Lunara Silvercoat's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

The full moon came four nights later. Lunara left the shrine at dusk and walked into the grove. The half-hallowed rot had spread while she waited. Black veins crossed the snow now, reaching from the poisoned center toward the last healthy trees. By morning they would touch the roots. She had run out of days. The moon rose full and white above her. She had to finish the rite tonight, or the grove would die. She knelt at the pale stone altar near the grove's heart. Its curved rim caught the moonlight. The silver bowl at its center sat empty, waiting. Beside it lay the moonstone tablet and a single white blossom she had carried from the shrine. She set the flower in the bowl. Then she drew the dagger from her belt. Its blade gleamed cold. Red streaks ran along the steel, and a small moon shone in the pommel. Fennric's words came back to her. Blessings take blood. That was the cost no tablet named. Lunara pressed the edge to her palm and cut. Blood welled dark and dripped into the bowl. She lifted the tablet and began to read the verses aloud. The words were old and hard in her mouth. She spoke them slow and clear. The pain came before she finished. It crawled up from the cut, not from the wound but from the blade itself. Something old lived in that steel. It drank her strength as she spoke. Her arm went cold. Her vision blurred. She understood too late. The dagger held its own corruption, and it fed on her while she gave her blood freely. She forced the last verse out. Her voice shook. The bowl of blood flared silver, then white. Light rolled off the altar in a slow wave. Where it passed, the black veins in the snow shrank back. The poisoned ground pulled tight toward the center and stilled. The spreading stopped. Lunara fell against the altar. The dagger dropped from her hand. She could not feel her fingers. The grove around her held its breath, no longer dying, not yet whole. She had bought its life with her own strength, and the blade had taken more than the rite required. She lay in the cold and looked at the wound in her palm. The cut had closed. But the coldness stayed, spread up her arm, and sat in her chest like ice. The corruption from the blade was in her now. She had stopped the rot in the grove and carried it into her own body. She gripped the altar and pulled herself up. The grove was saved for tonight. The full moon would not come again for a month. And whatever the dagger had put inside her was already moving, slow and cold, toward her heart.