Sylvara Thornwhisper's Arc

Chapter 2 of 8

Sylvara walked out past her borders for the first time in her long life. The trees thinned. The ground turned to dry road. She kept the fox's rose in her hand and pointed her feet the way the wind pushed the petals. She did not know if that was a real sign. She had no better one. By midday her wings hung wrong. She stopped and shook them. Nothing changed. Her light, the small green shine she had carried since the old trees made her, had dimmed to almost nothing. She lifted a hand. The glow that should have run along her fingers barely showed. She was farther from her forest than she had ever been, and the forest was where her magic came from. Every step out was a step thinner. A cart passed. She tried to lift into the air to clear the ruts and dropped back down hard. Her knees hit gravel. She stayed there a moment, breathing, and understood she could not defend herself out here. A crow could take her. A dog could take her. She had walked out of her strength. She crawled off the road into the brush and tried to think. The rose in her fist had gone limp. She smoothed a petal between two fingers. Lavinia had said: if you find the bush, you're close. Sylvara had been walking blind. She needed to walk toward something. She pressed the rose to her mouth and whispered the fox's name into it, because she had nothing else. The petal warmed. It was not her magic. It was the fox's, left in the flower. It tugged, small and clear, toward the west. She followed the tug off the road, through a hedge, into a meadow she did not know. Her steps were slow. Her wings dragged. Halfway across the meadow her legs gave and she went down in the grass. Something large came through the grass toward her. She could not lift her hand to ward it off. It was a beast the size of a plow horse, with a lion's mane, a bear's shoulders, and the neat split hooves of a goat. It stopped a body's length from her and lowered its head. Its breath smelled of hay. It did not touch her. It waited. She remembered what the fox had said. Something lives inside. Gentle, they say. I wouldn't trust 'they.' She had no choice left. She reached up. The beast knelt. She climbed onto its back and lay flat against the warm mane. It rose and began to walk west, the way the rose had pulled. Sylvara closed her eyes. She had failed to hold herself up on the road. She had accepted a stranger's animal to carry her. She was being taken somewhere she had not chosen, by something she could not fight, toward a tower she still could not see.