No Plan

No Plan
"Take Iolaire to the Laeryos mountains. Irongrave will know how to channel the Fountain properly. It’s time Ashthorn has a High Matron.” Aerun sputtered. “I know it’s a lot, but you can do it.”
Aerun's expression sharpened into something focused and certain. "Consider it done."
"High Matron," Isorai said, turning to Frythgrove. "I need every Frythgrove knight who can be spared sent to reinforce the southern boundary we just finished raising. It held against the initial collapse, but I don't know how long it holds against something actively trying to climb out from under it. Magical and physical reinforcement."
"They'll be moving within fifteen minutes," High Matron Frythgrove said.
"Thaeryn, I need you in a temple.” His eyes widened. “Elithor cannot fall, you understand? It cannot fall, the main root of the Great Tree that leads ot Bharin passes right through Elithor.”
He nodded as High Matron Bloodweaver appeared. 
The wind pushe and tilted her over. She cursed, flailing. 
Yseira appeared along with Maeryn and Iolaire. 
"Iolaire," Isorai said. "I need you at the Laeryos mountains immediately. Irongrave's coven will guide you through opening the Fountains properly. Aerun's going to carry it out to sea. 
Iolaire's breath caught, but she nodded without hesitation. "I'll go now."
"Maeryn, go with her. She may need backup.” Isorai's voice softened, just slightly, despite the urgency pressing at every word. "I trust you both with this, Lady Ashthorns."
Maeryn's chin lifted, steadier than Isorai had ever seen her. "We'll be there before you finish this call."
“High Matron Bloodweaver, get the restoratives and boosters ready: anything that keeps fighters on their feet. We're going to need all of it, including stamina for Starsong."
"It will be done," her aunt said.
"Yseira," Isorai continued. "I need your voice broadcasted along with every Starsong we’ve got channeling the Song of Reckoning with a Battle Hamony. I’ll join from the Grove.”
She winced, but nodded. “I can do it.”
“Focus it south, you’ll buy me time.”
“Time to do what?”
She bit her lip. “Find a bigger spear.”
"Move fast. I don't know how long the shield I put up will hold."
The call ended in a scatter of acknowledgments, and Isorai pressed the communicator into her pocket. Another sharp wind swiped at her, tumbling her over. She weathered it and changed her direction, aiming for the Grove’s main clearing.
She was nearly there when the air around her changed. The pressure dropped suddenly and violently. The air expanded and contracted around something enormous and fast ripping though the space. She had a half-second of warning, barely enough to register the shadow falling across her before the vroth broke from the cloud cover ahead of her, vast and corrupted and entirely between her and the Grove's edge.
It was smaller than the one rising from the south, but big and fast enough. The creature opened its maw and let out a blast of darkness. She didn't have time to dodge properly.
The blast of corrupted breath caught her along her left side, and the world spun violently as the force of it knocked her from the air, her control over the wind currents she'd been riding shattering under the impact. She fell, the ground rushing up faster as she flailed. The Grove's edge visible just ahead and impossibly, agonizingly out of reach as she fell. 
The last clear thought she had before impact was that she had run out of time.
She hit the forest floor hard enough to feel it through the crystal armor, the impact driving air from her lungs and sending her rolling through undergrowth before she found purchase against the root of a tree and stopped herself from going further.
For a moment she lay still, cataloguing damage. Left side: scorched through two layers of armor, the skin beneath it raw and screaming. Broken bones, maybe, but she couldn’t tell which ones though the mess of pain. Right shoulder: dislocated, corrected itself with a grinding snap before she'd finished noticing it, the Irongrave and shifter resilience came in handy. Her ears rang. Her vision swam at the edges.
She pushed herself upright.
The vroth circled overhead, visible through the canopy in sections, its wingspan throwing vast shadows across the forest floor in sweeping arcs. It had already located her, she could tell from the angle of its circling, and it was positioning for a second pass.
She did not give it the chance to get the angle it wanted.
She stepped sideways into the nearest shadow and pulled the forest's awareness around herself, dropping into the collective conciousness of the trees. It circled. Searching.
She watched it through the canopy's gaps, reading its behavior, waiting for it to lose interest in the forest floor and turn toward the Grove's edge. It was between her and the Grove. It might hav a general idea that she would have to pass by it to get there, and that was nearly impossible with it watching her so closely. 
It stopped and opened its mouth, a massive column of corrupted darkness shot straight through the canopy above her with enough precision to suggest the vroth had a better read on her location than the shadow technique should have allowed. She threw herself away form the strike point, the edge of it caught the air beside her with enough force to shatter bark and stone.
She came out of the shadow running, because there was no longer any benefit to stillness.
Her spear came to her hand, the thirteen rings blazing, and she turned toward the creature. Her armor shifted, the crystal quality of it deepened from the dark material it usually presented into something more purely crystalline, more transparent, the facets of it oriented to absorb and redirect rather than simply deflect.
The second blast hit her directly.
She'd angled for it, letting it come, and the crystal armor took the impact in a cascade of refracted light, absorbing what it could and distributing the rest across its surface in a wave that left her staggering but standing. The third blast came before she'd fully recovered her footing, and the fourth was already building in the vroth's throat before the third had finished.
It was working to exhaust her, but trying to avoid it wasn’t helpful, all she could do was try to evade the blasts she could, but she was running out of strength to defend and attack. The bright arcs of purifying fire that scored against its corrupted hide and drew those terrible sounds of distress from it weren’t enough to kill it. 
How much longer could she go like this? Maybe three more blasts. Then, what?
She needed a plan, but her mind wasn’t cooperating.
It reared back, locking eyes on here. Then, the sudden absence of solid ground beneath her feet as the earth opened in a circle exactly the size of where she was standing, and she went down into the dark too fast for her flight reflex to engage, the forest swallowed her from above as the hole closed over her head, plunging her into darkness.