Lyira Moonwhisper's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Lyira Moonwhisper crouched behind a fallen birch and watched the thing that used to be her brother drink from the stream. His skin had gone the color of wet bark. His fingers ended in black claws. Six months ago they had all been elves together, sixty-three of them born the same spring, raised in the same hall. Now sixty-two were fey, and only Lyira still had her own face. She did not know why. She had come to the stream to find out if any part of her brother remembered her, because if he did, she could begin to bring him back. But she could not step out from the birch. The fey killed anything warm that came near them, and her brother had killed a deer that morning without slowing his walk. She pulled the small dwarven figure from her pocket and set it in the moss. Her friend from the spellvault had carved it for her last winter, before any of this began, and had pressed a listening charm into its chest so they could speak across distance. She did not need distance now. She needed a shield for her mind. She thumbed the rune on its back, closed her eyes, and reached out the way the old books said elves once could, silently, thought to thought. She pushed her brother's name across the water. For a long moment nothing answered. Then something answered. It was not words. It was a wet, hungry attention that swung toward her like a head turning in the dark, and under it, faint and buried, one clean note she knew, the tune he used to hum while fletching arrows. Lyira gasped. Across the stream, her brother dropped the water from his hands and stood up straight. His black eyes found the birch. He began to walk toward her, fast, and she could not tell which part of him was coming. She grabbed the figure and ran.