They feel it before the messengers arrive.
In the deep groves of the Sylvan Courts, where trees speak in rustle and root, the dryads lift their faces from still pools. War stirs the wind wrong. The balance of the sky is shifting. One of the elder oaks weeps sap—amber tears for the blood yet to spill.
The Grove-Mother watches in silence, the leaf-crown upon her brow wilting at its edges. She kneels beside the river, fingers brushing the water like she’s waking an old friend. “The flame-bearers have forgotten,” she says, voice like moss and memory. “That fire feeds forest—or consumes it.”
But in her heart, she senses more than fire. A new rhythm beneath the wind. Not just heat, but hunger. Something unnatural blooming in a mortal shell. “She is not theirs to command,” the Grove-Mother whi
