A Third of the Moon and the Stars Struck

by Jade Brieanne

  That wasn’t the type of news she was hoping for. She bent back towards the feed.

  “Greetings. This is M’Chelle Kane with EBNH reporting live with a mandate directly from Interim-Above Leader, Bon Baji. This is an all point alert. I repeat, an all point alert. Khavah Dantò, the Great Mother, has been forced to recycle. In approximately four hours, realm border reinforcements will lock down and stay in place until a vessel can be located.”

  Aria frowned. Khavah had three remaining vessels. Why would they…

  “Last night, shortly before nightfall, Khavah Dantò’s remaining vessels were destroyed by Qeres poisoning. We are working with The Glory Beyond through Nuntii to find a solution to this.”

  A clip of Aria flashed across the screen. It was from her interview with M’Chelle Kane earlier that day. Aria groaned as her hand shoved the camera away. She knew that was going to turn around and bite her in the ass.

  “In connection with the crime of destroying Khavah Dantò’s vessels, be on alert for these people: Aria Jinni, noble daughter of the clan Eliyah and former leader of The Fallen. Ahn’anakim’melkyal Te, noble son of the clan Eliyah and former leader of The Above. And finally, Yusuf Dantò, noble son of the clan Elizi, current Luminary General of Shark.”

  A crow slammed into something and Aria screamed. She whipped towards the window. Another slammed into the window, leaving a trail of blood as its body slid down the glass pane. More repeated the action, crashing into the window, offering themselves to death for…Aria didn’t know. Birds flocked to her, that wasn’t new, but they never were in such a frenzy to get to her that they would hurt themselves, kill themselves. She flew to the window, threw it open and the birds flew in, filling the room and swarming around her. She listened to their caws, her eyes fluttering as she interpreted their message.

  Danger! They are coming! Run!

  Aria nodded slowly as she accepted their message. It seemed to calm them down. They settled out over the room, using any surface as a perch. She glanced at the halofeed as the broadcast ended. With a calmness that was made absolutely no sense, she walked over to it, turned it off and stepped back.

  Then the panic set in. She raced up the stairs, jumping them in twos and threes, and cut the corner hard, her hip banged into it painfully. She winced and ignored the pain, running down the hall, bare feet slapping against wood and concrete and metal. She skid to a stop in front of her son’s bedroom. Yusuf was camped outside of the door in a chair on guard, his head drooped. When she reached him, she grabbed him by his shoulders and she shook him awake. The young Luminary blinked his eyes open, his face scrunched in confusion.

  “Don’t question what I’m about to ask you. You have a choice. Accept it or not.”

  Yusuf frowned and sat up taller in his chair. “What is it?”

  “In the past, I have never led you wrong. I have never led you astray; however, it has been many, many years since then. I need to know if you still trust me. Trust me to protect you.”

  “Aria,” Yusuf breathed. He reached out and wrapped his hand around her arm, worried. “What’s going on?

  “Do you trust me?” Aria repeated, her features hard, her stare locked on Yusuf’s.

  He held the stare and the silence stretched long before them until he eventually nodded. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “What happened?”

  “Bon Baji has charged us with the crime of destroying your mother’s body and vessels. She has named us enemies of the realm.”

  Yusuf swallowed hard before choking. “H–how? We were there. We clearly saw her. There are witnesses! Kano and Sunny and Ara and Ryuu–they saw it!”

  Aria nodded. “Yes, they did.”

  “And they also headed straight into Elysian and haven’t been in contact since,” came Ahn’s voice from the doorway. The color had returned to his face and most of his wounds were nearly gone. His white linen sleeping garments, which Mosi Neith had reluctantly let him borrow, were still spotless, indicating he hadn’t reopened any wounds. “Which means they are either complicit in Pythia Phi’s plot or they have been apprehended. The only other witnesses to Pythia Phi’s conspiracy other than Anais was…”

  “T–the three of us,” Yusuf realized.

  “We have to leave,” Aria said, looking back at the window overlooking the madina. It was still quiet, no sirens, no screams, no commands for them to surrender. “They know where we are and we cannot be caught here. It’ll not only endanger us but all of Aeon Terra.”

  Ahn nodded. “I agree but where can we go? There isn’t a place on Caeli where people wouldn’t be looking for us now.”

  Aria walked back down the hall and stood in front of her office doors. She didn’t have her spear or her sword, but she still had weapons. She jiggled the handle and Azrael’s image appeared.

  “Password,” he asked, smiling.

  Aria set her shoulders. “We’re going to Antris.”

  CHAPTER NINETY SIX

  “When you said Antris, I should have known what I was getting myself into! I should have said, Ahn, there are only two ways to get to Antris. The civilized way and–and–”

  “We can still do it the ‘civilized’ way, Ahn. We can just march right into Elysian, hop a train to Au Courant and shoot the breeze in your magical sitting room. I mean, we’ll probably be arrested and shot dead before we get there but you know…the civilized way,” Aria quipped as she began to secure her weapons to her body.

  “Being a smart ass is not going to make me feel any better about JUMPING OFF A BRIDGE AND INTO THE MOUTH OF MURDER

  DEATH KILL CITY.”“You mean to tell me a bunch of humans escaped Antris alive and you’re this scared?”

  “And,” Yusuf added,” you also just fought my sister and kicked her ass. The Nonpareils are a cake walk after that.” Ahn frowned and Aria raised a brow at Yusuf. “Okay, so not a cake walk.”

  “Unless you like your cake drenched in the blood of murderous sociopaths.” Ahn sighed. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “Good.” Aria moved to the ledge and peered over the cliff. A floating lantern got in her way and she smacked it back towards the bridge. Yusuf joined her, looking very nonplussed about the whole ordeal. They both looked at Ahn expectantly. With a pained groan, he moved to crumbling edge, grabbing a nearby tree branch for support.

  “If I die,” he said mournfully, “make sure to check if Anais cries for me. I mean really cries, you know, snot bubbles and all. That’s the least she could do.”

  Aria rolled her eyes heavenward before she linked arms with Ahn on her right and Yusuf on her left. “If you don’t follow my cues, we’ll all die and then we’ll never know how many snot bubbles approximately, now will we?”

  “If we smash into the ground and break into a million pieces, I still consider it better than what’s waiting for me down there.”

  “Let’s find out which fate belongs to us then, eh?” Aria said before taking one giant leap forward.

  CHAPTER NINETY SEVEN

  Antris

  Choe Yeong didn’t consider himself a violent man. He considered himself a peace-loving man, a man with little desire for riches, a minimalist, and a man who held virtue above splendor. He wanted to live a simple life.

  However, because he was talented and intelligent, and he because he had served a King who culled brilliancy out of him, his life had been else anything but simple.

  It had been okay. He could shun away everything but his desire to serve his King and serve his country, which he did, without want for any other thing.

  Until he met Aria Jinni.When he’d first met her, it hadn’t been love at

  sight. It had been anything but.

  She’d shown up on the outskirts of Gaegyeong under the guise of a merchant from Persia. It was ridiculous! Yes, she had the coloring of a Persian, the culture of a Persian, spoke the language well enough. But she showed up completely overdressed, draped in flowing silks, expensive cottons and an ornate strange headdress he’d never seen
in Persia before.

  Not that Choe hung around the markets much because that’s where you would expect to run into a merchant. No, that’s not where he’d met her. He’d met Aria inside of his military camp, gazing into their makeshift fighting ring as if she would die if she didn’t step foot inside of it. The fighting ring was something he’d set up to allow his soldiers a chance to blow off steam as they fought off the remnants of wokou–Japanese pirates–who continued to raid the peninsula. It was not some kind of free for all for anyone who happened to drop by.

  The first time he’d caught her, he’d thrown her and her friend, a taller, darker woman with interesting eyes, out of their encampment. She whispered something vile to his back but when he turned around, she only smiled and made her way back towards town.

  The second time, he’d repeated the process, leaving her with a warning.

  “This is no place for a woman.”

  To this day, he knew that had been the absolute wrong thing to say. Her eyes sparked incredulous, defiant and angry as she and her friend left.

  A challenge.

  The third time she appeared she came to answer that challenge. Only he didn’t see or hear about it until after she’d won every match inside of the fighting ring. His men loved it. He was furious.

  That night, she snuck into his tent and made a deal with him.

  On the days she won her matches, she would be allowed to stay. She was looking for a person and the matches gave her something to do while she mindlessly searched the city for them.

  “You’re not a merchant are you?”

  The woman laughed and slapped her knee. “Never sold a damn thing in my entire life!”

  By the seventh week, Aria and Onyu–he’d learned their names because his men had decided that chanting Aria’s name for all to hear as she fought was their new favorite thing to do–were constants at the military camp. Aria’s wins were piling up and she’d become something of a living legend. Yeong rolled his eyes at the notion. He didn’t care if she became the fighting pit champion of all of Goryeo. As long as she stayed out of the way, they could do what they wanted.

  Six months in, he’d received a warning that a raid was imminent. He gathered his soldiers and prepared to sail to an island off Liaoning. He wished Aria a curt farewell and he swore he saw her standing ashore as they left the country.

  He’d been, as he’d find out happened often when dealing with Aria Jinni, very wrong. He found that out mid-battle when he looked to his side and saw Aria and Onyu fighting just as hard as he and his men were. They stowed away on my ship somehow, someway! He opened his mouth to berate her, to send her below deck, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t make his mouth work or form words. Not when his mouth was slack with shock and fascination. Aria and Onyu were amazing. Their command over sword and body was terrifying, awe-inspiring and he wouldn’t believe he was seeing if he weren’t staring at it with his own eyes! Maybe he should have paid attention to the matches! Onyu did all she could to shield the woman at her side from any attacks but Aria didn’t need the help. Aria moved like water, incapacitating wokou right and left with her weapons, a spear and a black tachi blade.

  Their victory only suspended his anger, it didn’t stop it. Once the rush of fighting subsided, his anger simmered to a quiet rage as they traveled back to Gaegyeon. It exploded, like a canon packed tight with gunpowder, when she approached him like she wanted a congratulatory pat on the back.

  What started as a shouting match devolved, quickly, into a physical fight when Aria hauled off and punched him square in his face when he brought up the fact she was a woman again. She actually punched him!

  “You stupid wench,” he seethed, thumbing his bleeding lip in shock.

  “Your mother!” she spat back.

  Their fight spilled out of the camp and into the market and Yeong was amazed that she was keeping up. No, not keeping up, that was his pride talking. She was kicking his ass. Despite how ugly it was, how much of the market they tore up, and how people practically ran when they saw the two of them coming, the fight had ended on a strange low note, anti-climatic and confusing as all hell.

  Aria was on top of him, her forearm across his neck, cutting off his air. She growled in his face and Yeong thought she was going to hit him again, maybe even break his neck when all of sudden she stopped.

  Her eyes widened and she…she sniffed him like a dog would sniff a pile of shit!

  He wouldn’t find out what that meant until many years later.

  “Are you going to sit there in that stupid cabbage patch all day or are you going to fight me?” Bohktar yelled from the edge of Choe Yeong’s garden. Yeong was fingering the petals of his annals–he’d developed a fondness for purple flowers over the years–and tried to ignore the young Nonpareil.

  It was a never-ending cycle. Every other day either Bohktar or Delir would show up at his house, try to goad him into a sparring match and then stomp off when he ignored them.

  It wasn’t as if he didn’t want to spar. Sparring was a habitual thing for them, the desire to test their skills amongst the strongest Mutare. Any other time, he would be more than happy to indulge them. They were very interested in beating the running record between the three of them–with Choe Yeong winning all of the matches so far.

  Bohktar threw a wad of wet dirt at him, which Yeong avoided easily, the mud sailing over his shoulder. “You’ve been acting like a sourpuss since those humans left! It’s so annoying!”

  That much was true. Ever since his encounter with the group who’d fallen into Antris, he’d found himself devoid of the inclination to do anything but sit in his garden. He felt the most peace here. Jin Amaris’s emergence, a woman who looked so much like Aria it hurt, had disrupted his spirit and thrown him off balance. He was unbalanced, spiritually and emotionally.

  She looked just like her.

  His heart longed for Aria’s presence. It was an ache that he felt when he breathed, or blinked, or moved. And he couldn’t tell where in his body it came from…it just ached, all the time. He wanted to see her, his Aria, so badly. He knew he would never see her ever again.

  They didn’t get much news from Caeli. None, actually. Hatshepsut wouldn’t allow it. So the fact a woman who looked like Aria and smelled like Aria had appeared didn’t tell him much other than The Creator was cruel.

  That woman is not Aria. That woman is not Aria. She is not. She is someone else.

  Despite his reverent reprimands, her face brought back a fresh wave of memories of their life together–especially how she’d died, and how he’d fallen apart. How he’d lost his son. How he wasn’t quite sure he was together at all, just a shell held together by twine and duty and the fact that he was unable to kill himself.

  Because he had tried. Countless times.

  But if he died…

  You ought to march up there and demand answers, Yeong. They owe you so many answers, for your mate, for your son.

  Deep in his thoughts, he hadn’t noticed Bohktar throwing another dirt wad at him. It hit him smack against his chest so he stood up and growled at the Persian.

  “You must be in a hurry to die.”

  “Not really,” Bohktar said, smirking, “But I’ll do anything to get you from turning into stone like those ugly gnome statuettes you’ve got. Spar with me! One day I won’t lose and that is the only thing I live for! You deny me my joy!”

  Yeong sighed and plopped down hard on the garden bench, resigned to being resigned. “I don’t have it in me today. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, we can spar.”

  Bokhtar’s face lit up, smooth dark brown skin creasing into a smile. “Delir, too?” he said, his voice high pitched in excitement.

  “Hell, Hatshepsut, Kato, and Gozen, too. Since you all are so damn bored.”

  Bohktar pumped his fist in the air and began to back up from Yeong’s garden. “I’m going to tell them all right this instance so you can’t back out of it!”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. You’ll bother me to death if I do
n’t!” Choe Yeong yelled back. “Now, go! Leave me alone.”

  “Ha! Absolu…tely…”

  Choe Yeong’s head angled towards the sky.

  “You felt that?”

  Yeong nodded. “Someone else has fallen into Antris,” he sighed. Again. He felt the strum of disturbance again, crawling under his skin like fire ants. “Hatshepsut should be calling us any second.” Yeong brushed his pants off. “Time to go deal with intruders.”

  He dropped down onto his designated marble stone column and his hand feathered along his weapon, a three-dragon sam-ingeom sword. Since Jin Amaris and her Mutare guests, they’d vow to not allow any others into the mausoleum. He wouldn’t stand for it. That woman was not Aria. He couldn’t allow Aria’s final resting place to be breached again.

  They felt the disturbance once more. Closer. Stronger. The ground shook as they all collectively drew up their power to push them out. Three figures dropped from the sky, their impact so powerful the ground rippled under them.

  Yeong frowned.

  The scent of petrichor drifted over him as the central figure rose. Choe Yeong felt the same chill he’d felt when he’d first seen Jin, race up his spine. Why is she back?

  He stepped down from the stone column, his jaw clenched so tight he thought it would break if he didn’t relax. “Jin Amaris?” he said after a moment.

  The woman shook her head, and he could sense humor and amusement coming from her. Then, like an uncaged bull, her spirit pressure filled the mausoleum courtyard, pushing them back.

  Yeong’s eyes fluttered closed and he shivered in warm familiarity as her power, her unique and ever remarkable power, washed over him. Impossible. It was impossible…but Choe Yeong knew his heart. His knew the missing piece of his soul when he felt it.