Aerie's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Aerie knelt in the test plot beside the glass dome, pressing a crushed leaf against a scrape on their own forearm. The skin reddened, then calmed. They wrote the result in the crystal-paged ledger open on the small metal-trayed table. One safe herb. Hundreds still unknown. Aerie was building a garden where every wounded creature of Zoastrya could find the herb that healed it, and today that promise felt very thin. The glowing crystal pillar at the edge of the plot pulsed twice. A creature had arrived to wait. Aerie stood and saw a small furred thing curled near the base, one wing torn, breathing fast. They did not know its kind. They did not know what would soothe it and what would stop its heart. Aerie flipped through the shimmering pages of the ledger. The column for winged mammals was nearly empty. Six herbs marked untested. Three marked dangerous for similar creatures. One wrong choice could poison the very animal they were trying to save. Their hands stayed steady, but their throat tightened. They ran to the path beyond the mushroom-shaped dome and called for the steward who tended the deeper groves. Eldrin Tarnai came without hurry, staff in hand, eyes already reading the creature before he reached it. "Moonmoth bat," he said. "Bitterroot kills them. Try silverleaf, ground fine, on the tear. Water, not oil." He pointed to a pale plant near the test plot. "Start small. Watch the breathing for a count of fifty." Aerie did exactly as told. The bat's breathing slowed and evened. Aerie wrote silverleaf into the ledger in steady ink, then bitterroot in red beside it. One creature saved. One page filled. Thousands of pages still blank — and Aerie understood, finally, that they could not learn this alone.