The Purifying Fire: A Planeswalker Novel Read Online Free Page B

horseback.
    Just let them try that nonsense up here
, Chandra thought. She’d send them fleeing back to Zinara with their horses’ tails on fire.
    In any event, the soldiers who patrolled the Great Western Wood were lucky that Samir had not been among those arrested. It would be amusing, though, if the soldiers took an elf prisoner next time they were meddling where they didn’t belong. Chandra imagined the storm that such a move would precipitate. The elves would never allow their way of life to be compromised by the Order.
    Oh, yes, that would be worth seeing.
    “Don’t mess with elves,” she muttered, gazing down at the darkened forest below Mount Keralia.

G host warden?” Chandra said. “What’s a ghost warden?”
    “Normally, it’s a spirit from the land of the dead summoned to protect the living,” said her host, Samir Mia Kauldi.
    Brannon cried, “I’ve heard of ghost wardens! They’ve got flowing white hair, and white armor, and no real legs, just wispy trails of magic dust where their feet should be! They float around in silence, spying on their masters’ enemies!”
    Chandra looked to Samir for confirmation of this description as they walked through the forest, the dry twigs and leaves crackling under their feet.
    He nodded. “‘Spying’ might be an exaggeration. As I said, they normally serve to protect, but the Order uses them to monitor the forest.”
    “They have arms without hands, and white lightning bolts shoot out of the place where their fingers should be!” Brannon said.
    “I’m told that it feels more like a sharp sting than a lightning bolt,” Samir said. “It startles more than anything else.”
    Samir Mia Kauldi was one of Keral Keep’s staunchest allies in the Great Western Wood. He was well-respected among his fellow elves and shared Keralian values concerning personal freedom and the right to self determination, but, most importantly, he understood the consequences of the Order of Heliud’s ever-increasing influence on the plane of Regatha. If the Heliuds were allowed to continue asserting their “civilization” agenda on the rest of Regatha, it would, sooner or later, mean an end to the elves’ way of life. Their tribes would be broken up and individuals would be relocated to the camps where they would be “trained” as productive members of society. The forests, stripped of the protectors, would become resources for the cities, the trees a commodity to be managed by ministers. Samir had heard how some of the smaller forests in the distant east had been clear-cut and used for lumber, only to be replanted in neat rows so that their next harvest might be more efficient. The geometry of their placement, and the flat grid of roads laid down, cut the living spine of those groves and all but stopped the once-rich flow of mana. The elves who were able to flee the camps and cities returned to unrecognizable terrain, pine barrens, monocultures of ash or spruce. The Order had broken these forests into pieces and made sure they would not go back together.
    Samir had told all of this to Mother Luti, but for years there had only been stories from far away. Now it was becoming a reality everywhere. But Luti, however her fighting spirit raged, was not getting any younger. Because the journey down the mountain to the forest below was physically demanding, she seldom made the trip herself anymore. She did insist on regular contact with the races of the woodlands that surrounded Mount Keralia, and often sent others in her place. They had to keep the Order’s power in check, especially sincethe mountains seemed to be next in line for the Order’s civilizing practices.
    It was true that the Keralian pyromancers and the races of the Great Western Wood led independent existences, but they all shared this desire to limit the Order’s influence to the plains and the cities of Regatha. As Luti said, they must be taught that fire and forest, much like their government, knew nothing of