Sapphire Crystalline's Arc

Chapter 10 of 12

The flower pointed north, but the moon cleared the hills. Sapphire felt the change take her at once. Her fingers curled wrong. Her skin pulled tight and cold. She had never watched it start before. She always woke after, dirt under her nails. Now she stayed awake inside it, and terror climbed her throat. The compass would fail if her cursed hand crushed it in the change. She had minutes. Then she would remember nothing, and the trail to the healing tree would be lost. Behind her, the drake screamed and thrashed at its harness. Shr'va was gone, or fled. Sapphire's knees gave. She hit the courtyard stones. The glowing stem slipped from her fist. A small figure caught it midair. Avra Ixanius dropped from the broken wall and landed low, white armor scraping stone. Kael had sent her ahead. He did not trust Sapphire alone at moonrise, and he had been right. A skitterling darted at Sapphire's feet, quick as a spider, and pinched her ankle to hold her attention. "Look at me," Avra said. Short. Flat. One wing hung dead at her back. She held the compass high, out of Sapphire's reach. "North. Fifty steps. Then a creek. Then the tree." Sapphire could not answer. Her jaw locked. The beast pressed up through her ribs. Avra did not flinch. She had knelt beside a dying woman once and kept her word past death. She kept it now. She pressed the flower's stem to Sapphire's transforming hand and folded the clawed fingers around it, gentle, sure. "Hold the flower," Avra said. "Not me. The flower." The change swept the rest of the way through. Sapphire's sight went dark at the edges. Her thoughts scattered. But one thing stayed, small and bright as the stem in her fist. Hold the flower. North. What rose from the stones was not Sapphire. It was tall and black and made no sound. Avra stood square before it, no taller than its knee. The skitterling climbed to her shoulder. She did not draw her sword. "North," she said again. The beast looked at the glowing flower in its own claw. It turned. It faced north. Then it moved, low and fast, over the ridge and down toward the creek. Avra ran after it on foot, grounded, keeping the thing in sight the only way she could. By the creek the beast stopped. Amber light bled through the dark. A tree stood there, wide as a house, its leaves every shade of green, thick sap dripping gold from the bark. The healing tree. The flower flared once in the beast's claw and went dark. Its work was done. Avra reached the water's edge, breathing hard. She looked at the tree, then at the beast crouched beneath it. "Found it," she said. When dawn came, Sapphire woke under the golden branches, the dead stem still clenched in her clean, human hand.