The stances of the two young women brim with immovable defiance as Vestylle holds her emerald-glowing rune stylus aloft and Alder keeps her Silver Birch branch elevated, both stylus and branch pressed to the verdant shield’s inner surface, the women’s arms vibrating with magical tension. Vestylle’s emerald-patterned skin and Alder’s forest green glimmer have miraculously held on to their hues amidst the grotesquely grayed world.

Mage power is not completely invincible after all, Wynter considers.

Pressure tightens around Wynter’s skull, the Zalyn’or necklace clearly wanting to blot out the rebellious thought. Which makes that rebellious, surviving shard of Wynter’s free will hold on to it even tighter.

Gray slashes across Wynter’s vision as she meets the frightened, silver gaze of her Alfsigr soldier-friend Ysilldir, the young Amaz warrior stripped of her weapons and down on her knees as well, ringed by soldiers, arrows aimed at her head. Like Wynter, Shadow-vomit sullies the front of her tunic, her pale skin veined with gray.

A heartbreakingly color-stripped azure finch lands on Wynter’s shoulder, and she stills as the small bird sets its feathery head against her neck.

Monstrous warning fills Wynter’s mind—a woman of ice and hate on a broken dragon...

Wynter’s head jerks up just as Valasca Xanthrir rushes around a Shadow-tree trunk halfway across Cyme’s Central Plaza. Young Sylmire trails her, a sobbing gray-hued child in the Alfsigr teen’s arms. There’s a charged rune blade in one of Valasca’s pewter-tinted hands, its hilt haloed with Smaragdalfar rune glow.

“Wynter!” Valasca calls out as she spots her, breaking into a faster sprint.

Wynter raises a frantic palm. “Run! She’s coming!”

The giant Shadow tree beside Valasca abruptly contracts downward. Valasca skids to a halt as branches slam down around her and solidify into a cage. Smaller branches dart out, coiling and slapping around Valasca, her blades wrested away, her hands swiftly bound.

“Val!” Freyja shouts as she springs forward, seeming as if she might leap through the translucent green shield. Young Sylmire stumbles backward from the branch cage, staring at Valasca in abject horror as the little girl in her arms shrieks for her mother.

“Stay shielded!” Valasca bellows at Freyja before fixing her fierce pewter stare on Sylmire. “Go!” she snarls at the teen.

The teen sprints to the shield, where both she and the screaming child are hauled through by Freyja just as Fallon Bane emerges from the plaza’s misty Shadow forest on the back of a broken dragon. Fog swirls around Fallon’s commanding form, an army of black-clad Mages also on dragonback emerging from the mist behind her.

As Fallon closes in through the mist, the details of her military uniform sharpen—the white bird on black, five silver stripes marking her uniform’s edges, one thick silver Mage Commander stripe below them.