Chapter 140 Lost the City Part 2
Daisy nodded. “It wasn’t mine to keep.”
“Nothing is.” The older woman’s eyes flicked to Delia. “Your healer. She is skilled. Let her work.”
Daisy looked back at Delia. Delia was focused, unpacking her battered kit and arranging tools with careful precision. Daisy tried not to watch her work and avoided thinking about whether her mother would live through the night.
The older woman traced another symbol, and the firepit in the center of the room blazed to life. The light flickered off the jars, off the bones and daisy petals, making the room look as if it were filled with a hundred little watchful eyes.
“Sit,” the old woman commanded, and Daisy obeyed, if only to conserve energy.
Xeris hovered near the door, arms crossed. More uneasy than Daisy had ever seen him, he bared his teeth when he caught her eye, a warning: This is not my world. You are on your own.
Oliver knelt beside Daisy, putting himself between her and the older woman. He glanced back, met Delia’s eyes, then whispered, “You trust her?”
“No,” Daisy whispered back. “But she’s the only thing that might kill us slower than the city.”
Oliver managed a half-smile. “That’s the Daisy I remember.”
The older woman watched the exchange, lips twitching. “I am Elder Fern,” she said. “This is my patch of the world. You can rest, but not for long.”
Delia called Daisy, her voice urgent but controlled. Daisy crossed to where her mother lay on the moss. Maribel’s breath came in short, wet rattles. Delia dabbed sweat from her mother’s forehead, then met Daisy’s eyes.
“She’s burning up. I can stabilize her, but not here. She needs proper care, water, and food. And we don’t have long, if her fever doesn’t break in the next twelve hours, she won’t make it.”
Daisy looked at her mother’s face, saw the way the eyelids fluttered, how the hand clutched at the locket under Daisy’s shirt, even in sleep.
Elder Fern creaked off her platform and hobbled over. She knelt, bones popping, and set a hand to Maribel’s brow. Her other hand moved in a slow circle above the woman’s chest, then stopped.
“Nothing to do but let her fight,” Elder Fern said. “If she wakes, she’ll need to choose.”
Delia wiped her eyes. “Choose what?”
“Whether to live as she is, or…” Elder Fern shrugged, letting the word hang.
Delia set her jaw. “She’ll live.”
Elder Fern watched the way Delia tended Maribel, a flicker of something like approval in her stone-black eyes. Then she straightened, turned to Daisy.
“You,” she said, “are the problem.”
Daisy wanted to argue, but the weight of the day pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth.
Elder Fern reached out, caught Daisy’s arm again, this time more gently. “You carry a spell forged elsewhere, one that is alien to these lands. The chain seeks more than to bind you alone—it craves dominion over all it touches, and if it takes hold here, the entire valley will be transformed by its influence. The roots beneath us, the villagers, even the central tree, could become vessels for its will, their identities subsumed and remade by its power. The song of the chain is relentless, saturating its surroundings, erasing boundaries, and devouring the autonomy of those within its reach. I have witnessed before how such magic empties a community, leaving each individual merely an extension of the chain’s purpose rather than their own. That danger now flows within your veins.”
Daisy tried to pull her arm away, but Elder Fern gripped it firmly, refusing to let go.
“The chain always wants to be part of something bigger,” Elder Fern said. “It’s hungry for purpose.”
At Daisy’s wrist, the black veins pulsed in time with a beat that was not her own. She could feel it drumming, steady and low, a hollow throb that rattled up her bones, urging her forward, seeking, searching for something beyond her skin. The rhythm made it hard to separate her fear from its ambition.
Daisy saw, in the firelight, that the veins had crept even higher up her forearms, branching at the elbow, worming toward her biceps. “I didn’t ask for it.”
“Nobody does,” Elder Fern replied, voice softer now. “But you’re marked.” She drew a finger across the black, then looked Daisy dead in the eye. “You can either break it, or be its new root.”
The fire crackled, sending up a plume of resinous smoke.
Daisy remembered her vision in the mist: the throne, the kneeling dead, the city devoured by daisies, and shivered. For the briefest instant, the flicker of firelight in Elder Fern’s hut became the cold gleam of the vision’s crown. Bone ash. She blinked, heart thudding, and the dream receded, but unease lingered, thrumming beneath her skin.
Elder Fern patted her arm, then let go. “Rest tonight. Tomorrow, we talk. I’ll show you what’s left when the chain fails.” Her voice, low and certain, seemed to gather the shadows around them. For a moment, Daisy thought she caught a flicker of grief across the older woman’s face—a memory of hollowed woods, eyes gone blank, and roots grown wild through ruined homes. The silence that followed pressed close, heavy with stories too terrible to name, as if the ground itself remembered all that had been lost.
Daisy nodded, the heat in her chest replaced by cold. She helped Delia settle Maribel, then slumped to the floor near the fire. Xeris stayed by the door, never blinking. Cornelius had found a corner and was already asleep, back to the wall. Mira was nowhere to be seen.
Oliver stretched out beside Daisy, arms folded under his head, eyes open to the ceiling.
“Not how you pictured the future, huh?” he whispered.
Daisy snorted. “I never pictured anything.”
She watched the flames, the flicker of the older woman’s eyes, the way Delia’s hands never left her mother’s side. Outside, the blue-green light painted the world in dream colors, but nothing here felt safe, not even in the heart of the valley.
She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling the chain hum low and dangerous beneath her skin. But instead of drifting off, she opened them again and reached beneath her shirt for the locket. Carefully, Daisy slipped it from its chain and pressed it into the hollow behind a loose stone in the wall, fingers trembling just once. She let the stone settle back, covering the locket from sight. Tonight, she would not carry it into her dreams. In setting the locket aside, Daisy deliberately enacted agency in a world determined to subsume her will; her small act of control signaled a quiet resistance to the chain’s influence and the surrender it demanded. That choice, small but hers, felt like the first pebble in a landslide—a refusal to let her identity be shaped solely by the forces that threatened to overwhelm her. Only then did she promise herself she’d outlast whatever tomorrow brought.
She had to.
If only to see how the story ended.