Foreboding swells in Wynter as she realizes that some of these birds are from the Agolith Desert, their normally vivid coloration torn away. Red desert hawks rendered to shades of gray. Cactus wrens and gilded flicker birds stripped of their gold. Sand-colored eagles with eyes that normally glow saffron, now pewter with eyes of white fire.

What’s been done to you?

The birds crowd in, the ones in the forefront pressing tilted heads to Wynter. Her empathic heart tightens from their rush of love—love that she returns a thousandfold. She touches her hands to feathers and closes her eyes.

The birds’ collective warning hits Wynter like a thousand bolts, her body shuddering from the onslaught.

SHADOW, SHADOW, SHADOW!

Beloved ones! Wynter counters, hurling the desperate, empathic thought out through the Zalyn’or’s strangling grip.

The birds still, an almost reverent silence overtaking the plaza and Wynter draws on that silence for courage.

My loved ones, she sends out even as pain strafes her skull, her thoughts threatening to collapse into oblivion if she waits a moment longer. Fly forth and pierce the Shadow! Find Naga the Unbroken and appeal for aid!

The Zalyn’or clamps down and Wynter wheezes, her empathic thoughts cut off as the birds lift as one. Their wingbeats are a storm, a roar against Wynter’s ears as they rise and rise then soar straight through the dome. The Shadow coating the dome briefly fragments, the Amaz battle cry rising as Wynter gapes up at what she’s wrought, heart hammering.

A sudden wave of hate slashes through her mind.

She stiffens, wings shivering, swept up in the feeling that she’s a butterfly caught at the end of a pointed stick. The plaza blinks out of sight, replaced by a vision of Shadow forest—undulating tree trunks and limbs of dark smoke tendriling upward from charred ground.

Thrust into panicked disorientation, Wynter glances frantically around.

Marcus Vogel strides toward her through the trees, a gray wand trailing Shadow in his hand. Wynter recoils, her trembling intensifying as Vogel fixes his pale green eyes on her.

Icaral, he says.

The Zalyn’or necklace tightens and Wynter’s head arches back, a strangled cry torn from her throat. She shudders as she’s swept up in a new, overpowering Zalyn’or yearning, the old yearning to be purely Alfsigr stripped away. Yes, she still wishes with everything in her for her demonic wings to be torn from her back. But there’s a staggeringly fierce, new longing in her now—to have black hair, glimmering green skin, and black clothing. And to follow the one true path. Not the path of the Alfsigr faith at all, but the Mage religion.

The only path to purity and righteousness.

The only path to salvation.

Realization hits Wynter like a tide.

I’m reading him. I’m somehow reading Vogel through the Zalyn’or.

Galvanized, she manages a steadying breath, summons her courage and closes her eyes.