Light sol's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Light Sol's hair snapped sideways before she heard the wings. She stood on the tower balcony at the edge of Alaria, and her strands, blue and green and copper, pulled toward the beacon above her. She read them like a sail. Something big had landed on the rim. Then something else. Then a dozen more. She climbed the inner stair anyway. Her job was the sky, and the beacon at the top of her tower had gone dark years before she took the post. Tonight she meant to relight it. Travelers were lost in the storm belt past the cliffs. Without the light, they would drift until the wind broke them. She cracked the hatch and looked up. Carrion birds crowded the beacon's rim, black-feathered, red-eyed, beaks the length of her forearm. One saw the hatch move and struck. She dropped. The beak split the wood where her hand had been. She slammed the hatch shut and pressed her back to it. Her hair pulled hard toward the ceiling. More were landing. She could not climb up to the lamp. She could not clear the flock with a broom and a silk dress. She thought of the old wizard who kept a fire two ridges over, a small man in a blue hat who had once traded her tea for weather reports. He worked with crystal flame. He owed her nothing, but he answered signals. She ran down to the signal shelf and lit her mirror lamp three short, one long: help, height, now. Then she waited by the window and watched her hair. It calmed. It swung. It calmed again. An hour later a light bloomed on the far ridge, a bonfire studded with sharp crystals, and Aldric Sunweaver came up the path with his staff and a covered jar. He did not climb. He set the jar on the balcony stones and opened it. Blue and purple flame curled out of a dark pot and lifted a floating shard above the rim. He spoke one word she did not catch. The flame pulled a thin sound out of the air, a sound like a wet reed, and threw it upward. On the beacon rim, the carrion birds lifted their heads. They screamed once. Then the whole flock rose together and flew north, chasing the sound, until they were specks and then nothing. "They'll follow it three days," Aldric said. "Maybe four. Long enough for you to work." He looked at her hair, which now hung still. "Climb tonight. Not tomorrow." Light Sol climbed. The beacon's lamp sat cold under a lid of dust, and the old wick was gone. She had bought the height. She had not brought fire. Below her, Aldric's blue flame guttered and died in its pot, spent. The wind turned. Her hair lifted toward the black sky and pulled east, where the storm belt was already thickening.