Onyx Ridge's Arc

Chapter 1 of 11

Onyx Ridge ran his thumb along the crack and felt his second life split open beneath it. The block sat in the yard outside his studio, a shoulder-high slab he had paid three months of savings for. He had roughed out the jaw last night. This morning a hairline fracture ran from the ear to the collarbone. Lesser stone. It would not hold the face he needed. He needed a face the gods could not break. His first statue had stood taller than the temple doors, and travelers had come from three valleys to touch its heel. Then the sky opened and a bolt turned it to gravel in the street. He had swept the pieces up himself. He had not stopped carving since. Onyx set down the chisel and walked the perimeter of his home. Half-finished figures crowded the entrance: a squat scholar, a crouching hound, a woman with a broken hand. Every one of them was cut from the same soft grey the quarrymen sold cheap. Every one of them would crack before the year was out. He knew now what he had been avoiding. There was only one seam of stone in the region that did not fracture. It ran under the ridge past the split arch, half a day's walk through fungi that made men vomit blood. Two carvers had gone for it in his lifetime. Neither came back with stone. One came back at all. He went inside and packed. Waterskin, wedges, the long chisel, a strip of cloth soaked in vinegar to tie across his mouth. He rolled his father's iron pry bar into a blanket and slung it across his back. At the door he stopped and looked at the woman with the broken hand. He had carved her from memory of someone he had loved. She would crack too, if he left her out here through winter. He carried her inside and set her by the hearth. He walked until the trees thinned and the ground went pale. The fungi began at his knees and rose past his waist, pink caps sweating in the cold. He tied the vinegar cloth tight. He kept his eyes on his boots and counted steps to keep from thinking about the two men who had come this way before him. By dusk he reached the seam. It broke from the hillside black and glossy, threaded with white. He wedged the pry bar in and worked until his palms bled through the wrap. A slab the length of his arm came free. He struck it with the chisel. The stone rang like a bell and did not chip. He laughed once, out loud, and the sound came back wrong. His throat was raw. His hands would not close. When he tried to lift the slab, his knees buckled. The sickness was already in him, and he was half a day from home with a stone he could not carry alone.