Bougainvillea LaFern's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Bougainvillea LaFern had a blade with no soul. She held the empty hilt over her forge and waited for a single mote of starlight to fall inside. She wanted a weapon of laughter and starlight, sharp enough to cut through any shadow. But the light kept slipping past the glass jar in her hand. Three winters without sleep had taught her to forge from stars. It had not taught her how to catch one. Her wings twitched at her back. A shadow once called them too small to matter. She had never told anyone that. She only made sure that same shadow knew a blade was coming for it. Now the blade was a hollow handle, and the shadow was still laughing somewhere in the dark. She carried the jar out to the meadow below her pale domed palace. The building sat quiet on its steps, all silver and moon-white, built for a queen she was not yet. Ferns and wild blooms grew thick at the palace foot. She had gathered them once for a welcome feast. Now she pressed the empty jar into that tangle of green and let herself cry, just once. A drop of starlight landed on a fern frond. It did not vanish. It hung there, trembling, caught in the tiny hairs of the leaf. Bougainvillea went still. She had been holding the jar like a soldier. Cold. Careful. Grim. But the ferns were soft. They did not grab. They simply waited, and the light stayed. She remembered the person she had lost. She remembered trying to forge a weapon out of that grief, and how the metal had come out heavy and dead. She had stopped because grief could not bring anyone back. She had been forging cold ever since. So she tried something foolish instead. She laughed. Not a real laugh at first, more a dry cough. Then she thought of the shadow calling her wings too small, and how absurd it was to fear a thing so afraid of light. The laugh turned real. It shook her small wings. Starlight fell toward the sound. It did not fight the jar. It poured in like water finding a low place, and it filled the glass to the brim. Bougainvillea ran to her forge with the bottled light cupped against her chest. She poured it into the empty hilt. The metal drank it. A thin, bright edge grew from the handle, humming, warm, alive. She had her first true length of blade. She laughed again, and the edge grew a finger longer. Then the light in the forge flickered. Something at the meadow's edge had swallowed the last of the dusk. The shadow had heard her laughing. It had come to watch her work, and now it knew exactly how she meant to kill it.