Lily Dewdrop's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Lily Dewdrop measured her hair against a friend's bare back and found it far too short. She needed enough to weave into wings. Her friend could not fly, and Lily had promised to fix that. She held a lock beside his shoulder blades. It reached only halfway. The first frost had already whitened the tree houses of the grove. Cold days meant fewer weeks. Her hair grew a finger's width each month, and a wing needed a river of it. Her friend sat still on a curled root, folding and unfolding empty shoulders where wings should have been. He was the only fairy in the grove who had never left the ground. Every morning he watched the others rise, and every morning he pretended he didn't mind. Lily minded for both of them. "Winter's coming," he said. "Maybe next year." "No," Lily said. "I'm not waiting a year." She climbed into the roots beneath her home and dug out a comb from a family chest. It was old wood, cracked and painted with fading flowers. Her grandmother had used it, and hers before that. Family lore said the comb woke whatever it touched. Lily had always thought that was a bedtime story. Now she needed it to be true. She carried the comb into her garden. There, among the mushrooms, a small toad watched her with one bright eye, a red cap perched on its head like a hat. Beside it grew a single fairy flower with petals that gave off their own soft light. Lily knelt in the cold soil. She pulled a hair from her own head and planted it beside the glowing bloom. Then she combed the flower, slow and steady, the way her grandmother had combed her. Light ran down the comb's teeth and into the ground. The planted hair sank and vanished. Lily waited, hands shaking. Nothing moved. The toad blinked. She combed again, harder, whispering her friend's name into the dirt. The soil cracked. A green shoot pushed up where her hair had gone. It thickened, split, and poured out strand after strand of hair, longer than her arm, then longer than her body. It kept coming. Lily grabbed handfuls and laughed. She had months of growth in her fists, more than enough for one wing. But the shoot did not stop. Hair spilled over the mushrooms and buried the toad, who hopped free with a squeak. It wrapped the glowing flower and climbed the roots of her home. Lily pulled the comb back, and the light died. The growing stopped. She stood in a garden drowning in hair. She had far too much now, tangled and wild, snarled around every root and stem. Her friend stared from the edge, mouth open. "I did it," Lily said. Then she looked at the knotted mountain around her ankles. "I have to untangle all of this before I can weave anything."