Feng-Shu Marsh-Walker's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Feng-Shu Marsh-Walker pressed a wet cloth to his mouth and counted the flowers that had reached his door. Yesterday there were three. Now a whole cluster of them crowded the threshold, petals twisted, sap dripping onto his step. Their fumes had killed his brother monks and blackened the swamp water for miles. He had sworn to find a cure. Instead the plague had come to his own home. The fumes worked into his skull. Feng-Shu saw men in the fog then. Old enemies he had buried years ago stood among the reeds, swords drawn, calling his name. He knew they were not real. He gripped his emerald necklace until the stone bit his palm and forced himself to breathe through the cloth. Something moved past the false soldiers. A fox. It was made of metal, plates sliding over its ribs, a blue light burning in its chest. Sparks dripped from a torn shoulder. The fox looked at him, then trotted into the brush and stopped, waiting. Feng-Shu did not trust the vision. But the false soldiers did not follow, and the fox did. It stayed ahead of him, always the same distance, leading him through the thick fog. Twice he lost it. Twice the blue glow appeared again and drew him on. His head cleared as the flowers thinned. The fox led him to a clearing and stopped beside something planted in the mud. A long torch, its handle carved with green runes. A flame the color of his necklace burned at its top. No wind touched it. Feng-Shu wrapped his hand around the handle and pulled it free. He carried the torch back toward his dwelling. When he touched the flame to the cluster at his door, the poison flowers curled and blackened. The sap hissed and dried. The fumes thinned where the green fire passed. Feng-Shu worked until his arms shook. One patch, then another. The flame ate through them, but slowly. Each plant took long minutes to burn. By dark he had cleared only the ground around his door and a narrow path beyond it. The rest of the swamp still glowed with twisted petals as far as he could see. He drove the torch into the mud and sat. The air near his home was clean now. The false soldiers were gone. But he understood the truth of the flame in his hands. Burning the blooms one by one would take a lifetime, and the plague spread faster than he could cut it back. The metal fox sat at the edge of the light, watching him. Its blue core flickered. Feng-Shu remembered where it had come from, deeper in the fog, at ease among the poison. The fox had not led him to a cure. It had led him to a tool. And a tool needed a source to strike. Feng-Shu pulled the torch from the mud. He would follow the fox back to wherever it had come from.