Below the Moon

by Alexis Marie Chute

  “The Haaz pack run here from the south. At any moment we will see them to the right!”

  Archie sprints left. He runs too close to the maze, and the tiny sprite bones protruding from the wall catch the flesh of his arm and leave a flaming scratch. Archie turns a corner to the right and then to the left. Lillium hums nervously at his ear, followed by Gobo. The wild-haired sprite talks quietly to her wings, which she affectionately calls “Wingies.”

  Every sprite bears a unique constellation of stars on their wings, kisses of Naiu, they say, that sparkle by moonlight. The freckles of light on Lillium’s Wingies create the curve of a silhouette in profile. She talks to her wings in her distress, and her yammering muddles in Archie’s mind.

  His steps propel him farther, faster than he has run in years. The rumbling, bouncing earth from the footfalls of the Haaz creatures increases his pulse, rocketing Archie onward. The growls are deafening and grow like approaching thunder, more terrifying and imminent than the perpetual, erratic wind and lightning in the atmosphere above that never rests. Lillium darts upward till she pops her head into the fresh breeze that whips above the maze walls and its stale, slinking current. She calls down directions, matching Archie’s pace.

  “Left now, Archibald. No, sorry, your left.” The sprite twists and rolls through the air, pointing and counting, squinting and gnawing at her lip. She flies ahead for one long breath, and Archie continues blindly. When a dead end appears, Lillium ducks down below the stone walls to slip into the breast pocket of his shirt. “Right turn here,” she chirps impatiently. “Right again. Go human, go!”

  “Despite what you may think, I’m motoring fast to most people’s standards. My legs have never felt so strong.”

  Archie can feel Lillium chuckle to herself in his pocket. Gobo suctions his fly feet to Archie’s cheek.

  “Enough talking and more running,” the sprite orders. “Left here. Now straight for a while.”

  “You sure?” Archie pants lightly.

  “Yes. If you had turned at that last left, we would have smacked into a floating orb of tar. Down that turn there is a slippery pit bursting with caged carakwas, their soulless voids filled up with the ghosts of ten nasty Bangols executed recently. I could hear their voices beneath the creatures’ clicks. They were feasting on one of them, bickering over who would eat the eyes.”

  A stone screams through the air and nicks Archie’s left ear. “Lillium! The pack! They’re catching up. We need to duck out of sight before—”

  Archie’s sentence is cut off as another stone connects with his left shoulder blade and knocks the words from his mouth and the wind from his lungs. He rolls forward, Lillium spilling from his pocket and Gobo bouncing along the ground. He skids along the gravel path until his back strikes the maze wall. He cries out in pain and clutches his injured shoulder where a sprite bone protrudes from his skin. He pinches the white sliver and yanks it out. Lillium covers her mouth, but Archie can make out her saying, “Oh no,” as she slips into the fissure of a monstrous boulder.

  The Haaz pack crowds above Archie and blocks the pale light from the indifferent moon. Their lips glisten with thick saliva. The smell of the massive creatures brings up from Archie’s stomach the last meal he ate in the Fairy Vineyard.

  The bloody Haaz, with its wild white eyes, comes closest. The bulky giant kneels and peers at Archie with loathing bewilderment. “What are you?” it finally croaks.

  Archie waves away the creature’s moldy breath. “I’m, well, human.”

  “Not so loud—your vibrations rattle my brain.”

  Lillium pops her head out of the fissure and retorts, “If you have a brain.”

  The Haaz flashes his chipped and serrated fangs at her and grunts. His breath blows her back into hiding. The Haaz studies Archie. “It’s tiny,” it tells the others. “Pale hair, pale skin, pale lips. Not much to look at. Not much to feast on. No obvious gift of Naiu.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Archie pipes up, improvising. “You may not be able to see my magic, but if I release it, you’ll wish to rezip your skin and bury yourself beneath the maze wall.”

  “Archie?” Lillium demands.

  He turns back to her and glares.

  “Oh … yes!” she hollers, finally understanding. “He is so powerful, he can tear you all apart.”

  “Well,” Archie begins, faltering in his resolve, “yeah, and sometimes I don’t even know what my magic is until it bursts out—bam!”

  “He is sweating under his arms. I can feel the vibrations of it oozing from his skin,” one Haaz snarls.

  The bloody Haaz studies his face, and beads of sweat begin to blossom on Archie’s forehead, soon surrendering themselves in weeping drips into his eyes. Archie blinks away their salty burn.

  “He is lying!” One of the sightless creatures picks up a large stone and hurtles it toward Archie, who quickly lunges into a roll and out of the way.

  The whole maze shudders, and the sighted Haaz swings its long arm and smashes its fist against the blind Haaz that threw the rock. “Do you want this whole place to come down on us?” it says, spitting through broken teeth.

  Lillium wobbles out of the fissure, jarred from the impact. Archie whispers to her, “Now what?” The sprite bites her lip. She darts into the air and swiftly away.

  “She did not have much faith in your magic, now did she?” The sighted Haaz smiles through its biting words. “Sprites!” it continues. “About all they’re good for is smoothing the crinkled edge of hunger.” It laughs. The Haaz stares down at Archie as if waiting for him to respond. “Not a talkative race, are you?”

  “Pssst.” The whisper belongs to Lillium, and there’s a faint buzz of a jittery Gobo at her side. Archie tilts his head to listen, keeping his gaze linked to the ravenous eyes that bear down on him. Lillium murmurs between a pass-through in the maze wall. “A flock of black flyers—they will be here shortly. They are coming like a storm. One minute, I promise.”

  Archie rises, though the Haaz creatures still tower nearly seven feet above his head. “I was taught to speak only when I had something worth saying,” he begins. “But when talk fails, I bring forth action like a starless shadow. That is my magic.”

  The creatures shake their heads at the riddle. “What are your friends in the southern maze up to?” demands the sighted Haaz. “You know they will never make it through.” It chuckles wickedly like the clapping of angry waves. “We know the perils on their path, the nasty traps. Now give me something to report to Tuggeron, and I’ll make yours a quick death beneath our feet.”

  “Tuggeron will get his news from me,” Archie says, sneering. “Black ones, come forth!”

  With this, piercing caws shred the air. The Haaz creatures fall in and out of moonlight as five black bodies appear and circle overhead. The black flyers have mutated further from Archie’s last encounter with them and the claws they sprout from their wingtips. Their twined, serpentine necks hold bird-like heads with piercing beaks. Oily black feathers cover their massive bodies.

  “Call them off !” the sighted Haaz demands.

  Archie shakes his head slowly, a menacing grimace across his face, disguising his own terror. The Haaz pack shrieks and roars. Their hands are outstretched, their muscles flinching as they sense the weighty vibrations of the enormous black flyers, they and their broad wingspans shrinking the creatures to puny hulks.

  “Run now, back to the fortress!” the sighted Haaz orders.

  The bulky giants shove and elbow each other as they tramp through the narrow maze. Sprite bones break apart like brittle leaves and fill the air with sweet-smelling white powder.

  Archie presses his back to the stone wall and feels his skin punctured in at least four places by the protruding bones. Before the Haaz pack disappears around the maze corner, a black flyer swoops down and hooks its protracted talons through the shoulders of the sighted Haaz. The black flyer lifts the fighting creature off the ground. The raging Haaz cranks its neck back and bite
s apart the stretched flesh of its left shoulder, then its right; it falls free, landing on the center of a maze wall, which bursts apart under its weight. The Haaz groans vehemently as the wall crumbles beneath him.

  The Haaz is weakened yet determined. Bloodied, it exposes its black-boned clavicle, its grey flesh peeling away to reveal an equally gloomy sternum. It stands and lifts a massive boulder from the ground, ready to pitch it at its target. Before the stone is launched, however, the black flyers descend from the jeering storm, swooping in and covering the lone Haaz in a blanket of shiny feathers. The maze unsettles at its dying screams. The beaks turn a haunting shade of crimson, set aglow by the moon. The black flyers toss the large white eyes onto the maze path, which roll in the direction of Archie and Lillium.

  “I would say now is the perfect time to run—that way!” Lillium points.

  “Yep. Quietly, now!”

  Lillium and Gobo slip into Archie’s pocket as he loops back to the start of the maze and takes the path to the right, the one that had taken the Haaz pack to the center of the Bangols’ fortress. The wails of the dying Haaz grow faint behind them, though new sounds replace the wails. Grinding. Chugging. Screeching, but not of a living thing.

  “What’s that?” Archie says, unsure of what terror they race toward. There’s a sheeeek and a zwiiiing, like a jigsaw on sheet metal, followed by clicking and clanging and groaning gears. Suddenly, angry sparks erupt ahead, bursting like blooming flowers to greet the multicolored lightning strikes.

  In a break between the steadily growing screeches, Lillium answers, “It’s the Bangols. They have dug deep,” Lillium says with a sigh. “I do not know what they have built, but it is of a material more resilient than clay.”

  “Metal?”

  “We will soon see for ourselves.”

  Chapter 16

  Archie

  Archie and Lillium develop a pattern for tracing their course through the winding, perilous maze. Lillium lifts off from Archie’s shoulder, embellished with tiny mud footprints, to rocket herself into the murky midnight sky. Once there, she struggles against the manic wind, which whips in every direction. It carries on its bleak current the smell of death, damp and strangling, along with bone dust and the distant caws of the satisfied black flyers.

  Lillium traces their route ahead, then dives down steeply, catching her arm on Archie’s earlobe. Into his hairy eardrum she repeats, “Left, right, left, left, straight, right, straight, right.” In this way, they avoid a magically suspended cage made of rose stems with thorns tipped in deadly green-glowing poison. Down another path, which Archie runs past, they miss colliding with an enchanted stone monster, which stands unmoving as the wall behind it until breathed upon.

  Racing along, between her guiding orders, Lillium proudly tells Archie how she made her shining dress. She swooshes the skirt and its silken tips tickle his neck. “My grandest adventure, until now, that is”—her words sing—“was stalking the black flyers, but never too close. It was my job to ensure they passed the perimeter of the Fairy Vineyard and did not return. I would follow their trail of carnage, collecting fallen wings of slaughtered awakins and shed feathers of green birds—you know, the ones your granddaughter spews from her mouth.”

  “Poor Ella.”

  “Poor Ella indeed! Although”—Lillium giggles—“I have replaced a few soiled plumes from my gown with newborn feathers from her birds. Ah, are they not lovely, Archibald?”

  Archie can hear Lillium spin in a silly dance near his ear. “Don’t mention this to Ell. She’ll be mortified.”

  “Pish posh! I am sure, like me, other spritelings would love to bask in her presence as she outfits us in emerald glory!”

  “Emerald glory? Oh, Lillium. I do see why they call you ‘silly spriteling.’”

  Lillium crosses her arms, but says, “Take your next left, then right, then two more lefts.”

  “I feel like you’re spinning me in circles!”

  “Maybe so, Archibald, but there are direct routes I reckon you’d rather we avoid.” Lillium’s voice turns grave. “You think you have seen the worst of Jarr-Wya, but there are greater terrors than the Haaz pack or the mutated black flyers—creatures I wish you to remain ignorant of, at least a little longer.”

  Archie’s feet pound the earth of the Bangol maze, and his joints are silent where they once ground together painfully with the groans of arthritis. Each footfall rattles the stony earth beneath him. Agile as a white sasar, Archie zips around a stack of chewed bones, past an avalanche of rocks where part of a maze wall has given way, and up and down the uneven path. Lillium and Gobo take to the air, surveying for dangers. Only slightly out of breath, Archie turns his chin up. He knows there must be ears against the walls, so he whispers, “I’ve been running for ages. We must be close.”

  Before the taste of the words have left his lips, Archie plows headfirst into something unseen. His forehead smacks loudly, and he falls.

  It takes a breath for him to slow the rattle of his brain. He is prostrate on the gravely path, winded and befuddled. He blinks away the concussive blackness inside him, even darker than that of the continual night. “Lillium?” he finally manages to say. He scoots to his feet, but he is not in the maze.

  Archie stands high on Baluurwa the Doomful.

  The rocky edge he finds himself on, alone, is three feet wide atop a steep, sharp cliff. It is nearly nightfall, a pale purple dusk. The sky is full of brilliant gold stars and a moon that looks so close, you could take its hand and leap onto its speckled chest. No lightning fireworks snap and boom. No wind rages wickedly.

  Off in the distance, Archie sees great swooning shadows dance through the sky. The black flyers are one headed and soar in spirals in a graceful waltz with pillowy clouds and silver moonbeams. The violet dusk is reflected on the angular panels of the Olearons’ glass citadel in the distance. Like the sky has shattered and fallen to earth, Archie thinks of the smooth, reflective buildings.

  Beyond the glass city, to the northwest of the island, gleams the rowdy Fairy Vineyard. The racing sprites appear as a green glow through their leafy tunnels, their tiny breaths making whole rows of vines quiver.

  “Lillium,” Archie whispers again, but he knows she cannot hear him. He is alone. The light of the constellations steal the heat of the day as the sun sets sleepily in the east at Archie’s back. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, he thinks, replaying the Boy Scouts lesson from his youth and remembering the first time he noticed the opposite being true on Jarr-Wya. In Jarr, the sun announces itself on the western shore, only to dive into the eastern sea once its light and Naiu are spent.

  The sight of the sun’s crest around the peak of Baluurwa leaves Archie in awe. It was many days since anyone on Jarr-Wya glimpsed the celestial orb. The Star had sent the island into a turmoil of darkness, robbing the crystaliths in the Olearons’ field of the Naiu delivered on sunbeams and channeled into the earth to nourish their crops. The days turned into a maddening, unshifting nightmare. Archie shivers suddenly. He unties the khaki coat from around his waist and hurriedly slips it on, struggling with the zipper as his fingers tremble with cold and fear.

  “Hello, Archibald.”

  “What the—who’s there?” Archie jerks fearfully away from the large warm hand that rests silently on his shoulder. As he turns his back to the sky, facing Baluurwa and its sparse trees and knee-high cactus bushes growing through the rocks, his eyes take a moment to adjust.

  “Are you … Tanius?”

  “I am not.”

  “It was past midnight and storming. Now, it’s … a peaceful, quiet sunset.” Archie’s voice tapers off. The sliver of sun has ripened to crimson, brightening its violet shadow across the melting sky, giving new vibrancy to the gold constellations that sing its farewell. The face of the Steffanus is unfamiliar to Archie when he braves a second look. Her features are distinct from those of Tanius. They are gentler, softer, though her face is ravaged by reddish-blue scars, raised in places, de
pressed in others, smooth here and rough there. Archie recognizes the wounds as the caress of Olearon flame.

  The Steffanus wears a shredded gown of molten sapphire and chocolate, delicately braided in two thick strands over the slope of her smooth shoulder. Tanius had worn red—bloody, violent red. The antlers of this mysterious Steffanus branch broadly and shine in polished gold. Her eyes, like those who chased the company off Baluurwa toward the Fairy Vineyard, are intensely blue-red and searching. Her lips do not curl in hate but tilt upward with the satisfaction of something earned.

  “I am as I always have been, Archibald. Favored by Naiu, birthed of seed and foresight. I did not, however, foresee a visitor this night. The last sunset I beheld you, you were but a fresh-skinned babe with a warm, willing spirit, innocent to life’s cruelties. You did not cry at the sight of me, or at the sound of my deep voice, or at meeting my sad, angry eyes. But now, you are changed, and I am left in wonder.”

  Archie’s words are slow and leery. “You know me?”

  The Steffanus does not answer.

  “Who are you?” Archie shuffles his feet to back away, but there is nowhere to go but down the merciless cliff to the graveyard of broken stones at Baluurwa’s foot.

  Archie searches his memory for a Steffanus visit in any of the dingy, bohemian homes he and his mother shared before they settled in Seattle. All he can see is his mother’s smooth face and rich chocolate hair, and her animated eyes that sparkled when she told him stories. He feels her lips on his cheek; she had kissed him goodnight, every night, no matter whether they slept in a townhouse, a tent, or under the cracked roof of their station wagon.

  Archie’s mother smelled like spring flowers and spices from the other side of the world. She was a friend to immigrants, both legitimate and undocumented. They painted her hands with henna and filled their bellies with curry. They told Archie that his mother was an old soul, connected to all, as if she had been touched by magic and was no longer bound by the pettiness of all that consumed the mind but mattered so little.