Winter Star

Chapter One

Dahlia

Icradle the small clay cup in my hands, the warmth seeping into my fingers as I edge closer to the fire.

I tell myself I should go to bed—rest before the long, grueling trip home tomorrow.

But the pull of this bittersweet night keeps me rooted here, savoring the last moments of an incredible, albeit fruitless, journey.

I take the final sip of my chai—the rich, creamy tea that tastes like the essence of this place, its sweetness lingering on my tongue as I half-listen to the other travelers swapping tales. Their voices melt into the background as my gaze drifts over the edge of the woods across the Migaia River.

Moonlight pools like silver on the water, dappling trees in sharp relief against the night. Below the canopy, the forest floor vanishes into inky shadows, breathing secrets in invitation.

I don’t know why I can’t tear my eyes away.

I’ve seen this same view every night since I arrived, been up and down its banks.

But tonight, there’s something different.

Something alive in the air. It crackles over my skin like electricity before a lightning strike and raises the fine hairs on the back of my neck.

I scan the riverbank, searching for the source, until…there. Two luminous eyes lock onto mine, glittering under the moonlight like the icy blue heart of Migshira, the holy glacier at the headwaters of this river.

They are too high for any of the local animals—far above where even a tall man’s gaze would reach. Too large, too fierce and knowing to belong to the monkeys that call these trees home. Their gleam cuts through the darkness with an intensity that steals my breath.

Who, or what, is watching me from the shadows?

I freeze, pinned in place, caught like prey ensnared in a hunter’s trap. A thrill courses through me, sharp and jagged, mingling fear with something darker, something hotter. My instincts scream at me to run, but my body doesn’t move—can’t move.

It’s not just fear keeping me rooted here; there’s a pull in those eyes, a wordless promise of danger and…

something else. Something primal and fierce that I long to chase me down and lay claim to me, as illogical as that sounds.

Something to disrupt my tightly held control, to piece back together my life that is slowly unraveling at the seams.

Adrift in a sea of loss from my failed research expedition and an uncertain future without the plant I was so desperately searching for, the idea of belonging, of being made whole again calls to my soul. An anchor for this stormy season.

Despair threatens to wash over me, drown me in its dark, icy depths.

But I can’t give up hope yet. Surely, all cannot be lost. My throat aches as tears prick my eyes.

Not here, not now, I tell myself, surprised by the emotion that stare has pulled from the dark recesses of my soul.

Shocked at how easily it cracks my carefully controlled facade to wrench me open, bare my secrets.

As if there is also a promise, a comfort that I finally could be free if I only gave myself over.

I blink hard, breaking the spell. When I open my eyes, the darkness has swallowed the mysterious sight.

They may be gone, but the pull remains, and oh, how I want to surrender myself to those shadows.

How I long for the release from these self-imposed constraints.

How I wish to be as wild as these mountains.

I glance down at the clay cup in my hands, tilting it toward the firelight.

The liquid swirls innocently. Just tea, none of the local bhang.

I had tried the edible cannabis only once when I had first arrived.

After all, what kind of ethnobotanist would I be if I didn’t partake in the ceremonial and social use of a native plant?

The fire burned brighter that night as we sipped our laced lassi drinks. I wanted a second one, but luckily, my friend and host, Sita, stopped me at one. A few hours later, I was relaxed enough to want to dance under the stars on the hard-packed dirt surrounding the firepit.

I stuck to what I had learned early on in my field research—listen to the locals. As Sita steered me to my room and away from my impromptu dance floor, I was thankful for her guidance. A second drink and I might have hallucinated.

Tonight’s vivid vision must be my mind playing tricks on me, exhaustion casting imaginary eyes where there aren't any.

The yearning to belong must just be my heart aching for my fiancé, Ben, back home.

He is my anchor, not some imagined, mysterious pull from the dark woods.

I just need to get home and go back to serious, scientific Dahlia Wilde.

Although as Ben liked to point out, Wilde had always seemed like an oxymoron for a science nerd like me.

The past few days had been brutal as I pushed myself to find the elusive plant this whole trip had been for—Silene vitalis. A tiny flower with a big possibility to save lives. My life. And it had been for naught.

I had always loved plants, and the summers I spent working in a greenhouse taught me they made it easier for me to interact with people.

So, when I stumbled upon a niche career where I could marry the two, I was thrilled.

What I hadn’t known then was that my unusual choice would turn out to be my only chance at running down a cure for the disease that took my mother.

An inborn error of metabolism that would cause an accumulation of fatal proteins to turn toxic over time.

There is no known cure or treatment, no hope on the horizon. So, I took matters into my own hands and empowered myself the only way I knew how: I took my grief over losing my mother in the middle of college, and I buried my nose deeper into books as I lost myself in the library.

I analyzed botanical medicines, natural cures, and dusty tomes of plant extracts, seeking an antidote to the protein.

I don’t know why I thought I, Dahlia Wilde, would find some miracle cure when all the doctors and scientists had failed.

But I didn’t have a choice. Because my mother had passed that same damn gene down to me.

So, I scanned every database, exhausted every dusty library stack, and hounded every botanist I could get to talk to me until I found one promising compound in a handwritten journal.

I traced it down like a determined bloodhound until finally, I hit paydirt, digging through some nice lady’s great uncle’s dusty attic bins where I found a single preserved specimen.

When I lifted it from its resting place, undisturbed for years and forgotten by the world, the setting sun streamed through the grimy window, casting the specimen in a golden glow. Time had reduced most of the plant to a withered, lifeless brown, but one petal—just one—defied its fate.

It gleamed with an almost unnatural brilliance, a luminous, iridescent, blue violet that mirrored the striking eye color my mother had passed down to me, along with this cursed disease.

From the moment I first stumbled upon a mention of this plant back in the library, I knew the coloring they described was no coincidence.

But there were no words to do it justice, it was mesmerizing.

Seeing it in my hands, tangible, solidified my resolve—I, too, would defy my fate. Like the lone petal that refused to fade, I would be the first to survive this legacy of death. The Silene vitalis was the answer, and I would track it down.

The journal had listed a vague, general location deep in the Himalayan mountains with a hand drawn map. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack. But what choice did I have?

Back in the lab, the mass spectrometry had analyzed the only viable fragment from the shimmering petal preserved by sheer luck, or maybe fate.

My hands had trembled as I prepared the sample, scarcely daring to breathe.

The slightest mishap could ruin the only sample in existence, and thereby, the only Dahlia Wilde in existence.

Using a sterilized mortar and pestle, I ground it into a fine powder and then soaked it for hours in methanol.

As I filtered the liquid until it ran clear, I felt like I was walking a tightrope—one wrong step and I’d lose everything.

With a whispered prayer, I injected the final extract into the mass spectrometer.

I counted the beats of my heart while I waited for the results to load, each thud echoing the weight of my hope, my hard work, my life, hanging in the balance.

As the machine’s readout flickered to life, a graph blooming in jagged peaks against a black screen, I held my breath as if my exhale would make the image vanish.

Each peak held its own story, its position on the x-axis marking its mass-to-charge ratio while the height declared its abundance.

My eyes locked on a towering spike at m/z 152.1—a match to the theoretical mass of the compound I was hunting. A smaller peak at 198.3 confirmed the presence of a secondary compound, hinting at the medicinal properties I needed.

In the corner, the software cross-referenced the data with its molecular library. The text glowed faintly, C12H10O3, followed by the name: Silenol. Below it, a 2D molecular structure appeared, its lines and rings promising salvation.

I exhaled a shaky breath. It wasn’t just hope anymore. It was proof. I read it, then read it again, my vision swimming as tears blurred the screen. I was right. I was fucking right!

Risking that one shimmering petal had been worth the gamble. The plant’s unique chemical profile confirmed my theory—a potential cure, real and tangible, blooming before my eyes. The weight of it crashed over me, my forehead sinking to the desk as I let the tears finally fall.

It wasn’t just overwhelming joy—it was something deeper, sharper, and infinitely more complicated. A fierce exhilaration tangled with a grief so raw it left me aching inside. The knowledge that I had been right, that I had proven it, was a triumph I had dreamed of.