvan’s silver-burning eyes narrow on me as he draws a rune-marked stone from his tunic’s pocket, murmurs a spell...

and his glamour drops away.

Revealing Vogel’s green-glimmering, black-haired, shockingly shirtless form.

The Shadow Wand is gripped in his hand, dark wings fanning out from his back and black horns rising from his head, unfamiliar Shadow fastlines marking his hands and wrists.

The world-upending truth slams through me with planetary force.

“You’re an Icaral ,” I gasp.

Vogel hisses and lunges for me, the multi-eyed raven winging away as he falls on me. Dark-clawed fingers slap onto the stone

beside my arms as he bares sharpened teeth and snaps them close to my face.

“I’m a Mage ,” he snarls. “Not an Icaral demon. And my true Black Witch is going to freeze this winged corruption out of me .”

My heart thunders against my ribs, the whole Forest echoing my overwhelming alarm.

He’s mad. He’s completely and utterly mad.

Straddling me, Vogel leers at my Wyvernbond mark before he bares elongating teeth and grabs cruel hold of my jaw. “I’m going

to draw your power out of you, Fae whore ,” he growls, eyes burning, “and siphon it all into my Black Witch. And then the Magedom’s prophesied Black Witch will rise and your cursed Fae Wilds and Icaral beast will fall !”

I gape at him in horror as the shattering comprehension slams down.

Yvan was never the Icaral of Prophecy.

Vogel is.

And Fallon isn’t the Black Witch, no matter how much Vogel wants to try to turn her into one.

I am.

It all falls into horrifying place—the Void tree image that assaulted my mind when I first met Vogel, the two of us on a Forest-prophesied collision course from that very first moment onward. My eyes flick toward the Wand in his hand—the Shadow counterforce to the Verdyllion. The Wand that took down III.

Panic rising, I grit my teeth and summon every ounce of magical aura in my Wyvernbond, horde bond, and rootlines. Letting

loose a rage-filled scream, I blast my aura out toward Yvan and my entire horde.

Vogel snarls and flicks the Shadow Wand’s tip forward. A gag flies around my mouth just as I’m hit by the sudden, burning

sense of not only Yvan’s fire scalding through our bond, but my entire horde’s fire blasting toward me, a blaze of returning

alarm in it.

“Oh, I can feel their fire too,” Vogel sneers with a vicious grin as he rises and steps away from me, drawing his wings in

tight behind his back. He grabs hold of a military tunic lying on a boulder beside us and throws it on, hiding his wings,

before thrusting his hand into the tunic’s pocket. Withdrawing it, he drops a rune-marked stone to the ground.

A line of rotating Shadow runes fly up from the stone then arc down to form a portal arch, its interior rippling silvery black.

Holy Ancient One, no. I gasp, my alarm sliding into primal horror.

I blast urgency through my bonds once more, Yvan’s fire blazing searing-hot through our Wyvernbond as he bursts into view

in the distance, soaring toward us, my entire horde flying behind him, including Raz’zor’s pale dragon form. Yvan’s full storm

of fire power is zeroed in on Vogel, a feral rage slashing through it.

Vogel grabs hold of my bindings and yanks me up as I struggle violently against them to no avail, a vicious smile on his lips

as the multi-eyed raven lands on his shoulder.

“Elloren!” Yvan snarls, speeding toward me and lifting a violet-glowing hand as Vogel hurls me at the portal.

“Vogel’s the Icaral of Prophecy and I’m the Black Witch!” I struggle to scream out against my gag, my words muffled into incoherence

as Yvan and my horde release their fire, the portal’s Shadow power closes in around me and I’m swallowed up by Vogel’s silvery

Void.