The visions gain clarity, images that follow the Western Realm’s network of forests down through leagues of ocean plant life and onto the shore of a realm that lies across a great sea. The vision swoops up from the ground into the sky, the landmass now viewed from high above, as if seen through the minds of birds, this unknown continent seeming bigger than both the Eastern and Western Realms put together.

Tree-memories light.

Cities and towns teeming with Kelts and surrounded by verdant forest and abundant life. The visions shift, and a knotty Sea Pine beside a seashore unfurls in my mind, the unfamiliar tree’s needles gleaming gold instead of Western Realm green. The golden tree looks over a deserted seashore, its sand a burnished brass in the prestorm light, a foamy, steel tide rushing in.

A chill wind blows as a gray, spiraling wand washes up onto the shore and a young man strides into view. The lanky, brown-haired Kelt spots the wand, lowers himself, and grasps it, lifting it from the pulsing surf. A helix of dark smoke curls from its tip.

Revulsion rips through me as a sense of foreboding builds, the young man’s eyes riveted to the Wand. I want to leap from the golden tree, run to him, and wrest the Wand from his hand. To warn him that he’s not picking up some harmless branch.

He’s picking up an invading force.

Lightning flashes across the ocean and the scene blinks out of sight to be replaced by scene after horrifying scene. The Wand in the hand of a Keltish king with glowing gray eyes astride a multi-eyed horse. An army of gray-eyed Keltish Shadow soldiers massing around the king as they advance on a city.

Death everywhere.

Screaming children and families. Slaughtered animals. Visions of the fall of the forests and the mutilation of the wilds as the Shadow’s demon tide rolls in like a toxic fog and collapses the living world. Destroys the farms. Poisons the water. Corrupts the air.

I’m accosted by images of famine as food runs out and every element turns to Shadow. Great floods of Void water. Great storms of Void wind, dark lightning pulsing through it. Void fire consuming everything in its path and tunneling down to cause great rifts in Erthia, only a few Kelts managing to escape in ships, bound for the Western Realm.

Finally, as the last of the ships depart, the great Nothing descends.

A charred landscape cools to gray. Blackened trees hold up smoking branches, as if in supplication, toward an ashen sky.

Horror bears down on my mind.

Because I know, deep within me, that this is not just a vision of what happened in some distant realm beyond the sea—it’s a foreshadowing of what is coming for the Western and Eastern Realms.