Sylara Helion's Arc

Chapter 3 of 10

The seer came at dusk, the way she always did. Sylara found her sitting outside the door, knees drawn up, eyes fixed on the sky where Odin hung swollen and pale. Seven cycles ago Sylara had measured the girl a dose too strong. The girl lived, but the Helium Mother never stopped speaking to her after. Tonight, with the potent shrooms sealed against her chest, Sylara knelt in front of her at last. "I need to hear you," Sylara said. "Before I take the same dose you did." The girl looked at her. Then the fragments spilled out, the way they always had. "The web. The teeth in the web. She said count the teeth." Her hands sketched shapes in the frost-dust. Small marks. A long dragging line. Nonsense, the elders had ruled years ago. Sylara had believed them. She did not believe them now. She went to the far dwelling. Silvaeth Dreamcaller was cleaning toxin from a blade at her stone bowl. She did not look up. "The patient lived," she said. "Now tell me what you want." "The seer speaks of teeth in the web," Sylara said. "She draws a dragging line. I cannot read it. Can you?" Silvaeth set the blade down. She studied the marks Sylara scratched on the floor. A beat passed. "That is not a vision drawing. That is a track." She met Sylara's eyes. "You need a hunter." The hunter's hut sat low and rounded at the grove's edge, its fungal walls dappled gray. Veyla Shadewhisper crouched inside, coating a spear tip one slow pass at a time. The toxin glowed faint purple. He did not stop working when they entered. "The seer draws this," Sylara said, and showed him the marks. "A dragging line. Small teeth beside it." Veyla's hands went still. "A Gloomstalker with a bad foot." He looked at the marks longer. "No. Not a Gloomstalker. Wider. Smaller teeth. Sits in the grasslands." His voice dropped, final. "A Plainsstalker. They den in the roots. In the web." Sylara went cold. "The mycelial network." "Something is chewing it from below," Veyla said. "That is what she keeps drawing. Not a spirit. Teeth." Sylara sat back. For seven cycles the girl had carried the answer in plain fragments. No one decoded them because no one asked a hunter to read a hunter's track. The network was not simply dying. A predator was eating it. She had her testimony now. She knew what the girl had seen. But the knowing changed everything. The Helium Mother was not the only voice she had to reach. Somewhere beneath the grove, in the roots that fed her whole people, a Plainsstalker was denned and feeding. And the festival was one day away.