Chapter 1: The Flood

Fafnir bolted forward, his breath ragged. The world flashed white. A terrible crack of thunder followed, like the sky splitting in two.

Like the world ending.

The wind screamed in his ears. He ducked as it hurled a twig as large as himself over his head. The grasses writhed like snakes, striking the breath from his chest, stinging his hands. Rain drops crashed over his head.

Ahead, the body of a fallen hawthorn towered above him. Dragans clustered around it, devouring the trunk, their shifting eyes black wells of sorrow. Gritting his teeth, Fafnir leaped and caught hold of the fissures in the bark. The wet, rotting wood—wood that had once held a body pulsing with life—crumbled beneath his fingers. He climbed hurriedly, swung onto the top of the trunk, and dropped down on the other side.

Cold mud splashed in his face. Up to his chest in it, he pushed on, holding his chin high, until he stumbled out onto a crest just above the bank of the river.

His ears drew back.

It was as he’d feared.

The River Ifrati was white with froth, roaring like a stampede of deer. It had burst its banks by fourteen and a half martens and counting. Almost double its usual width. He had never seen it so—

A frenzy of sound intensified to his right. Turning, he paled.

A massive wave crashed down the bank, headed straight for him.

Breath hitching, Fafnir scrambled up the crest, grasping at blades of grass. His feet slipped and slid in the mud.

Rot.

He toppled. Water struck his back, and he fell into its depths.

Noise. All was noise, frenzied and chaotic. He clawed at the depths, but they beat back against him. His arms jerked over his head, a fire of agony seizing his joints as the water pulled and pulled.

He bit the inside of his mouth, the taste of copper competing with muddy water.

Then he was falling, sinking. The waters folded softly around him, cradling his form as they pulled him down into their depths.

No.

He couldn’t die. Not now; not like this. He was a faerie, with immortal blood surging in his veins.

He must live.

He tried to move his limbs, but they were heavy, as though the entire ocean pressed upon them. The roar of the tides sounded from above...he had sunk far, far down. The waters churned around his ears, whispering. Spots of black fogged his vision.

His back collided with a hard surface, and water rushed by him, but now, he was going up, not down. The pressure in his chest lightened, the blackness fading.

It was a miracle. It was—

Light dazzled his eyes as he burst out of the water. A large brown face looked back at him, eclipsed by the sun.

A dryad.

He was in her hands, draped across her cupped palms, her long, slender fingers forming a wall between him and the river.

His stomach flipped. Turning over, he crawled forward and retched up a lungful of water over the side of her hands.

“You are alive.” Her voice lilted like the murmuring of a stream, saturated with relief. “Hold on. I will put you down.”

Her palms tilted inwards, encasing him within as she lowered him to the ground. As her fingers flowered open, he stepped out.

“Aeonida, good faerie. My name is Esen. What is yours?”

Eyes the color of the summer sun looked back at him. Her face was round, the distance from her chin to her forehead the same as his entire height. The forest must look so different to her, from so high up.

Her acorn-brown bark was smooth with youth. Shiny green hazel leaves curled around her head, sprouting from her branches and in shoots off her shoulders. Likely, she had only just recently left the roots of her parents and begun to Walk the earth. Behind the kindness in her eyes, a deep sorrow looked back at him.

Fafnir stepped back, his chest constricting.

He had been rescued from death by a being who would soon die, all because he had dared to change the Ancient Law…

He had dared to try to be free.

He bowed slightly to the dryad. “I-I thank you, Esen.”

She frowned at him, tilting her head.

His fault.

This was all his fault.

Spinning on his heels, he walked away. He soon found himself running, splashing through puddles of mud.

The rain had stopped. Suckling sounds surrounded him—the sounds of the soil pulling the water into itself.

It had been a thousand years since he changed the law. All that time spent trying to perfect himself, to mend the pain, to reach new heights of discipline…

It had all been a lie.

The forest had been dying around him all that time.

A bramble snagged him in the chest, and he tumbled headlong into a clump of ferns. Cursing, he struggled upright; his head pounded and pounded.

This time, the forest had survived, but only because enough Rooted Ones remained to pull the water up through their roots. But if the faeries continued to refuse the dryads and leave them to die off entirely…

When another flood came, the entire forest would be destroyed.

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To be continued in Chapter 2: The Sorrow of the Forest!