Flower lifia's Arc

Chapter 4 of 6

The crystal fire steadied under Lifia's outer ring and her sibling's thin trickle. The stone beneath the moss stayed warm. But when Lifia pressed her seventh ring closer to the seam, she felt what she had been afraid to feel. Her sibling was stuck. Their light reached the seam and stopped. The stone still held most of them inside. She traced the edge of the seam with her thinnest thread. The moon-chakra pavement under the moss hummed against her — a wide circle of painted petals and small moons, its old lines drinking any light that spilled. That was the trouble. The pavement's pattern pulled outward. Her sibling's pattern pulled inward. Between them, the stone had clamped shut. Lifia knew one way to loosen a shut thing. Move a bloom. She had done it once. Three others had cracked. She had promised herself never again. A small weight landed on the moss beside her. A butterfly with one wing gone thin as fog. Behind it, more — a low hush of wings, thousands moving as one. Not her decoy swarm. A different swarm. Purple and pale, small fairies threaded through the wings. "We felt a hollow," they said. Their voices came together, one sound. "Like a missing finger. We came." Lifia did not lift her ring from the seam. "You will pull the blight here faster." "We are already many lights," they said. "One more edge does not matter to the hunter. It matters to your kin." The half-winged butterfly crept onto the stone. It laid its thin wing flat against the seam. "Borrow from us," the swarm said. "Not from yourself. We have carried empty places a long time. We know how to give one up." Lifia understood. She would not move her own bloom. She would take a small light from the swarm and press it into the seam from outside, while her sibling pushed from inside. The stone would open between two hands, not one. "Slow," she said into the stone. The chime under the moss answered. The swarm gathered a bead of light at the butterfly's torn wing. Lifia took it with her outer ring and slid it along the seam. Her sibling met it. The stone gave — not all at once, a long soft crack, like ice thinning on a pond. Light rose out of the pavement in a slow column. A shape formed inside it. Small. Purple. Seven rings, uneven, still learning their weight. Her sibling stepped free of the stone and stood on the painted moon. The crystal fire guttered. Two lights had become two lights standing apart, bright and separate, with no stone to muffle either one. Far to the east, the false light on the decoy swarm winked out. The blight had noticed. "Run," the swarm said. "We will hold the edge." Lifia took her sibling's hand for the first time and pulled them off the circle.