Lyra Brightgaze's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Lyra Brightgaze had wasted six days asking the wrong people about sight-restoring magic, and the healer in the market had just laughed her out of his stall. She walked off with her hood down and her scar bare, the way she always did. Her left eye was blind, but it felt the sun on her cheek and the cold of the brass coins in her pocket. It also felt magic. The eye had been dim since the fight, the one she would not talk about, and every quiet day let the scar settle deeper into her face. She needed a lead before the dimness became permanent. She stopped at the fountain to think. A purple-skinned elf with a slashed eye drew stares, and she had learned to use them. She asked a flower-seller where strange remedies came from. The woman pointed past the temple road, toward a low district where the lamps stayed lit at noon. Lyra dropped a coin in her basket and went. Two streets in, her blind eye went hot. Not the warm prickle from a charm-stall. A hard, steady burn, like standing too close to a forge. She turned toward it. The heat pulled her through an arch in a stone wall and into a garden ringed by pale columns. Plant beds glowed from under the soil. A woman in green knelt among the roots, pinching dead leaves. She looked up at Lyra's scar and did not flinch. "You feel it," the woman said. Lyra nodded. The woman stood and brushed dirt from her hands and walked to a shelf set into one of the arches. She took down a crystal bottle. Purple liquid moved inside it in a slow spiral, lit from within. Lyra's blind eye burned so hot she pressed her palm against it. The gardener held the bottle out but did not let go. "This isn't the cure," she said. "It's a compass. It points to what made it. If you want your eye back, you follow the pulse." Lyra asked where. The gardener's mouth tightened. "The sellers gather in a cavern under the black hills. Bring coin. Bring better sense than you have now." Lyra paid what the woman asked, which was most of what she had. She walked out with the bottle wrapped in cloth against her chest. Through the cloth, through her ribs, the heat pulsed against her blind eye in a steady beat, and each beat pointed the same way, toward the hills outside the city. She had a direction now. She also had no money for an inn, a warning she did not understand, and a road that led to people who traded in magic the healers would not name. She started walking before sundown.