Sylara Helion's Arc

Chapter 10 of 10

The girl stood in the center of the sealed stone. Sylara knelt at the rim, Silvaeth beside her. This was the moment every step had led to. If the rite held, the dead channels could heal. If it failed, they lost the girl and the answer both. Sylara set the last dream-fungi spore sac at the girl's feet. "When you're ready," she said. Silvaeth broke a fresh cap from the blue-capped cluster ringing the circle. She measured it with her eyes, then with her fingers. "This is enough," she said. "No more." She had lost a patient to a wrong dose once. She still led with the fact that they lived. Now her hands did not shake. She pressed the cap into the girl's palm. "Swallow it whole. Then lie against the stone and let the voice go down into it." The girl ate the cap. Her glow deepened from blue to violet. She knelt, pressed both palms flat to the silver veins, and lowered her forehead to the stone. Her breath slowed. The purple spore sacs around the rim pulsed brighter, in time with her. The silver lines in the stone caught fire under her hands and ran outward, down into the soil. Sylara felt it move. The living channels beneath the circle warmed against her knees. The girl spoke, but not in words Sylara knew. The sound went into the ground and did not come back. A seer moth lifted from the saplings and circled once. Then dozens rose behind it, their six wings flashing, drawn to the light bleeding up from the stone. "It's opening," Silvaeth said. She leaned close, watching the girl's chest rise and fall. "The channel is taking her voice. It's holding." Her own skin rippled green. "The web is drinking." The girl's glow dimmed. The violet drained from her skin to pale blue, then paler. Sylara reached to pull her back. Silvaeth caught her wrist. "No. She agreed to this. If you break it now, the soil takes nothing and keeps her half-here." So Sylara held still and watched the light leave the girl and pour into the ground. The silver veins ran out past the circle, into the bare western channels. Where they touched dead soil, faint threads of new glow answered. The healing had begun. It would spread from here, channel by channel, back toward the grove. The girl lifted her head. Her eyes were clear and empty. She looked at Sylara and did not tremble. "She's gone," the girl said. "The Mother. I can't hear her anymore." The voice that had spoken to her for seven cycles was silent now, fed into the roots. Sylara helped her stand. The soil was healing. But the girl who carried the question no seer had cracked could no longer ask it. The answer was in the ground now, spreading west, and Sylara did not yet know how to read it.