Flora Nightingale's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

Flora reached the weeping willow at dawn. The grief floated in her lantern's glow, quiet and waiting. She knelt at the roots where the door had opened before. But the wood had knit shut. No seam, no gap, no way down. She pressed her palms to the bark and pushed. Nothing moved. "Please," she whispered. "I brought it home." The willow did not answer. The golden leaf pulsed once in her bag, then dimmed. Orwyn dropped from the branches and landed beside her. He folded his wings and studied the sealed roots with a flat, unhappy eye. He had guided her since the first night, sparing his words like coins. "You came all this way," he said, "and the Heart shut its own door." He clicked his beak. "It is afraid of what you carry." "Then how do I open it?" Flora asked. "You don't. Not yet." Orwyn turned his head. "There is one who might. An old tree spirit, far older than this willow. He lives past the Moonroot Passage, in a hollow where the mist keeps secrets. He owns a black mirror that shows what a closed door hides. If anything can tell us the next step, it is that glass." Flora followed the owl through the woods. The passage waited where he said, a low mouth of tangled roots and moss, glowing faint blue below. She stepped inside. The dark swallowed her lantern's flame until it flickered and turned blue itself, whispering. She held the grief close and climbed down. The tunnel opened into a hollow choked with mushrooms and hanging moss. Something in the corner unfolded. It rose on root-knotted legs, mushrooms sprouting from its shoulders, its face carved from old bark. Elder Mossroot. His black eyes fixed on her lantern, then on the shadow inside it. "You carry the Heart's cast-out sorrow," he said. His voice creaked like a bending trunk. "And the Heart has bolted its door against it. Foolish. A wound cannot heal shut around the splinter." "I need to reach the Heart," Flora said. "Orwyn said your mirror could help." Mossroot beckoned. From the moss he lifted a round black mirror, its edge crowded with dark thorns of iron. He held it toward her. "Look, and do not flinch." Flora looked. The glass darkened, then cleared. She saw the sealed willow roots from below, from inside the Heart's chamber. The trembling light within had walled itself in with fear. But the mirror showed more. A second path curled through the corrupted northern woods, down through blackened earth, to a back entrance the Heart could not seal, because it had forgotten it existed. "The front door is shut by fear," Mossroot said. "The forgotten door is open. But it runs through the sickness the Heart abandoned. The same dark that made your sorrow." Flora watched the path fade from the glass. She knew the way now.