Sylva Mossward's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

The village path was shorter than Sylva remembered. She passed a pine log cottage with smoke curling from its chimney and kept walking. She did not need a warm porch. She needed someone who knew the deep forest, and she needed a way in. At the edge of the village stood the ranger lodge. Its windows glowed yellow against the dusk. Sylva pushed the door open. The walls were covered in pinned maps, layered thick from years of rangers passing through. She scanned them for Elfroot's deep interior. Every map stopped at the tree line. Past it, only blank parchment. A keeper sat by the stone fireplace, sorting gear. Sylva asked for anything that charted the inside. The keeper shook their head. No one mapped what they did not return from. But they slid a small bundle across the table: a brass spyglass with a worn finish, and a folded note describing a cairn — stones stacked waist-high, topped with a mounted compass, set by a ranger who had gone in and come partway back. Sylva turned the spyglass in her hand. One waypoint. One marker, somewhere past the tree line, left by someone who had at least known which direction to face. It was not a map. It was a single thread. She asked about the herd. The keeper said they would send word to a cousin two valleys over who had worked branch-antlered deer once before. It would take three days for the cousin to arrive. Three days, and then Sylva could go. She stepped back onto the porch with the spyglass heavy in her pack beside the folded cloak. She had no map. She had a stone marker and a lens and a direction. It would have to be enough. In three days she would cross the tree line.