Lumina Opalknight's Arc

Chapter 7 of 11

The next night Lumina bloomed four more flowers. She cut them fast and carried them toward the path. Halfway down, the first blossom drooped in her hand. Its glow faded. The petals browned and folded shut. By the time she reached the sick villagers, all four flowers had died. She held out a fistful of wilted stems. A mother turned away, weeping. Lumina climbed back up with nothing given. Atticus waited by the willow. He looked at her empty hands. "They spoiled," she said. "They die within hours of blooming. I can't get them down fast enough." She sank onto the moss. "Every flower I make rots before it reaches a mouth that needs it." The troll rubbed his beard. "Then don't carry the flower," he said. "Carry the sick to the flower." But the path was steep, and the weakest could never climb it. He fell quiet, out of answers. Boots scraped the stones. A dwarf climbed into the glade, silver-bearded and stooped, his shoulders bent like a man carrying a weight only he could see. Lumina knew him. He was the weary dwarf from the market who had once warned her that songs could not heal. He had guided her through his dead garden's song, note by note. He had been a master gardener before some ruin drove him up this mountain to hide. "Your flowers rot," he said. Not a question. "Mine did too, once." He knelt by a spent seedling and touched the soil. "You cut them. That's your trouble. A blossom torn from moon-fed root dies in an hour. It has no water, no dew, no root to feed it." "Then how did you ever move a cure?" Lumina asked. "I didn't move the flower." He pulled a clay pot from his pack and set it down. "I moved the plant. Root and soil and bloom together. Kept alive. A rooted blossom holds its glow for days." He looked at her seedlings. "Lift them whole. Pot them in dew-soil. The sick press the living petal, and it heals while still attached. Then you carry the pot back and replant before sunrise." Lumina stared at the four spent seedlings. She had been killing her own cure with the knife. She dug the first plant free, roots and clumped soil intact, and packed it into the dwarf's pot. She wet the soil with dew from the willow leaves. The bloom held its light. An hour passed. It did not wilt. "It's holding," she breathed. The dwarf nodded once. "Rooted, it lives. Cut, it dies. Remember that." At dawn Lumina carried a potted blossom down to the mother. The petal glowed against the sick woman's palm. The color came back to her face. Lumina climbed home to replant before the sun cleared the ridge. She had beaten the wilting. But one pot cured one patient at a time, and the torchlit line below grew longer each night.