Lyra Brightgaze's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Lyra walked the hill road two days before she saw the sign. The bottle pulsed against her ribs in a steady beat, and the cloth she wrapped it in had stopped hiding the glow. Purple light leaked through the weave and lit her chin at night. She kept walking because she had no coin for a wagon and no other lead. The road climbed between cracked orange cliffs, and the wind carried the smell of woodsmoke that did not match any town on her map. The smoke came from a tin-roofed shed at a bend in the road. A painted board read SUPPLY STATION in faded red. Fuel drums sat stacked by the door. No one stood at the counter. A leather satchel lay open on the dirt, its lining glowing faint green from moss packed inside. Someone had cut the strap. Lyra stopped walking. She pressed her hand over the bottle to smother the light and stepped off the road into the rocks. Her blind eye went hot, but not from the bottle. The heat came from above. She looked up. A narrow ledge jutted over the road from the cliff face, half hidden by a lip of stone. Two men crouched on it. One held a crossbow. The other held a charm that flared when he turned it toward her. They had been watching the shed, waiting for the glow to come close enough to drop on. Lyra ran back the way she came, off the road, into a dry gully. The crossbow bolt struck rock behind her. She crouched under an overhang and unwrapped the bottle. The purple liquid spun hard toward the hills, past the bandits, past the cliff. She needed the light gone. She scooped wet clay from the gully floor and packed it around the glass until only her palm felt the pulse. The glow died. She held still and listened. Boots scraped stone above her, then moved off down the road toward the shed. She waited until the boots were gone, then climbed the gully wall on the far side and cut across the slope away from the road. The clay dried and cracked but held. Her blind eye still burned toward the hills, steady as before. She walked through scrub for the rest of the day, scratched and thirsty, with no road under her feet and no water in her pack. By dusk she found a goat track that ran the same direction the bottle pulled. She had kept the bottle. She had lost the road. The bandits would tell others a glowing elf had slipped them, and the next watch would look harder. She sat against a rock and chewed the last of her bread. The clay on the bottle pulsed under her hand. The hills rose ahead, dark against a red sky, and somewhere inside them was the cavern the gardener had named.