Flower lifia's Arc

Chapter 2 of 6

Lifia lay across the stone with her seventh ring pressed to its warmth. The blight had touched her outer ring and pulled back, but it had not left. It circled the pavement now, thin black threads testing the edge, learning the shape of her light. Every heartbeat she stayed made her easier to find. Every heartbeat she left made the stone easier to eat. She understood the trap. Her light was a lantern, and her sibling was the thing the lantern showed. She could not carry the stone. She could not move a bloom. She could only pick which of them the blight caught. A dry sound crossed the pavement — small feet, then a tail dragging paper. A tarot-shaped creature stepped between two black threads without touching either. Behind it drifted a cloud of pale butterflies that moved as one body, a young figure at their center in a butterfly-scaled dress. Further back came a small healer in white and purple robes, sleeves too long for her hands. "You are lit up like a festival," the healer said. "Very pretty. Very stupid. My crystals would like a word." The tarot creature sat on its haunches. "A lamp that stands over its treasure only teaches the thief where to dig." Lifia did not lift her ring from the stone. "If I leave, the blight opens it. If I stay, the blight follows my light to it." "We can hold light," the swarm said. Their voice came from all the butterflies at once. "We are many. We can be a shape that looks like you. We have done it before, when we were whole. We are not whole. It will still work." The healer knelt and set a small bundle on the moss — sticks, resin, and a fistful of raw crystal. She struck it. A bonfire jumped up, ringed in sharp bright stones, throwing sparks that did not fall. "Signal eater," she said. "It drinks the shine off you. Not forever. Long enough." "Long enough for what," Lifia said. "For us," the swarm said. The butterflies lifted from the young figure and gathered above the pavement in a slow purple cloud, taking a rough echo of Lifia's rings. "We will wear your light. We will walk east. The blight will follow the shape it already knows." Lifia's seventh ring shook against the stone. If the swarm carried her signal and the blight tore through them, she would owe a debt she could not pay. But the stone would live. Her sibling would keep the seam she had opened. She drew her light up out of her outer rings and pushed it into the butterfly cloud. It took. The false Lifia lifted and drifted east across the moss. The blight threads shivered, turned, and chased. The crystal fire closed over the true stone. Lifia crouched in its dim, hidden now, and heard the seam inside the stone hum back — awake, waiting, and no longer alone.