Marg's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Marg had crossed three countries to find the god who gave her the sky, and she still couldn't stop the sky from turning on people. Her palms itched. Clouds bunched over the little hut where she'd been practicing for a week. She had come to this quiet plain to learn control before she found him. So far, control did not come. Twice on the road her temper had spun up storms. Twice, only luck kept them from crushing a village. She stepped out of the hut and shook her hands, trying to loosen the pressure under her skin. Overhead, the clouds darkened. A cold wind pushed her braids across her face. "Not now," she said. "Not here." Her dragon lifted his head from the grass. He was black with gold along his wings, and he had followed her from the first day the powers woke. He watched the sky, then watched her, and made a low sound in his throat. A warning. Marg didn't listen. She reached for the storm and tried to pull it apart. Instead she fed it. Thunder cracked. A bolt of lightning split a rock near the hut, and the heat threw her back into the dirt. Rain came down hard and cold. She realized she couldn't hold this. She could barely feel where her power ended and the storm began. So she stopped fighting the sky. She turned to the old stone fire pit under the heartwood tree. If she couldn't reach the god through her hands, she would reach him another way. She dragged herself to the pit and threw in what she had carried for this: a river serpent's bone crown and a strange dark flower she'd cut days ago. The fire hissed and jumped. "Council of gods," she called over the wind. "I don't want this power loose. Tell me where the one who gave it is. Help me before it kills someone." Her dragon spread his wings above her, blocking the rain, steady as a roof. The offering burned green, then white. For a moment the storm above her hut went still. The wind died. The rain stopped in the air, hanging. Then the fire showed her something. Not a face. A direction. A pull, sharp and clear, tugging north like a hook behind her ribs. She knew, without doubt, which way the sky-god waited. The storm broke apart. The clouds thinned and drifted off, harmless, over empty grass. No one had been hurt. Marg knelt in the mud and breathed. But the offering had answered only half her plea. The pull told her where to go. It said nothing about her hands. She still couldn't control the power, and now she couldn't stay. The god was days north, and every mile between here and there was a mile she might spark another storm with no fire pit and no warning. She stood and looked at her dragon. "North," she said. "We can't wait to be ready."