Sylvaine Nocturne's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Sylvaine Nocturne had searched the forest for two years, and she still had no proof the sister existed. The midwives who raised her swore a second girl was born the same night. They swore someone carried that girl into the dark and never brought her back. But swearing was not proof. Sylvaine needed a thing she could hold. Without it, she could not begin the hunt. Tonight the wolf found her first. She smelled it before she saw it. Wet fur and old blood. The lean gray animal stepped between the trees, muzzle red to the eyes. It did not attack. It stared at her the way a hunter studies a scent it half remembers. Sylvaine went still. She had seen this wolf twice before, always at the edge of her camp, always watching. Tonight it wanted her to follow. She followed. The wolf led her through brush that tore her sleeves. It stopped at a hollow beneath a fallen oak. Then it lowered its bloodied head and pawed the dirt. Sylvaine knelt. Her fingers closed on cold metal. She pulled a locket from the soil. Silver, rusted, small enough to hide in a fist. Old blood had dried in the seams of it. She wiped the face clean and saw the design pressed into the metal. Two vines curled from a single stem, split down the middle, one mirroring the other. Her hands shook. She knew that pattern. It matched the scar on her own shoulder, the mark the midwives said was cut into her at birth. Jagged lines fanning out from one center. She had always thought she was the only one who carried it. Sylvaine worked the locket open. Inside lay a curl of hair. Dark, near black, with a single blond streak near the tip. She raised her own braid beside it. The same color. The same pale streak. Not her hair. She had never cut it. Someone with her exact hair had worn this locket, bled on it, and lost it here. The wolf watched her understand. The sister was real. She had walked this forest. She had carried a mark that answered Sylvaine's own. And the blood on the wolf was fresh. Sylvaine stood. The proof she had wanted for two years sat cold in her palm, and it changed everything. She was no longer chasing a story the midwives told. She was tracking a living person who bled, who moved, who had been here days ago at most. The wolf turned and trotted deeper into the trees. It stopped, looked back, and waited. Sylvaine closed the locket and pressed it against the scar under her collar. Both halves of the design met and fit. She wiped the blood from her fingers onto her sleeve and stepped after the animal. The trail was fresh now. She meant to walk it while the scent still held.