Nyx foxglove's Arc

Chapter 5 of 6

The spring poured clean and cold from the passage behind the spirit. Nyx cupped her hands and drank. Fresh water, no salt, no rot. This was what she had dug for through years of black sand. But the sailors' knocking still echoed below her, faint and steady. She could not free them. She could only carry their water up to the light. She followed the flow out of the glittering black cave. The spring ran with her, spilling over ledges of dark stone, pooling in stair-stepped basins between stark black palms. She marked the path in her mind. If she wanted this water to green the whole island, she had to move it. Water did not climb sand on its own. Nyx knew a well on the far shore. An old stone ring, deep and dry, its dark pool long gone still. If she could link the spring to that well, the flow would reach the sand near her greenhouse. She swam back for the glass pipes she had built for such a day. Straight tubes, sealed tight, the same ones she used to lift saltwater to her greenhouse. She fitted the first pipe to the spring's mouth. Water rushed in and swirled dark, threaded with green from the deep. She laid the next pipe, then the next, dragging them across the sand, digging channels to hold them. Her arms ached. Grit crusted her tail. The knocking would not leave her ears. She dug faster, as if speed could pay a debt she could not pay. Halfway across, her trench crossed old wreckage. Broken timbers, split planks, rusted fittings half-buried in black sand. A drowned ship, long forgotten. She stopped. These planks had carried men once. Maybe the same men who knocked below. She pulled the debris aside and kept laying pipe through the grave of it. At last the line reached the old well. Nyx sealed the final joint and opened the flow. For a moment nothing moved. Then dark, green-flecked water climbed the pipes, filled the ring, and rose in the deep pool. It caught the light in tiny glittering points. The spring had reached the surface, miles from where it hid. She knelt beside the well and watched. Around its base, where a little water had already seeped, thin blades pushed up through the black sand. Dark grass, near black, tipped with forest green. Living turf, growing where nothing should. Nyx pressed her palm flat to the new grass. It held. She had done it. The spring flowed free, and now it flowed where she wanted. The island could be greened. But the sailors were still down there. She had taken their water and left them in the dark. She stood, wiped the grit from her hands, and looked back toward the cave.