Thalen Greenleaf's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

The colored leaves burned bright ahead, but Thalen's lantern was dying. The moss-wrapped light shrank to a dull coin in his fist. He shook it. The glow flickered and sank lower. Around him the trees swallowed the last of it, and the dark closed in. He drew the splinter and held it out. In the light it had run hot as a coal. Now, with the lantern nearly gone, its warmth thinned to nothing. He turned in a slow circle. Left, right, back. He felt no pull. The dark stole the wood's whisper the same way it stole his sight. Thalen stopped. He remembered his home, the shelter of broad woven leaves where the splinter had first fallen at his feet. He remembered how it glowed there, warm against green shade. The wood wanted light. It answered light. He knelt and cupped his hands around the failing lantern. He pressed the splinter flat against the warm glass. For a breath, nothing. Then a spark caught deep in the grain. The splinter drank the last of the lantern's glow and gave it back, brighter, a clean gold thread running through the wood. The lantern guttered out. The splinter did not. It burned steady in his palm, its own small sun. Thalen turned. The wood pulled him forward, sharp and sure, toward the burning leaves. He walked. The pull grew. He pushed through a wall of glowing branches into a clearing. It stood in the center. A giant of stacked stone, taller than three men, its slabs cracked and green with age. Carved lines ran across its chest and arms. Some of the lines glowed a faint blue, the same cold color that lit its deep-set eyes. It did not move. It had the stillness of a thing that had stood a thousand years. Behind it grew the tree of colored leaves. The splinter in Thalen's hand strained toward it, hot and violent, nearly leaping from his grip. This was no ordinary tree. This was the trail's end. His heartwood was here, or its trace was, and the stone giant stood between. "I've come for what your masters stole," Thalen said. His voice was small in the clearing. The blue eyes brightened. Stone ground against stone. One great arm lifted, and the earth shook when its fist came down where Thalen had stood. He rolled clear across wet roots. The giant turned to face him, slow and certain. Thalen crouched in the dark, the burning splinter his only light. He had found the trail's end. He could not read a path around a thing that guarded it. The wood had led him true. It had led him to a wall of ancient stone that meant to crush him.