Briar Willowshade's Arc

Chapter 9 of 9

The basin held the pool steady, but the water still dropped. Briar watched it fall a finger's width by noon. Oberon was right. Something below the channels drank the spring dry. She could balance the flow all she liked. If the deep drain kept pulling, the grove would die anyway. She had to go down and find it. The deepest passage ran below the pool, flooded to the roof. Beyond it the water turned black. Rot floated on the surface in gray sheets. The blight-killed water had choked the far tunnels, and Briar could not swim through it and breathe. She knelt at the edge and stared into the dark. Somewhere past that fouled water, something was stealing the spring. "You'll drown," Oberon said. He stood at the tunnel mouth, black against the stone. He never touched the water. He only watched her fail and told her why. "Then I need to go through without breathing it," Briar said. She remembered the winged cat batting at the basin days ago, riding its own reflection on the water. A shell that floated. A shell that held air. Briar gathered a hard seed-pod she had dried for planting and worked it in her hands. She fed it a drop of spring water and her own breath. It swelled and rounded. Portholes formed where her fingers pressed. Small fins unfurled like wings. She had grown a shell she could ride inside, sealed against the rot. She climbed in and sealed the pod. It sank. The fouled water pressed gray against the glass. She could not see. Then a light bloomed ahead. Torches lined a carved channel deep in the rock, their flames burning underwater, throwing gold across the flow. Someone had built this long ago. Briar steered the shell down the lit channel, following the current where it pulled hardest. The channel opened into a round chamber with smooth earthen walls. The water here spun in a slow drain, sucking down through a gap in the floor. That gap was the thief. But she was not alone. A water fairy floated in the chamber, pale and calm, her hair drifting like weed. She held the drain open with both hands. Briar cracked the pod. Clean air from the shell let her speak. "You're pulling the spring down." "I'm feeding another below," the fairy said. Her voice moved like current. "Two springs. One source. It cannot serve both open." Briar looked at the gap, then at the fairy's steady hands. She could not close it by force. But she could split what flowed. She grew a moss lip across half the gap, the way she had lined her channels. Water still fell through. Just less. Enough for both. The fairy let go. The chamber's spin eased. Above, Briar knew the pool would rise again. "It holds now," the fairy said. "But she below will want more. You've only shared the thirst."