Moonbeam Shadows's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Moonbeam Shadows opened his fist above the grass. The pink-haired fairy was not there. A smear of light hung in his palm where she should have been, and a thin trail of the same light ran off into the mushroom caps at the edge of the path. She had slipped his dark. She was small enough to bend through the gaps his silence left, and she was fast. If she reached others in the woods, they would come back with her, and he would meet the keeper's gate with a crowd at his back. He stood. The half-fox woman sat where he had put her, mute, her black hand open in the dirt. He did not look at her again. He stepped over her legs and followed the trail of pink light off the path, into the mushrooms. The trail was easy at first. Bent gill on one cap. A dust of light on a stem. He moved fast between the stacked cones of caps that marked the old way, and his dark moved with him, drinking the small sounds out of the moss. He did not want her to hear him coming. He wanted her tired and cornered before she knew he was close. She was tired sooner than he thought. He found her past a leaning cone of red and orange caps, clinging to the underside of a broad white gill, her wings shivering. She was speaking, fast and low, to someone he could not yet see. He followed her eyes. An old gnome stood in the moss ten paces off. White beard braided to his belt. A small bell at his shoulder. He had one weathered hand held out flat, and the fairy's light was pouring words into his palm. The gnome listened. He did not look surprised. He looked like a man being told a thing he had already half-guessed. Moonbeam Shadows pressed his dark into the ground and drove it forward in one wide push. The moss went silent. The fairy's voice cut off mid-word. She dropped from the gill cap into the gnome's open hand, and the gnome closed his fingers around her, gentle, and tucked her inside his vest. Then the gnome lifted his other hand and set his palm flat against the air between them. The air pushed back. Moonbeam Shadows felt his dark break against it like water on stone. The old man had set a line he could not cross without a fight loud enough to ring back to the gate. The gnome turned and walked into the mushrooms with the fairy at his chest. He did not run. He did not need to. Moonbeam Shadows stood at the edge of the pushed-back air and watched the white beard disappear between the stems. The messenger had reached someone older than her. Whatever she had said, it had already been heard.