Credo Oakwhisker's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Credo Oakwhisker crouched beside a fresh boot print and pressed his palm to the soil. He had tracked the three loggers since dawn. His staff leaned against his shoulder, the white crystal at its tip quiet for now, holding only the old grief of the four-hundred-year tree felled the night before. He would stop them. The forest was his to guard, and no one else was coming. Then the crystal screamed. It flared bright and hot, glowing like a lantern carved from acorn-shaped light, runes flickering wild along the staff's grain. Credo staggered. A new pain poured through him — fresh, splintering, alive. Another tree was falling. Right now. Somewhere he could not see. He shut his eyes and let the crystal guide him. He felt the rip of saw teeth. He felt roots that had held the soil since before his grandfather's grandfather. He felt the slow, terrible lean. Then the ground-shaking fall. Credo ran. He crashed through brush and leapt a mossy stump that pulsed faint blue beneath his boot, an old marker of deeper magic he had no time for. He followed the crystal's burn until the trees thinned and he saw it — the wreckage. A great trunk lay split open, its heartwood raw. Sawdust drifted like snow. Wedges, oil rags, and a dented tin cup lay scattered near a stump still weeping pale sap. The loggers were gone. Credo stood in the ruin and gripped his staff until his knuckles went white. The crystal dimmed to a slow, steady ache. He had been too far. He had been too late. But now he had their trail, fresh and stinking of fuel, and he started after them without resting.