Arista Wildheart's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Arista Wildheart wanted to grow a mushroom that no witch had grown in fifty years. The moonbloom, the old stories said, could open a door to the gods of the Hollow. She had studied every page in her cottage, dried every kind of cap on her shelves, and coaxed strange fungi from rot and shadow. But she had one problem she could not solve. She had never seen a moonbloom seed. She had never even seen a spore. Without one, all her skill was worthless. She searched the woods for three days. She turned over logs and split old stumps. She found glowing caps and blue toadstools, but nothing that matched the golden bloom in the stories. On the fourth morning, she stopped searching alone. She went to find the one creature who might know. Grizzleshell was a turtle older than the willows. Mushrooms grew across his massive shell in every color, a living garden he had gathered over centuries. Witches said he collected every mushroom that mattered. Arista also knew he wanted a moonbloom as badly as she did. He might help her. He might race her to the spores instead. She found him half-buried in moss, chewing a fern. "Go home, girl," he grumbled before she spoke. "I've got no time for young witches and their questions." "I need a moonbloom spore," Arista said. "Just one. I know you understand mushrooms better than anyone alive." Grizzleshell's yellow eyes narrowed. "So you want the same prize I do. And you expect me to hand you the map." "I'm not asking for the moonbloom," she said. "Only where to begin. I can grow it. You can't. Look at your shell. Every cap but that one." The turtle went quiet. His slow breath stirred the moss. Arista saw the truth land on him. He had gathered mushrooms for hundreds of years, and the one he craved had always slipped away. "You'd share it," he said at last. "If I helped you grow it." "Half of every spore it makes," Arista said. "My word." Grizzleshell studied her a long moment. Then he shifted his heavy body. Behind him, half-hidden in the dirt, sat a dried mushroom she had never seen. Its cap was pale gold, thin as paper, marked with tiny crescent shapes. "A moonbloom drops its spores once each generation," he said. "This one crumbled to dust the year you were born. I kept the husk." He nudged it toward her with one clawed foot. "There may be spores inside. There may be nothing. I never dared try." Arista lifted the husk with shaking hands. It weighed almost nothing. Somewhere inside its brittle folds might sleep the only moonbloom spores in the Hollow. Or only dust. "If you fail," Grizzleshell said, "there won't be another for a generation." Arista held the husk to her chest and started home. She had what she needed to begin. Now she had to open it without destroying it.