Briar Willowfen's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The smoke rose thick and gray against the morning sky, visible from half a mile out. Briar stopped on the trail and felt her chest tighten. The woman beside her went still, one hand gripping the strap of her pack. They'd been walking for four hours, moving fast to beat the frost. Someone else had reached the root site first. Briar pushed forward at a run, the woman keeping pace behind her. The site opened into a small clearing where the root should have been growing, sheltered between two old stones. Instead, fresh-turned earth marked where someone had dug deep. A campfire still smoldered at the edge of the clearing, smoke curling up from the embers. Beside it lay an ornate pickaxe with a transparent chamber in its head, the kind used for precision root work. The chamber was empty now, but streaks of pale fiber clung to its edges — wind-anchor root, recently harvested. Briar knelt at the excavation site and ran her fingers through the loose soil. The roots went deep here, deeper than most harvesters would bother with. Whoever had come before her knew exactly what they were doing. The woman circled the campfire, then stopped. She crouched and picked up a knife with an orange handle that had been left on a flat rock near the flames. "This is a harvester's blade," she said, turning it over in her hands. "Expensive. Whoever left it might come back for it." Briar stood and brushed the dirt from her hands. The frost would come tonight, and there was nothing left to harvest here. But the pickaxe and the knife told her something useful — someone else knew about wind-anchor root, someone skilled enough to dig out the deepest growth, and someone in enough of a hurry to leave tools behind. She pulled her pack off and retrieved her own digging blade. "Check the edges of the clearing," she said. "Root systems spread. If they missed any lateral growth, we might still have enough." The woman nodded and moved to the far side of the stones. Briar started digging at the perimeter of the excavation site, working quickly. She didn't need much — just enough to start the process. The plan hadn't failed yet.