Sylvanna Brightwood's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Sylvanna Brightwood was the fourth druid to try to heal the grove, and the first to sleep within reach of it. Three had come before her. The last one packed his mule in the night and rode out without speaking to anyone in the village. Nobody back home would say why. Sylvanna had asked. She got pressed lips and changed subjects. So she walked out to the grove herself, saw the rot crawl sideways across a root like it was looking for something, and built her cottage at its edge anyway. One night the blight slid three feet toward her bedroll while she slept. She moved the bedroll back a pace and stayed. This morning she was losing again. Inside her stone-and-thatch cottage, a copper pot sat over the hearth, full of crushed elderbloom, marrowroot, and clean spring water. She had ground the reagents fresh an hour ago. Now the surface of the brew was turning gray. Black threads spread through it like ink in milk. It was the sixth batch this week. Every reagent she touched went the same way — sound in her hand, rotten in the pot. She could not test a cure she could not keep alive long enough to pour. Outside her door sat a barrel of the failures, sealed with a loose cork, purple sludge weeping down its staves into the dirt. The pot hissed. Foam climbed the rim and slopped onto the coals, stinking of wet grave. Sylvanna grabbed the handle with a folded cloth and ran. She kicked the door open and carried the pot out into the yard, meaning to dump it beside the barrel before it ate through the copper. Three steps from the threshold, the brew bucked in her hands. The black foam leapt toward the treeline — toward the blight, like it was being called home. Sylvanna staggered and dropped the pot in the grass between her cottage and the rotted trees. Light came up out of the ground where it landed. A sheet of blue and violet rose between her and the grove, rippling like water held upright. The rot at the edge of the trees pulled back. A creeping black tendril she had not even noticed touched the light, hissed, and curled away. Sylvanna stood very still. The barrier held. The spoiled brew, the thing she had been throwing away all week, was the thing the grove feared. She knelt by the pot. Most of it had soaked into the dirt under the new wall of light. A finger's depth remained, already going clear. She had enough left to study, if she worked fast. For the first time since she came to the grove, the blight was the one being kept out.