Dark Moon Daughter

by J. Edward Neill

  Her blood boiled, her fury unlike ever before. She writhed like a snake, ripping one wrist free. One was all she needed, for the moment her hand came loose of the Uylen’s cold-fingered grasp, she grasped the hilt of Wkhzl’s three-tined knife. The Uylen did not expect it, not from me, their skinny little supper. When she raised the Kiln dagger and thrust it into the throat of the one atop her, she felt the others’ grasps loosen.

  The Uylen straddling her toppled lifeless to the ground. The one to her right slavered and bit at her face, but she met his eye with the blade, and he fell away, foaming blood from his empty socket. A third wrenched her arm and lifted her wrist to its jaws, but she twisted free and kicked upward. Her sandals were gone, but the ball of her heel crunched against the Uylen’s chin, and she heard the splash as he pitched backward into a puddle of scarlet muck.

  Swift as lightning, she sprang to her feet. She never remembered moving so fast in her life. “Slow as syrup!” She kicked the Uylen whose eye she had taken. Its skull felt like glass against her shin, the bones shattering beneath its flesh. Weak and withered as old men.

  She felt like an animal now, snarling and enraged. Teeth bared and wet with Uylen blood, she held her knife outward as though it were a sword. Two Uylen stalked in circles around her. She heard a thousand more in the forest, their skeletal legs shredding the undergrowth to tatters. Wondering where her fear had gone, she imagined herself holding her ground and slaying as many as she could. But I am no warrior. No matter how many I kill, more will come. I have to flee.

  Dozens of Uylen tore into the clearing. They spilled from every nook of the darkness and leapt from between every tree, their white skin and dagger fingers flashing through the pallid shafts of moonlight. Sucking in a shallow breath and folding her bloodied dagger against her wrist, she spun and ran. The nearest hundred Uylen gave quick pursuit. She heard them snuffling, loping after her like jackals. Wherever she darted through the forest, they followed her, relentless, tireless, perfect hunters. With every step, every leap between the trees, they gained on her. She felt their filthy nails swiping through the wisps of her ebon hair, and she saw ropes of white saliva streaming from their mouths.

  For a thousand breaths she ran, until at last she sprinted into the hugest clearing in all of Nightmare. She might have stopped and stared, were the Uylen not closing in by the thousand. Running through a vast pool of moonlight, she glimpsed entire gardens of their totems. Between trees tall and far apart, strands of flesh were slung like spiders’ webs and decorated with more bones than she ever could have counted. It seemed like some twisted temple, the foulest of Uylen lairs, a mockery of the graveyards of men. With her all-seeing gaze, she saw the faces of hundreds of dead, hanging like puppets from strands of raw red tendons. And here I will die.

  She could run no further. Surrounded by death, stared at by too many skulls to count, she slammed to a sudden stop in the heart of the clearing, spun about, and faced her pursuers down. They were legion. Their faces haunted every patch of earth on every side. They slowed to savor their kill, and she gasped for breath. They made a great ring around her, a seamless circle of white faces and dead eyes. She re-lashed her knife to her naked thigh and held out her arms as though it might delay them. Pray the shadows take me, she whispered. Pray to live a while longer.

  This time her mind was clear. This time the night was willing. Even as the Uylen closed in, grasping at her, snapping tooth and talon at her, her flesh became ethereal. The shadows swirled at her feet, dark as the deepest sea. Her eyes pulled back into the void, and all sounds of the world went dead. She was a spirit again, as insubstantial as a dying breath, untouchable by any object in the world. I am the night, she knew. Not air, not a ghost, not the wind, but the night.

  She knew she could not remain in such a state for long, and so she flew. All things parted before her: flesh and bone, tree and totem. Like death itself she swirled through the night, existing in the shadows long enough to drift over the ring of Uylen and deeper into Nightmare than any Thillrian had ever gone. Only a few moments passed, though it felt like an eternity to her. Far from the dread clearing, she settled to the earth and took mortal shape once more. Again she dozed, curled like a baby upon the earth. She did not dream. She slept, and nothing came to kill her.

  An unknowable time later, she awoke. What happened? She thought as she peeled herself from the earth. Where am I?

  She sat up in the moonlight. The place she had come to was the crown of a hill whose sides were black and desolate but whose base was ringed with brambles and rotting trees. She felt weak, mortal again, fragile as a dry old twig. If a single Uylen were here, it would be enough to end me. She ran her palm down her aching calf and found it gouged by talon strokes. She rubbed her elbows, bruised and bleeding, and her head, throbbing like the insides of a well-beaten drum. Her body quivered from hunger and thirst, and her bare feet bled, her sandals lost somewhere in the forest. And yet I live. Somehow. Somewhere in this forsaken place.

  She sat for a time. The darkness yielded to her gaze, but she saw no Uylen approaching. As she tried to gather her senses, she tore off the last ragged strips of her shirt sleeves to make bandages for her leg. The longer she toiled, the less she was able to concentrate. I must be going mad, she thought. I hear something whispering my name. The voices? No. Something else. Get up, Andelusia. No time for rest. Finish this. Finish it now.

  After tying Wkhzl’s dagger back to her waist, she willed herself to stand. She was not sure where to go or what to do, but at least I am not afraid anymore. After a moment spent swallowing back her pain, she wound her way to the hill’s bottom, cut between a hundred rot-bellied trees, and slithered past countless curtains of sinewy, blood-colored vines. When she emerged onto a narrow path in the forest, she expected a thousand more Uylen to await her, but she found nothing. She saw no totems strung across the way, no Uylen dozing in the tree hollows. I am well away from them. I must have flown farther than I thought.

  The Pages Black

  After many hours walking the narrow path through Nightmare, Andelusia found what she was looking for.

  Shadows ruled the earth. The starless night was so deep and dark she knew that without her magic she would have been blind. When the path ended and the realm of the trees fell behind her, she lifted her gaze. South, she knew. I am looking south. This is the place Jix wanted me to find.

  A great ruin lay before her. Its destroyed splendor swept to the end of sights. A city. She held her breath as she gazed upon it. This was a city. The Pages Black is here. The ruins were vaster than any city she had dreamed of. Its grey spires, pale-domed minarets, and labyrinthine dwellings looked like a hive, all of them conjoined in some elegant way, none of them standing on their own. Every doorway seemed connected to another, and every hollow window watchful of the structures beside it. Crumbling bridges and covered passageways stretched from tower to tower, from the highest halls to the lowest hovels, a spider’s web of smooth white stone. Tens of thousands must have lived here, she knew. The Uylen.

  In silence, she walked across a white-grassed field toward the city. She felt bone-weary, ready to collapse and sleep a week away, but her curiosity compelled her. The ruins were beautiful in one manner, and tomblike in another. The towers were grey, their sides shrouded in sickly veins of ivy, while the decaying domes, several thousand in number, looked ready to collapse at any moment. Neither rain nor wind had touched the ruins in a long, long time, for the dust was everywhere, thick enough to weave curtains of, floating like stars in every empty courtyard. The masters of stone and mortar who had fashioned the city were long dead, she knew. Time stopped with their fall. I wonder what happened.

  She strode through what she imagined had once been the city’s primary gate. Blocks of marble were tumbled all around her like headstones, the dust like a second skin crowning each one. In the dwellings beyond, many hundreds of doors lay open. She looked into each one and imagined she knew where it led to. That one was a school, she imagined. The do
ors are small, as if for children. That one was a shop. Look, it has a signpost. But what do the symbols mean? And that one. That one was somebody’s home. Curtains still hang across the windows. Or are they ghosts?

  She might have spent a lifetime exploring the ruins, had she the time. But no. I am here for a reason. She walked closer, until the towers loomed high above and the windows seemed ready to swallow her. In the darkness, nothing cast a true shadow, but she felt as though shadows were everywhere. I see no color, only greys and blacks and whites. The light in my mind comes from everywhere…and nowhere.

  She wandered onto a wide, white-marble street. The Pages were somewhere near, she knew. She needed only choose the right door among millions. Plumes of dust leapt beneath her bare feet. Gauzy spirits of century-old cloth fluttered when she walked by, falling still as death again behind her. She crept along the street, passing scores of towers. In the towers’ flanks, square blocks of stone were missing, and she peered into the holes, wondering when it was she would glimpse a clue to the Pages, or a host of Uylen waiting to devour me. In each tower, she saw tables, chairs, tapestries shrouded in dust, and stairways long collapsed. These are empty, she sensed. Nothing and no one. No one and nothing.

  Deep into the night, she meandered up and down the streets. Nothing lived in the city that she could tell. No crickets, no birds, not even the Uylen. She came to countless doorways beyond which only emptiness lay. She passed beneath thousands of windows, and though she felt watched, she peered into each one and saw nothing. She walked beneath towers and bridges, crept past mansions and huge, hundred-spired cathedrals, but she entered none of them. The voices…they will tell me when I come to the right place.

  Dawn returned. Her eyelids hung like leaden curtains above her eyes, wanting to slam shut, but as she shambled into a courtyard at the junction of six white towers, she felt the morning’s light creep across the sky. The sun, though veiled by dreary clouds, shined upon the domes and tower tops, whitewashing the stone and setting every roof softly aglow. Her eyes, so perfectly adjusted to the dark, winced against the new light. She felt the sun might burn her, or that its presence might steal her powers away. Fearful, she slunk into one of the towers. Shadows reigned in its black foyer, and she huddled within them, trembling with hunger and fatigue. She sank to the floor, the dust like a blanket beneath her, and after a dozen breaths more she drifted asleep.

  The day, so swift and fragile in the realm of Nightmare, passed her by. She suffered no dreams, no voices. She slumbered like a stone at the bottom of the sea, drifting into a realm so deep and dark she might have died and never known. In these abyssal throes, it seemed an eon lurched by, a thousand years of silence, of emptiness, of nothingness, but at twilight’s fall her eyes reopened. She sat up, and her hunger and weakness were gone. The night restores me, she realized. I need fear no starvation, no death by exhaustion. What powers are these? What else will I learn?

  She stood and stretched. Her arms and legs felt like water, smooth and loose as rivers flowing into the darkness.

  Yawning, she walked to the tower door and felt the city shake.

  The noise sounded like drums. Far at first, then closer, the rhythm of thousands of footsteps snaked up the streets and rattled in her ears. She thought at first the Captain had pursued her with some hidden army to overtake the ruins, but then she shut her eyes and perceived the clicks, creaks, and groans beneath the rhythm. Somewhere in the city, a gate opened. Somewhere, a host of Uylen is on the move.

  She dashed into the tower gloom and up its curling stair. How many floors she ascended, she could not have said, but when she reached the highest window in the barren top floor, she claimed her best vantage of the city yet. She hunkered by the sill and peered like a ghost across the ruins. There. She focused on a street far from the tower, one she had walked twice only yesterday. The Uylen walk.

  Like a pallid, waterway they streamed out of a massive cathedral in the city’s heart. She saw thousands: men, women, even little Uylen children, all of them skeletal, blind, and clacking. Not monsters. The realization blossomed in her mind. Human. They have families. They have feelings.

  She could hardly believe it. The Uylen were not what she had thought. Uylen mothers carried bald, sightless babies in baskets, while children darted and played in the milky grass, teasing each other with jabs and punches, using hands that were not yet ruined with Uylen talons. More than once, she saw displays of affection, as mothers gave toothless smiles toward their husbands, and as fathers tousled their younglings’ ratted hair. It made her feel sick to watch, but even so she felt a moment of sympathy. The Pages did this, she knew. An entire people cursed.

  The Uylen made their slow exodus away from the cathedral and out of the ruins, delving into the blackness of the forest. Though they seemed peaceful among themselves, she had no doubt they would slay her if they found her. Only after the last of them vanished into the trees did she dare to leave her window and descend to the tower bottom.

  She emerged into the city. The Uylen were gone, the streets cold and silent. She knew what she had to do. Inhaling an ocean’s worth of air, she sprinted out of the courtyard and darted through a dozen alleys, gliding through the darkness with the ease of the wind. Far from her hiding place, she came to the thoroughfare the Uylen had walked. She slithered like a snake to the street’s end, where lay the grand cathedral. The white church was the vastest dwelling in all the ruins, a city unto itself. Its door was like no other, a circular gate of black iron wide enough to march an army through. Along the path toward the great door, scores of statues stood, busts and effigies and nubile caryatids, all of them defaced and limbless, all surely scarred by the Uylen.

  She eased down the street. She saw talon-prints in the dust from the Uylen’s twisted feet. Like a mouse, she slinked from column to column, from statue to statue, until she arrived at the door. She felt tiny beneath it. She reckoned the huge slab of circular iron had been blackened by some vast furnace, for it was unblemished by rust, seeming out of place amid so much decay. She glimpsed no markings upon it, no hinges, and no rings for pulling it open. She wondered how the Uylen had opened it, or shut it, for she saw only a slender slot at the door’s bottom, wide as a knife turned on its edge. A key, she understood. This door needs one. But Jix never said anything about…

  It struck her. She already possessed a key.

  It dangled at her waist, crusted with Uylen blood, the strange, many-tined knife Wkhzl had given her. She remembered the shop in Kilnhome, and she thought of the shopkeeper’s words. ‘For you, my sweet, it has no price.’ Wkhzl had handed her the dagger as if to bequeath a great treasure. ‘Keep the blade close. You have the look of someone who might need it.’

  He knew? But how?

  She untethered the blade from her waist. She was almost naked, having lost most of her clothing to Uylen claws. Blade in hand, she considered herself for a moment, her rags and pale, skinny legs. What would Rellen think of this? She wondered. Would he even remember me?

  Holding her breath, she lifted the blade to the gate’s slot. Three tines, she thought as she slid it in. I should have known. Astonishingly, the blade was a perfect fit. It moved by itself, turning slowly and soundlessly in the lock. Its edge became like ichor, churning and roiling, throwing back ten tumblers without effort. Once it completed a revolution, it hardened and fell back into her palm. The gate began to grind open. Her eyes were wide as moons.

  A black wheel, the gate rolled open. The sound deafened her, but so too did the silence thereafter. She stood before the cathedral’s vast opening, and though it was utterly dark inside, she saw everything. The ceiling looked high as any tower, the white colonnades thick as oaks, while the stained-glass windows reminded her of the abbey in Aeth, only on a far grander scale. Knife in hand, she lingered on the threshold. Her fear climbed up inside her chest and wrapped its claws around her heart. The Uylen will have heard. They will swarm this place and strip me to my bones. I have to hurry.

  She crep
t inside. The cathedral void felt more like a hollowed mountain than a hall built by the hands of men. Ten steps in, she lost sight of the ceiling, and she began to doubt one even existed. Maybe the night is the ceiling, she marveled. But then, what are the columns for?

  She walked deeper into the gloom. The grand scale of it all reminded her of Furyon, of Malog, whose size had dwarfed all the creations of mankind. Most frightening of all were the cathedral’s obsidian statues, which she glimpsed lurking along the walls. Many hundred in number, the tall, gangly carvings were graven in the image of a frightful manner of creature, neither man, nor Uylen, nor any beast of the wild. I know these shadow people, she knew without knowing. My voices. These are the creatures who speak to me. Saul had a name for them. What was it? The Ur? The Uylen worship them. But why?