Dark Moon Daughter

by J. Edward Neill

  Dripping, she stalked for the tower. Her body crackled with raw Nightness, the black smoke sloughing from her shoulders. Every Ur candle she passed, she extinguished. Every step she took, frost formed on the glass beneath her naked toes.

  Faster and faster she swept across the isle, until she reached the grounds outside the tower door. She thought to find the Sarcophages waiting, her friends’ throats cut, and her father cowering before a dark and mighty Ur. But instead of Sarcophages, she found only their skulls, their broken swords, and their armor lying in dusty heaps. Garrett stood in the center of it all, his blades coated with white powder. All of them…she gaped. He destroyed all of father’s soldiers.

  She parted her lips to call to him, but no sound came out. Following his gaze, she saw a shadow emerge from the tower door. Not an Ur, she realized. Grimwain is back, and the world not yet burning. What happened?

  Grimwain stepped into the Ur candles’ glow. Dust and cobwebs trailed his raiment, clinging adoringly to him. His braid was loose and several shocks of tangled black hair framing his jaw. His eyes glittered white as starlight on a face dead as dusk.

  The warlock, tall as he was, cowered. “What did you find, Master?”

  Master?

  “Empty,” Grimwain declared. “The tomb is empty.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Empty…” Grimwain repeated. “You’ve lied to me. You’ve failed.”

  “No.” The warlock quavered. “I didn’t. I did everything you asked…everything to perfection.”

  “Perfection…” Grimwain looked to her and Garrett, to the sea of bones strewn at Garrett’s feet, and to Saul, Ghurk, and Rellen, who hunkered near the tower’s side, clutching Sarcophage swords in the shadows. “Perfection is nothing known to you, son of Archithrope. To achieve it, you must abandon morality. Were my brothers pouring from the night and you the only creature left alive, perhaps you might witness perfection. But you…you are human. You in all your haste have failed us.”

  “I don’t understand,” said the warlock.

  “The one act we could not do for ourselves, you were unable to perform,” Grimwain snorted. “A wizard, you claimed to be, the last and most powerful of the almighty Anderae. It was never you we should’ve placed our faith in. The world might fall into winter by itself, the forests become brittle, and the oceans turn still as glass before you uncover what part of your magic has failed us. Perhaps I should’ve looked to her, your fair offspring, who already we sense will surpass you.”

  Grimwain gazed at her, and through me. She saw death in his eyes, the pain of millions compacted into two pinpricks of white light. If the Ur are not inside the tower, she wondered, then where?

  Grimwain fell upon the warlock. She had never seen any creature move so quickly. Grimwain backhanded the warlock to the ground, slapped the Pages Black aside, and bared one of his blades against the apple of her father’s throat. She could hardly help but pity her father. I should save him, she thought.

  No. I should not.

  “Empty, you say?” Grimwain growled.

  “For now…not forever.” Her father lay helpless beneath the blade. “I…made a mistake…in the timing…yes, that’s it…more time is all I need.”

  “I could kill you for this, Anderae. I could carve you into something unrecognizable. You’re hardly the only wizard in the world. Many more lie in hiding, skulking for fear of me. And then of course we have your daughter. Why then? Why should I let you live? You’ve failed us. The brethren will not be free, and tomorrow the sun will rise over Thillria yet again”

  “No…” the warlock stammered. “This is not the end. My daughter is nothing. You might hunt for centuries before finding another as powerful as I am.”

  Grimwain tapped his blade on her father’s cheek. “And what are centuries to me?”

  “Why wait so long? Let me live, and I’ll find the answer in a year, a month, a day...”

  Fearful of what was about to happen, she looked for Garrett, but Garrett is gone again. With a cruel smile, Grimwain whisked his blade across the warlock’s flank. Pain welled in the warlocks’ eyes, and blood pooled on the island beneath his robes. “I can…still help you,” he groveled. “Let me…live.”

  “Leave him be!” she shouted.

  The force of her voice rattled the island, the sea of Sarcophage bones, and the sword in Grimwain’s hand. He leveled the silver tip at her chest, and she stared him down. “Point that elsewhere,” she warned. “I am not like father. I will hurt you.”

  “You had better.” He smiled.

  He came for her, sweeping his sword like a scythe at her throat. She flinched and raised her hands as if to block his blows with her bare wrists. His blade would have killed any other, but it only made ribbons of smoke as it passed through her.

  “New tricks,” Grimwain scoffed. “Clever girl.”

  “Why do this?” She backed away.

  Murder smoldered in his gaze. He tore his second sword from its sheath and came at her even swifter than before. His blades whistled through the air, stinging the space between her and him such that she felt the cold steel against her cheeks. It mattered not. She was faster. Each time he flashed his blades, she blinked in and out of her nether state. Against the Nightness, his hundred hews were no more hurtful than the wind.

  “The tomb is open.” She retreated into the wasteland of Sarcophage bones. “What more do you want?”

  “To be free.”

  “Why? Why kill us all?”

  “I have no answer to please you.”

  She wanted to understand, but now is not the time. He came for her again, but with a cluck of her tongue, she became smoke once more. Relentless, he chased her. He was not nearly as slow or predictable as Mogru. Each time she thought to become flesh and burn him to ashes, he outmaneuvered her, flashing his blades in precisely the location she hoped to reappear in. Horrifying, he was, his white eyes seeing her no matter where she flitted to, no matter what state of shadow she took.

  As her Nightness waned, he drove her to the island’s edge. She thought to fly over the water and escape, but it was then she heard a shout from behind her attacker.

  “You!” The voice belonged to Rellen. “Leave her!”

  She took womanly shape in the shallows. Standing in the inky water, she watched as Rellen and Saul approached, each with glowing Sarcophage swords. Saul, my genius! Her heart leapt. He put Ur candles in the sword pommels to see with!

  Saul and Rellen, no matter their wounds, stormed Grimwain. She feared for them, but less so when she saw them drive Grimwain into the water some twenty paces away. Stay and help them? she agonized. Or deal with father now that he is alone? Crows take my heart, what do I do?

  She slammed her eyes shut. In a half-breath, she dreamed of all the horrors that might happen. Grimwain seemed a monster, but he deals in swords, not sorcery. Father is the true threat. Without him, I cannot close the tower.

  She left the battle behind. Flitting across the island in in the shape of a shadow raven, she became flesh before the tower. She knelt, panting beside a fallen Sarcophage, whose skull smiled at her. She heard Rellen and Saul waging war against Grimwain behind her. She forced herself to shut the sounds out of her mind.

  Her father stood in the gloom outside the tower door, the Pages Black tucked under his arm. Blood from Grimwain’s slash dripped from his robe, pooling at his feet.

  On the ground in front of him, Garrett lay inert.

  Garrett? Her heart dropped to the bottom of her soul. But…

  “You are many places, daughter.” The warlock wrung the dust from his fingers.

  “What did you do to Garrett?”

  “I put him back where he belongs,” he hissed. “It’s the least he deserves. If not for him, your sister would still live.”

  “Midnon,” she realized.

  “Yes. His mind, but not his body. His bones will wither, but his soul will rot forever inside me. I should’ve thought of it sooner. I’d have tucked you bo
th away.”

  “Deceiver!” she screamed. “Everything you promised…lies! You never loved me or Ona. We were toys to you. And Grimwain…that fiend…how can you call him Master? I want you gone, father. I want everything to be right again. I despise you.”

  His robes shimmered silver in the Ur light. She assumed he would smite her with the worst of his spells, but no. He weeps? Shivering, he crumbled to his knees. He looked lost, as though in the span of a single breath he had forgotten who he was and why he stood at the bottom of the world.

  “Do not hope for my sympathy.” She advanced on him. “Kill me or close the tower door. Decide.”

  “I…” He let the Pages Black fall from his fingers. “I’m sorry, daughter. Look at me. I’ve failed. Grim is the master, and I the pauper. He’s right; this isn’t done. He’ll find another. He has all the time in the world.”

  “Where are the Ur? Why are we still alive?”

  “The tower is empty,” he shuddered. “Thank the sun and the stars it is so. I’ve missed some crucial part of the spell. I thought this place was a tomb. It’s not. Grim didn’t know either. How could he?”

  If not a tomb, then what?

  “A conduit,” her father finished her thought. “There are no Ur here, nor have there been for thousands of years. They’re imprisoned elsewhere, far from the Undergrave.”

  “Will you stop Grimwain?” She glared a hole in him. “Help me save Rellen? Revive Garrett? Answer me! Will you?”

  “No.”

  She had known his answer before he said it. He lifted his gaze to hers, meeting her distress with empty, emotionless eyes. She saw the shadow fall over his countenance like a storm cloud across a miserable midnight moon. He closed his fist and squeezed a rope of running blood to the ground.

  I have no time for this.

  She moved faster than he could react. Yielding to the Nightness, she became shadow yet again. He conjured eight Ur flames upon his fingertips, but she streaked at him like a meteor, and before he could so much as cry her name she thinned herself to vapor and wafted into his eyes, his ears, and his mouth. She had no intention of suffocating him. She simply wanted inside, where I can find what matters most.

  Soaring into the nebulous tracts of her father’s mind, she invaded the true location of Midnon. Through a door left ajar, she crashed, and once again emerged in the grand hall of Midnon’s heart. Her body became whole again. A woman once more, her feet were bare, while her raiment, dark and alluring, caught in the cold breeze of her father’s fear.

  This is how he sees me. An object. A pretty thing meant for manipulation.

  Midnon’s door shut fast behind her. She stole her way across the hall and into a narrow, ebon-floored passageway. Along the walls unfamiliar objects were arranged: statues with strange, sinister faces, violet lanterns whose lights paled in her presence, and shelves stuffed with thousands of moldering, untitled books, stacked to a ceiling some twenty men high. It looked as though Midnon had been left untended for many years, for nothing appeared as sterile and ordered as she remembered. Chaos, she thought. All his neatness is gone.

  “Garrett? Where are you?”

  She earned no answer save an echo. She ran down the corridor, glancing from wall to wall, counting at least fifty doors. In younger years she might have panicked, but instead she shut her eyes and allowed her mind to roam, asking questions aloud as though she were Midnon’s new master.

  “Garrett, where would I put you? If I feared you so deeply, where would I lock you away? Behind which door? Think, Ande, think. There is a place. If I hated someone, I would put them…”

  The answer came to her. The moment she knew, she opened her eyes and gazed to the floor.

  “Down.”

  Midnon shook, and many things within the corridor changed. The tiles shifted beneath her feet, sending her sprawling to her backside. Every door blinked out of existence, erased as though they never had been. She knew at once the changes were her father’s work. You found me. And now you try to kill me.

  After another breath she witnessed the statues along the wall creak to life. Wearing hateful, misshapen visages, they shook the dust from their obsidian shoulders and stalked for her with their stone fingers extended. They groaned her name with unmoving lips and gazed through the darkness with lidless eyes. Midnon shook again. The walls tumbled away from her, and the narrow passage became a cavernous library. She slipped the grasp of several statues, and as she ran books fell in droves from the walls. The rotten tomes took flight toward her, their bindings flapping like bats’ wings, their pages dangling like teeth. She ducked and dove beneath a table. The horrors closed in around her.

  Remembering her destruction of Mogru, she cupped her palm and summoned a fistful of Ur magma. She flung a glob of black broth on the floor, where it boiled and hemorrhaged, smoking a hole through the stone and into the stratum beneath. In the instant before the statues and bloodthirsty books could devour her, she slithered into the hole and plummeted faster than any of her father’s constructs could follow.

  Far she fell, tumbling into Midnon’s bowels. In a cavern not unlike the Undergrave’s darkest, she splashed into a lake of silvery, translucent liquor. The reeking fluid stung her nose and smothered her senses. Sick with the smell, she paddled to a stone outcropping. What is this liquid? Father’s anger? His fear? Disgusting…

  She clawed her way to the top of the outcropping and gasped for dear life. In the loathsome sewer between one layer of Midnon and the next, she sensed her father’s horrors could not reach her. The cave was untouched by any part of his cognizance, she sensed. As sick as she felt, I must dig deeper.

  The cavern was far from Midnon’s lowest point, she knew. After catching her breath, she stretched her arms and strained her Nightness to its very limit. She became less like smoke and more a ghostly dagger, her edges sharp enough to penetrate any surface in Midnon or the mortal world. Once changed, she streaked downward, diving through the liquor lake and beyond. She spiraled between the many materials of her father’s mind, needing only moments to pass through a thousand twisted passages, falling the same as a star into Midnon’s bottommost chamber.

  I know this place. She recognized the hollow tower. My dungeon. The same place he imprisoned me. Here there were no monsters or hungry minions waiting to ambush her. Chains hung from a ceiling too high to see, and the walls wept, the only light that of seven Ur candles smoldering in an obsidian chandelier.

  Had she been more than a slip of shadow, her heart might have pounded right out of her chest, for her very first sight in the lonely tower was exactly what she hoped it would be. Garrett. He moved at the tower’s bottom, ambling across the floor, completely unaware of me. Her Nightness exhausted again, she drifted down and touched her toes upon the floor behind him. There she lingered for longer than he knew.

  “Garrett…” His name wafted between her lips.

  He seemed calm, even here. “I thought you might come,” he said. “You should not have.”

  “Why not? You are my friend. I need you.”

  With his back to her, he knelt and collected a gobbet of dust on his fingertip. His mood was distant, as far retreated from the world as though he had lived in Midnon for a hundred years.

  “Garrett, we have no time.” She knelt beside him. “I will not leave without you. I am sorry for whatever made you this way, but I need your help. Rellen and Saul do, too. Come back. Come back now.”

  He lifted himself from his haunches.