by S. M. Beiko
Phae relaxed her tense shoulders. “You all know so much more about Ancient than I do,” she replied. “You’ve just got to trust your faith.”
“But you’ve been there,” Isela urged. “You’ve seen the realms. So they must still be there. Yes?”
This is usually how the conversation went, before the end. Everyone wanted at least some reassurance that there’d be something waiting for them on the other side. In Isela’s case, it was the Warren she dreamed of, just like all the other Rabbits. The final resting place of their souls, in the comforting embrace of their First Matriarch, Heen.
But Phae had only ever seen the Glen. Watched the flicking soul-shadows of Deer racing around the silent mountain. Walked with her own adopted god with three faces and a terrible fatalistic attitude towards the world. That hadn’t given her comfort. Especially since Phae wasn’t born a Denizen — she was made one. She chose this path, and it’d led her here.
And the last time she’d seen the Glen, it had been completely destroyed.
But she didn’t tell Isela any of that. She smiled again. “The Matriarchs are with us, even when we don’t feel it as much as we used to.”
Isela relaxed into her pillow, shut her eyes. “Ancient may be silent, the Matriarchs’ influence waning, the Calamity Stones lost, but I still dream of running through wide open thickets. I still believe it’s there.”
“That’s all you need,” Phae said. Isela spoke no more, breath coming unevenly as she relaxed, as Phae helped steer her towards the end. “May Heen be with you.”
One of Phae’s hands went up to the chain around her neck, to the stone hanging from it and hidden in her shirt. She smoothed a thumb over the locket that contained the stone she’d thought would save everything. Yet so long ago, at the edge of a cataclysm, that moment had never come, and the stone had gone silent. Still, silent or not, it was Phae’s only comfort now.
Isela’s hand loosened. Phae didn’t hear the sound of fluttering moth wings like she did in her dreams, but she could imagine them clearly enough. She sat back in the chair as another soul fled to another plane, or maybe it remained floating around this room. But whatever the place, she had no proof it existed.
Phae looked out the window to the dark smudge hanging over them all and felt, as she had for many years, the crushing weight of her failure.
* * *
Seven years ago, in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Phae had woken suddenly with a weight pressing on her legs. At first she thought she was being crushed, until she looked down and saw it was someone else’s body lying across hers.
Phae reached down and laid a hand on Barton’s fuzzy head. His hair was soft like a cottontail, amusing given his Family. She hadn’t thought she’d actually, really touch him ever again.
He jerked awake and slammed back into his chair. “Phae!” And his strong arms were around her neck, hugging her fiercely.
She touched him tentatively at first, then squeezed back just as hard. “I’m not dreaming.”
“Nope,” he pulled away, face broken by his exhausted grin as he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Though it doesn’t mean the world’s any less of a nightmare.”
It was morning and light slanted across Phae’s hospital bed from the window. There was something dark hanging in the overcast sky. “What’s —”
“We don’t know yet.” Barton shook his head, glancing at the thing once and looking right back at Phae, laying his palms on her face. “But you’re okay, and that’s good enough for me right now.”
Everything came crashing down on her like a nauseating tidal wave. “Wait — what happened?” Frantic, she looked around. “Where’s Roan? Eli?”
Barton sat back stiffly in the chair, massaging his legs. His running blades were propped up against the laminate bedside table. The grave look on his face made Phae’s stomach knot up like scar tissue.
“Don’t know that, either,” he said, voice quiet. “They had a plan. We all did. God knows we sacrificed enough to see it through.” His mouth twisted. “But we obviously couldn’t make the winning goal.”
Phae shut her eyes and pressed her fingers into her temples. The last things she remembered came to her in snatches: the wide and raging sea. Natti had been there — and Roan. Roan was changed into something terrible — then all at once she’d overcome it. Her body was a vessel for the stones that they’d all been desperate to bring together in the first place, the fifth of which Phae had carried with her from one crumbling realm into this one. A last bid: wake Ancient. Save everyone. Stop the Darklings from breaking through.
Her eyes flashed open and she whipped off the bed covers, as if the dazzling trinket was lost amongst them. “The Quartz,” she hissed, frantically searching, nearly yanking out her IV line. “Where is it?”
Barton had been fastening his blades on and caught her before she tumbled out of bed. “Easy, Phae, relax.”
“Relax?” she whirled on him, dark hair in her eyes. “How can you say that? How can you say we failed? Where is Roan?”
There was a knock on the door so quiet they barely heard it.
“You can come in, Saskia,” Barton said to the little face pressed into the gap in the doorway.
The girl was skinny, small. Her black hair was cut in a ragged bob around her chin, freshly combed. She wore a hospital gown underneath a terry cloth robe, and though she looked tired, her big round eyes never left Phae as she came around the bed, hands twisting in front of her. She couldn’t be any older than ten.
“You’re awake,” she said to Phae.
Phae’s glance darted quickly to Barton and back to the girl. “Hello,” she said uncertainly.
“This is Saskia,” Barton said, settling back into his chair. Saskia climbed into the chair next to him. “She was the one who found you.”
Phae blinked at the girl slowly, trying to master her thudding heart. “Oh.” She swallowed, not sure how to ask. “Is she —”
“No,” Barton answered right away. “But she knows about us. She knows quite a lot, actually.” He smiled at Saskia, who looked away, chewing on her fingernails. “You can talk to Phae. She’s —”
“A Deer. I know,” the girl huffed. “And you’re a Rabbit. And I’m no one.”
Barton raised an eyebrow. “Believe me, Saskia. Being a Denizen isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And Phae and I are still pretty new at it.” He tried to smile at Phae, but she was staring at the round dark shadow in the sky behind her visitors.
“That’s them, isn’t it?” Phae said. “The Darklings.”
“Yes.” She was surprised it was Saskia who answered. “They’re free now. They’re together.”
Phae looked at her oddly. “How do you know that?”
Saskia had been kicking her feet in the chair. They went still. “I saw it when I killed Urka.”
“Urka?” Phae’s heart sped up again. “How?”
“We can go over that later,” Barton said, standing carefully and using the bed rail for support. “As for me, I need at least three gallons of coffee. And to check in with my unit.”
Phae blinked, trying to comprehend what he’d said. That’s right — Barton was wearing a sort of green linen uniform. That was why they’d separated months ago: he’d joined a coalition that had formed between Families to fight the threat, called Seela, that was after the Calamity Stones.
Barton still hadn’t answered Phae’s most burning questions, though. He must have known it, which was why he was trying to make his escape. Phae tried a different question. “Is Natti all right?”
Barton turned back. “She’s down the hall. You can ask her yourself. She’s a bit more battered than us. But it’ll take more than the end of the world to knock her down, I think.” He squeezed Phae’s shoulder, and she held his hand, kissed it, before he left the room.
Saskia remained. “The Quartz sang,” she said af
ter a while. “Roan went through the song, and away.”
Phae sat up a little straighter. A snatch of hazy memory confirmed it. So that part had worked, at least. “She got into the Brilliant Dark?”
Saskia lifted her shoulder. For someone so young, she looked like she’d seen too much. Haven’t we all? “Eli went with her.”
That offered Phae some comfort. At least her best friend wasn’t alone. “There’s hope then.” She couldn’t help it — she turned her head, looked out the window one more time. That thing hanging in the sky seemed to command her attention. She knew there might not be any looking away for a long time.
She felt a solid, smooth weight pressed into her hand and looked down.
“I don’t know about that,” Saskia said, taking her hand away and revealing the winking surface of the Horned Quartz. “It washed up on the beach with you. But it’s quiet. It’s not saying anything anymore. Not since the others cracked.”
Phae stared at the stone, the gift with which Fia, a god whose own faith in humanity had barely hung on at the end, had entrusted her. The key to the last Realm of Ancient, where Ancient itself slept. If they’d opened the door and done everything right, it should have woken the slumbering godhead. Should have stopped this.
But it hadn’t. The Horned Quartz just looked like a dull piece of glass now, nothing like the mystical gem imbued with any of the grace Phae had felt when it was given to her.
Phae felt like she was falling. “But Roan —”
“I’m sorry,” Saskia said, and when Phae looked up she realized the little girl was crying. “Roan’s gone. And I dunno if there’s any way for her to come back.”
* * *
Natti often thought about waking up in that hospital in St. John’s, these days. She replayed everything, tried to change those memories, but always awoke to the same outcome. She’d known the consequences, of the words she couldn’t take back. Seven years later, there was nothing much she could do with these regrets except offer them up to the snow.
Natti peered out into the tundra, scanning. Snow upon snow. White shore, white sea. She narrowed her eyes towards the south and pulled the crossbow off her back.
“What is it?” her mother asked. She had been on the shore, where the water lapped against the crusted rock, praying. It brought her comfort, even if no one was likely listening. Not even the sea.
Natti didn’t reply, just aimed, let a bolt of ice fly, and they both watched the object in the sky hurtle landward. “Third one this week,” she said.
They made their way across the tundra towards the crash site. It didn’t take long for them to come upon the drone with black curls of smoke peeling into the frigid air.
The wind sliced past, but their faces were well bundled against it. Natti pulled down her mouthguard. “They just won’t quit,” she muttered. The drone was just another warning.
Her mother shook her head, toed the wreckage. “Not until they have what they want.”
“I know what they want,” Natti grunted, scooping up the drone. She often brought them back to town, displayed the crushed plastic and steel on a shelf like a trophy. It raised everyone’s spirits, though it always darkened hers. “Maybe I should surprise them and give them exactly what they’re looking for.”
When they made it back to the cabin in the village, remote and removed and barely connected, as had been the deal, her mother bent to unlace her boots indoors. “Are you seriously considering going back to Winnipeg? To meet with the chancellor?”
“The moon moved,” Natti replied. “Not even we can ignore that. If things are shifting, our help might be needed.”
Her mother peered hard at the daughter she’d gotten to know only these past few years through uneasy silences and difficult times. “It was your call to keep us Seals separate, all those years ago. You yourself said it was the only way to keep this Family safe.”
Natti didn’t disagree. She had been right; they’d been safe. But at a cost that had been weighing on her as each day passed, looking out into nothing but a wide, empty sea melting at a rate it never should have. She had no compass to follow. No confidence to keep for anyone. She’d trusted people before, and for years she believed they’d let her down.
“So what if there are more of those river hunter things popping up?” Her mother waved her hand. “Isn’t that why the Task Guard formed? If you ask me, him wanting you to go there and start some kind of Seal Unit is the most obvious trap I’ve heard of. All those Rabbits disappearing last spring, no cause or reason, but probably for processing. We’re next.”
Natti scoffed. “Of course it’s a trap. But something else is going on. Reminds me of what Barton tried to do. Reminds me that once upon a time, there were some of us who had a plan to fight back, if the fighting was good.”
“You’ll remember, then,” her mother said darkly, moving into the kitchen, “what happened to that boy because of what he tried to do.”
She passed Natti then and squeezed her shoulder, probably as much to reassure herself as her daughter. Natti turned to close the interior cabin door, but happened to squint skyward, that black smudge sharp and clear even against the midnight sun.
“Hmph, well,” she said, shutting the door with a slam. “Maybe I’d like a front seat to this impending doom we’ve all been going on about for so long.”
Maybe, she thought, I’d like to see what remains of my friends, one last time, before the end.
“Aivik?” Natti called down the hall. “Have you seen my bag?”
Marked by the Dark
Saskia stood now in front of the house where it all began.
It was like all the other houses on Wellington Crescent. Big, old, grand. Many of these houses had been seized for the Restoration Project, lived in or run by the Elemental Task Guard and supplied with government funding; it was the same in other cities. Larger houses acted as central dormitories for the Task Guard who were integrated into neighbourhoods, in this case, houses specifically near the Old Leg and the Law Courts. It made dealing with conflicts easier, they’d said. What it really did was remind people, Denizens in particular, that they were being watched by their neighbours.
But Cecelia Bettincourt’s house — long taken over, semi-rebuilt, and its infamous summoning chamber beneath it likely filled in — housed more than just the enemy. It housed a history. Saskia didn’t know why she’d come here, but she’d wanted to see it. She thought, maybe, if she was seeing Death, she’d see something else in the place Death set this all in motion, with Roan Harken.
Saskia and Ella had spent maybe too much time here, daring one another to get close to the house. After scaring themselves giddy, Ella would regale Saskia with everything she’d been told had happened in this house, filling in the gaps and strengthening the legend of Roan, her family, and their quest for justice in the face of authority’s version of the greater good. Roan had been a Fox, after all. Last scion of a family that had sacrificed so much to change the unchangeable Narrative. It was a good story. Saskia never got tired of hearing Ella tell it with such passion. Such fire.
The corners of Saskia’s eyes burned.
Whether the stories were true or not, whether any of it mattered now, Cecelia’s house always made Saskia feel like she was a part of that story, even though she’d been relegated mostly to the margins. And this house was still here, and that meant something.
Saskia’s heart caught when the front door opened, and a stream of cadets came out into the street, likely to relieve other street guards. Gods only knew what went on in these satellite houses. Some of the officers loaded into a dark van and pulled away. Neighbours didn’t seem to mind or do more than glance up from their yardwork. Just a normal civic routine, like a garbage truck making its rounds.
You could be one of them, Saskia thought, watching the van disappear up Lanark. You could learn all their secrets and undo them from the inside.
Yeah, right. More hero stuff to fail at. Saskia turned the other way, towards the open waters of the Assiniboine River across the road. She played a game in her head that she often did, staring stalwartly ahead. Don’t look up. She knew the moon would be there. A permanent immovable (until today) fixture in the sky, watched diligently by every international government space program. After the first couple of years, the world let its guard down and tried to resume the day-to-day in their new normal.
But when it’d landed up there, it took out satellites. Didn’t just obliterate them — it sucked them in. And it did the same to anything the world tried to launch near it. Some people theorized the black mass-less ball had some kind of sentience. That it didn’t want people to be so connected anymore. So there went the internet, cellphones.
Why did Mundanes bother with theories? All they had to do was turn to the Denizen lore, to actually listen when the last Family leaders urged Mundanes, begged them, to ally with Denizens to fight whatever the moon was.
But that conversation was over before it could start.
Saskia did finally look up. I lose again. The Denizens had a name for it: the Darkling Moon. Because that’s what it was — an amalgam of the three darkest souls in the Realms of Ancient, monsters who wanted nothing more than to snuff out Ancient’s creation and leave behind only shadow.
Three entities that Saskia had known, in one form or another, a little too intimately.
She looked around, hands thrust into her pockets, kicking the sandy path, deflated. What was she doing out here? She’d get a citation for skipping school, and if she was already on the ETG radar, she could be arrested again. She realized, like last night, she didn’t care. She’d reached the height of terror and survived. What did school matter when the world was coming to an end, as Cam had predicted?
Saskia had come to Cecelia’s house on the way to Omand’s Creek — where the river goes by. She’d hoped, somehow, Ella might be there. That they could go back to the way things were. That had been childish. Even though, technically, she still was a child . . . she couldn’t remember what it felt like to be one.
