Color hollow's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Color Hollow followed the scanner's pulse for two days before they saw the body. It lay twisted on the road ahead, one arm stretched toward them, the other curled against its chest. The stranger wasn't moving. Color Hollow stopped walking and watched for breath. Nothing changed. They counted to sixty, then started forward again, careful to step wide around the figure. That's when they saw the light between the stranger's fingers. A soft glow leaked through the gaps in their fist, pale and steady. Color Hollow crouched low without getting close. The light looked wrong. It pulsed the same rhythm as their scanner. The stranger's hand opened. Not voluntarily. The fingers just went slack, and a fragment of bone rolled out onto the dirt. It glowed brighter now, no longer muffled by flesh. Color Hollow stared at it. The bone was shaped like a horn tip, jagged where it had broken. Around it, the grass had turned vivid green, almost luminous. Flowers pushed up through the soil in a perfect circle, their petals bright enough to hurt. The fragment was giving color, not taking it. Color Hollow looked at their own hand, then back at the bone. They needed to touch it. They needed to know if it would turn gray like everything else, or if this piece of horn was different. The stranger made a sound, wet and rattling, and Color Hollow saw their eyes open halfway. A map lay crumpled beneath the stranger's body, its edges soaked dark. Color Hollow reached for the bone fragment. Their hand stopped two inches away. If they drained it, if their touch killed whatever made it glow, they would never know where it came from. The stranger's breathing had gone thin and uneven. Color Hollow leaned closer. "Where did you find this?" Their voice came out flat. The stranger's lips moved but no sound followed. Their eyes fixed on Color Hollow's broken horn, then dropped to the glowing fragment on the ground. One finger twitched, pointing past Color Hollow's shoulder. Color Hollow turned and saw it: a small stone structure in the distance, nearly hidden by massive orange-capped mushrooms. The stranger made that wet sound again, then stopped breathing entirely. Color Hollow wrapped the bone fragment in cloth without touching it directly. The glow dimmed but didn't fade. They pulled the map from beneath the stranger and unfolded it carefully. Most of the ink had run, but one spot was circled in red: a cluster of mushroom symbols around a small building. The same building they could see from here. Color Hollow tucked the map away and stood. The fragment pulsed against their chest, warm through the cloth. It wasn't their missing piece. The scanner would have screamed if it was. But someone had found horn fragments before, and that someone had marked where they found them. Color Hollow started walking toward the mushroom-covered structure. They had a direction now. That was more than they'd had two days ago.