Thorne Mire's Arc

Chapter 6 of 10

Thorne decided to test her powers on something bigger. She had seen a wild boar rotting near the twisted tree for weeks now. Its body was large enough to make a real guardian, something that could charge at threats and knock them down. She gathered her tools and walked to the carcass. The smell hit her hard, but she ignored it. She laid out the binding circle in the mud and spoke the death words carefully. Green light flickered above the bones. The boar's body twitched and started to rise. Then the light sputtered and died. The bones collapsed back into the mud with a wet thud. She tried again, speaking louder this time. Nothing happened. The magic wouldn't hold. She had failed. She needed to understand what went wrong. Her books said failed rituals left traces behind, marks in the magic itself. She walked through the swamp until she found the crater pool where she had tried her first large summoning months ago. Dead trees leaned inward around the murky water. Ash still coated the surface. That ritual had exploded before it even started, leaving this hole in the ground. She stared at the crater and felt her stomach tighten. The boar wasn't her first failure. It was just the latest one. Movement in the shallow water caught her eye. Something glowed beneath the surface near a cluster of roots. She waded in and reached down. Her fingers closed around fragments of broken glass. She pulled them up and saw green light trapped inside each piece. The shattered orb from another failed experiment, still glowing after all this time. She had tried to bind three guardians at once that day. The orb had cracked and released everything she had gathered. All that power, wasted. She threw the fragments back into the water. She walked until she reached the twisted cypress reflection pool near her training area. The dark water mirrored the gnarled trees perfectly. She sat at the edge and looked down at her own face staring back. Her hands shook. She had raised small creatures and built simple guardians, but every time she tried something powerful, the magic failed. The boar should have worked. She had done everything right. Maybe she wasn't strong enough yet. Maybe Bramblemire needed a better defender than her. She pressed her palms into the mud and took a long breath. Tomorrow she would try again with something smaller. She had to keep going, even if each failure left another scar on her swamp.