Calla Herne's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Calla Herne walked faster than she ever had, but the blight walked faster still. She was the young goddess of spring, and one blighted grove remained at the heart of the fen. If she reached it, she could wake it into endless bloom. Green shoots pushed up wherever her bare feet landed. Then frost bit them dead behind her, because the cold always followed her. She had made peace with that. She had not made peace with the thing chasing her now. It moved through the reeds as a pale deer made of mist. Antlers of bare bone branched from its skull. One blue eye burned in the fog of its face. The blight had taken a shape, and the shape wanted the grove before she did. Every place its cloven hooves touched, the water turned black and still. It was closing the gap. She could see the grove ahead, a ring of gray trees, and the wraith angled to cut between her and them. A heron stood in her path, long neck bent over the shallows. It did not fly when she came near. It only fixed her with one yellow eye and stepped aside, lifting a foot high above the black water. That was when Calla understood. The wraith poisoned the ground it crossed. But the bird moved above the muck, never sinking, never touched. Calla looked down at the ruined shoots behind her. Her feet dragged death into everything. She could not outrun the wraith on the ground it was spoiling. So she stopped fighting the cold in her. She let it rush ahead of her instead. Frost spread across the black water in a sudden white sheet, hard as a floor. She ran onto the ice the way the heron walked, quick and light, her feet never breaking through. The wraith lunged. Its hooves struck the ice and slid. It had no purchase on the frozen skin she had made. Calla reached the ring of gray trees three strides ahead of it and pressed both palms to the nearest cold trunk. Spring poured out of her. Buds split the dead bark. A cluster of tulips burst up at the roots, petals striped in every color, mouths open as if mid-song. The grove drank her in. Green raced through the branches faster than the wraith could follow, and the creature broke apart into cold vapor at the tree line, unable to enter what she had woken. Calla stood in the first living grove of Turbidfen, breathing hard, blossoms shaking in her crown. She had won. But she felt the frost still pooling around her ankles, spreading outward from her feet into the new grass. The cold had not left her. It had only followed her here. The grove was alive, and now everything alive in it would have to survive her.