Chapter Five

Mangrove Bond

Marina Song Spinner

Salish Ocean, Salishen Isles, Noilaan

Xishlon night

Marina steels herself, battling back the undertow of horror as she takes in Vogel’s incoming wall of Shadow sea. Her arms arc through the salty water in rapid, rhythmic strokes, her sealskin tied firmly around her shoulders, as she and Gareth swim toward the Vu Trin navy’s ships moving toward the dark mass. Gareth’s mangrove root is clenched in his teeth, both of them ready to join with the Vu Trin to do battle with the Shadow sea. Above them, the purple moon has morphed to gray, its loving light snuffed out.

A sense of the mangroves trying to draw her back to them tugs at Marina’s newly forming energy lines, the strange feeling like phantom tethers struggling to reel her in.

Thrown by the sensation, Marina resists the mangroves’ pull as her thoughts storm.

Vogel’s mass of corruption got here so quickly, the incoming tidal wave of gray chaos roaring straight toward Southern Noilaan’s translucent dome-shield. Marina’s thoughts careen to her people. The last time she was allowed in their territory, there was talk of all of them fleeing East to escape the Shadow sea’s killing path.

Panic grips hold.

Where are they? Were they overtaken by the Shadow sea?

She was shunned by her people when she professed her love for Gareth and refused to forsake him, but even so, nearly everyone she loves was potentially in the path of that Shadow sea.

“Our Selkie’kin,”

Marina cries out to Gareth as they swim, her gills so tense with fear she’s unable to get the words out clearly. But she can tell, by the stark look Gareth flashes toward her, that he understands.

Marina’s stream of dread turns into a swifter current of alarm as the incoming Shadow tide comes to a roaring halt before Noilaan’s shield. A net of Shadow flows up and over the huge dome-shield, and Marina and Gareth slow, treading water, as the Shadow net dims the world to a darker shade of steel and Gareth takes his mangrove root in hand.

“Gareth,”

Marina manages, gills flaring, “the Noi runes on the East’s shield . . . they won’t be strong enough to hold back the Shadow. The Mage, Alaric—he told of its rune-destroying abilities.”

“Is anything strong enough to hold it back?”

he presses.

She nods. “Alaric and the Selkie Nerissa went to a Shadow-destroyed continent in the West. They read the journals of a Death Fae who witnessed the Shadow’s destruction there and learned that Varg magic can fight against Shadow. And—”

her eyes widen with the spark of an idea “—so can Dryad magic.”

Marina’s attention is snagged once more by the mangrove’s pull, her new lines of energy crackling to brighter life throughout her body. Gareth’s head jerks toward the mangroves. “Do you feel that?” he asks.

“They’re pulling on the lines forming in me,”

she affirms, her gills ruffling as she meets his stare. “The Mage affinity lines I gained when we joined our tides and merged our powers.”

Gareth’s ocean green eyes narrow on hers. “I think the mangroves are trying to tell us something, and I think we should follow their pull. When I’m close to the center of the grove, my magic amplifies. If I send out magic from there, my Dryad power might be strong enough to strengthen Noilaan’s shielding.”

Exchanging a blazing look of agreement, they launch themselves back toward the purple saltwater trees at a fast stroke.

Darting underwater, they glide through the mangroves’ arcing roots and slow before the huge roots of the grove’s central, largest tree. The pull of the tree on Marina’s new lines of energy tingles under her skin and through her hands, urging her closer. Surrendering to the pull, they both press their palms to one of the tree’s roots.

All the power of the grove swoops in around them in a whirling tide, and the scene around Marina cuts out as both she and Gareth are drawn into the purple-shimmering darkness of the huge mangrove trunk’s center.

They reach for each other at the same time, pulling each other into a protective embrace as Marina is filled with a vision of a huge tree made of prismatic starlight and covered in ethereal birds linking to them, its stunningly potent energy intimately connected to the mangroves, feeding Life and Balance into them through a continent-spanning network of roots.

The trees of the continent all connected.

The huge tree’s name—III—resonating through her mind.

But then, nightmare images assault Marina—scenes of Erthia’s every tree being consumed by a Shadow storm, the gray-roiling skies siphoning up the Natural World’s land power to rain poison down on Erthia’s previously pure, Life-giving Waters, choking the life and color out of them.

Marina lets out a strangled cry as she’s overcome by a fuller sense of how the land and Ocean are connected in their vulnerability.

The visions of Erthia’s destruction dissipate, and a new vision emerges—the suspended, pulsing image of a spiraling Wand-Stylus glowing with prismatic light. The name of this magical tool reverberates through her mind.

Verdyllion.

Urgency shivers through Marina, the lines of energy in her hand pulling toward the Wand-Stylus, the sense of an invitation to join with the power of the Forest through the Verdyllion burbling up.

“I will help you fight the Shadow power,”

Marina murmurs to the Verdyllion, and she’s instantly swept up in an escalating sense of rightness as she reaches out at the same time Gareth does, and they bring their hands to the Wand-Stylus.

The image of the Verdyllion flares into rays of chromatic light, sending both Marina and Gareth spiraling down through the Great Tree’s dark center. They grab hold of each other, another flash of color bursting through both Marina’s sight and lines as color and sound pour back into the world and the mangrove forest around her snaps back into clarity.

Her gills and lungs struggling to pull in an even breath, Marina finds herself wrapped around Gareth and just above the grove’s sloshing waterline, her back to the huge mangrove’s trunk. He draws slightly back from her, astonishment rippling through Marina as she blinks at an equally astonished Gareth, amazed by his transformation.

There’s a deeper forest green hue and shimmer to his skin, a purple mangrove branching pattern overlaying it, his previously naked form now garbed with purple armor made from fused mangrove leaves. She reaches up to run her fingers over the Dryad Fae points now gracing both of Gareth’s ears, noting the broader streaks of Selkie-silver and a new streak of mangrove-purple that now color his tousled black hair.

Marina glances down and is amazed to find herself garbed in the same armor, her sealskin secure around her shoulders, an identical deep purple pattern branching over her own dark blue skin. A sting crackles against her palm, and her gaze slides to it. Astonishment wells as she takes in the image imprinted there of the Great Tree from the vision she had in the mangrove, a sense of Erthia’s entire Forest network joining to her sense of Erthia’s Waters.

Marina holds her palm up to Gareth, and he responds by raising his identically marked palm. “I saw the Great Tree in a vision,”

he hastily imparts.

“I saw it too—”

Marina’s words break off as something slick slides around her arm and gently hugs her. She looks down to find it’s an octopus tentacle, a prism of hues rippling over the color-shifter’s hide. Other tentacles embrace her calf, her waist, and the water around them lights up with swirls of the octopuses’ glowing color as Marina is hit by a palpable wave of the creatures’ joyous affection.

One tentacle tip twirls gently around her finger, the octopuses’ energy suddenly rippling through Marina’s newfound lines in a rush of prismatic light as their magic connects not only with her but with the energy of the surrounding mangrove forest.

My kindred ones, Marina thinks, as a multitude of bonds to these beautiful, bioluminescent creatures lock into place.

A pang of affection tightens Marina’s heart as Salish Electric Eels swim in to join the octopuses, their dark purple bodies pulsing with multicolored lightning. Bioluminescent cat sharks, dragonfish, firefly squid and jellyfish emerge into view, all of them pulsing chromatic light through the water, as if summoned there by their own mangrove call.

“The Great Tree,”

Marina shakily says to Gareth as her bond to her octopuses swells in her breast, “it bound me to both the mangroves and all these kindreds.”

Urgency overtakes Gareth’s expression. “I feel a connection to an incoming kindred. Marina, it’s strong—”

Above them, the dome-shield’s Noi runes flash out rays of sapphire, cutting off Gareth as they both startle. They jerk their heads up, gray light rippling through the dome’s runes.

Marina’s octopuses retreat toward the Ocean floor, and she swims out of the grove with Gareth just as the Eastern Realm’s protective dome blinks out of being.

Marina’s gills flare in a hard gasp as the runes marking every runic vessel and every runic supported structure on the heavily populated distant coast go dark.

A chorus of screams rises and Marina stiffens in horror. She grabs Gareth’s slick arm as every runic airship falls and every rune-supported structure collapses, their great, shuddering crashes sending shock waves through the water.

An earsplitting CRACK sounds to the south, followed by a rumbling roar.

A surge of shock tightens Marina’s gills as a churning barrier of storm rises, spitting white lightning.

“The Sylphan Fae,”

Gareth says, “they’re trying to wall off the Shadow sea.”

Another Ocean-jostling BOOM streaks pain through Marina’s sensitive ears as the Shadow sea crashes into the Sylphan wall of storm. The world flashes bright white then dark gray as the Sylphan stormwall is rapidly consumed by the Shadow sea.

The Vu Trin naval ships launch themselves backward in a swirl of Fae wind power, rapidly retreating toward Marina and Gareth as the Shadow sea slowly advances.

Marina climbs onto a broad root with Gareth, and he breaks off and readies a mangrove root at the same moment that a winged swarm blasts out of the incoming wall of Shadow sea, soaring toward the retreating Vu Trin vessels.

“What is this evil?”

Marina growls, terrified for her kindreds, for the mangroves, for every living thing in the path of this advancing abomination, the feral instinct to fight rising.

The leading winged beast soars toward the ship closest to Marina and Gareth, easily dodging Vu Trin arrows and bolts of power.

Marina flicks out her blue claws and readies her sharpening teeth as she surveys the beast. It’s the size and shape of a man, with a gray body and bat-like wings. It swoops toward them before arcing back toward the nearest ship, and Marina gets a glimpse of the creature’s four bulbous, gray eyes, bony ridged head, two telescoping mouths, and six insectile limbs. It darts toward the side of the ship and hovers there, soon joined by its swarm, their wings beating the air. Long, black tongues flick out of their mouths, along with a spray of what looks like Shadow liquid, the gray spray splashing against the ship from all directions.

The ship explodes in an inferno of silvery fire, its wood seeming to melt instantaneously.

“Holy gods, Marina,”

Gareth rasps out as disbelief strikes through Marina, all of the Vu Trin on that ship, murdered.

Her emotions slip into chaos.

If these Shadow-sea demons can take down an entire naval ship so quickly, then she and Gareth, her octopus kindreds, and the mangroves . . . as well as all of Southern Noilaan . . . none of them stand a chance . . .

“The kindred I sensed,”

Gareth chokes out, “it’s still coming toward me . . . its energy is flowing around my lines.”

A huge gray whale suddenly breaches the water’s surface nearby, and Marina’s eyes widen, the whale’s trajectory an arrow straight toward them. Before Marina or Gareth can get a word out, several other whales—a whole pod of them—surface in dramatic sprays and glide toward the mangrove forest.

Static sizzles through Marina’s mating bond to Gareth, and she’s filled with the overwhelming sense of the pod’s energy clicking into Gareth’s lines like a lock engaging, as strong as Erthia’s axis.

The portentous realization hits—these are Gareth’s kindred.

Incredulity leaps through their bond as Gareth dives into the water and launches himself toward the lead whale, the gigantic kindred sliding through the waves to reach him as another Vu Trin ship explodes.

The whale and Gareth make contact, and he slides aboard his kindred’s back then turns to Marina, his mangrove root in hand.

“Go!”

she calls to him, sensing this kindred bond fused to Gareth and Gareth alone, the link clearly enabling him to withstand the whales’ monumental stores of power, which she can feel spitting static through the very air.

Stores of electric power that no whale should have . . .

What are they? Marina marvels as Gareth and his pod of whales turn and start for the swarm of Shadow demons and the incoming Shadow sea in the distance, lightning crackling to life all over the whales’ skin.

Marina’s gills flare with awe as realization detonates through her.

Storm Whales.

The Great Blessed Ones of her people’s religious fables, fated to return when the Great Unbalancing comes for Erthia’s Life-giving Waters.

Heart in her throat, Marina watches as Gareth lifts his mangrove root, his body now covered in crackling lightning. An explosion of lightning blasts from Gareth’s root at the same time that the whales shoot great bolts of it from their blowholes, the bolts of power forking toward Vogel’s Shadow demons.

The demons explode in bursts of starlight white, and Marina’s heart thunders as Gareth and his pod dive underwater. They soon resurface past the Vu Trin naval ships and blast out a huge wall of crackling lightning toward Vogel’s Shadow sea.

The lightning wall collides with the Shadow sea’s leading edge in a seismic CRACK.

The Shadow sea skids backward as a sheet of storm clouds shot through with lightning rises before it, rapidly forming a dome that encases a huge expanse of Ocean and the entirety of Southern Noilaan.

Walling out the Shadow sea.

Gareth and the entire pod of whales dive underwater, disappearing beneath the waves. Marina waits, pulse pounding, knowing she’s witnessing a myth come to life. That the foretold fight against the Great Unbalancing is here.

Now.

Marina absently grips the slim mangrove root under the water beside her, and it breaks off in her hand. Her eyes snap toward it as she’s flooded by a sense of the mangroves flowing their collective power into her via the root, which feels so alive . . . as if, through her lines, it maintains its living connection to the trees. As if she’s become an extension of the grove itself.

Show me what to do, she implores the mangroves, opening herself up to them like she opens herself up to her beloved Ocean’s tides.

Her octopuses, some jellyfish, and a whole riot of other bioluminescent animals are suddenly swimming around her in urgent swirls, prisms of color pulsing over their surfaces.

Astonishment streaks through Marina as all her color-shifting octopuses and other luminous creatures morph to a glowing mangrove purple.

Marina can feel the mangroves’ underwater roots drawing energy from the burst of color. They take on a violet glow, newly luminous with magic, the sea surrounding them illuminated by the bright purple light.

Power crackles through Marina’s lines toward the living root in her hand, the mangroves’ elemental energy coursing through it.

I can draw on my kindreds’ light power, Marina realizes in a shocked rush. Following the mangroves’ pull on her lines, she thrusts her root toward the sky.

Beams of purple light burst from it, raying up and over the grove’s canopy to form a translucent purple dome, like the inside of a jellyfish’s mantle, that soon encases the entire mangrove forest.

Euphoria rising, Marina glances at her bioluminescent allies—Ocean life and land life united against the Shadow.

I’m a bridge, Marina realizes in a world-upending wave. Linking the light power of the Ocean to Land power. Just like Gareth is a bridge from Forest to Water.

A conch shell horn sounds, powerfully loud, and Marina’s gaze jerks toward it, the sound coming from the surviving Vu Trin naval ships.

Before she can react to the distant figures leaping from the water to scale their way onto the ships, tethers of silvery power fly toward her from the direction of the vessels and slap around her wrists, ankles, and waist.

Marina snarls in protest as her living mangrove root falls from her hand and she’s yanked into the Ocean, then sped away from her octopuses toward the ship, streaming past the two ships that were reduced to scattered, flaming debris. Her invisible bindings tighten, and a breath is forced from her gills as she’s yanked into the air, flown through the sky in an arc then thrown down onto a surviving ship’s black-lacquered deck.

She doesn’t quite believe the sight she’s met with.

Selkie soldiers in blue-shell armor surround her, deadly cone-snail spears raised and fury in their eyes as they circle Marina’s bound form.