Atsuki Nightwhisper's Arc

Chapter 1 of 17

Atsuki Nightwhisper had carried the broken pendant for twenty years, and still no one could tell him whose it was. He turned it over now on the moss-covered library's stone step. Half a silver disc. A cracked edge where the other half had snapped away. Faded marks curled across its face in a script he had never learned to read. Somewhere in Eldergrove, one of the old bloodlines had made this. One of them was his. He had come to this library to find a reader for the dead language before the trail went cold for good. Inside, the air smelled of damp stone and old paper. Vines had crept through the windows and coiled along the shelves. Atsuki set the pendant on a reading table and waited. Books here held forgotten tongues, but books could not answer questions. He needed someone older than the words themselves. A voice came from the shadows between the stacks. "Put it away, boy. You'll wear the marks off with all that rubbing." An old dryad stepped into the light. Bark grew across her shoulders like a cloak. Bare branches sprouted from her white hair, and her eyes burned gold, like two small suns. Stellara Rootweaver moved slow, but her gaze fixed on the pendant at once. She stopped. Her branches trembled. "Where did you get that," she said. It was not a question. "It's all I have of my family." Atsuki lifted it toward her. "No one can read it. Can you?" Stellara took the fragment in fingers like polished roots. She held it close to one burning eye. For a long moment she said nothing. Then she traced the faded script with a bark-tipped nail. "I read it when the tree that bore me was a seed," she said. "These are house-marks. A binding oath, carved for a marriage between two lines." Her nail stopped on a broken curve at the cracked edge. "This half names the mother's house. I knew it once." Atsuki's chest went tight. "Say it." "I can't. Not from this." She turned the disc so he could see. "The name breaks here, where the metal snapped. Half the marks went with the other piece." She pressed the fragment back into his palm. "You carry a mother's house with no name to finish it. The rest lies on the missing half." "Then the other half exists." "It did. Oaths like this were split between two families. Each kept a piece." Her gold eyes narrowed. "Someone in Eldergrove still holds yours. Find them, and you find your name." Atsuki closed his hand around the silver. For twenty years the marks had meant nothing. Now they meant a person, alive or dead, holding the other half of him. He had come for a translation. He was leaving with a hunt. "Who kept it?" he asked. Stellara turned back toward the shadows. "That," she said, "you'll have to dig up yourself."