Sylara Helion's Arc

Chapter 1 of 10

Three days before the Glowflight Festival, Sylara Helion still had no question to carry into the vision. As the camp's seer, her task was simple and impossible: guide the people to true communion with the Helium Mother, and return with an answer. But an answer needed a question. And the question her people brought her was fog. She sat on the deck of the great mushroom-house, its glowing fibers pulsing soft blue beneath her hands. Below, the Glowcamp stirred. Elders climbed the wooden stairs one by one. They came to her because their children were sick with fear, and no one could name the reason. "The forest feels wrong," one elder said. Her skin flickered pale purple with worry. "Tell us what troubles us." Sylara wanted to shake her. She could not frame a communion around "wrong." The Somnivox visions answered sharp questions, not fog. Ask a blurred thing, and the Helium Mother gave a blurred reply, or nothing. Seers had drowned in vagueness before her. She would not. "Show me," Sylara said instead. "Not what you feel. What you saw." The elder led her down the stairs, past the luminous fungal sheets, to the edge of camp. There stood an old moon-tree, its purple-blue bark wrapped in glowing vines. Sylara had passed it a thousand times. She stopped now. The berries that hung from its lower branches were dark and shriveled. The shelf fungi along the trunk had gone gray. She pressed her palm to the bark. Cold. Too cold. She crouched and dug her fingers into the soil at the roots. The mycelial threads there should have glowed rose-pink, the living web that fed every fungus in the grove. They were dim. Breaking. She lifted a handful and watched the pink light die in her hand. Sylara stood very still. The vagueness cracked open. Her people did not fear a mood. They feared this: the great mycelial network beneath their feet was failing. The berries died because the roots died. The children sensed the grove's hunger before the adults named it. "This," she said. "This is the question." Her voice came out steady. "Not 'what is wrong.' We ask the Helium Mother why the living web is dying. And how we stop it." The elder's skin brightened, then dimmed. "You can carry that into the vision?" "A sharp question," Sylara said. "Yes." She closed her hand around the dying threads. Relief moved through her, quick and cold. She had her question at last. But the answer she carried up the stairs was worse than fog. If the network truly failed, the whole grove would follow. Every fungus. Every tool. Every meal. The Glowflight communion was no longer a rite. It was the camp's only hope of surviving the season. And Sylara had three days to prepare a vision she could not afford to fail.