Dark Moon Daughter

by J. Edward Neill

Laughing at her high above the Thillrian plain, the sun roasted Andelusia. Her salty sweat ran like flames into her eyes, like puddles into her palms, and like a river between her breasts. After just one day on the Thillrian fields south of Denawir, she felt well and truly braised. Her white dress was ruined, the sleeves sopping, the hem gone from ivory to muddy brown. Even her pants and hard-bottomed shoes felt damp, moistened by hours and hours of her skin’s slickness. Here it is, a cool day in autumn, she lamented. And I burn as though this were the dead of summer.

  Riding atop her smelly, rough-saddled horse, which jostled her and flicked its dirty mane into her face, was no help. She felt miserable atop the beast. She wished they had let her keep her mare, but they had taken her favorite steed away only an hour outside the city. ‘Not fast enough,’ they had told her. ‘Nor brave enough. She’d sniff the Uylen and bolt.’ She wished it were night, that winter would come to claim the sky, and that the wind would loft her right out of her new horse’s saddle. But there was no relief. The beast slogged on, the Thillrian plain endless before its hooves.

  The men she traveled with did not seem to care for her plight. There were eleven of them, eleven youngling soldiers garbed in blacks and dull browns. They rode all around her, trampling the grasses with their ugly horses, but they never said a word to her. They think me a nuisance, she believed. A tag-along. Where is Jix? If I am so important to him, why did he send me off with these strangers?

  Of her eleven companions, only one was more than twenty winters old. The officer Jix had handed her over to looked like a grave sort of man, and surely not a Thillrian. His hair hung in a braid over his left shoulder. His cheeks were tanned and gaunt, a rope of beard dangling from his pointed chin. The scraps of armor he wore over his grey shirt looked as though plucked from half a hundred battlefields, while his twin swords he kept sheathed in rotting scabbards. She had seen no smiles cross the officer’s face, or any expression at all. Captain, the others called him. Dangerous, she guessed he was.

  The rest of Jix’s riders were not so grave or distinguishable as the Captain. They were fresh-faced Thillrian knights, looking no wiser than apples picked too early. They seemed nervous as they rode, shying in the Captain’s shadow, never laughing, singing, jesting, or even stealing glances at her. New to their jobs as soldiers, she could tell. Are they Jix’s idea, or the King’s?

  She had never felt such relief in her life as when the sun plunged down and the night’s breezes began to blow. The hour was late, and the clouds like violet fingers clawing away the cover of daylight. Led by the Thillrian riders, she rode across a shallow stream and into a copse whose tall, bendy trees drooped toward the water. As the soldiers dismounted, she watched them, but none of them so much as glanced at her. I am alone in the company of many. I wish Jix had let me bring Saul.

  The sun dipped below the horizon, the shadows of the trees conjoining with the darkness. The soldiers built their camp, erecting tents and conjuring an angry little campfire. Saying nothing to them, she tied her horse to a birch and ambled alone to the stream. She sat at the water’s edge, slipped her feet into the stream, and splashed her face clean. The water was cool, the world’s finest refreshment. She drank enough to fill her belly, watched the last strips of lavender clouds fade to black, and returned to camp with her thirst quenched, but her body as sore and stiff as ever in her life.

  “Will there be anything to eat?” she asked no one in particular.

  “Here.” One of the soldier lads marched up to her and shoved a plate of harshly-cooked meat into her hands. “Supper.”

  The soldier walked off as quickly as he had come. Platter in hand, she sank to the earth beneath a tree, nibbling at her food only because she knew she needed to. The meat was tasteless, though she knew even the finest fare could not have pleased her. Was this the right thing to do? Her doubt gnawed at her. How can I ride with these men toward so terrible a place and not know them at all?

  The night deepened. She remained alone in the darkness, watching the men by their fire and wondering if any of them would ever talk to her. Whereas the eleven Thillrians gobbled their food with bare fingers and swallowed from their cups with great, noisy slurps, the Captain seemed a world apart. Sitting beneath a tree on the far side of the fire, he skewered his dinner with a three-tined silver fork and pursed his lips upon the rim of a golden goblet. A noble? She wondered. Surely Jix would have told me. The Captain was not dressed the part, but his manners betrayed him. His every movement was refined. His fork seemed a silver rapier in his grasp, his goblet a chalice made of glass. She could not help herself. If this is the man who might take me to my death, I must know him.

  “Excuse me, ser.” She stood over him, her hands folded at her waist.

  The Captain said nothing.

  “Ser, I hoped to ask you a few questions. This is our first night out, and no one has explained why Jix is not here.”

  He speared another morsel on his plate, chewing the meat slowly, staring straight into the darkness between the trees. His chin-braid was motionless, his gaze lost in some faraway realm.

  “Ser?”

  Another silence passed, and the Captain dabbed at the corners of his mouth with a white cloth. “Jix is needed elsewhere,” he finally said.

  “And who are you who takes his place?”

  “Your servant, who else?”

  She disliked his tone, but at least he speaks. “We are bound for Shivershore? To the Nightmare Forest? Are you Jix’s man or Orumna’s? Are you my guardian or my captor?”

  “Guardian.” His voice was cold. “Though if the rumors are true, you will not need me.”

  She frowned at that. She was unsure what to expect in the Nightmare Forest, and she was not so foolish as to not be afraid. Jix had told her a thousand times how special she was, how she alone could survive to find the Pages Black, but he never said why.

  “Maybe it is true,” she said to the Captain. “Maybe the Uylen will not see me, or maybe they will be afraid. But I would have liked Jix to be here. I had counted on it.”

  “He is otherwise detained. Does this mean milady wishes to turn back?”

  “No.” She put on her proudest look. “I made a promise.”

  “Then go to sleep.” He waved her off. “A tired mind makes a lamb of the fiercest lion. If you are this creature Jix believes, you will want to sleep…and well.”

  And what creature is that? She wanted to be angry, but instead felt confused. “What is your name, ser?” she asked “You look somewhat…foreign. Are you the King’s champion, or someone else?”

  He sat, solid as the tree at his back, sipping from his goblet. “I am the Captain,” he said. “That is all you need to know.”

  That night, she lay on the south bank of the stream, her tent forgotten in the trees. The winds soothed her and the soft soil made a bed far better than most, and yet every time she shut her eyes she snapped them open just as quick. If I fall too far into sleep tonight, I will dream, she thought. If I dream, I know who will come for me. The voices…they are near.

  For several hours she lay, restless and alone, until her escorts dozed off. The hour was midnight, their campfire was dead, and she could hear them snoring. With no one else awake, she rose for a walk beneath the stars, whose light illumined the pale grasses beyond the trees. Barefoot, she splashed across the stream and wandered out into a field, gliding through the night like a glass spirit. As her eyes became accustomed to the dark, she found she could see almost as well as if it were day. The blackness does not hinder me, not even a little.

  Some hundred steps into the field, she found a place to sit. A great rock, seeming out of place so far from any mountain or hill, lay half-buried in the grass, painted on all sides with moss and creepers. She climbed it, nimble as a goat, and sat atop it so she could see the lay of the land. Not much was near, only a sleeping village and countless pale-grassed fields. The sound of crickets and night birds made for a chorus she rather liked. A symphony just for me.

 
So alone, she remembered the abbey at Aeth. This moment is like that one, she reckoned. No one knows I am here. The night is mine. Strange though it seemed, she preferred these moments to all others. These were the hours when she could think with an uncluttered mind, without the needling of friends, of conversation, of expectation. If time were to stop and the night last far longer than it should, she did not think she would mind.

  She lay atop the rock for a long while. She felt languid, her body as cool as the water in the stream. The longer she stared at the stars, the more she began to believe she was not the woman she had been in Graehelm. Something had changed inside her. If daylight never returned, I could bear it, she mused. If the voices came to me tonight, I might listen after all. They were frightening thoughts, and yet she embraced them. She began to gaze less at the stars and more at the darkness between, and she felt the shadows gaining momentum within her.

  Come the deepest dark of night, she allowed her mind to slip back to Furyon. She closed her eyes and remembered the realm of ghosts, black towers, and never-ending rain. I have not been honest with myself, she thought. Furyon changed me more than I could know. The memories of her days as a captive, a pupil of Furyon’s malefic artifact, and a willing servant of the warlock Revenen sprang back to life in her mind. Like a dark city rebuilding itself atop her mind’s foundation, she remembered it all. Her life’s blackest hours felt as though they had happened only yesterday, and the smallest details of her imprisonment filled in the voids of her memory. She remembered Revenen, more a ghost than a man, his voice collecting like cobwebs in her head. She remembered the vast corridors of Malog, the bones of tens of thousands at its bottom, and the thrum of the Orb as it begged her to slay herself for its satisfaction. She even remembered Vom, the pupil she had been jealous of, the man she had slain with Garrett’s black-flame sword.

  The war with Furyon was over, but the enemy’s mark remained within her. She was of the old blood, a child of the haunted peoples of ancient Archithrope, makers of the Five and destroyers of civilizations. Of those forgotten days when evil reigned supreme, she knew very little. But here I am. She shivered and opened her eyes to the stars. Their child, one of few who live, or so said Revenen. I understand now, Jix. I know why you came for me.

  At dawn, she awoke on a naked patch of soil beside the shallow stream. The morning was grey and cold, and upon rising she wondered just when in the night she had climbed down from her rock and curled up next to the water. She crawled up from the void of sleep, her head full of fog, her belly aching.

  And then she saw the Captain.

  She nearly jumped out of her dress when she saw him. He stood over her, his arms crossed, each palm on the pommel of a sword. He might have been a statue for all his stillness, and when he gazed down at her, she swore she heard a bone in his neck pop. “Arise, mistress.” He said to her. “Shivershore awaits.”

  “How far?”

  “Eight days.”

  For eight days, she rode. The sunlight was ever upon her, bright and hot and penetrating. From dawn until dusk, she sweated her soul out into her clothes and ached so hard she feared her bones might shatter whenever she dismounted. Her dress hung from her body like leaves from a tired old tree, while her small suppers left her hungry and weak. No one else seemed bothered by the sweltering heat, least of all the Captain, and after several days she realized she was the only one affected. It is not hot, she came to know. Nor even warm. This is as crisp an autumn as ever. The heat is all in my mind.

  It never rained on her way south. The clouds, herding in the north like a flock of dark-woolen sheep, were too slow to catch her. They teased her, looming out of reach, the sky beneath them turned grey with rain. She wished she could ride back just to be caught beneath the showers, to be bathed by the thunder and wind, but she did not dare. Shivershore awaited. People were dying, women and children she believed she could save.

  Thillria was no Graehelm, she came to learn. The stark, flat heaths between the thousands of farmers’ fields were as grey and dour as graveyards. Autumn stripped the leaves from the bushes and trees, and the grass seemed to grow dryer the further south she traveled. Even so, the wilderness called to her. Few folk lived in the Thillrian heartland, or so she observed. Had she been her old self, she would have spent every night wandering the meadows and swimming in the dark-watered lakes, and she would have done it alone, which is all I want to be.

  During the nights, when the sun sank and the stars came out, she felt her only comforts. Breezes from the south tousled her hair and whisked her sweat away. Often, while sitting alone beside her tent, she swore the wind carried whispers to her ear, invitations to wander off to Shivershore alone. Every evening, while the soldier lads made camp and the Captain sat in silence, she anxiously awaited the hour of sleep. Once the others drowsed, she fled the camp and sneaked beneath the moon, where waking dreams of shadows and dark places spirited her imagination away. She felt nocturnal, a ghost free to wander, and the nearer to midnight it became the blacker her thoughts turned. She tasted death in the wind, blood on her tongue, and horror in her heart, but she was no longer afraid.

  She thought her journey would never end, but on the ninth eve from Denawir the pale grasses gave way to the landscapes of the south. She came to Shivershore at last. Gatherings of lantern-eyed towers and old, creaking houses stood amid the stony hills. Beneath the twilit sky, diminutive cities twinkled like stars, dotting the landscape as far as she could see. She heard dogs barking, distant music plucked, and laugher rising in the night, but she and her escorts did not stop for any cause. They avoided all dwellings, large or small, and when greeted on the road by a caravan of tradesmen, they trotted past as if they had heard nothing.

  Later that night, well past the normal hour of camping, the Captain rode to her. She trotted atop her ill-tempered horse, and he dropped back from the others, sidling up to her on his black-maned steed.

  “We are close now.” He gazed into the darkness ahead. “Beyond these hills is another part of Thillria, where the roads lead to dead, abandoned cities. The forest is there. You will know it when you see it.”

  For the first time in days, she looked at him. In the dying daylight, she saw his eyes, enigmatic as the last stars gleaming just before the dawn. “You are not Thillrian, are you?” she asked.

  “Nor of any nation.”

  “How is it you came to serve Jix? Or Orumna? Or whichever man employs you?”

  “Serve?” He clacked his teeth. “Is that what Jix told you?”

  “Not in so few words. She turned her cheek to him. “Will we go into Nightmare at sunrise? I can see well enough in the night, but you and the others might need the sun.”

  “At sunrise, yes,” he snorted. “For all the good it will do you. We will accompany you to a point, but the rest of the forest is yours to conquer.”

  She gulped at that. The wailings of the dying folk in Orumna’s hall were still alive in her memory, and their sight of their blood oozing off the King’s tables fresh as yesterday. The Uylen, she remembered the stories Jix had told her. Only I can end this. There is no going back, Ande. Be strong.

  “What can you tell me about them?” She sucked in a breath and shut her eyes. “The Uylen, that is.”

  “Everything.” He grinned. “But words will matter little to one who has not seen them. Do what you are meant to do. Swallow your horror, work your Furyon spells, and the Uylen will not matter.”

  She shivered. “I must retrieve their sacred thing, their book, but I do not know where to find it. How will I know where it is? If I stumble across it, am I to bring it back to you? Am I to destroy it? What does it look like?”

  The Captain grinned again, as sure of himself as any man in the world. “Find it. Bring it out. You will know what to look for and where it lies. It will become obvious to you. Yes, we know…you have your doubts. You think you are new to this, that your misgivings will matter. They will not. You are not meant to fail here. Jix would never have trusted you other
wise.”

  His words gave her no confidence. The fear was upon her. She tried to hide the feeling by clenching her jaw and balling her fists so tightly that her fingers went numb, but he sees right through it, she knew.

  “You are terrified.” He stroked his horse’s ebon mane. “It is to be expected. If nothing else gives you solace, if we are too grave to be of comfort, take heart in this; Jix, your little friend, is not so foolish as to send someone incapable. If he says you possess the means to evade the Uylen, it is true. He does not lie, not to me.”