Wren Caldwell's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Wren Caldwell had guarded the iron gate for nine hundred nights, and she could not remember the last time she sat down. Her skin was gray stone, cracked like old riverbed. Iron armor hung on her, rusted and split. She never slept. Every dusk she planted herself before the towering gate, its ember highlights glowing like coals, and let no one pass until dawn. Somewhere under her cracked skin, an old guardian bloodline lay sleeping. If she could wake it, the cracks would close. She could finally rest. But no one in Embervein knew how to wake it, and she had never left her post to ask. Tonight the cracks ached deeper. A thin dust sifted from her shoulder when she moved. She pressed her palm to the gate's cold iron and stared at the dark road beyond it. Out there, somewhere, might be someone who understood her stone. But leaving meant the gate stood open. Leaving meant she failed the only thing she had ever done. "You're leaking," said a small voice. Wren turned. A child sat on the gate's base, swinging her boots. Her coat was stitched from a dozen scraps of cloth. Wren had chased strangers from this road for years, yet she had not heard this one arrive. The child grinned, showing a gap in her teeth. "Go home," Wren said. "No one passes." "I don't want to pass." The child hopped down. She pressed one finger to the crack in Wren's shoulder, right where the dust fell. "I want to tell you something. But secrets cost sweets." Wren had no sweets. She had nothing but iron and stone. "I have nothing to give you." The child studied her a long moment. "This one's free. Just this once." She tapped her own chest. "Same blood as yours runs in me. Older than any grave in this town. I've watched your kind turn to statues at their posts because they never went looking." Wren's hand curled into a fist that ground like millstones. "Went looking for what?" "For the ones who can wake what sleeps in you." The child pointed down the dark road, past the gate. "They're out there. Half a night's walk. But you have to leave the gate to reach them. And you never leave the gate." The dust kept falling from Wren's shoulder. She looked at the road, then at the child, then at the gate she had never once abandoned. If she stayed, she would crack apart standing up. If she left, the town lay open behind her. Wren reached up and unhooked the gate's iron bar. It swung wide with a shriek. For the first time in nine hundred nights, the road lay open, and she was not standing in it. "Take me to them," she said, and stepped through her own gate. The child laughed and ran ahead into the dark.