Lunara Silverleaf's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Lunara Silverleaf had six days left before the grove died, and she was spending the first one begging a stranger to tell her where to go. She pressed the silver root fragment into Cassandra Veil's palm. It was the only piece of the wellspring left in the grove after the theft. The rest, stone and water and old magic together, had been carried off in the night while Lunara stood at her sister's wedding rehearsal, promising she would not miss the vows. She had missed them. She had left before dawn with the fragment in her pocket and a note that said only, I have to try. Her sister had told the messenger she understood. The messenger said her sister's voice broke on the word. Cassandra closed her fingers around the fragment. She was small, wrapped in beads and dark robes, and she did not open her eyes. "You know my price," she said. "Name it." "A year of your sight. Not blindness. The green in things. You will see the world, but not the color that tells you it is alive." Lunara thought of the grove. She thought of the moss on the wellspring stones, the light through the summer canopy, her sister's wedding sash. She said yes. Cassandra pressed the fragment to her mouth and hummed once. The silver in Lunara's vision drained first, then the greens, leaf by leaf, until the walls of the ruined temple around them looked like ash. Cassandra opened her eyes. "North," she said. "Three days on foot. A sod cottage packed with snow, half-buried. Two men and a woman. They are bleeding your wellspring into jars. When the jars are full, they will sell them, and the source will be empty stone." She pressed something small and cool into Lunara's other hand. A feather, silver, edged in colors Lunara could no longer see. "This will point while they still hold it. Do not lose it." Lunara stepped out of the Forgotten Moon Temple into a world gone gray. The feather in her hand pulled north like a compass needle on a string. She had a direction, a deadline, and a debt already paid. She lifted the silver root fragment to her lips and whispered the name of the oldest creature that had ever slept beneath the grove — the rose-winged drake her great-grandmother had fed by hand — and asked it to wake and guard what was left of the source until she came home with the rest. The fragment warmed once against her mouth, then cooled. Somewhere south, in a grove she could no longer picture in color, something old opened its eyes. She started walking north.