Vera Cogsworth's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

For three nights Vera Cogsworth had not slept, and the revolver on her workbench sat half-built. She had traveled into the petrified burn to finish it. The gun needed a captured lightning core to fire itself, and the burn's stone-dead trees hummed with old current she could harvest. But she could not solder a single wire with shaking hands. Something walked the ash fields after dark, and it walked toward her. She crouched behind a fallen trunk turned to gray rock. Her tools lay scattered where she had dropped them the night before. The lightning core pulsed faint blue in its brass cage beside her boot. Each pulse lit the ground for a moment, then died. Vera watched the dark between pulses. Something big moved out there, dragging weight across the crusted ash. Her unicorn stood guard behind her. Crystalline Gearwhisper was small, white, and fitted with brass gears at her ears and hooves. Her rainbow horn threw off a thin light. The unicorn had carried Vera into this burn without complaint, but now she stamped and pinned her ears flat. "Easy," Vera whispered. "I see it too." The unicorn tossed her head toward a shape on the ridge. A tall barn loft stood there on crooked stilts, its planks half-rotted, its roof caved on one side. Vera had passed it twice and ignored it. Now the dragging sound grew louder, and she understood. She could not fight what she couldn't see. She could get off the ground. "The loft," Vera said. "Move." She grabbed the caged core and her tools. Crystalline Gearwhisper knelt so Vera could climb her back. They crossed the ash at a run. The dragging thing changed course behind them. Vera did not look back. She fixed her eyes on the loft's ladder and counted the rungs. The stilts had rotted, but the platform held six feet off the ground. Vera scrambled up first, then hauled the unicorn's tack line taut so Crystalline Gearwhisper could lunge up the sloped ramp. The old wood groaned and held. Below them, the dragging stopped. A low shape circled the stilts, testing them, then scraped one with something hard. The stilt cracked but did not fall. Vera lay flat and breathed. The thing below could not climb. She had shelter now, and height, and walls at her back. She set the lightning core in the loft's far corner, where its blue pulse would not show through the gaps. "We rest here," she told the unicorn. "I finish the gun tomorrow." But when she laid her tools out on the plank floor, she saw the problem she had traded for. The soldering iron needed a steady flame, and the loft was dry rotted wood. One spark in here would burn the whole platform down around them. She had won a roof. Now she had to build a lightning gun inside a tinderbox, with the thing below waiting for her to come down.