Flower lifia's Arc

Chapter 3 of 6

The crystal fire dimmed. Lifia felt it before she saw it. The heat over the stone thinned. The sharp bright stones ringing the flame had gone dull at their tips. The healer had left with the tarot creature to guard the swarm's eastern path. No one had stayed to feed the fire. Lifia counted breaths. Six, and a spark died. Nine, and another. When the fire went out, her signal would leak from the stone even without her body over it — her seventh ring was still pressed to the seam, still awake, still shining under the moss. The blight would feel it. The blight would come back. She could not carry the stone. She could not move a bloom. She could feed a fire. She lifted her outer ring — the one farthest from the seam — and pushed a thread of her light into the crystal at the fire's edge. The stone drank it. The flame jumped. One sharp point brightened. Then dimmed again. It wanted more than a thread. She gave more. The fire climbed. Two rings on her body went thin and gray. She felt her third ring pull tight, complaining. She remembered the last time she had moved weight inside herself — three blooms cracked in one breath. She stopped pushing and waited. The third ring held. The fire held. A sound came up through the moss. Not from the pavement. From under it. A slow chime, like a small bell wrapped in cloth. Her sibling, awake inside the stone, had heard the fire fail and was answering. The seam under her seventh ring warmed. A thin trickle of light rose out of it and slid sideways into the crystal at the fire's edge. Her sibling was feeding the fire with her. The flame steadied. The sharp stones brightened along their whole length. Lifia eased her outer ring back. The trickle from the seam did not stop. It matched her, thread for thread, keeping the crystal fire fat and bright. She pressed her seventh ring closer. "Slow," she said into the stone. "You are not all the way out yet. Slow." The chime slowed. The light from the seam thinned to what the fire needed and no more. Lifia held still under the bright dome of stones. The fire would burn. Her sibling had chosen to share the work, which meant her sibling was awake enough to choose. That was farther out of the stone than she had meant to bring them tonight. Somewhere east, the false light on the butterfly cloud was still walking. Somewhere closer, the blight would notice — sooner rather than later — that the signal it chased was thinner than the signal it had left behind. Two lights now burned in the pattern where there had been one. Lifia watched the crystal fire and waited to be found again.