Aurelius Draconis's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

They set out for the sick grove before noon. Gaia walked ahead with the small mushroom on her shoulder, and Aurelius followed with his staff. The heart stone in the staff head rang clean against his palm. The other six stones on his body answered in low agreement. He should have felt ready. Instead his tail kept snapping tight against his calf, over and over, in short warning jerks. Something in the gray trees was watching. He did not know what. Until he did, he did not dare open his chakras wide and pour signal into the ground the way Gaia needed him to. Gaia stopped at the tree line. The trunks past her went the color of old ash. She touched a root with two fingers and pulled her hand back fast. "Oh. It hurts here." The mushroom on her shoulder shrank down small. "Something moves in there. Pip feels it too." She looked at Aurelius. "Can you hear what it is?" He shook his head. His crown said nothing. His tail said yes, close, wrong. Two signals that did not match. He had a rule for that. He waited. He turned back the way they came. A small pond sat off the path, ringed with stones and mushrooms, lotus pads floating flat on the water. A tall broad woman knelt beside it with her hands in the shallows. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbow. Fish moved slow around her wrists. She did not look up when he approached. She said, "I'm Wren. I work with hands. The rest of me breaks things. So I sit still." Her voice barely carried. "You're leaking fear off that staff. I felt it from here." Aurelius knelt at the pond's edge. He set the staff across his knees. "There is something in the grove. My tail knows. My mind does not. I cannot open the stones until I see it." Wren nodded once. She lifted one wet hand and laid two fingers on the stone at his throat, careful, precise. "Closed," she said. Then his brow. "Closed." Then his solar plexus. "Open, but tight." She dried her hand on her shirt. "You already know what's in there. You just don't want to name it. Same as before." He looked at the water. A lotus turned on its own slow current. He thought of the boy whose name he had said aloud once, only once, at dawn. He thought of the gray trunks. His tail went still against his leg. He said, low, "It's grief. Not mine. Theirs. The trees are grieving something that died in them." The staff pulsed hot in his hand. His crown and his tail agreed at last. He stood. He walked back to Gaia at the tree line and told her what stalked the grove was not a hunter. It was mourning. He could open the stones now. He did. The seven began to ring together, out into the sick wood, and the nearest gray branch shivered once and held.