Lily Pondwhisper's Arc

Chapter 1 of 12

Lily Pondwhisper stood eye-to-eye with a beetle, and this was wrong. Her grandmother had once been tall enough to touch the low branches. Now every fairy in the hollow was small enough to ride a frog. Something had shrunk her whole kin, and Lily meant to undo it. But to reverse a curse, she needed to know where the curse began. She had no idea. That was the problem gnawing at her. She lived under a cluster of dark mushrooms, their caps shading her doorway from the moon. Her pet slept curled on a root, a small black cat with butterfly wings folded across its back. Lily nudged it awake. "Get up," she whispered. "Nobody remembers the old days. But something must." The elders had failed her. They spoke only of being large "before," never of how or why the shrinking came. No fairy had written it down. No fairy could. So Lily left the mushrooms and crossed to the one place that might still hold a record. The old library rose from the dark, its stone cracked and its roof sagging. Ivy strangled the windows. Fairies avoided it. Lily squeezed through a gap beneath the door, her winged cat slipping in behind her. Dust lay thick on the shelves. The books towered over her like cliffs, far too big for tiny hands to open. She searched for hours. She climbed spines, pried at covers, found nothing but silverfish and rot. The words inside were written for creatures her grandmother's size. She could not even turn a page. She sank onto a shelf, hopeless. Then her cat pounced. It had spotted something small on a low ledge, small enough for a fairy. Lily scrambled over. It was an oval locket, its surface cracked, a butterfly and flowers etched across the metal. Fairy-made. Fairy-sized. Someone tiny had left it here. Her fingers found the seam. The locket resisted, then popped open. Inside lay no portrait. Instead, letters were scratched into the metal, deep and hurried, in the old fairy hand. Lily read them aloud, her voice shaking. "The one who cast it lies where the water goes dark." That was all. No name. No date. But it was a start, the first thread in a knot no one else had dared to pull. Someone had known the truth and hidden it inside this locket. Someone had wanted it found. Lily closed the locket and pressed it to her chest. Her cat rubbed against her arm, wings twitching. She finally had a clue to follow. But the words raised a colder question. Where did the water go dark? She had never heard of such a place, and no living elder had spoken of one. She climbed down from the shelf, locket in hand, and headed for the door. She would have to ask someone who remembered. And the fairies who remembered the most were the ones who feared the answer.