Rain's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

The morning her father cut her off, Rain stood in the crystal grotto and counted what she had left. One rainbow horse-dog. A sleepy knot of tiny dragons. A caterpillar the size of her arm, chewing a mushroom cap. Yesterday she had been the daughter of the richest family on Nebula. Today her father's letter lay in her hand, and it said one thing. Make the planet beautiful on your own, or come home and stop dreaming. Rain had always wanted the same thing. She wanted Nebula to glow with every color. She wanted the gnomes and fairies and farmers to live in harmony. Her family had paid for all of it before. Gardeners. Painters. Crews who hauled crystal and planted color across the hills. Now the money was gone, and the dreaming was hers alone. She looked at the grotto walls. The crystals threw pink and blue light across her boots. It was the one place her father's wealth had not built. She had found it herself, as a child, and filled it with creatures nobody else wanted. The rainbow horse-dog pushed its head against her chest. Its coat shimmered red to violet. She had raised it from a pup. It did not care that she was poor now. "I can't buy beauty anymore," she told it. "So I have to grow it." She knelt by the mushroom cluster at the grotto's mouth. The caps burned red, gold, deep blue, all crowded together. Her father's crews would have ripped them out and shipped in something tidy. Rain had let them spread. Now she saw what they were. Free. Alive. Already beautiful, and multiplying on their own. An idea pressed at her. She did not need crews. She had the grotto. She had creatures that made color just by living. The caterpillar would become something winged. The dragons would grow. The horse-dog could carry her across the hills. She pulled a sharp knife from her belt. She cut a dozen mushroom caps free, roots and all, and wrapped them in cloth. She filled a sack with spores from the grotto floor. The dragons stirred and climbed onto her shoulders. The caterpillar inched into her pocket. Rain stepped out of the grotto into hard sunlight. The hills ran brown and bare to the horizon. Her family's old gardens lay somewhere behind her, locked now. Ahead was nothing but empty ground and the start she had to make. She tore her father's letter in half and let it fall. Then she whistled. The horse-dog trotted to her side, and she climbed onto its back. "We plant today," she said. "We start with one hill." The horse-dog carried her down the slope. Behind her the grotto glittered, empty of everything she owned, because she carried all of it with her now. The first hill waited. By nightfall, if she was lucky, it would hold one patch of color that she had grown herself.