Nebulous starfiend's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

The blight had eaten another grove overnight, and Nebulous could smell the rot from their doorway. They stood at the crystal threshold of the great tree's hollow, watching gray veins crawl through what had been green moss the day before. Their small hands, blue as deep sky and freckled with pinprick stars, still glowed faintly from last night's failed weaving. They had spent every drop of gathered starlight on a patch of forest that turned out to already be healthy. Meanwhile, three trees behind it had died. Nebulous was a starfiend, part fairy, part goblin, made of the same magic that lit the sky above the Melcholy Woods. Their whole purpose was to weave that magic into a living shield for these trees. But a shield only worked if you knew where the wound was. From the doorway, the forest looked whole. The blight hid. Their dragon uncurled from its perch on a crystal root, no bigger than a cat, its scales swimming with nebula clouds. It chirped at them, worried. "I can't keep guessing," Nebulous told it. "I need a map. A real one." They went back inside the hollow. The faceted walls held every book they owned, tucked into ledges of raw crystal. Nebulous pulled down the oldest one, the one their mentor had left behind, and dragged a finger down brittle pages until they found what they half-remembered. A sketch of small beetles with mushroom caps. Underneath, three words: *follows the sickness*. The book said the beetles fed on blighted sap. Wherever the rot ran deepest, the beetles gathered thickest. Nebulous had seen them before, wandering the roots in ones and twos. They had never thought to count. They packed a jar of shooting-star wisps for light and stepped out into the forest floor. The dragon flew ahead, sniffing. It took most of the morning to find the first beetle. It was alone, chewing on a curled leaf, its shell shimmering with tiny constellations. Nebulous knelt and waited. The beetle finished, turned, and walked north. They followed. After an hour, a second beetle joined the first. Then four more crawled out from under a stone. By midday, Nebulous was walking behind a slow, glittering parade of twenty. The dragon circled above, marking the direction. The beetles led them past the rainbow-flowered tree Nebulous had been guarding for years. Its blossoms were still bright. The beetles didn't stop. They kept going, into a stand of pale birches Nebulous had always thought healthy. There, the beetles swarmed. Hundreds of them. They covered a single trunk from root to canopy, feeding on black sap that oozed between the bark. Nebulous pressed a hand to the trunk. The rot went deep. It went far. Under their palm, they could feel it branching underground toward every tree they loved, including the crystal one they lived in. They had found the heart. It was worse than they'd feared, and closer to home.