Spore Willowveil's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

They walked until the ferns thinned and the ground turned pale under Spore's feet. The hum was there, but it was everywhere. Every root pulsed the same. Every stone. He stopped and pressed both palms to the dirt. He listened for something that felt like his mother and found only noise. He did not know what his mother felt like. He had no face, no voice, no scrap of cloth to match against the ground. Sylvara hovered at his shoulder. "What is it?" "I can't pick her out," Spore said. "It all hums the same." "You need a marker," Sylvara said. "Something that was hers. Without it, the ground is a crowd." He had nothing. He had never had anything. Sylvara studied him, then pointed through the trees. "There is someone near who knew this stretch of forest before you were born. She might remember a woman with a child made of mushrooms." They found the mushroom girl kneeling in dead soil, pushing green shoots up between her fingers. She was smaller than Spore, thin as a twig, with a pale cap over her hair and wings like clean glass. She did not look up when they arrived. She was working. A patch of sick ground stretched behind her, and one thin line of new moss ran across it where her hands had passed. "Fern," Sylvara said. "This boy is looking for his mother. She left him here years ago. Do you remember a woman among the mushrooms?" Fern Capella sat back on her heels. She looked at Spore's cap, then at his face. Her eyes were steady. "I remember," she said. Spore's breath caught. "She left a basket," Fern said. "I kept it. It's in the old library." She pointed west, past the trees, where pale stone towers rose above the canopy. Pointed windows caught the light in pink and green. "On the shelf by the book tree." "Will you take me?" Spore asked. "I can't stop." Fern pressed her palm back to the soil. A shoot pushed up between her fingers. "The poison spreads if I rest. Go without me. The door isn't locked." Spore ran. Sylvara flew beside him. The library rose out of the trees, cracked and quiet, its arches leaning. He pushed the door open. Inside, a tree made of stacked books held up the ceiling. Pages fanned from its branches. On the shelf beside it sat a small woven basket, gray with dust. Spore lifted it. A folded square of cloth lay inside, and under the cloth, a dry curl of dark hair tied with a strip of bark. He closed his fist around the hair. The ground under the library floor hummed, and one thread of that hum matched something in his chest he had never felt before. It pulled north. He had a direction. He also had a shape for the thing he was chasing, and it was smaller than he'd hoped.