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By Root 642 0

surrounded them were lovely, but there were three especially large maples off to one side whose appearance the mage found disturbing. By their size, Akabar judged them to be hundreds of years old, but he didn't expect they could live much longer. Their trunks were riddled with insect bore holes. Sucker vines covered many of their branches. While some of their leaves were an autumnal gold, most were brown and dry far too early in the season. He hadn't noticed the trees when he first regained consciousness, but now he couldn't get them out of his mind, even when he turned his eyes away from them. As the sun sank lower in the sky and the shadows lengthened and deepened, the sickly trees and even the young oak saplings seemed to close in on the forest clearing where they sat.

Akabar started and gave a shout. The trees were closing in on them. The oak saplings surrounded them in a neat ring, twenty feet across, standing so close together that their trunks resembled the bars of a prison. There was no space wide enough to pass between them; the two mages were trapped inside the circle of saplings with the three great maple trees. At Akabar's shout, Grypht looked up from his staff with a look of annoyance that his study had been interrupted.

The moment the saurial spotted the maples, he leaped to his feet and roared.

Just then Akabar noticed the features of a face on one of the older maples. He also noticed that the tree's trunk split into two great, bark-covered legs. The maples weren't trees at all, Akabar realized. They were treants, good creatures who protected the forest. All three treants closed in on Grypht. The saurial wizard growled threateningly and held out his hand to cast a spell.

"Wait!" Akabar warned, stepping between the saurial and the treant he was pointing at. "These trees are treants," the Turmishman said. "They won't harm us."

Grypht growled again, shoving Akabar aside. Akabar remembered then that the saurial could no longer understand him. Somehow he had to figure out a way to keep the wizard from injuring the treants. The smell of fresh-mown hay began to fill the meadow as Grypht began sprinkling a tiny white ball with yellow powder.

"No!" Akabar shouted. He rushed toward the saurial wizard and yanked at the sleeve of his robe, jerking his arm to one side, so that the fireball Grypht had summoned exploded off to one side of the treants instead of in their midst.

Immediately several of the oak saplings surrounding them crackled into flame.

Suddenly Akabar felt himself being lifted off the ground by the sash around his robe. Akabar strained around and looked up. A huge treant held him in one of its woody hands and glared down at him.

"Please," Akabar said in common, "don't harm the saurial. He's a visitor from another world. He doesn't understand about treants."

The treant cackled wickedly and pointed at Grypht with its free leafy hand.

"Kill him!" it ordered the other two treants in a booming voice.

"No!" Akabar shouted, struggling fiercely and beating ineffectively at the wooden hand holding him nearly ten feet off the ground.

Unable to cast a spell before the treants were upon him, Grypht grabbed the arm of the nearest one and swung his feet from the ground like a child swinging from a tree branch. Unable to bear the weight of the giant lizard, the treant's arm broke away from its body with the dull sound of a rotting log when it crumbles beneath a woodsman's axe. Dust rose from the decayed wooden arm as it crashed to the ground.

The injured treant's face formed a scowl, but it gave no indication that it felt any pain.

Akabar's eyes widened in horror. From the hollow depression where the treant's arm had broken away from the trunk, a slimy green tendril shot out and whipped about Grypht's throat. Akabar realized he'd made a terrible mistake. These creatures might once have been treants, but like Kyre, they'd been infested somehow with a rotting parasite that made them servants of the Darkbringer.

The tendril wrapped about Grypht's throat began to constrict, choking the saurial and pulling