Moonpetal's Arc

Chapter 4 of 6

By morning the seedling had grown. Its red mouths were wider now, and they turned to follow anything that moved. Moonpetal's tarantula crept too close to the clean soil. A trap snapped shut a hair from its leg. She scooped the spider up and held it to her chest. "You can't stay near this thing," she whispered. But she couldn't watch it every minute. The seedling was hunting, and it wanted meat. Sage crouched beside her, wings folded tight. The dragon-woman had guarded this ridge for years, and she'd shared her sleeping draught to help Moonpetal grow her first plant. Now she watched the little traps with a hard face. Her green snake coiled at her boot, tongue flicking toward the seedling. "It smells them," Sage said. "It won't stop until it's fed. Give it what it craves, or it takes what you love." "I have nothing to feed it," Moonpetal said. "No meat. No prey I'd give up." She looked at the tarantula, then at the snake. Both trusted her. Both were exactly what the seedling wanted. "There has to be another way." Sage was quiet. Then she pointed past the ridge, toward the dark patch of poisoned earth near Moonpetal's cottage. Green ooze bled from its cracks. "That ground is dead," Sage said. "But it's full of small things. Beetles. Grubs. They live in the taint where nothing else does." She grinned, sharp. "The monster eats poison and prey both. Feed it the crawlers from the blight." Moonpetal grabbed her trowel and ran to the blight patch. She dug into the cracked, sickly soil. Her fingers found fat grubs and hard-shelled beetles, pale and squirming. She filled a cloth pouch with them. The whole time, the seedling's hunger pulled at her mind like a thread. She carried the pouch back and knelt at the clean soil. She shook a grub loose in front of the nearest red mouth. The trap struck. It closed on the grub and pulled it under. Another mouth caught a beetle. Then another. The seedling fed, fast and greedy, its traps working through the pile. One by one, the red mouths swelled and went still. They stopped turning toward the tarantula. They stopped tracking the snake. Moonpetal set her spider down at the edge of the soil. No trap moved for it. She let out a long breath. "It's full," she said. "And I can feed it forever. The blight is huge." Sage laughed. "You just turned poison into food." But Moonpetal built a fence anyway. She wedged wooden slats around the seedling, tight enough to keep her tarantula out on the days she couldn't dig. The barrier stood firm. The seedling stayed fed and caged, hunting only what she gave it. She wiped her hands. The monster was tamed. Now she could grow it larger, carry its children across the valley, and clean the blight for good. And a larger seedling would need far more than a pouch of grubs.