Moonwhisper's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Moonwhisper knelt on bare dirt where the grove used to stand. Her white hair fell across her shoulders as she pressed a palm to the ground. Nothing answered. No hum, no green pulse, no memory of the dances her kin once traced across this earth. She was the last white-haired one, and the land had forgotten them. She needed a rooted piece of the old grove to teach the soil what to grow again. A seed. A cutting. Any living thread. She had none. She had searched every hollow and stream bank for a season, and the grove had left nothing behind. At her chest, the talisman warmed. Its lunar stone caught a pale light even in daytime. She lifted it and turned the runes with her thumb, the way her mother had shown her once. The talisman could hold power. It could not make life from nothing. A cluster of small wings brushed her cheek. Four fairy folk hovered close, their skin glowing soft pink, blue, gold, and lavender. They pointed together, insistent, toward the mossy roof of the cottage at the wood's edge. Moonwhisper stood. She had lived in that cottage her whole life. She had never climbed the roof. A voice landed behind her. "You've been looking down. It's been growing up." She turned. Lysander Willowbreeze stood barefoot in the grass, green hair tousled, arms folded like a boy who had waited too long to be noticed. He was the forest's caretaker, and he had avoided her since the grove died. Seeing him now made her jaw tighten. He had known something. "Growing what," she said. He tilted his chin at the cottage. "Climb." She crossed to the porch and pulled herself up the carved beam. The roof was thick with moss and vine. Near the crooked chimney, half hidden under a curl of ivy, a single sapling had rooted itself into the shingles. Its bark was pale as bone. Its leaves were the shape she had only seen in her mother's weavings. Moonwhisper's breath caught. A seedling from the old grove. It had drifted here on some wind years ago and taken hold above her head while she searched the ground. She cupped the small trunk. "How long?" "Six winters," Lysander said from below. "I didn't tell you. I wasn't sure it would live." She pressed the talisman against the sapling. The runes flared. The stone drank the sapling's faint pulse and held it, steady, a rooted link she could carry. She worked the roots free from the shingles with careful fingers. Moss came away in her hand. The sapling sighed and settled into her arms, alive, hers. Below, the fairy folk spun in a bright ring. Lysander did not smile. "You have your link," he said. "But the ground you mean to plant it in isn't empty anymore. Something moved in when the grove left. You'll have to answer to it first."