Elliro Fernspire's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Elliro Fernspire laid the unfinished firearm on the workbench and knew, for the third night in a row, that it was worthless. The barrel was clean. The trigger sat perfect against the guard. But the chamber was empty of the one thing that mattered — a core that no other smith in Chorastine could match. Without it, this would be another gun. Elliro built guns from bone, from riverglass, from the hollow reeds of dying trees, because a weapon should cost the world something to make. A legend could not be forged from parts anyone could buy. So Elliro shouldered a satchel and walked the swamp path to the workshop tucked into the mossy boulders at the edge of the wetlands. Smoke leaked from its chimney at an ugly angle. Inside, Raduk Steelclaw stood over a half-built engine, one claw pinning a coil, the other soldering. He did not look up. "You're bleeding on my floor," he said. Elliro glanced down at a shallow cut from the reeds. "I need a material," Elliro said. "Something alive. Something no one else has pulled from this swamp." Raduk snorted and set the iron down. "Everyone wants alive until alive bites them." He walked to a shelf and pulled down a jar. Inside, wrapped in damp cloth, sat a nugget of warm amber. A shape moved inside it — small, curled, breathing in slow pulses of light. "Living amber," Raduk said. "Grows in the throat of a flower that eats what it lures. I've seen two in my life. You want one, you go get it. I'm not dying for your gun." Elliro asked where. Raduk drew a rough map on the back of a scrap tin: a bend in the black water where a pale bloom grew taller than a man, its petals white and gold, its vines lined with hooked thorns. "It sings," Raduk said. "Don't listen. Cut low, reach fast, pull the nugget from under the tongue. The flower will close. If your arm's still inside, that's your problem." He pushed a short curved knife across the bench. "Bring me back a petal and we're even." Elliro found the bloom at dusk. It sang the way Raduk warned, a low hum that pulled at the ribs. Elliro cut the base of the stem, drove one hand into the wet throat, and closed fingers around something warm and pulsing. The petals slammed shut on the wrist. Elliro twisted, tore free, and fell backward into the mud with the living amber clenched tight and a long red line opening from elbow to knuckle. The nugget beat against Elliro's palm like a second heart. The gun had its core now. And something in the swamp, somewhere behind the reeds, had begun to answer the flower's dying song.