Lumina Opalknight's Arc

Chapter 3 of 11

By the fourth morning, the villagers came. Roslin's story had spread down the mountain. A woman with a coughing baby reached the glade first. Then an old man leaning on his son. Then three more, pale and slow, climbing the last stones to the willow. They all looked at Lumina with the same hope in their eyes. "The flowers," the woman said. "Please. Just one for my child." Lumina stood among her six seedlings. Green leaves. No petals. Ten people watched her now, waiting. She could not say sorry ten times. "They haven't bloomed," she began. The old man sank onto the moss. The baby wailed. Kofer pressed against her ankle, ears flat. She needed the seedlings to bloom tonight. She could not force them with hands or heat. Then she remembered the market below, and the harp she had once seen glowing on a stall there. A silver frame, moons carved along its neck, strings that shone like moonlight. The seller had claimed it could stir sleeping things awake. Lumina had thought it a trick. Now she had nothing else. "Wait here," she told the crowd. "I'll return by dark." She flew down to the market, traded Roslin's coin and her own opal ring, and carried the harp back up the slope. A dwarf sat outside the glade when she returned. Silver hair, a long beard, shoulders bent like a man who had given up. He watched her set the harp in the dew-soil. "I knew a gardener who tried music once," he said. His voice was tired. "I was that gardener. My garden died anyway. Songs don't feed roots." Lumina's hands shook. "Then why are you here?" "To see if you'd fail like I did." He did not move to stop her. He only watched. The moon rose. Lumina knelt and played. The strings hummed low, then rose. She did not know the tune. She played what she felt, the coughing below, the child's coin, the ten faces waiting. The notes drifted over the leaves. One seedling trembled. A leaf curled back. Slowly, at the tip of the stem, a bud swelled and split. A single opal blossom opened, pale and glowing, one flower on one plant. The other five stayed green. The crowd gasped. Lumina stopped playing. One bloom. Ten sick people. She plucked the flower with careful fingers. The dwarf stared. "It worked," he whispered. "For me it never worked." Something woke in his tired eyes. Lumina turned to the crowd. Ten hands reached for one flower. "I can only give one," she said. "Tonight." The woman with the baby stepped forward. The old man's son stepped forward. Voices rose, sharp and desperate, each claiming the greater need. Lumina held the single blossom above them. The harp could wake one flower a night. The mountain below held far more than one dying soul. And now every one of them knew she could grow a cure.