Bastian Everly's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

By the third day, Bastian had twenty men. Word of the silver spear spread through the villages, and the poor came to it like moths. But numbers made a bright target. Each night the sky above their camp cracked with heat lightning, though no rain fell. Something in the high dark was measuring him. A watching god, and it grew impatient. The serpent had told him to build a warband. It had not warned him he could be struck down before he finished. On the fourth night, the lightning came down. It split a tree beside two of his sleeping men. The bark burst into flame. His men scattered, screaming, and by dawn six had run home. Bastian understood then. The god would burn his warband to nothing before it ever grew large enough to protect him. He could not out-recruit a bolt from the sky. He needed a shield only a god could give. So he climbed to the goddess's home. It stood white and gold on the hillside, ringed by marble columns and windows full of painted stars. He knew whose door this was. Maren Solke had ruined her own hands to arm him. He hated to ask her for more. She opened the door before he knocked. Her flowering hand held a cluster of pale blooms that glowed like cold moonlight. The rot on her other arm had crept higher since he last saw her. Giving to him cost her, and he could see the price on her skin. "You brought a storm to my hill," she said. "It follows you." "A god wants me dead before I'm strong," Bastian said. "I can't fight the sky. I came to ask how." Maren looked at the flowers in her hand. "These grow between the living and the dead. No god's eye passes them. Plant them around your camp, and the watcher will lose your scent." She held them out. "But I harvest them with my rotted hand. Take these, and the rot takes more of me." Bastian did not reach for them. "Then I won't take them." She pressed the blooms into his palm anyway. "You already faced the serpent alone. I would rather bleed for a boy who kneels than for one who begs." Her black fingers curled shut. The rot climbed past her elbow as he watched. He planted the pale flowers in a ring around his sleeping men that same night. The lightning came again at midnight. It struck the hillside, then the field, searching. It never found the camp. By morning the sky was empty and blue. The watching god had lost him. Bastian stood in the ring of glowing blooms and counted fourteen men. He was hidden now, and safe to grow. But he had spent a goddess's flesh to buy it, and the debt sat heavier than any storm.