Halsin Silverbough's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Halsin Silverbough knelt in dead soil and pressed a healing spell into it, hoping to wake a forest that had died under a curse. Green light spread from his palm. The ground drank it and stayed gray. He was Archdruid of the Emerald Grove, and for a whole season he had come to this cursed edge of the woods to force new life from it. Nothing grew. He did not even know why. He tried a second spell, then a third. Each one guttered out like a candle in wind. His problem was simple and cruel: he could not tell whether his magic reached the sickness or missed it entirely. Until he understood the curse's source, every effort was a guess. He wiped soot-black earth from his hands and looked at the small garden he had carried here to test against the rot. The garden sat on a wagon behind him. Oaks no taller than his arm grew in a barrel of good soil. Around them clustered mushrooms, pumpkins, strawberries, and two snapping carnivorous plants that hissed at shadows. This bundle of living things was his measuring stick. If the curse touched it, he would see how. He pushed the wagon past the tree line. The strawberries browned. The snapping plants went limp. The pumpkins sank in on themselves within seconds. Halsin watched the speed and the order of the dying, but he could not read the pattern. He needed eyes trained on poisons and cures, not on beasts and weather. "You brought your whole pantry to a graveyard," a voice said behind him. Freya Moonflower stood at the wagon's wheel, already crouched over the withered strawberries. She was the Grove's herbalist, and Halsin had sent for her because no one in the Grove knew rot and remedy as she did. Flowers still clung to her hair. She crushed a dying leaf between two fingers and sniffed it, unbothered by the ruin around her. "I can't tell healing from waste," Halsin said. "Every spell dies. I don't know what I'm fighting." Freya broke a blackened stem and studied the sap. "It isn't rot. Rot spreads out from a wound." She traced the dead line across the soil with one finger. "This came from below. All at once. Same moment, everywhere." She looked up. "Your curse doesn't kill the plant. It kills the soil's hunger for life. The magic comes up from the ground itself." Halsin knelt beside her. He pressed his hand down and finally felt it: a cold pull under the earth, drinking his power before it could work. Not a wound to close. A source to find. "Then I've been healing the leaves," he said, "while the root of it drinks from beneath." "Now you know where to dig," Freya said. Halsin stood and stared at the cursed ground. He knew his enemy at last. It lived below him, and it went deeper than any garden.