Sage Willowmere's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Sage Willowmere found the rot at dawn, spreading up the seed tray where her mentor's rare bloom should have sprouted. She was seventy years old, and this seed was the last thing her teacher left her. For forty years she had chased the story of a lost garden and one impossible flower. She'd finally traded half her savings for a single seed. Now a blue fungus crept toward it, fern-like and shimmering, its fronds glowing across her greenhouse bench. She pushed her glasses up and leaned close. The fungus had already killed two seedlings overnight. Where it touched soil, the sprouts blackened. If it reached her mentor's seed, forty years ended in a dead tray. Sage knew this pest. She had read of it in her teacher's old journals. It fed in darkness and hated dry heat. Her greenhouse held both moisture and shade, a perfect nursery for the glowing fern. She had one night to starve it out. She worked all morning. She scraped the fungus from the bench and burned it in her stove. She cut the shade cloth from the glass roof to let hard light in. She hauled her mentor's seed tray to the far corner, away from the spreading blue. But the fungus fed on more than shade. By afternoon it had crawled up the water pipes. Sage cut the water. The greenhouse went dry, and the fungus wilted. So did her other cuttings, but she let them wither. The seed mattered more. Then came dusk, and a new problem flew in. A bat with pale, glassy wings dropped through the open roof vent she had cut. It landed on the seed tray and licked at the last glowing fern. Sage froze. She raised her hands to shoo it, then stopped. The bat ate the fungus. It worked down the tray, tongue flicking, until the blue glow was gone. When it finished, it sat on the rim and blinked its green eyes at her. Sage laughed, a dry sound she hadn't made in weeks. "So you eat the thing that's killing me," she said. "Stay, then." By full dark the fungus was gone. Sage checked the seed tray under her lamp. The soil was clean. In the center, a thread of green had broken the surface. Her mentor's bloom had sprouted. She pressed the pipes back together and let a trickle of water return. The bat hung from a roof beam above the tray, folded in its shimmering wings. Sage watched it and understood the cost. The fungus was dead, but her greenhouse was ruined. She had no shade cloth, no cuttings, no water system. She had one fragile sprout and one strange bat to guard it. To raise the rarest bloom now, she would have to rebuild everything from bare metal and glass.