Lily Summers hummed her grandmother's lullaby and stopped where she always stopped. The words ran out halfway. "Up past the... something... where the rivers bend." She slapped the table. That missing verse was the map. Her grandmother had promised the song led to a realm above the clouds, and Lily had believed her every night. Now her grandmother was gone, and Lily had only half a song and a whole sky she couldn't reach. She knew the tune by heart. She knew the story by heart. But she couldn't remember the lost words, and without them the cloud realm stayed a rumor. For weeks she had asked the old neighbors. None of them knew the song. "That was your grandmother's," one had said. "She made those verses herself." So the answer wasn't in the village. It was in the house. Lily climbed to the attic and dragged down the trunk her grandmother had kept locked. Inside, wrapped in a wool scarf, sat the music box. Delicate flowers curled across its polished lid. A small crank stuck out from the side. Lily had seen it a hundred times but never once heard it play. Her hands shook as she turned the crank. The lid trembled. Then notes spilled out, thin and bright, and they were the notes of the lullaby. Lily gasped. She sang along, past the place where she always stopped, letting the box lead her. "Up past the peaks where the rivers bend, follow the flower that never ends." The words came back through the music. She grabbed a scrap of paper and wrote every line. The song finished. Lily read it twice. "Follow the flower that never ends." She said it out loud and frowned. She knew the peaks. She knew the rivers. But she had never heard of a flower that never ends. The verse gave her a direction and a riddle in the same breath. Then the music box clicked. A drawer slid open at its base, one she hadn't known was there. Inside lay a single dried petal, curled and orange. Lily lifted it to the window light. The petal caught the sun and flickered, as if fire lived inside it. It looked less like a dead flower and more like a small, sleeping flame. She pressed the petal and the paper to her chest. The lullaby was whole now. She had the words, and the words named a flower like living fire. Lily understood two things at once. The music box had given her the way, and the way began with finding that impossible bloom. She tucked both keepsakes into her pocket and stood. The sky waited above the peaks, and now she knew where to start climbing.

Lily held the dried petal to the morning sun. It flickered orange, alive with light. But when she turned in a slow circle, nothing changed. The glow never brightened toward one peak or dimmed toward another. A dead petal could shine, but it could not point. Without a living flower to follow, she had no idea which mountain to climb. She needed someone who had known her grandmother better than the neighbors did. One name kept coming back. Her grandmother had spoken of an old friend from her younger years, a woman who had helped half the village into the world. Lily wrapped the petal in cloth and went to find her. The retired midwife was kneeling in her garden when Lily arrived. Agnes Fairweather pressed a seedling into the dirt with her thumb, gentle and sure, the way she must have handled a hundred newborns. She looked up through round glasses and smiled. "You have your grandmother's eyes," she said. "And her habit of arriving with a problem." Lily knelt beside her and unwrapped the petal. "It glows," she said, "but it won't show me where to go. Grandmother's song says to follow the flower that never ends. I don't even know which peak." Agnes went still. She took the petal and held it to the light, and her hands trembled. "I haven't seen one of these in sixty years," she said. "Your grandmother and I climbed for it once, when we were girls. We were fools and we nearly froze." She laughed softly, then her face turned serious. "The flower only grows in one place," Agnes went on. "On the north peak, above the tree line, where the snow melts into a bright pool. The living blooms grow at the water's edge. A dried petal can't guide you. But I can tell you the way, because I walked it." Lily's heart jumped. "You remember the path?" "Every step." Agnes brushed dirt from her knees and stood. She went inside and returned with a folded square of cloth. She spread it on the garden bench. On it, in faded ink, ran a line of the trail, the melt pool, and a small drawn flower. "Your grandmother made this after we came home. She left it with me for safekeeping. I think she meant it for you." Lily traced the drawn flower with one finger. The north peak. The bright pool. A living bloom that could finally point the way upward. "Thank you," she whispered. Agnes closed Lily's hand around the cloth. Her smile faded. "Take warm clothes and go before the season turns. The melt pool freezes early. Once the ice covers it, the flowers sleep, and no one can wake them until spring." She squeezed Lily's fingers. "You have days, girl. Not weeks." Lily folded the map into her pocket beside the petal. She knew the peak now. But the cold was already coming, and the flower she needed would not wait.