Celestia Starweaver's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Celestia Starweaver could brew a storm into a bottle, but he could not remember the recipe that mattered most. Fifty years ago someone stole his youth. Tonight, in his vine-wrapped stone cottage, he meant to steal it back. He spread his cauldron, his knives, and his empty jars across the table. Then he reached for the recipe in his mind and found only fog. He knew the elixir began with something red. Something that bled. Beyond that, nothing. His hands shook as he lit the fire beneath the cauldron. The flames answered. His memory did not. Celestia sat down hard. His knees ached. His fingers had gone thin and spotted. He had wasted decades on lesser spells while the true one slipped away year by year. He had waited too long. He pressed his palms to his face and breathed the smoke. Then he remembered the locket. He kept it in a drawer he never opened. Silver, worn smooth, engraved with symbols he no longer read. His younger self had hidden things there. He pried it open with a knife. Inside lay a curl of paper, folded to the size of a seed. He unrolled it under the firelight. The writing was his own hand, young and sharp. Most of it had faded to gray ghosts. But two lines survived. The elixir needed the sap of a flower that wept red. And it had to be picked by moonlight, or the sap turned to poison. Celestia looked out the window. The moon hung full above his garden. He grabbed a jar and a knife and pushed through the door. He knew those flowers. Dark bushes crowded the far edge of his land, heavy with blooms the color of open wounds. Red beads dripped from every petal and gathered on the leaves below. He had planted them years ago and forgotten why. Now he knew. He knelt in the wet grass. His old knees protested. He cut a stem and caught the falling sap in his jar, drop by slow drop. The liquid was warm. It smelled like copper and rain. He filled the jar to the brim and pressed the lid down tight. Back inside, he poured the sap into the boiling water. The cauldron hissed. Steam rose green, then gold, then a deep and living red. For the first time in fifty years, the brewing had begun. Celestia leaned over the pot and smiled. Then the paper in his hand crumbled to dust. The two lines were all he would ever recover. He had the first ingredient. He did not have the rest. And the sap, he now remembered reading, spoiled by dawn.