Nyx foxglove's Arc

Chapter 2 of 6

The well had fed one flower. Nyx wanted more. Before dawn she waded into the black tides past her greenhouse and dug her claws into the wet sand. She was hunting the place where the dark water ran deep, the spring that could green the whole island. The tide reached her waist. She worked the sand loose, cup after cup, and felt the pull of something colder underneath. Then the water rose against her. It climbed her chest without a wave to push it. A shape gathered in the black surface, tall and star-flecked, shaped like a woman with a pharaoh's crown. Its silhouette held tiny points of light, like sky poured into a body. It did not speak. It reached, and the tide reached with it, dragging Nyx toward the deep. She kicked. The sand she had loosened gave way beneath her. She went under. Water filled her ears. The spirit's hand closed on her tail. Cold burned through her scales. She understood then that this thing lived in the deep water she was chasing, and it would drown her before it let her take one drop. Nyx clawed at the seabed for anything solid. Her hand closed on a shard of gold half-buried in glittering silt, a fallen star fragment cold as the tide. She jammed the sharp point into the spirit's grip and twisted. The star-flecks in its arm scattered like sparks. The hand let go. She broke the surface, gasping. The spirit rose after her. She scrambled for the shore, but the black sand offered nothing to hold. Her fingers found the drape of dark kelp hanging where the tide had left it snagged on stone. She hauled on it, hand over hand, and dragged herself out of the water. On the sand she turned. The spirit hung at the tide line, unable to leave the water. It watched her with pale eyes. Then it sank without a sound and was gone. Nyx lay still until her breath came back. The lesson was plain. She could not dig the deep water alone. The thing beneath the tides would take her the moment she went in. But the shard in her fist still glittered, and near it, where her runoff from the greenhouse had seeped down to the shore, something had changed. A patch of dark grass grew in the black sand. Blades so deep green they read as near black, thick and living, watered by the clean spill from her pump. Her purified water had reached beyond the pyramid on its own. It had grown grass in ground that killed everything. Nyx pressed her palm to the turf. It held. The island could be greened after all. But the spring she needed lay under the spirit's water, and no shovel would win it. She needed to learn what the thing in the tides wanted. She would have to ask someone who spoke to spirits.