Whimsey Silverstream's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Whimsey Silverstream had guarded this stretch of river longer than she could count, and now she was watching it die. A gray film clung to the surface. She skimmed low, her dragonfly wings brushing the water, and felt the river's fear run up through them before her mind caught the truth. The spirit beneath the riverbed slept, as it always had. But the spirit would not wake in sickness. Only its waking could restore the magic fading from her old forest, and the water had to run clean first. She tried. She hovered in the spray and poured her faerie light into the current. Silver sparks sank and dimmed. The film only thickened. She knew every stone on this bed by heart, and tonight she could not feel half of them through the murk. Her magic was a candle against a flood. She landed on a reed and pressed her small hands to her face. "You pour and pour," said a gravel-rough voice. "A thimble into a wound." Whimsey turned. The druid stood on the bank, hood up, a stormcloud stitched across his back. A golden sickle hung at his belt. Storm Rider. They had worked the same woods for years, though he spoke to her maybe once a season, and never kindly. She had sent for him and half expected him not to come. "The water won't take my light," she said. "The spirit sleeps. It will not wake in filth." "Then stop lighting it. Clean it." He knelt and dug his fingers into the mud. "Faerie work mends spirit. Druid work mends earth. You cannot do mine." He closed his eyes. The riverbank trembled. Roots rose from the bed like dark fingers and spread through the water. They drank the film in long pulls. The gray thinned to green, then to clear. Whimsey felt the change through her wings, a cold ache easing into something like breath. "Now you," Storm Rider said. His voice had gone tired. "The roots hold the poison. They cannot hold it long. Wake the spirit before they rot." Whimsey did not wait. She dove into the clean current and sang her light down to the deepest stone. This time it sank true. The riverbed glowed. Something vast and old shifted below her, and the water pushed warm against her wings. Then the roots broke their hold on the sickly film. They sagged and split, and a gray cloud bled back into the water downstream, past her stretch, into the woods where the willow grew heavy with crystals. Storm Rider staggered and caught the bank. "It woke," he breathed. "But the sickness went with the river. It did not vanish. It moved." The spirit stirred beneath Whimsey, half awake, half drowning. Clean here. Fouled there. And the poison was flowing straight toward the heart of her forest.