Cole's Arc

Chapter 1 of 7

Cole crossed the empty village at dawn and did not stop walking until the last house was behind him. He had passed through the place a dozen times on his old routes. He knew which door stuck, which chimney smoked, which child waved from which window. Now the doors stood open and the wells were still. No bodies. No blood. Just cold hearths and half-eaten bread on the tables. Something had scared them off, and Cole believed it started in the Obsidian Mountains, where the old seals were failing. He wrote the date in his journal, tightened his grip on his staff, and turned toward Lumina City to find help before whatever emptied the village spread further. Veronica caught up to him at the tree line. She was his wife, and she had been searching her own ground for three days. Her family was gone. Her eight-year-old niece first, then the rest. She wore her deep green cloak and carried her staff like she meant to use it. A small pendant hung at her throat, one she used to leave in a drawer. "Lumina," Cole said. "We need a mage. Someone who knows the seals." "Then we go." "It's two days on foot." "One and a half." They walked hard and reached the city gates by the second dusk. Cole knew a scholar there who kept rooms above a bindery, a woman who had once mapped the wards beneath the mountains. He led Veronica through narrow streets to her door. The wood was solid, the hinges oiled, the handle bright. He knocked four times. No one answered. He knocked again and tried the handle. Locked. A neighbor leaned out from the next window. She said the scholar had left six nights ago. Packed a bag, paid her rent through the month, and walked north. She had not said where. She had not said why. Veronica set her palm flat against the door. "North is the mountains." "I know." "She's not coming back." Cole opened his journal on the step and wrote the date beside the scholar's name. He had counted on her. He had planned the whole route around her maps. Without a mage, they had no way to read the seals, no way to know what was breaking, no way to hold anything closed once they got there. Something moved by his boot. A fox kit, no bigger than a loaf, with fur the color of wet moss and small pale flowers caught in its coat. It sat on the step and looked up at him. Where it had crossed the stones, three tiny blooms had opened between the cracks. It had come from the north road. Veronica crouched slowly. "That shouldn't be in a city." "No," Cole said. "It shouldn't." He closed the journal. The plan for allies was finished. Whatever was stirring in the mountains had already started walking toward them, and now they had to follow it back.