Nyx foxglove's Arc

Chapter 1 of 6

Nyx came ashore where the black sand killed everything. She was a tan sphynx cat, part mermaid, and she had crossed the dark sea to grow flowers here. Her tail glittered as she dragged herself up the beach. She held a bundle of black foxgloves against her chest. The sand swallowed her boat's shadow. Within an hour, the foxgloves in her hands began to wilt. She knelt and pressed one bloom into the sand. It curled brown and died. She tried a second. Dead. The black grit burned her fingers with heat it had trapped all day. Nothing rooted here. Nothing lived. She understood then why the island lay empty. She had sailed for weeks to reach a graveyard. But Nyx had built gardens from nothing before. She would not sail back. She dug. She dug for days. Her claws split. The sand poured back into the hole each night. She built a stone ring to hold the walls and kept going. On the tenth day, her hand plunged into cold. Dark water pooled at the bottom of her well. She cupped it and tasted salt and rot. It would kill her flowers faster than the sand. So she built. She raised a greenhouse of black glass beside the well, shaped like a pyramid with a half-moon door. She rigged a pump to pull the water up. She strained it through cloth and charcoal, again and again, until the salt was gone and the rot was gone. Clean water dripped into a trough. She mixed it with ash and crushed shell and made a small bed of soil on the pyramid floor. Into that soil she pushed her last living foxglove. Then she waited. On the third morning, she saw it. The stem stood straight. A bud swelled at its tip. By nightfall the flower opened, black as the sand outside but glittering with fine gold flecks. A thin trail of gold dust drifted up from its throat like smoke. It was more beautiful than anything she had grown in her life. She had beaten the black sands. Nyx laughed and cupped the bloom. Gold dust settled on her wet fingers. She lifted them to her nose and sniffed. Her throat closed. Her vision swam. She stumbled back and caught herself on a pot of twisted black sticks by the door. The flower was poison. Its scent alone could drop her. She had grown a killer. When her breath returned, she stared at the bloom through the glass. Her small well could feed one flower. But the water beneath the sand ran deep. If a spring lay under this whole island, she could turn the graveyard into gardens for miles. She wiped the gold from her hands and picked up her digging tools. The well was only the start. She had to find where the dark water began.