Elowyn's Arc

Chapter 1 of 12

Elowyn spread the pressed flower on the elder's table and asked him to name it. He would not even look. The petals were pale and thin, almost see-through, and they still held a faint smell after all these years. She had found the flower in her grandmother's journal. No living plant matched it. Only one place could explain it: Thessara, the lost garden that was said to hold every plant driven to extinction. Elowyn wanted to press every rare bloom she found into her herbarium and record what each one had once been used for. But she could not begin without knowing where to look. The elder finally spoke. "Thessara is a story for children," he said. "There is no garden. There never was." He pushed her old maps back across the table. Elowyn had studied those maps for months. She read their symbols better than their words. She needed someone who remembered the real tales to point her toward the first marker. This man was the last in the village who might. And he had just closed the door. "He's not going to help you," Tavian said. He leaned in the doorway with his mapmaker's satchel on one shoulder. Elowyn had known him for years; he chased lost places the way she chased lost plants. He crossed the room and looked at her spread of maps. "You keep reading that mark as water," he said, tapping one symbol. "It's roots." Elowyn stared at it. For four months she had read that same symbol as rivers. She had traced streams that led nowhere. "Roots," she repeated. "Not rivers." "Roots run under things," Tavian said. "So your garden isn't marked by water on the surface. It's marked by what grows below." He unrolled his own map beside hers. The two symbols matched. His route and her flower pointed to the same place. "You don't need him to believe," Tavian said. "You needed the mark read right. That, I can do." The elder watched them from his chair. He said nothing. He did not have to. Elowyn no longer needed his memory. She had the symbol, and now she had someone who understood it. She rolled her maps and slid them into her satchel. "Then we follow the roots," she said. Tavian tucked one hand in his pocket. "There's a catch," he said. "The mark isn't near the village. It sits past the old stonework, where my compass won't hold still." He lifted the compass on its cord. The needle spun and would not settle. Elowyn looked at the wild needle. The elder had refused her, and it no longer mattered. She had a direction at last. But her direction led somewhere the ground itself seemed to twist a compass in circles. She stood, ready to walk toward it.