Sylara Helion's Arc

Chapter 5 of 10

The festival was one dawn away. Sylara walked to the vision grove with the frost-grown shrooms wrapped in Frost Bark cloth. She meant to enter the communion alone and ask the Helium Mother how to grow the dead web again. Then she saw the girl waiting at the grove's mouth. The seer sat on the stone ring, knees drawn up. Seven cycles ago Sylara had measured her dose wrong. The girl had not died. She had come back changed, and she said the Helium Mother had never stopped speaking to her since. Before every festival she came to Sylara's door and waited to be seen. Sylara had learned to walk past her. She could not walk past her here. "I go with you," the girl said. Her eyes did not blink. "She wants us both inside. Alone, you will hear only pieces." Sylara's chest tightened. To bring the girl into the communion was to risk the one mind still tied to the Mother's voice. Another wrong measure and she would lose the only listener she had. But refusing her carried the same loss. The girl would rise and walk away, and take the thread with her. Silvaeth arrived with the dosing bowl, cloak dragging frost-dust. She looked at the girl, then at Sylara. "She survived the first time," Silvaeth said. She always began there. "Two joined in one communion doubles the strain. But I can split the dose. Weaker for each. Both hold the same vision." "Can you measure it that fine?" Sylara asked. "Yes." Silvaeth met her eyes. "That is the one thing I still trust in my hands." Veyla stood at the tree line, spear low. "I stay," she said. "If either stops breathing, I pull you out." She did not soften it. She never did. Sylara knelt at the ancient altar. The blue caps of the shrooms glowed under the smoldering flames. Silvaeth split the caps into two portions, one slow pass at a time, and pressed each to paste. Sylara took hers. The girl took hers without waiting to be told. The grove's light bent. Sylara felt the girl's mind beside her own, steady where hers swam. Together they reached down into the dead web. The Mother did not speak in words. She showed a single image: the girl's own hands, seven cycles young, pressing broken threads back together. The severed web did not heal by itself. It healed when a living listener carried the Mother's voice into the soil. Sylara surfaced first. Her filaments dripped frost. "The web will grow again," she said. "But only if she feeds it the voice she carries." The girl opened her eyes. For the first time in seven cycles, she smiled at Sylara. "Then I am not broken," she said. "I am the seed." Sylara had her answer's shape at last. She also had a new dread. To save the grove, she would have to give the girl to it.