The Dryad soldiers carry me through the portal into a predawn forest, the surrounding leaves shifting from steely black to a paler gray in my Shadow vision. Despite their altered color, the enormous trees have the distinctive crenelated bark I’d recognize anywhere.

Ironwood.

They loom over me, their hulking forms struck by furious recognition—Black Witch!

Loathing bears down with suffocating weight as their elemental force rushes in around my corrupted affinity lines.

Vogel’s venom unfolds. My lines tense of their own accord and I shudder, my Shadowfire aura blasting out at the Forest so violently, its catapulted force has me gasping. The energy of the mammoth trees gives a collective recoil, a frisson of horror rippling through them that’s so potent the air seems to waver from it.

The Fae steal an alarmed glance at the Forest canopy before their gazes swing to me, clearly reading the Forest’s punch of emotion. Flora locks eyes with Pine, her lips trembling as she says something impassioned to him in their leafy tongue. Pine knifes a murderous glare at me, his green face twisting with a look of outrage. “III is going to destroy you, demon witch,” he seethes, “before you can make one move toward our Forest.”

Before I can wonder who this Three is who is about to end me, the woods open up and I’m carried into a starlit clearing. A frisson of awe races down my spine.

An Ironwood tree stands in the middle of the clearing, towering above all the others.

It’s taller than the Valgard Cathedral and shrouded in gauzy green mist, its mammoth branches rising to hold up the predawn sky. I can feel the tree’s focus turning with planetary force as it fixes its attention on me.

A great, magical tide breaks from the tree and crashes forward, my eyes blown wide-open as its cataclysmal power sweeps into me, rushing around my lines with what feels like an incoming tidal wave of all the elemental magic in the world.

Vogel rears up with heightened ferocity.

His gray magic blasts around my lines with unbearable force, clawing in. I throw my head back and cry out, afraid I’ll be torn clear apart, as my lines stretch toward the tree’s incredible pull and Vogel pulls in turn. The realization hits me—

Three is III of myth. Descendant of the Sacred Source Tree from all the religions I read about in Jules Kristian’s books. The Mages’ Source Tree. Everyone’s Source Tree. The heartbeat of the Forest, holding the power of all the elements combined.

Set against me.

III’s power is like a storm with no end as it slams into me with wave after wave of typhoon-force magic. Vogel’s power flattens against it like a sapling bent to the wind, granting me some slim agency over my besieged body as Vogel bucks against the elemental onslaught.