Below the Moon

by Alexis Marie Chute

  The second contingent to depart was Grandpa Archie and the sprite Lillium, plus her pet fly named Gobo. They are the diversion. Grandpa and Lillium will approach the Bangol fortress from the west, cause just enough of a distraction that the Bangols will not detect the Lord’s group, and then get out of there.

  Finally, Kameelo forms a contingent of one, on a mission to watch from above, ensuring the first two groups aren’t discovered. This he must do carefully, so he isn’t spotted. The Bangols won’t be expecting a flying Olearon, but still, he can’t let his free-spirited personality get the best of him.

  Of those remaining in the Fairy Vineyard, some opted to stay, waiting for the deed to be done, while others—like me—were not given an option. I wanted to make the decision for myself, to be given the freedom of a choice, even if I would have taken up residence in the Fairy Vineyard anyway. Lady Sophia, too, was not given a say. Also staying behind are Mom and Dad, Captain Nate, Junin, and two of the Olearon brothers, Azkar and Nameris.

  Here on this crazy island, when I’d normally find myself falling asleep, I’m awake instead. Luggie’s only been gone a few hours, but I miss him. He’s my safe place. He treats me like a person, whereas Mom treats me like an illness. When we’re together, I don’t doubt Luggie’s feelings for me. Apart, however, I begin to bite my nails, obsessing over every interaction, replaying and analyzing it all on a torturous loop. Nothing remains of the midnight-blue nail polish I wore when we arrived on Jarr-Wya.

  I don’t understand why Luggie obeys the Lord. It’s not like him. The Olearons callously lump all the Bangols together, vilifying them, but the stone-heads are not uniformly evil—apart from Tuggeron. Luggie is good, which is why I feel uncomfortable with this new plan, though even Mom wouldn’t listen to my concerns.

  Grandpa Archie, too, acts like the Bangols are expendable. He quickly suggested pitting them against the Steffanus race. He must know Bangols are going to die. Luggie’s family and friends. They’ll be stabbed through the brain by Steffanus daggers, like Yuleeo was, sliced open by golden antlers, and who knows what other fatal gifts the Steffanus warriors will bestow.

  Chapter 14

  Luggie

  Luggie hangs back as the Lord consults his warrior, Islo. Duggie-Sky listens attentively to them, to the smooth language of the Olearons, which sounds like cursing to Luggie’s ears. Their contingent of four arrived at the foot of Baluurwa not long before. The deepening night is cold and carries the cutting smell of frost on the breeze. Luggie shivers. The Olearons refuse to ignite their ruddy bodies for fear of catching the attention of the Bangol night guards. The four crouch on the edge of the black rock, baring their skin as they press up against its warmth.

  Luggie feels tense, distracted, consumed with plotting ways to kill the Lord. I must choose the right moment, but the decision is impossible, he frets. He concludes that the trepidation hammering in his heart is a warning, not an urging. Perhaps the Lord still serves a purpose in saving Ella, he thinks. He puts the matter to rest, for now.

  Their contingent has not yet observed the Bangol guard turn to the west. Luggie hopes, for Ella’s sake, that Archie is alive. A thundering Haaz creature, cousin to the Bangols, shakes the earth near the western entrance, but the Bangols, including Luggie’s father Tuggeron, are not concerned. The Lord insists they delay their advance into the fortress until all bright yellow eyes are on the west.

  Of course, the Lord will sacrifice Archie and his sprite companion, Lillium, so we get in and out safely, Luggie thinks irritably. Just like he will do to me if I am not careful.

  Luggie grinds his teeth. He does not wish to know what the Lord and Islo discuss. I have heard enough, he thinks with a grimace. The Lord has only ill will for the Bangols and no shame in cutting them down with his words within earshot of Luggie. The Lord has also never failed to remind him of his role on this journey.

  Obedience.

  Or the Lord will scorch every Bangol.

  Submission.

  Or the Lord will murder Ella and everyone she holds dear.

  Luggie slips backward into the shelter of a nearby blue-bark tree that has bravely fought its way through the warm rock. When he is sure the Lord and Islo have no interest in him, he tenderly slips the magical object from his sack. It is a risk, but one he is willing to take. The secret history of the Olearons has beckoned to Luggie every sunset since their departure from the glass city. Delicately, he slides the callused pads of his fingers across the dazzling jeweled surface, and the glass responds in turn.

  Storm clouds sweep across the face of the glass, growing from white wisps to angry, foreboding billows that engulf every edge. The clouds melt to black, and white letters appear in Bangol as the Naiu in the glass reveals itself to its reader. As one sentence disappears, another slides in line, the words joining haphazardly, only remaining fleetingly before they are replaced. Luggie reads quickly.

  The 22nd Lord, Devi, grew ill after his capture of a Steffanus youngling: ill in body and in mind. Tormented dreams scathed his sanity and planted in him a grotesque fear of the she-race. He shared with his advisors the nocturnal visions he witnessed each night: Baluurwa the Doomful, the great mount of Jarr-Wya, leaking silver-skinned women like blood. The great shadow-giver that towered at the center of the island was pierced through the heart. The silver women, with their eyes of fire and ice, propelled themselves up to the stars on terrible wings, hunger cut across their twisted, angry faces.

  Devi’s advisors assured him they had set their sights on Baluurwa for forty sunsets, and that the captured one was the sole remaining Steffanus. Devi’s father, the 21st Lord, had called forth the flame and passion that pulsed with rage in the Olearons’ veins, unleashing himself upon the mount. He burned it to naked rock. Many generations would pass before seed and soil could support new life.

  Certain of the truth of his dreams, despite his father’s actions, Devi called forth the Olearon warriors. Together, they devised plans to search every tunnel and crevice. These plans never came to be. The captured Steffanus eventually spoke—and not willingly. Her pride was a confirmation to Devi that there were more of the terrifying sisters. The mountain had to be rife with them. Devi and the elder Olearons did glean much from the Steffanus’s testimony: the beginnings of the she-race, and the beginnings of all worlds and time and planets with their derivative dimensions devoid of magic. After recording this testimony, Devi took delight in draining the blood of the Steffanus, though it did not give him the peace he desired. On the contrary.

  The morning stretch of the sun revealed the end of Devi. His Maiden turned in their bed, within their glass chamber, to find her Lord, her soul partner, ash white, the heat drained from his ruby skin, bleached of all life, as it had been with the Steffanus. Across Devi’s chest, cut deeply with a dagger, his papery skin bore these words:

  A Lord to destroy.

  A Lord to rebuild,

  To destroy once more.

  Vanity. Foolishness.

  The stars be witness.

  Peace does not hold hands

  With war.

  We are coming.

  Devi’s Maiden, now possessing his spirit and his fear, hurried to appoint their second-born son, Tennam, the 23rd Lord of Olearon. Tennam and his sister Daneelo performed the scorching ceremony on their father’s body that dawn and by sundown released a green bird to Baluurwa. Tennam and Daneelo asked the Steffanus for peace, believing it could endure, which it did for two generations.

  Tennam passed lordship to his only son, Masillo, the 24th Lord, who bestowed it on his firstborn, Till. It would be the son of Till—Yulan, the 26th Lord—who would unearth unrest once more. The Lords who followed—Jenu the 27th and Teemun the 28th—would become entrenched in a well-worn rut of attack and defense. The Steffanus warriors flew over the glass city, dropping stones that shattered the great hall, the chambers of the Lord and Maiden’s attendants, the armory of glass weapons, and finally the Olearon nursery.

  The Lords responded with f
ireballs to the sky and burning grass lassos that bound silver feet and curling golden horns. Olearons aimed, too, for the wings. Steffanus sisters tumbled, landing on jagged fragments of glass that sliced bone from skin and feathers.

  In the reign of Teemun, the burning and smashing and piercing and roasting and deeply ingrained hate was a way of life.

  By that time, the Steffanus race traveled between Jarr and Earth frequently, growing in foresight—and in anger—with each passage through the threads that pulsed between dimensions. The Steffanus sisters were skilled makers of Tillastrions, some needing no more than a pebble, which they used to call forth their power of Naiu. Others on Jarr-Wya—the Olearons, Bangols, and sprites—would need one from the human world to portal jump to there. The Steffanus race boasted duality of spirit, being birthed at the fusion of human and magical origins.

  Steffanus travelers returned with ill omens for the Olearons, which they scratched onto the glass city (always in a state of rebuilding) during the night, so that the dawn would illuminate their dark words. Teemun returned anger for their loathing, fiery boulders for their stones, and words best left unsaid for their dire proclamations. He unearthed his forefather’s plans—scrawled by Devi six generations before—and brought his warriors to Baluurwa. No Steffanus was spared. The mount rained with blazing newborn feathers. Golden antlers were collected, piled, and smelted into the breastplate of Teemun.

  Baluurwa was silent. No food preparation fires—evidence that the Steffanus race endured—dotted the mountain in the night. All was lilac smoke and a windstorm of white. Ash. The red kin emerged, their fire so hot with hatred that their blue jumpsuits, which repelled the lick of flame, burned from their molten skin.

  They returned to the glass city, naked, proud, and ready for peace.

  Teemun bore four children during his reign: two daughters, Mazanoo (called Mazi) and Jeeleano, and two sons. The elder son, Telmakus, joined the Olearon contingent that guarded the Sea of Selfdom on Jarr-Wya’s east coast. When Teemun, now more than thirty thousand sunsets old, grew faint of fire, his eldest son was called back from the Olearon ship.

  Telmakus was exalted to the glass throne on the eve of Teemun’s passing. Having grown up in a time of peace and believing his father that it was honorably won, Telmakus did not concern himself with Baluurwa or the silver-skinned she-race, and only learned of them from fire-yellowed parchment accounts with words ringing as embellishment and myth. He was tenderhearted and sought first his Maiden.

  The bloodline of Lords and Maidens is flexible like chain mail. A Lord may be born in any magical world and inhabit any form. In each world, there is one race to which the spirits of the Lords and Maidens are pulled. In Jarr, they are Olearons. In other lives, they find themselves reawakened in different skin, but always the same race as each other. Never the grey of Bangols. Never the shine of sprites. Never a race of a derivative dimension. And never the silver of Steffanus. The Maidens and Lords are joined to one another, as if by hands held through a fog. One always finds the other.

  Telmakus searched the glass city. He waited for the new births in sunny summer’s heat, one of two seasons hopscotched between on Jarr-Wya, the other being tepid budding spring. Not even through one-sunset-old eyes could Telmakus find his love. He sought out the sprites, to no answers, and the Bangols, who had left their northern fortress unguarded to trawl the eastern sea. So Telmakus took to Baluurwa. To mourn. To contemplate. To call on the Naiu in him, pleading for his soul partner, as his loneliness was encompassing, confusing, and corrupting.

  That was when Telmakus met Laken, the last remaining Steffanus, who hid herself in Baluurwa’s heart.

  Laken was barely surviving in a tunnel, concealed beneath a broken bough of a slanted tree. She was older than he, by how much he could not tell. Laken’s robes were pale blue like the sky. Her face was pinched and puckered by fire’s harsh embrace. Her body was rail thin like the Olearons’, though she appeared starved, lacking the full breasts, wide hips, and round cheeks of the Steffanus women, whose likeness had been sketched in the Olearon public record. Telmakus nearly confused her with an overgrown sprite, but she was unlike any he had seen in all of Jarr.

  Telmakus did not recoil when Laken reached out her silver hand to him; it was scarred and missing three silver nails. She placed it on his heart. He knew she felt his ache, the longing as loud as his unabated cries during the sunset that had just passed to vapor at the kiss of the moon.

  They spoke in the common tongue of the land, brought to Jarr-Wya by the Steffanus travelers many thousands of sunsets ago from Jarr’s derivative dimension—a language now spoken by all races on the island when not addressing one of their own. Laken held the young Olearon and gave him passage by Tillastrion so he could search for his missing love.

  After his return, Telmakus never spoke to the Olearons of what was birthed in him during that journey. He told of meeting beings with no magic—and his love, his soul companion—and of a land that stretched a distance beyond the cusp of the Sea of Selfdom. He strained to explain the deviation of time from one world to the next—that their rhythms were two parts of the same song. Telmakus was changed, in ways he did not understand—nor did those in his charge.

  The Olearons were perplexed that a Maiden would be reborn a world apart from her Lord and that she would be discovered in a derivative. Their questions about their Lord’s well-being were repetitive and confrontational, but greater than this was their fear of the Steffanus race.

  The elders burned with suspicion. Telmakus referred only to a diviner who lived in the mountain as he struggled to evade the Olearons’ dread that perhaps Teemun, his father, had not annihilated the Steffanus race as believed. It was obvious to all that Telmakus felt gratitude for the diviner’s kindness. Naivety they blamed, for Telmakus had not known the bloodshed, nor the roasting of the mountain at the hand of his father.

  The Olearons rose against their 29th Lord in the name of peace. Telmakus, wishing to display his autonomy from Laken—whom the Olearons assumed was the vaguely described diviner, though they never knew her name—scorched all public records of the Steffanus, vowing to rid the island, and all of Jarr, of the she-race. It was an overcompensation Telmakus would have regretted if it were not for his madness.

  In secret, however, he transcribed as much of the record as he could recall, wishing to study it for clues to the blind hatred so easily awakened in his family, his warriors, and all who dwelt within the glass city. The violence in them bled fire from their dreams and caused them to forge a new arsenal of sharp glass weapons.

  Elder Olearons met with warriors in the training paddocks to pass on knowledge and battle techniques. Rumors skipped through the grasses between glass structures and bounced off the smooth, angled surfaces, coating everything with distrust. The words, both truth and lies, crept into Telmakus’s brain and began to fester there. He wondered at Laken. Was he too easily fooled by her silver-blue wounds? By her frailty? Was it all a theatrical distraction to keep him from the truth?

  Telmakus looked bloated with the weight of his decisions, lacking decisiveness. He consulted his older sisters, Mazi and Jeeleano, who knew the ravages of war when they were young, many sunsets before. Mazi, the eldest, spoke of horrors that became a blade through Telmakus’s mind, destroying everything he had come to know through experience—with Laken, in the derivative world, with his love. All of it was called into question.

  Jeeleano, a wisp compared to her sister, was soft-spoken and prone to forgiveness in both her beliefs and her manner. She was nursing her newborn then, which Mazi blamed for her sister’s sensitivity, but in truth she had always been the gentler of the two. Jeeleano advised her brother that fault is shared, and if it is shared, so, too, is compassion.

  Telmakus refused sleep to pore over the secretly recorded testimony of the Steffanus sister told to Devi many generations of sunsets past and of the she-race’s escalating threats and prophecies. His hands throbbed with the heat of rage at his growing disori
entation, so intense that he felt he did not belong in any world.

  Elders banged on his glass door from dawn to dusk, looking to poison Telmakus with their theories and ravenous cravings for dominion, manipulating the vulnerabilities in him that he refused to acknowledge. In many ways, the elders had already succeeded.

  Telmakus retreated into the blue forest to the south, needing to relieve himself of the weight he carried via the enchantment of Naiu, a gift from Laken to protect what he and his love had made together. Laken met him there. Her skin shone brightly like the starlight that rained from overhead. She was growing in strength since their voyage through the channel between worlds. She met him so they might again travel to the derivative of Jarr.

  Together, Laken and Telmakus delivered the child back to the womb of his love, for her to protect and raise. The Steffanus was leery on this journey. She observed the fear that now encircled Telmakus’s eyes, turning their black even darker as he stared at her. His words were few and clipped, secretive. He needed her, as he had before, but this time, their embrace to activate the Tillastrion was joyless, and their parting between Jarr’s mighty blue trunks after the earthly delivery had been made was even more distant.

  Both Laken and Telmakus turned to look at the other, volumes of words left unspoken, questions left unasked, hearts left hungry for the time they had stolen away for friendship. Yet generations of anger pulsed in their blood and shot outward in one step after the other as they marched off in opposite directions, one toward Baluurwa and the other to the west.

  Deflated, Telmakus arrived in the glass city beneath a full moon, which did not lift the shroud of darkness off his shoulders. He was hunched. His anger flared at whoever was nearest. He tolerated the plotting of the elders and the training of the foolish young warriors, blood-hungry and sword ready.