Aelindra Moonwhisper's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Aelindra Moonwhisper had been hunting for a single name for six years, and tonight a drunk cave-guide finally gave her one. He slurred it into his cup at the back of a miner's tavern in the lower tunnels of Subterria: the sunken temple. He said the old loyalists of her house had gone there the night the crown fell. He said none of them came back. She paid him in copper and left before he could see her hands shake. Above her braid, a small green fairy darted between the lantern hooks, keeping pace. The pixie had followed Aelindra since the burning of her mother's hall. It did not speak, but it glowed brighter when Aelindra lied, and it had not dimmed once while the guide talked. Aelindra was the last of her bloodline. The white relic her ancestors carried was the only proof left that the throne belonged to her family. Without it she was a smuggler's daughter in borrowed boots. With it she could walk back into the upper city and be recognized. She had known the goal for years. She had not known where to start until now. She went down through three levels of wet tunnel to reach the sunken temple by dawn. Broken pillars rose out of black water. Trident carvings covered the stones. She waded to the altar and pried up the cracked slab the guide had described. Beneath it lay a bundle wrapped in oiled cloth. She opened it on the dry step. Inside was a staff, taller than her arm, its shaft studded with white diamonds in a lattice of gold. Not the relic itself, but a summoning staff keyed to it. Her grandmother had carried one like it in the old portraits. The pixie flared and shot backward. Something moved in the water behind her. A small creature climbed onto the altar, gray-skinned, horned, pale crystals growing out of its shoulders and chest. It watched her with green eyes. When it opened its mouth, her own voice came out. "The relic is not here," it said. "The loyalists split it. One piece at the forest shrine. One piece in me." It tapped a claw against a crystal in its own chest. "I am what they made to guard it. I am the curse on your house. You woke the staff. Now you carry me until the last piece is found, or I take back what you touched." Aelindra tightened her grip on the staff. The pixie hovered between them, burning green. She had her lead. She also had a passenger she could not put down.