Lumina Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Lumina Nightshade crouched in the hollow of an old golden tree at the edge of Karridale market, pressing the cracked crystal in her forehead against the bark to keep its glow hidden. Her braids had gone stiff an hour ago, hard as wire against her shoulders. That meant a shard was close, or trouble was, and today it was trouble. A stranger in a gray hood had been moving through the stalls since dawn, asking after a tall fairy with a broken forehead crystal. If he found her before she found him, she would lose her only lead to the bloodline she had been chasing for fifteen years. She pulled the staff from across her back and laid it flat on her knees. The crystal crowning it was twin to the one in her head, uncracked, a gift she did not understand from an elder who had taught her once and vanished. Lumina pressed her thumb to the staff's top stone, then to her forehead. A faint line of light traced from her skin to the staff and held there, steady. She read the fracture lines the way the elder had shown her, only once, years ago. Two of them pointed north today. One pointed straight at the stranger. She watched him from the hollow. He had set up beside a public brazier in the square, where a tall flame burned silver and pink above the coals. He warmed his hands at it and spoke to every fairy who stopped to light a lantern. He showed them something cupped in his palm. Twice, fairies looked toward the lane that led to her rented room. Lumina counted the coins in her pouch and the hours until sundown. She had maybe one of each. She could not let him keep asking. She stepped out of the tree and crossed the square with her hood up and her staff shortened to a walking stick. Two small dogs trotted near the brazier, silver-coated, dragonfly wings folded against their backs, sniffing at the stranger's boots. Lumina knelt as if to pet them. She glanced into the stranger's open palm and saw a chip of blue-black crystal, no bigger than a fingernail, veined with a fracture she had mapped on her own forehead when she was eight. A shard. He had a shard. He was not hunting her to hurt her. He was hunting her to trade. She stood before he saw her face and walked away at the pace of someone with nowhere to be. Behind her, one of the winged dogs began to bark. She did not turn. She had what she came for: he carried a piece of her, and he did not yet know what she looked like. By morning she needed a name, a price, and a plan to take the shard without giving him hers.