Whisper Brightwing's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Whisper Brightwing had until the harvest moon to gather a whispered wish from every kind of creature in Driftleaf, and this morning she could not tell a beetle from a bug. She sat cross-legged on a curled fern, her notebook open on her knees. Her list read: bee, other bee, small bee, maybe not a bee. She scratched it all out. The spell she meant to weave needed one wish from every kind, and if she missed even one, the whole weave would unravel in her hands. Her butterfly circled her head, dark wings flashing orange along the underside. He landed on her wrist and folded his tail-like points against her skin. "You count as one," she told him. "But what about your cousins? The pale ones by the creek? Are they your kind, or their own?" He fanned his wings once. No help. She flew up to the sunflower that ruled the clearing, its yellow crown wider than her whole body. A striped insect crawled across the seed-heart. Whisper leaned close. "Excuse me. Are you a bee, or something that only looks like one?" The insect ignored her and kept walking. She groaned and dropped onto a petal. Two more insects landed on the bloom before she could sit up. One buzzed. One clicked. They looked almost the same. She needed a tool. Not a book — she had tried books, and the pages argued with each other. She needed something that showed her the truth. Whisper flew home to the hollow pinecone she slept in and dug through her shelf of borrowed things. Under a moth-wing scarf she found the lens her grandmother had left her: a round crystal in a gold frame, clear as spring water. Her grandmother had called it a naming glass. Whisper had thought it was only pretty. She carried the lens back to the sunflower. Her hands shook. She held the crystal up to the striped insect on the seed-heart and looked through. A word bloomed inside the glass in thin silver script. Honey-bee. She moved the lens to the buzzing one on the petal. Honey-bee. She moved it to the clicker. Flower-beetle. Different kind. Whisper laughed out loud. She swept the lens across the clearing. Every creature it touched wrote its true name in the crystal. Two moths that had looked identical came back as separate kinds. Three ants on one stem came back as one. She opened her notebook to a clean page and started again. This time she wrote fast. Her butterfly settled on the corner to hold it steady. By the time the sun climbed over the fern, she had eleven true kinds listed and no crossings-out. The lens hung from her belt on its little gold ring. Then she looked up at the wider wood beyond the clearing, where the creatures she had never seen lived, and understood she would have to go to them.