Lysander Brightwind's Arc

Chapter 1 of 11

The first blight-wind came at dawn, and Lysander Brightwind knew he had six weeks to spin a cocoon big enough to hide every fairy in the grove. He stood on a low branch and pulled a thread from his fingertips. The wind snapped it before it reached the leaf below. He tried again, thicker this time. The thread tore, drifted, and vanished over the ferns. Lysander was strong for a fairy, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, with hair the color of pollen. Strength did not help him here. Silk needed walls. Silk needed a roof. The open grove offered neither, and the blight-wind would only grow meaner as the weeks passed. Without a sheltered anchor, every strand he spun would rip loose and waste itself on the sky. He flew low along the moss paths, searching. Hollow logs were too small. The old stump was cracked through. He landed at last outside a compact green shed tucked between two roots. Hooks lined the ceiling in tidy rows. The interior was gray, dry, and still. Wind pressed the walls but did not enter. He measured the space with his wingspan. Wide enough for an anchor line. Tall enough to hang a first bloom of silk. But not nearly large enough to shelter a grove of fairies. A seed, then. Not the cocoon itself. A place to start one that could grow outward. "You're standing in my workshop." Celestia Threadwhisper stood in the doorway with a spool under one arm and a half-finished net looped around her wrist. Blue hair, green eyes, a skirt stitched from petal scraps. She was the grove's best weaver, and she had been avoiding him since the council named him cocoon-keeper over her. Lysander felt the old sting and set it aside. "I need the shed," he said. "For an anchor. The wind is tearing my silk." She looked past him at the sky. Her mouth tightened. She had felt the blight-wind too. "An anchor won't hold a grove-wide cocoon on its own," she said. "You'd need something heavy at the center. A living weight." "Do you have one?" She stepped inside and hung her spool on a hook. "I have an idea. But I want the shed shared, not taken." "Shared," he said. She whistled once, high and clean. Something stirred above the shed roof. A giant silk moth drifted down through the doorway, wings pale as milk, antennae feathered like ferns. It settled on the center hook and folded its wings. The hook bent, then held. Lysander drew a thread from his fingers and pressed it to the moth's shoulder. The silk caught. He tugged. It did not tear. "That will hold a start," Celestia said. "Not the whole grove." "Then we build outward from here," he said. Outside, the second blight-wind was already rising, and it smelled of rot.