Mary Nova's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Mary Nova knelt by a flat boulder at the edge of the deeper woods, humming a song she could not finish. The boulder sat thick with moss, its top worn smooth by generations of paws and hooves. Every wary creature in this forest stopped here before crossing deeper. Mary knew that. She also knew the song her grandmother used to hum at this very stone was the only way to keep them from bolting. Two notes in, her memory went blank. She had come into the woods alone, as the elder made her promise. No tools. No guide. Only the extra food packed into her bag and a description of the beast that guards the heart of the forest, told to her and no one else. The elder would not even meet her eyes at the gate. Mary had taken that as a warning and walked in anyway. Past the moss-stone, the trees thickened toward a grove she had only heard about, where a tree hung with glowing fruit marked the true border. The beast lived past that line. To reach it she had to pass the small ones first, and the small ones would not let her near without the song. A field mouse crept onto the boulder and froze when Mary leaned forward. She tried to speak to it the way she always did, mind to mind, soft. The mouse twitched and fled. A jay screamed from a branch and would not answer her either. The silence felt like the crow that had looked at her once and flown off without a word. She had carried that silence for two years. She would not carry another. Mary opened her bag and dug past the bread the elder had packed. At the bottom, wrapped in cloth, was her grandmother's flute. She had brought it as a keepsake, not a tool. The mouthpiece was cool against her lip. She blew one note, then another, fumbling. On the third try her fingers moved on their own, the way they had when she was six and her grandmother had guided them across the holes. The melody came out thin but whole. The flute remembered what she could not. The boulder filled. A pair of rabbits. The jay, quiet now. A fox that should have run. And from the brush behind them stepped a small purple wolf with nine slow tails, watching her with steady eyes. It did not speak, but it did not leave. When Mary lowered the flute, the wolf turned toward the glowing grove and waited. The other animals scattered. The wolf did not. Mary stood, tucked the flute into her belt, and followed. She had her way in. She also had something the elder had never mentioned, walking ahead of her into the dark.