Lumina Nightglow's Arc

Chapter 8 of 34

The healed groves still glowed behind Lumina when the cold wind came. It rolled out of the deep dark, thin and biting. It reached her guard creature first. The stardust in its veins had shone like small rivers, but now those rivers dimmed. Frost crept up its legs. It swayed and pressed against her side. "No," Lumina said. She wrapped her arms around the creature's neck. Its fur was going stiff and white. She pushed warmth into it, the same love she had sent through the roots. But the wind stole the heat before it sank in. The frost climbed higher. The creature's breath slowed. Celsius Heartwood ran to them, flowers shaking in her green hair. She had shown Lumina how to merge with the heart. Now she pressed her small hands to the creature's flank and pulled them back, burned by cold. "This darkness eats warmth," she said. "Fire won't reach it. Neither will your hands." Luminara Tidewhisper drifted close in her ribbon of river water, blue hair trailing starlight. She had guided Lumina from the very start. "Your power works through what you love," she said. "Not through the air. Through the bond." Lumina held the creature's face. It had pledged itself to guard her the day she mastered the heart. It had walked every step beside her since. She stopped fighting the wind. She looked inside herself, past the forest's power, to the deep quiet place the merge had opened. Something answered there. A warm emblem of light bloomed in her chest, pink and gold, turning slow. It was not the forest's fire. It was older. It was hers alone. The starlight in it pushed back against the dark the way nothing else had. And she was not the only light. Another glow drifted up beside her, radiant, her skin flawless, her long hair threaded with leaf and flower. Heart Solia sparkle, the fairy the heart itself had made from Lumina's own joining. She laid her hand over Lumina's hand on the creature's brow. "Together," Heart Solia said. Lumina let the emblem open. Its light poured down her arms and into the creature. This time the wind could not steal it, because it did not travel through the air. It moved through the love between them, straight and unbroken. The frost cracked. It flaked away in white dust. The creature shuddered. Its veins lit again, brighter than before, stardust racing under its coat. It lifted its head and licked her cheek. Lumina laughed and cried at once. The wind died. The dark drew back, but it did not leave. Far off, past every healed grove, the ancient cold still waited. Now Lumina knew the weapon it could not touch. Not fire. Not the forest's power. The starlight love hidden deep inside her. She stood, one hand on her guard's warm neck. "That is how we reach it," she said. "That is how we wake the last dark."