Uma's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Uma walked through a meadow that should have been bright with morning but glowed silver instead. Moonlight pooled where sunlight belonged. The flowers beneath her feet bent away from her presence, their petals curling inward. She had come to see what her unchecked power was doing to the world. The sun goddess remained trapped somewhere Uma could not reach, and without her, the balance had broken. Uma needed to find a way to free her before everything that needed warmth forgot how to live. At the meadow's edge stood an ancient tree with branches that twisted toward the sky like reaching hands. Its leaves had once been green, she knew, fed by days that held heat and color. Now they hung gray and brittle. The bark had turned pale, drained of the gold undertones that marked things touched by sun. She stopped beneath it and placed her palm against the trunk. The wood felt cold. Not winter cold, but the deeper chill of something dying from the inside out. Withered blossoms lay scattered at the tree's roots, their petals faded to purple-black. They had opened in darkness instead of dawn, forced into bloom by her light alone. But moonlight could not feed them the way they needed. It could only pull at them, the way it pulled at tides, until they gave up and fell. She knelt and touched one. It crumbled between her fingers into dust. Uma stood and looked at the tree, at the meadow, at the wrongness spreading because she had no counterweight. This was not a place she could fix by visiting. This was a wound that would keep bleeding until the sun returned. She turned away from the tree and began walking again, her resolve hardening with each step. She would find the door that held the sun goddess, even if it meant testing each of her three suspicions until one of them broke open.