Dark Moon Daughter

by J. Edward Neill

  “And if I resist?”

  “If you breathe a word of rebellion, I will kill them all. The sons, daughters, and wives of every man in the Undergrave will fall lifeless from the ends of my swords. For you to speak is to condemn your listeners to death. If you believe you are a righteous man, you will save many lives by keeping your tongue behind your teeth.”

  “Why not just kill me?”

  “I’ve asked the same question.” Grimwain licked his perfect teeth. “Once, twice, a hundred times over.”

  “Andelusia.”

  “Indeed.” Grimwain’s eyes glimmered. “She begged, and the warlock agreed. Even so, it’s only a temporary thing, this borrowed life of yours. You’ve a sliver of the old blood inside you. It’s why the woman loves you. But in the end, it won’t be enough. If wasn’t for Lord Croft, and it shan’t be for you.”

  He hated the man, no…the creature, standing beside him. He hated Grimwain’s absence of emotion and remorse, the way he stared through every man and everything. He fantasized of drowning him, of tearing away his moon steel swords and carving him to tatters. Flush with fire, he felt a shiver run from his knees to his jaw. I should do it, he thought. I should do it now. The grey men will flee if their master is dead. The warlock will see what I’ve done and…

  His courage died in his heart. Grim waded five steps into the lake, descending into the shallows until it swirled like oil around his waist. When he looked back, his eyes gleamed as if with white starlight.

  “Cold,” said Rellen, “but not nearly as cold as you.”

  Grimwain cupped a pool of water into his hands. The dark droplets rained between his fingers, and as he gazed into the void, Rellen felt such fear he nearly collapsed. “You do not know me, little boy,” Grimwain rumbled, and the water went still again. “A few years of waddling through the Grae-grass cannot qualify you to read my soul. You are unfortunate to have lost your lady love, but consider those of us who have never known such emotion. Consider that many of us walk in a realm without compassion, where the only meanings are blood, pain, and death. I am what the universe made me, you small, simple thing. Until your death, you will not understand.”

  The grey men came for him. Gliding down the tunnel, they leveled their spears at his throat, his belly, and his back. Their silent threats were not what drove him to leave. He backed away from Grimwain, who remained in the water as though waiting for some unknowable horror to arrive. Until losing him in the darkness, he stared at the lord of the Undergrave’s back. He means to cross the water. He is not human. He is death. No one will believe me. We are all going to die.

  “What did he say?” Ghurk whispered when he rejoined the chain-line.

  “Say something, Rellen.” Saul steadied him. “Look at you. Are you unwell?”

  He gave no answer. His plans for vengeance were broken inside him, drowned in the dead shallows of the underworld lake. We are not prisoners, he wanted to tell the men marching ahead of him. We are dead men. Not just those of us in the Undergrave, but likely all of Thillria. Did you see him? Did you see his eyes? His warlock wants more than a book. He wants the world, and whatever lies beyond that water just might give it to him. You, I, and all those we ever knew are puppets in their play. Look hard on the grey men’s lamps, for they are the last lights we will ever see.

  Darkness between the Stars

  From dreamless sleep, Andelusia crept back to consciousness.

  Her first breath rushed into her lungs, reviving her as though she had slumbered at the edge of death. She sat up in her bed, parted her lips to breathe, and opened her eyes to the sliver of starlight gleaming through her window.

  Something is different.

  Swinging her feet over the edge of her bed, she braced her toes on the frigid floor and padded to the center of the room. She was naked, her black gown lying in a heap in the corner. She liked the feeling of the Midnon air against her belly, her breasts, and her throat, but the difference is not my lack of clothes, she knew. It is something else.

  Her entire body felt lighter, less burdened by the pains of her imprisonment. She stood in silence for many breaths, and she knew why.

  My iron bands are gone.

  Who or what had removed her bands, she never could have said. In the irons’ place, white bandages were bound about her wrists and moistened with some manner of salve. No bands, she thought. No pain. Did the same one who stole my bands strip me? Or did I do it myself?

  She plucked her ebon gown from the floor and dressed. The black folds fell like raindrops over her skin, though beneath the waifish cloth she felt no less naked than before.

  She heard three heavy knocks against her door.

  “Yes?” she called.

  She waited. The door opened, yet no one stood behind it. She had expected the Captain, her father, or even a Sarcophage, but nothing lived in the dead space beyond the door.

  “Is anyone there?” Her voice bounded into the seven-doored chamber beyond her room. “Hello?”

  For half a hundred breaths, she stood. No one is coming, she came to understand. Father awaits me. I am to find the way myself.

  She stepped across the threshold of her room, not knowing if she would ever return again. Barefooted, floating across the seven-doored chamber in her diaphanous gown, she took to the stairs. She felt no fear as she descended. The violet lamps and torches lived no longer, but her shadow gaze penetrated everything. No matter the darkness, I am at home here.

  Her hour felt at hand. The beginning of her new life beckoned. She believed the moment her father opened the Pages Black to her, she would become powerful, that the voices in her head would fade into oblivion, that she would free again. As she spiraled down the stairs, her heart tumbled from the things she used to love. Her blood coursed blacker through her veins, its rhythm a dark, pleasuring beat within her. I will embrace this. I will become Furyon wanted me to be.

  Alone, she walked Midnon’s corridors. After hopping off the lowest stair, she glided into the grand hall. Twenty Sarcophages stood watch, guarding against nothing. She smiled as she walked beneath their gazes. Twice, she even tapped their masks with her forefinger, and they never once moved.

  She had never been to the warlock’s chamber, but today she knew the way. She slid through many more doors than she could count, clicking each one closed behind her. She strode down hallways black and empty, loped up twisting stairwells, and crept across chambers lit by thousands…no, millions of tiny candles. Following the pulse of the shadows inside her, she walked as though she had known Midnon since birth, as if the haunted halls and rooms filled with dust and death were the same she had played in as a child.

  Deep in Midnon’s heart, she halted at the beginning of a hallway. Father’s hallway. It seemed to stretch into forever, an artery to the world’s end. No lights lived in the hall’s empty lamps, no doors lined its outer walls, and no Sarcophages stood guard. She strode between the barren stone, setting one naked foot before the other, treading the glasslike floor until many thousand steps later she arrived at a pair of marble doors. The portals’ surfaces were as solidly black as two starless nights. She pushed lightly, and they creaked open before her.

  The room beyond the doors glimmered with the light of many score violet-flamed lanterns. She saw the diminutive lamps dangling from the ceiling by chains, lining the walls, and blazing atop black marble tables. The chamber was large, half as huge as Gryphon hall, yet somehow the eerie lighting made it feel much, much smaller. His room. No doubting it.

  Two steps in, his voice broke the silence.

  “Much better, my child,” she heard him boom. “Much, much better.”

  The warlock emerged into the heart of the room, where the violet lamplights played like Furyon lightning against the polished floor. His robes were the same midnight hue as hers, his eyes consuming the light nearest him. He was handsome all the same, his hair coifed in a black rope between his shoulders, his beard trimmed in the manner of a Thillrian lord. She did not remember him b
eing so comely, if in fact this is the real him.

  “Father,” she said, and her words felt natural. “Do you like me now? I am clean and fed, thanks to you.”

  He walked nearer. “Yes. So I see. Lovely, you are, and so like your mother.”

  “Father,” she said, descending to a knee, “I am ready to learn. Please teach me.”

  He came to her. His boots sang a sharp rhythm against the floor. He took her hand and lifted her gently to her feet. His fingers were cold against her palm, as sharply frigid as ice.

  “You are so cold.” She trembled.

  “Always.”

  He led her to a table, a misshapen sheaf of mirrored marble in the chamber’s center. “Sit,” he beckoned, and she did.

  “You are afraid?” He stood behind her.

  “Yes.”

  “I was the same. When first I looked within the Pages, I did not know what to expect.”

  He walked away, but soon returned. Silent as a specter, he strode back to her and placed a glass orb onto the table. He uttered a phrase as she watched, a few subtle words of magic, and the little orb burst to life with luminance, lighting her face lavender, cooling the space around her.

  “An Ur lamp,” he explained. “For you to read by. One secret of many.”

  “I can read without light. I did it in the forest,” she reminded him.

  Again he moved behind her. He rested his hands on her shoulders, and his touch felt even colder. “When you read the Pages Black, I want your concentration complete. An error or mispronunciation, and you might strangle your tongue or set your fairest skin afire.”

  She sat atop her hands, waiting anxiously. He remained behind her, barely breathing. “Tell me what you feel now,” he said.

  “I am cold. I feel naked.”

  “Is that all? Tell me everything.”

  “I am tense, excited. My mouth is dry. My stomach is aflutter. I do not know whether to trust you or whether to spare myself the pain of this life and throw myself from the highest tower. I am so lonely, so empty, but I am used to it now. This is who I have become.”

  He released his hold of her and walked to the table’s opposite side. “The truth flows like wine from your lips.” He gazed almost lovingly upon her. “Honesty is your weapon. It serves you well.”

  “May I ask a question?” She roamed in the shadows beneath his eyes.

  “Yes.”

  “Are we alone here? I saw your soldiers in the Thillrian fields, but I have not seen them since. This place seems too huge for just the few of us.”

  He sat across from her, steepling his fingers beneath his chin. “This one question I shall answer, but you shall not ask more, not of Midnon.”

  “Yes. No more. Not today.”

  “We are not alone.” He smiled, and the lavender orb fluttered as if about to die. “Ona, whom you met yestereve, is here, but there are others. You will not be able to see them yet. They live within my grasp, on the precipice of my mind, on the tip of my tongue. They are everywhere I want them to be, but nowhere else.”

  He knows I saw Ona. What does he mean by…others? She opened her mouth to ask another dozen questions, but remembered what he had said.

  A last breath, and the moment arrived. It happened faster than she imagined. He placed the Pages Black before her, and the table shuddered beneath its weight, the shadow fire inside the Ur orb growing brighter and colder.

  “Open it,” he commanded.

  His words were sweet succulence to her. She peeled the cover open and stroked the first Page with her fingers. Her gaze grazed the topmost symbols, words which writhed like lightning in her mind, roiling like black nimbi beneath her touch.

  “The Page of Storms,” he explained. “It is familiar with you. The Furyons tore the Grae armies apart with these spells. Their relic, the Orb of Souls, was writ with these words from top to bottom.”

  She touched more of the symbols. She expected them to crawl off the Page and bite her, for there were too many for her to count, crowding on the dry sheaf like a warren of spider legs and ant mandibles. She flipped to the next Page, then to the third, then onward. By the time she reached the tenth, her eyes ached and her heart was pounding.

  “So many symbols,” she exhaled. “How will I learn them all?”

  “With patience. In any event, the last page is not for you.” The warlock pushed the tenth Page back to the seventh. “The tenth is mine. Do not look upon it.”

  She drew back her hand. “Forgive me. I did not know.”

  “This one is yours,” he said. “The seventh Page. This is the Nightness, the glibness of the shadows, the gliding, guileful spirit who lives where Father Sun cannot go. This you have always possessed, even as a little girl. The Nightness is strongest in you, more so than in me. Your lessons will begin here.”

  “The Nightness,” she breathed. “I used it in Furyon and again in Nightmare.”

  “The Nightness is powerful. It will put ideas into your mind. It is for this reason you must wear your iron bands each night as you go to bed. You will not wander Midnon again until I allow you, and you will not taste the temptation to drift like outside your window. This may change in time, but not yet.”

  “Yes, father. Of course.”

  “Now, no more sadness, no more wilting hope.” He clasped her hands within his. “Look to the first line of the Nightness. Tell me what you see.”

  She did as he asked. She fell deeper into darkness than ever before.

  So began her first day, but not nearly her last. When she gazed upon the ciphers of Nightness, she saw no meaning at first, only twisted lines and agonized strokes. But when the warlock pulled his chair next to hers and whispered into her ear, she began to see. The symbols became words. The words became knowledge. An hour went by, then four, then eight, and with each slow segment of time the warlock taught her the meaning of another symbol, a new utterance, a new power.

  Her first day came to an end, but its end was only her beginning. Each of the next thirty days began the same. She rose in her bed by a sliver of starlight, breakfasted on apples, cider, and cinnamon sweetmeats, and dressed in whatever raiment the shadows had left lying on her floor. Her iron bands, locked into place before sleep, were always gone, and her wrists bandaged and salved. After dressing, she journeyed Midnon’s labyrinthine halls to find the warlock’s room. Her journey sometimes took a quarter of an hour, sometimes much longer, for the path she took was never the same, as though there were a thousand ways to reach any part of the fortress. But no matter which way she walked, she always reached her father’s door, and the hours thereafter were filled with darkness and wonder.

  Her studies deepened with each hour, each day, each week. Fixing her attentions upon the Nightness Page, she began to unravel the secrets of the Ur, the ones who existed before us, whom her father whispered only the barest hints of. His tutelage was the key to her enlightenment, the guiding shadow by which she broke down the meaning of each symbol and uncovered the significance behind every slash of ancient ink. After ten days she understood fully half the Nightness Page, and by twenty she nearly knew it all.

  The powers of Nightness were many, she learned. The warlock taught her spells of shadow-walking, night-seeing, and invisibility. At length she began to unravel even grander powers, treacherous magicks such as flight through the nighttime clouds, healing the most grievous wounds by twilight, and even stealing the shadows of the living to inhabit their bodies until sunrise. These and still darker things she devoured. She skipped meals to study them longer. She forsook sleep until her eyelids came crashing down. So did thirty days pass, and so did she desire a thousand more.

  She kept a secret as she learned.

  The temptation of ten Pages was far too much for her to linger only on one. Often, whenever the warlock gave her his back or wandered to another part of Midnon, she sneaked glances at another Page, the ninth Page, the codex of Ur Fire. Using the Nightness, she summoned an eye of shadow, a disembodied ocular spy with whom she sub
tly stole glances at symbols her father had forbade her. She memorized as much of the ninth Page as she could, nearly wetting her robes in the fear he might discover her trickery.