Daisy Duke's Arc

Chapter 21 of 22

For a week the moth never failed. Daisy pulled each dream, watched the small wings, and knew teeth from summer porch. The line moved smooth. Word spread. People came from far off just to taste a dream they'd lost. Then, one grey morning, the door opened and the moth went strange. A man stood at the counter. His dream rose off his palm, thick and knotted, coiling like a rope. The moth flew close. It did not flinch. It did not settle. It hovered, wings shivering, then landed on Daisy's wrist and sat there, still as a stone. Not calm. Not afraid. Blank. "Well?" the man asked. Daisy stared at the moth. Every other dream got a clear answer. Safe wings or curled legs. This one gave nothing. The knot was too tangled to read. She couldn't tell if baking it would heal him or break him like she'd broken the man with the shaking hands. "Come back tomorrow," she said. The man frowned but left. Daisy set the moth beside the vanilla sprig. It trembled, worn out. "You couldn't smell it," she whispered. She needed another way to read what the moth couldn't. She thought of the deep water, and the tail that had risen from her frozen corner. That night she knelt at the meltwater fall and called down. "Lyra. Please." The water shimmered. Lyra Starflow rose, hair streaming blue and pink, scales bright as fallen stars. Her neighbor from the deep, who spoke only when it mattered, and who had given Daisy the moth before swimming down to find her lost star. "I'm searching still," Lyra said. Clipped. "What." "A dream too tangled to smell," Daisy said. "The moth can't tell. I can't bake blind." Lyra studied her, then reached below the water. She drew up a wrapped bundle, dark and star-flecked, ribboned with green kelp. Small glowing rolls, one orange, one deep purple. "From my grotto," she said. "Cosmic food. Eat it and the knot untangles on the tongue. You'll taste each thread apart." "You'd give me this?" "I want my sea clean of rot," Lyra said. "Feed him one roll. Watch his face. Then you'll know." Next morning the man returned. Daisy set the star-flecked rolls before him. He ate. His shoulders loosened. Then his jaw tightened, and his eyes went wet. She saw it plain now, split down the middle, one thread joy, one thread a grief he needed to keep. Daisy pulled the dream. She baked only the joy thread into shortbread and left the grief where it lived. The man bit down. He laughed, soft, and did not break. He left whole. Daisy held the empty kelp wrapper. The moth read most dreams. But now she had a way to split the tangled ones herself, thread by thread. Her bakery could open safe, even for the knotted dreamers. Lyra slid back into the fall, still searching below.