Sylara Helion's Arc

Chapter 8 of 10

The girl said yes at the pond. But yes was not a map. The die-off raced west while the rite moved slow, and Sylara did not know how far the death had spread. Feed the girl's voice into the wrong channels, and they would heal soil already dead, wasting the one gift the girl had left. Sylara needed the reach of the sickness before the rite began. She went to the vision grove to ask the only one who could see it whole. Silvaeth Dreamcaller waited by the altar, the map-etched relic pressed to her chest. She had prepared frost-grown shrooms once for the girl seven cycles ago, and one dose had gone wrong under her hands. She did not hide from it. "She survived," Silvaeth said first, as she always did. Then, after a beat: "But I will not split the frost dose again. Not with her. The rite comes tomorrow. Push her too far tonight and she has nothing left to feed the soil." "Then I go alone," Sylara said. "I need to see how far west the death runs. If I heal dead channels, I kill her voice for nothing." Silvaeth set the blue caps in the shallow bowl. "Alone, you may not return." She lit the smoldering flame beneath the altar. "But you're right. Blind, the rite fails anyway." She measured the dose with steady hands. It was the first steady thing Sylara had seen from her in cycles. Sylara took the caps. The purple spore sacs shimmered as she swallowed. The grove tilted. Silver-blue light poured through the carved bones above her, and the mycelial web spread out below her like veins under skin. She followed it west. Some threads pulsed, still living. Others hung gray and cold. She reached the tundra edge, where the sickness thinned. There. The death stopped short of the far channels. Three grids west still held life. If the rite began there and moved inward, the girl's voice would land on ground that could still take it. The web pulled at her. It wanted her deeper, past the edge, into the dead where no return waited. Silvaeth's hand closed on her arm and dragged her back. Sylara woke coughing on the luminous mat, the flame low, the girl standing in the grove entrance with the amethyst skull against her chest. "I saw the line," Sylara said. Her voice shook. "The death stops three grids short. We start there and heal inward. Not the dead channels. The living ones." The girl's glow steadied. "Then I know where to give my voice," she said. Silvaeth capped the bowl. "Dawn," she said. "She feeds the soil at dawn. We start west and work home." Sylara had the map now. She also had one night left before the girl's voice went into the ground and stayed there.