Elowyn's Arc

Chapter 7 of 12

Elowyn had memorized the grove path in daylight. A leaning stone. A split root. A tree shaped like a cupped hand. She and Tavian set out toward the rarer bloom, following the marks she held in her head. Then the mist rose. It came from the thinning boundary ahead, pale and thick. Within minutes it swallowed the split root and the leaning stone. Elowyn stopped. She could not see the next landmark. Without a light, her memorized route was useless. "I can't find the markers," she said. "The mist covers everything." Tavian pulled the compass from his cord. The needle spun in slow circles. "That's no help here," he said. "We're close to the boundary. The needle's drunk." He tucked it away. "We need to see the ground, not the sky." Elowyn opened her satchel. She dug past beads and charms and dried petals. Her fingers found a small glass bottle from Morrowyn's windowsill. Inside floated the seed she had watched wake days ago, glowing faint green in the moss. She had carried it without thinking. Now it was the only light she had. "That's it," Tavian said. He crouched beside her. "Hold it low." Elowyn lowered the bottle near the path. The soft glow pushed back a small circle of mist. There, at the edge of the light, she saw the split root she had memorized. She stepped toward it. The glow found the leaning stone next. One mark at a time, the seed lit the route she had lost. They walked slowly. Elowyn swept the bottle side to side, reading the ground like her old maps. Symbols she trusted more than words. A curve of roots here. A flat stone there. Each landmark surfaced from the mist, then sank behind them. The path ended at a wall of light. Cascading towers rose from a coast split in two halves. On one side, sunlit sand and daisies. On the other, a moonlit dreamscape of coral arches and hanging crystal drips. Giant pale flowers glowed inside it. Between the two halves ran a shimmering seam, like water standing upright. "The boundary," Tavian said. "This is the thinnest place." He looked at the seam and did not step closer. "Morrowyn's bloom is past it." Elowyn raised the glowing seed. Its light reached the seam and bent, pulled toward the moonlit side. The mist parted there, showing an opening in the towers. A doorway between the coast and the dream. "The seed points through," she said. Tavian frowned. "It knows where it came from. That doesn't mean we can follow and come back." Elowyn looked at the split coast. She had found the path. But the path had led her here, to a door that opened one way. The rarer bloom waited on the far side of the seam. So did the question of return. She closed her hand around the warm bottle and stepped toward the doorway of light.