Sylvara Thornwhisper's Arc

Chapter 1 of 8

Sylvara pressed her palm to the heartroot and felt nothing answer. The great pale trunk stood at the center of her forest, older than her long watch, and she had come to wake it. If she could rouse the heartroot, every root and wing and hoof under her care would be bound together, warned as one. She needed that now. Something had walked through her woods last week and left no track, no scent, no shape she could name. She could not guard what she could not see. She needed more than her own eyes. Her hand slid down the bark. The wood stayed cold. She knew the trick required an old song, the binding-song the first trees had hummed to themselves before she existed. She had never learned it. The trees who remembered it had gone quiet a long time ago, and she had been too busy walking the borders to ask while she still could. She left the clearing and went to find the fox. The fortune teller lived at the forest's edge in a hollow lined with dried petals. Lavinia was an old acquaintance, useful when Sylvara needed to know a thing she could not see. Her fur was the wrong color for a fox, a washed lavender, and a pink rose sat behind one ear. She was shuffling a deck of cards when Sylvara ducked under the doorway. Every card she laid down came up upside-down. She turned them anyway. "You want the old song," Lavinia said, before Sylvara spoke. "You know it?" "No. I know who did." She tapped a reversed card. "My readings are broken. Someone cursed the sight. I can't promise what I see." "Tell me anyway." Lavinia looked at her a long moment. "The song isn't lost. It was written down. A book. Kept in a tower of pale stone, roses on the walls. Something lives inside. Gentle, they say. I wouldn't trust 'they.'" "Where." "That's the part I can't see. My last client came from there. I can't remember her face. I can't remember what she paid me." She set the deck down. "The curse eats the edges." Sylvara's wings pressed flat. She had hoped for a map. She had a rumor and a warning. "Take the rose," Lavinia said, pulling the bloom from behind her ear. "From the same bush as the tower's. If you find the bush, you're close." Sylvara took it. The thorns bit her thumb. She welcomed the sting; it was the first clear thing she had felt all day. She stepped back into her trees with a flower she did not grow and no direction to walk. The heartroot still slept behind her. Somewhere past her borders stood a tower she had never seen, holding a song she needed, guarded by a thing rumored kind. She had never left the forest before. She started walking toward its edge.