Solara Brightbloom's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

Yawen stopped. His ice met the shadow and slid off it. Solara looked past him at a wall of black that filled the path from ground to sky. It did not drift like the shadow behind them. It hung solid, thick as stone. Yawen threw frost at it. The cold crawled up the wall and died. He tried again. Nothing froze. "I can't cut this," he said. "It's too deep." Solara stood behind him, her light banked small in her chest. The heart-tree waited on the other side. She had no way through. A cold nose touched her hand. Solara jumped. A coyote stood beside her, its coat dark as the wall, its edges smoking like a snuffed wick. Its eyes were pale blue and calm. Behind it stood a goose, white with feathers that shone purple and black. The goose stretched its neck toward the wall and hissed. Its whole body leaned away from the dark, as if the shadow burned it. Solara had seen no living thing in the blight until now. "They came from the side," Yawen said. "Through a gap." The coyote turned and trotted a few steps, then looked back. It wanted them to follow. The goose kept its eyes on the wall and would not turn its back to it. Solara followed the coyote off the frozen path. Yawen laid new ice as they went. The coyote led them along the base of the black wall to a place where the shadow thinned. Not a gap Yawen's cold could hold, but a seam, a narrow fold where the dark did not press so hard. Roots wove across it. Among them grew a single flower, yellow as noon, its petals layered in tight rings. It glowed faintly. It was the only bright thing in the blight, and the shadow had not touched it. "Sunlight," Solara said. She knelt and cupped the blossom in both hands. She had drawn her own light inward to save it. This flower held light that was not hers to spend. She pulled the warmth into her chest, and her banked fire swelled. Heat filled her hands. She pressed both palms against the seam and let the light out for the first time in hours. The shadow burned back. Where her hands touched, the black wall thinned to gray, then split. A path opened, low and narrow, but open. The coyote slipped through first. The goose followed, quick, glad to leave the wall behind. Solara crawled through after them and stood. The heart-tree rose ahead, close now, its split bark black with rot. She could see it plainly at last. But her chest ached where the borrowed light had drained. She had spent the flower's warmth to break the wall, and she had none saved for the tree. She had reached it empty.