Orin Wanderwood's Arc

Chapter 1 of 26

Orin Wanderwood knew three things about home, and he was losing them fast. There was a tree with pink flowers by the front step. There was a woman who sang while she cut apples. There was a younger sister whose name started with an L, or maybe an E. He crouched at the edge of the Fen with his knees in wet moss and tried to hold those three facts still, because the Fen ate memories the way it ate footprints. He had been walking since the mist came up. He did not know for how long. The Fen shifted while you weren't looking. A path you took an hour ago became a black pool. A stand of reeds turned into a bank of stones. He needed a direction. He had no direction. He only had the tree, the woman, the sister, and the certainty that his family was somewhere past the Fen, waiting, or looking, or forgetting him back. A small ghost girl stood in the reeds ten paces off. She wore a pale dress and no shoes. She watched him the way a deer watches a road. Orin held very still. The dead could see him, he had learned that already. He said, quietly, "I can't remember which way my house is." The ghost girl did not answer. Her mouth moved, but no sound came. She had been dead too long. She lifted one hand and pointed, not at a direction, but at his chest. Then she pointed at the air above his shoulder. Orin turned his head. A pink butterfly sat on his collar. He had not felt it land. Its wings opened and closed, slow, patient, like it had been waiting for him to notice. The butterfly lifted off and drifted three feet and stopped in the air. Orin stared. He knew this butterfly. He knew it the way you know a smell from a room you grew up in. His mother kept a jar of them once, or drew them on the kitchen wall, or one had landed on his sister's finger while she laughed. The memory was thin, but it was there, and it was pulling. He stood up. His knees cracked. Somewhere far off in the mist, something tall moved between trunks, a shape with long ears and a human back, and Orin felt it turn its head toward the sound of his joints. He did not look. He did not want to be seen looking. The ghost girl was already gone. The butterfly floated forward, one slow beat at a time, waiting for him to follow. Orin followed. He fixed the three things in his mouth like stones under his tongue. Pink tree. Singing woman. Sister with an L. He walked after the butterfly into the shifting reeds, and for the first time since the mist came up, he was moving in a direction that meant something.