Dark Moon Daughter

by J. Edward Neill

  The ninth Page felt unlike the seventh. Not just powers, she learned. Stories. Each time she pilfered glances at its writings, she shivered. The Ur Fire…the black fire, she read. She felt her sweat beading beneath her gown. Not meant for illumination. Meant more for violence. Look at these symbols. In this one, cities burn. In this one, the entire world catches fire.

  The more glances she stole, the more she came to believe that at one point, perhaps in the darkest corner of history, the Ur Fire had been used to murder millions. The old war, she remembered something a forgotten friend had once read to her. Archithrope. Niviliath. Millions dead. Mountains of bones. Who are these Ur father whispers of? Why does father want to learn this book?

  She hid her knowledge, tucking it deep within her mind, never once asking of it. She progressed in her learning of the Nightness. After forty two days she was more than just an apprentice. She became a practitioner, earning more of her father’s trust with every hour. Each night she wandered the darkness and collapsed into her bed, bewitched by her encounter with the Pages. Each morning she awoke hungry, but never for food.

  On her forty-third day of learning, she awoke as always. She heard rain drumming against her tower, and she imagined she could feel Thillria die, slain by the shivering wind slipping like a dagger through her window. Her bands were gone, her body naked to the breeze. She donned her gown, spooned a cold bowlful of orchard sauce down her throat, and peered at herself in the tall, slender mirror her father had placed in her room only two nights ago. She was not sure whether to be happy or horrified by what the mirror revealed. She was now more shadow than woman, a skinny sapling of a girl with pale cheeks and haunted eyes.

  The knocks came, one then two then three. She answered as ever, cracking her door open with a slender smile. Today I will finish the Nightness Page. Tomorrow he will show me another.

  In nothing’s place stood a Sarcophage.

  She saw the creature, lost her breath, and crumbled like ashes to the floor. The Sarcophage stood a full head taller than she, its face hidden behind an eyeless mask, its cold cadaver concealed behind a hauberk of marrow and black gristle. It made no sound as it came for her. It reached for her with mummified fingers as black as midnight, and it hauled her out of her room.

  She shrieked. She screamed. She writhed in the Sarcophage’s grasp. She slapped, kicked, and drove her elbows into its mask. None of it mattered. Terrifyingly strong, the dead thing dragged her down the stairs, across the hall, and into the barren corridors of deeper Midnon. Its hold of her wrist felt more powerful than ever her bands had. After a time, she went limp in its grasp. Something will change, she wept. He would not send this thing unless…unless he knew I were spying on pages other than the Nightness.

  “Please…” she whimpered to the Sarcophage. “Can you understand me? Let me go. I mean no harm to father. I only want to learn. Please…”

  The Sarcophage never answered. She could not know it, but it was three-thousand winters dead, as deaf to her bleating as a coffin full of bones. Its name was Mogru, eldest of the warlock’s servants, a hunter from far bleaker days. His very presence was death, his entropic breaths curling like smoke from beneath his mask. As he dragged her through Midnon, his passing withered moths dozing peacefully on walls and turned bowlfuls of red apples to ash. She felt like a rag in his clutches. Her tears ran like ebon wine down her cheeks.

  When Mogru threw her down at the warlock’s threshold, she crawled away from him, weeping and pawing at the door. “Please father…let me in.”

  The warlock’s doors opened, and she crawled inside a half-breath before they slammed shut behind her. On the black marble floor, she gasped for breath, bent on all fours like a wounded dog. “What did I do, father?” she sobbed. “Why do I deserve such punishment? Please…never again. That thing…that monster. I beg you.”

  The warlock emerged from the shadows. “You did nothing wrong, my dear.” He sipped from his chalice. “Why would you think otherwise? Are you uncomfortable with my servant? Mogru fetched you because I believed you were ready. He didn’t wound you, did he?”

  She pushed herself to her feet. Pride welled in her gaze, burning away her tears. “No.” She raised her chin high. “I only hoped you would send something living to fetch me. The Captain, Ona, anyone but that horrid thing.”

  He sidled closer. For all his indifference, she could have strangled him. “You will come to accept the dead, my daughter. They are fearsome to our enemies, but hardly dangerous to you. Learn not to loathe them, and someday you might use them. Once your lessons have advanced, I will teach you to control such beings as Mogru. You will like it, I think.”

  “Teach me the fire, the wind, and the shadow, but not of the dead,” she smoldered. “Anything but that. And should you think to send that creature for me again, think otherwise. I can find you without its help.”

  “As you wish.”

  “I more than wish it.” She gritted her teeth. “If we are to play at father and daughter, you must torment me no longer. I am your prisoner; we both know it is true. But you will learn to respect me, else you might as well destroy me.”

  For once, his indifference seemed to waver. “My daughter, I see your strength. You do me proud. I apologize.”

  He took her hand. Her anger boiled in her blood, but she allowed his touch to subdue her. Something is different about him today, she sensed. For the better or for the worse?

  “Will I have a lesson today?” she asked he led her away from the door, and the monster on the other side.

  “A lesson, yes,” he answered, “but perhaps not what you are used to. Someday, not so long from today, you and I will leave this place. But not just yet. Today your preparation must begin. You must know what to expect when we depart. The world you knew will not be the same.”

  “Oh?”

  He draped his arm over her shoulders. The sleeve of his robe nearly swallowed her, and his closeness carved away her memory of Mogru. “I know you will never truly see me as your father.” He squeezed her, and for a fleeting moment she felt warmer. “But you mustn’t fear me. I will never harm you, even should you decide to hate me.”

  “Do you mean it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you tell me of my mother? Of my sister? Of why you abandoned me in Cairn?”

  “Yes. But not today.”

  Easier to think of his as inhuman, she thought. And yet… She peered up at him. Beneath his heavy hood, she caught a glimmer of life in his eyes, however faint, however fragile. In his green gaze the softness of an ocean swam. Perhaps this is the real him, she dared to hope. There seems no reason to lie to me anymore.

  “You have come far, Andelusia.” He led her before the bare black wall at the rear of his chambers. “You have conquered fear. You have endured pain. You have learned faster than I thought was possible.”

  “Thank you.” She felt so small beside him.

  “As a reward, I want to show you something. I’ve only shown this to one other, but even Grimwain cannot appreciate what it means. He only cares for the end, not the path we take to reach it.”

  What does he mean? Her heart beat faster. Only a bare expanse of shining black wall lay before her. She hoped the next moments would give purpose to all that she had learned. Though it feels unlikely.

  Again he took her hand within his own. “Come, daughter.” He squeezed the last warmth from her fingers. “Glimpse now the world as it was, as it is, and as it will be again.”

  He loosed her hand and grazed the wall with his fingertips. Magic, she knew what was to come. A spell I have yet to learn. She watched in wonder as the bright black marble became the consistency of water, the stone rippling like a surface of a lake. The solid blacks because murky greys, then midnight blues, and finally dark, undulating violets. Images began to take shape upon the wall, too real to be lies.

  “They sleep now.” Her father moved his hand over the rippling marble, and the image of a door appeared. The door cracked open, leading do
wn into a maze of passages lit by Ur lanterns. She saw men moving in the shadows, workers with picks and hammers slung over their weary shoulders.

  “All of mankind believes they are dead.”

  The image changed. As if seen from the perspective of a raven in flight, the lanterns and dark hallways sped past, sending her vision soaring into the darkness far below the earth. Cavern corridors fell away from her sights. The workers vanished and the lights went out until all that remained were twisting hallways of smooth ebon stone.

  “Even with the Soul Orb, the Furyons failed to wake them.” Her father’s voice grew louder. “Entire nations searched for their relics, but found only dust. None of these men possessed the Pages, which the Ur meant for only you and me to find.”

  The image endured one final transformation before becoming tranquil. This is no illusion. She blinked. These places exist. Upon the wall she glimpsed the image of a vault, a shadow-shrouded tower a hundred times taller than any structure she had ever seen. It speared into the darkness from the floor of a cavern somewhere at the world’s bottom. Upon it she saw symbols graven, some of which she recalled from the Pages Black, others she had never seen before. In the Midnon silence, she swore she heard breathing from within the thing. The voices, she shuddered. They are real.

  “And here in the void they lie.” Her father tapped the wall, sending a ripple through the image. “They are waiting for me…for us. When they rise, they shall make me king, and I shall wear whatever crown they give me.”

  “Who?” she asked.

  “The Ur. The nether children. The creators of the world. It is their language we read in the Pages Black, and they who meant for us to find it.”

  For several breaths, she believed he proposed to be king of mortal men, of Thillria and the nations beyond. But no…not that manner of king. He means a king of another kind.

  “Mankind has ruined the earth.” He dragged his fingers across the image of the black tower. “The forests are not but furnaces, the mountains riven with mines, and the golden grass of every plain divided and fenced into men’s war-weary holdings. Even the sea is blighted, drained half-dry of life, skewered by the hulls of every nation’s skirmish. It will only become worse. Every nation will vomit itself upon the land, breeding more and more of themselves.”

  She gazed at the wall, where the image of the tower undulated beneath his touch. The black spire seemed an unfathomable, terrifying thing, and the longer she watched it, the more she sensed it was not merely a tower, but a tomb, and not for men.

  “I do not understand,” she said. “What do you mean to do?”

  “Nothing,” he answered.

  “Nothing?”

  “The Ur will do it for me.”

  “What will they do?”

  He spread his arms, and his sleeves made shadows dark enough to lose herself in. His coldness caught fire, his dry emotion ascending to passion. “A sweep of their palms, a slight exhalation, and whole realms will be renewed. With a king like me to guide them, the Ur will be driven to do beautiful things. No wars need be fought, no devastation worked. The coming peace might last forever, the tranquility of a thousand eons, the world put to eternal order, eternal perfection. I will be its shaper, its master. I will be benevolent, the shepherd of all futures to come.”

  He speaks of peace, she thought. Of order, perfection, and renewal. It sounds none too horrible.

  She tried to believe it, but she too quickly climbed atop the truth. The Pages Black has no spells of renewal or beauty, she knew. It holds only shadows, poisons, and death. Look what it did to the Uylen, what horrors lived in the shadow of its magic. And the voices…they speak nothing of tranquility.

  She backed one step away from the wall. The black tower seemed to see her, a dagger meant for the world’s heart, watching me, whispering my name. She remembered seeing herself in her mirror only a few small hours ago. She recalled her paleness, her gauntness, the sickness of the Pages Black like ashes in her eyes. She doubted the warlock’s planned hopes for the world would come as cleanly as he proposed.

  “You speak of being a shepherd.” She felt her cold sweat beading. “Of what? Of whom?”

  “I’ve worried you, I see.” He faced her. “Let me explain in simpler terms.”

  “Please.”

  “Once my mastery of the Pages is complete, I will release a single Ur from the many entombed in the Undergrave tower. I shall awaken him; he will not be able to resist me. One is all I require. One is enough to make or unmake everything the earth has even known. I will command his favor, and all will be undone.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” The passion in his eyes turned to frost. “To idly sit while other men break the world is unimaginable. To let fools remain the lords of us all is a crime I cannot bear. We are meant for better things than this, Andelusia. We are of the old blood, you and I. Why should we endure a moment more?”

  For all my terror, he shivers worse than me. Here he is at his moment of triumph, and he is afraid. “What if the Ur does not listen?” she asked. “What if it disobeys?”

  “I’ve often wondered that.”

  “And?”

  “Were that to happen, the end would come swiftly.”

  “The end? What end? Our lives? Everyone’s life?”

  “The Ur would free its brethren and reclaim the world,” he said, and she knew it was not a lie. “So it is written in the Pages, and so I believe. Mankind, at least as we know it, would be lost. Not so terrible a fate, I think.”

  She backed another step away. “I wonder, father…” Her heart halted in her chest. “Will the rest of the world see it your way?”

  “No,” he admitted. “They will not. It will not matter. Death has a way of curing every man’s concerns.”

  She backed a third step away. The voices from the tower flooded her head, sharper than ever she had heard them. There will be no king, she knew. Father lies to me. He knows as much. If he does what he hopes to, the sleeping shadows will wake, and nothing in the Pages will stop what they unleash upon the world.

  And I helped them.

  A Door Never Dreamed Of

  What am I to do? Help him? Betray him? This is not who I am. Better to die than be the daughter he desires. Better to throw myself from my tower than live to see the end.

  Alone in the gloom of her father’s chamber, Andelusia hunkered over the Pages Black. An Ur lantern flickered on the table beside her, illuminating the Nightness Page. She pretended to be absorbed with it, but whenever her father strayed out of sight she gazed emptily into the lantern’s violet glow. Only yesterday, he had shown her the tomb at the world’s bottom.

  And now I am lost.

  Come dusk, or at least the late hour she assumed was night, she remained alone. The warlock was gone, having drifted to some far and dark corner of Midnon. She looked again upon the Nightness Page and yawned. She had memorized it weeks ago, learning its symbols so well that they seemed a map in her mind, each one a trigger to a different dread power. She felt weary of it, tired of knowing the powers but never being allowed to use them.

  She pushed her way to the eighth Page, the Page of Ghouls.

  One glance at the eighth Page, and she felt a chill settle beneath her skin. Its sigils looked more like bones than words, knit together by sinewy slashes of ink. The Sarcophages, she thought. Mogru. It ought to be called the Page of Death. Or perhaps the Page of Undeath. I promised myself I would never learn these. Turn the Page, Ande. Read none of this.