Arrow's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

Arrow could hold his flame now. But holding was not aiming. Luminos led him to a tall stone building with a domed roof and glowing windows. Spirits used it to send messages across the veil. Inside, the air hummed. Arrow lit his paw. The blue flame spread wide, warm and bright. He pushed it toward Mommy's world. The light burst outward in every direction, thin as fog, and faded into nothing. "It scattered," Arrow said. "Again." He tried for an hour. Each time, his flame spilled out loose and died before it reached anyone. Mommy never heard a word. Arrow pressed the plain pebble under his huge paw and started again. Same result. The flame went everywhere, so it went nowhere. A small black cat slipped through the door. Pepper. She was the living cat who once carried his message to Mommy, back when her own paws glowed. Now she padded across the stone floor and sat close. "You're spilling it," she said. "You throw the light at the whole world. Pick one person." "I am picking Mommy," Arrow said. His tail lashed. "I think about her the whole time." "No." Pepper tilted her head. "You think about sending. You think about doing it right. When I reached her, I wasn't aiming. I just missed her. I held one picture." She touched her own chest with a paw. "Her hand. That's all I kept." Arrow sat back. He had been pushing the flame like water from a hose. Spreading it. Showing it off. Pepper was telling him to stop pushing and start remembering. He closed his eyes. He let the flame rise soft and small. He stopped trying to send it anywhere. Instead he found one memory and stayed inside it. Mommy's hand on his back. The weight of her palm. Her thumb behind his ear. Fourteen years of that one touch. He did not think of the veil or the building or Pepper watching. Only the hand. The flame narrowed. It drew together into a thin blue line, bright and sharp. It no longer spread. It pointed, straight through the glowing window and out past the stone, aimed at the one person who owned that hand. Pepper's eyes went wide. "It's going somewhere," she whispered. "It's going straight." Arrow held the line. He felt it reach, felt it find a far-off warmth, like a door he could almost touch. For one moment the warmth pressed back. Then his own flame thinned and faded, gently, on its own. He opened his eyes, breathing hard. "I aimed it," he said. "I felt her." Luminos ruffled his feathers from the rafter. "You found the thread. You followed it to her edge." The owl's gaze sharpened. "But a thread is not a voice. You reached her door. Now you must learn to make her hear what you carry."