Bastian Everly's Arc

Chapter 4 of 5

For three days no lightning came. Bastian's men slept without fear inside the ring of pale flowers. But on the fourth morning, Bastian walked the road that led to their old stone barracks and found it empty. Two travelers he had hoped to recruit stood at a crossroads below, turning in circles. They shouted his name. He waved. They did not see him. The flowers hid him from the god's eye, and from mortal eyes too. He returned and counted his men. Still fourteen. No one new had come in three days. The blooms had saved them and trapped them. A hidden warband could not grow, and the serpent god had promised death if he stayed small. Bastian sat on the worn steps of the barracks and studied the flowers. Their glow faded in daylight but never died. He pulled one from the earth. The moment its roots left the soil, he felt the air shift, like a door swinging open. He was seen again. He pushed the flower back down and vanished once more. Then he understood. The ring did not have to be a cage. It could be a mouth. He dug up a single cluster of the pale blooms and carried it to the crossroads. He planted it there, in plain sight, where any traveler would pass. Then he walked back inside the ring and waited. Through the gap he had made, one narrow path now led from the open road to his hidden camp. A man who followed the glowing flowers would cross from the seen world into the unseen. Anyone else would walk past an empty field. That night he lit no fire. He watched the crossroads instead. A young man came first, thin and barefoot, drawn by the strange light. He touched a bloom, stepped past it, and gasped when the camp appeared before him. Two more followed by dawn. By the third night, nine strangers had walked the flower path into the ring. Bastian counted twenty-three men. The god's eye still swept the hills each night and found nothing but grass. His warband grew in the dark, one traveler at a time, safe behind the blooms. But on the fifth day he walked the path himself and stopped cold. The flowers at the crossroads had begun to wilt. Their glow was thin. He knelt and touched a browning petal. These were the goddess's flowers, cut from her rotted hand, and away from the whole ring their power drained fast. In a week the path would close. The mouth would seal shut, and his growing warband would be sealed inside with it. He stood in the dying light and knew what it meant. To keep the path open, he would have to climb the white hill again. He would have to ask Maren Solke for more flowers, and watch the rot climb higher up her arm.