Roswyn Brightwillow's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Roswyn dipped her brush and stopped. The winged puppy sat beside the glowing jar, wings shedding slow dust onto the stone. The paint was ready. Her hand was not. She had a color now, but no picture. The stone stretched wide and empty in front of her. If she painted the wrong shape in true moonlight, her grandmother had warned, the sleepers would sink further, not rise. She did not know what the fairy realm looked like. She had only ever seen a coin glow and vanish when she was six. She set the brush down. The ripples on the lake had stilled again, waiting. She flipped through her notebooks by moon-glow. Dates. Temperatures. Which moonflowers bloomed and which stayed flat paint. The bloomed ones shared nothing she could name. No color. No hour. Only a feeling she could not log. Behind her, up the slope, her kiln stood cold under its stone hood. The worktable held her clay tools and rows of unfired cups. She had come here as a potter first. She knew how shapes were tested. You made a small one. You fired it. You broke it if it lied. Roswyn scooped a palm of wet clay from the bucket under the table. She carried it back to the stone. She pinched a coin from the clay, flat and round, the size of the one she had dropped as a child. She pressed her thumb into its center. Then she painted the coin, not the stone. One thin stroke of the glowing paint around its rim. The puppy leaned forward. Its wings beat once. Roswyn set the clay coin on the flat rock at the water's edge. She waited. The paint pulsed. The coin lifted a finger's width off the stone and hung there, humming. Light crawled off its rim and drew itself in the air above the water. Not letters. Not exactly. Curved marks, looping into each other, the way vines find a trellis. They held for three breaths. Then they faded, and the coin dropped back to the rock with a small clay click. Roswyn grabbed a notebook and copied every mark before her eyes forgot them. Her hand shook. She copied them twice more, from memory, to be sure. When she compared the three pages, they matched. The realm had answered a test question. It had shown her its own writing. She looked at the long blank stone. She looked at her jar. She had the symbols now. She had the paint. But the marks she had copied were only a greeting. She did not know the rest of the language, and the paint in the jar was already dimmer than a minute ago. The puppy yawned. Dust drifted, thinner than before. Roswyn closed the notebook. She needed more powder, and she needed someone who could read what she had just been shown.