Dark Moon Daughter

by J. Edward Neill

  Join us.

  She decides she will not.

  An hour after Garrett’s leaving, Andelusia arose in the grotto’s center. The remains of the Thillrian camp encircled her. Their bedrolls lay just as they had left them, their weapons, tools, and food scattered about the wet stone floor. She would have wept for them had she any tears left. Instead she remembered them, their courage, and their foolishness for believing in me.

  For many hundred breaths, she stood right where Garrett had left her. She could not believe he had marched away without her, and yet she dared not think him a fool any longer. How many times has he been right and I wrong? she reminded herself. Every time. Always.

  She sucked in a last sharp breath, narrowed the Nightness in her eyes, and sprinted down through the Undergrave.

  If ever she had run so hard, she could not remember the day. She ran like a doe pursued by a pack of wolves, like sunlight soaring across the horizon at dawn. She sprinted across bridges above chasms deep and dark. She darted around limestone columns ten men wide and leapt over streams flush with overworld rain. Pursuing the faint trail of Garrett’s heartbeat, she ran without slowing until she thought she would die. And then she ran more.

  In a corridor narrow and featureless, upon whose floor stretched a chain a hundred men long, she caught him. She trailed his torch between two weeping walls and slowed as she approached him. Garrett halted, and beneath his flame’s smoldering gaze she knelt and gasped for her life.

  “Let no man doubt your persistence.” He gazed down at her.

  “There…might be…a way,” she panted. “I have…an idea. Will you listen?”

  “I already have a way.” He patted the sword hilts jutting from his belt. “Go back. Save yourself.”

  Breathless, she clambered to her feet. “Unless you plan to cut me down, you had better get used to the idea of me. I am coming with you.”

  He arched his eyebrow. “You will show me the way. No more than that.”

  “No. I will take us to him. And then I will do as I like. We have the same end in mind, Garrett. The only difference is the reason.”

  “My reason is the only reason.”

  “Hardly.” She planted herself in front of him. “Your reason is driven by emotion. You know something is wrong, but not how wrong. If we had time, I would explain.”

  “If you mean to lead, we have all the time in the world.”

  “We do not.”

  He took a step deeper into the tunnel. She bounded ahead and blocked his way. He tried to brush her aside. She caught his wrist and tugged it down.

  “I need you to trust me,” she hissed.

  “I already do. Now leave.”

  “I will not.”

  “I have lost enough.” He glowered at her. “Go home. Find your way back to Denawir, back to Gryphon.”

  His wisdom fails him. There will be no Denawir, no Gryphon. If only he understood.

  “I know where the warlock is.” She pushed him.

  “You said as much.” He hardly moved.

  “If I am to help you, you have to let me near.”

  “You already are.”

  “Not near enough.”

  Just do it, Ande, she told herself. He will not hurt you. He will understand. With a shallow breath, she clapped her palms against the front of his shoulders. Even through his Thillrian hauberk, she felt his warmth. She dreamed of embracing him, but dared not. “We have no time to walk,” she told him. “I have a faster way.”

  “You learned magic.”

  “Forgive me. It was the only way.”

  She watched him retreat into thought. Judging me, she knew. Hating me. Deciding whether to let me help.

  “Do what you must,” he said. “Quickly.”

  Relief flooded her. Her idea caught fire in her mind, a way to reach father far swifter than by walking. “Put your torch down,” she commanded.

  He dropped his torch to the tunnel floor. The flame guttered and hissed, smoking the air between them. He gave in, she felt stunned. Hurry, Ande. Do it before he changes his mind.

  “Do you understand what I must do?”

  “I do not.”

  “And yet you trust me?”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  “When I saw you running, I knew you were the real you.”

  “How?’

  “I remembered Furyon. I saw your courage then, and I see some sliver of it now. I remembered you in Grandwood the day I returned. I remembered wanting to kiss you at the lake in the Dales. You think I am cold to these things. Perhaps I was, but no longer. So close to death, a man makes peace with who he is. Go ahead, then. Use your magic. Gain me my revenge.”

  “You mean it?” She almost toppled at the truth.

  “All of it. The vengeance especially.”

  For a breath, she loved him. “Do not be afraid. This will not hurt, I think.”

  She took his hands and locked her fingers within his. His flesh felt like fire against her frozen skin. And I could melt, she knew. Right here. If he willed it.

  She wanted to tell him about the Ur, the black tower, and her father’s dreams for the world, but we have no time. She agonized that what she was about to do might kill him, or both of us. Before she dared think better of it, she let the Nightness drip from her tongue. She shut her eyes and mouthed many silent syllables, speaking a spell only she could hear.

  “Stay close.” She pulled him to her. “Never let go.”

  Garrett’s torch sputtered and died. A tremor rocked the Undergrave, a rumble beneath her naked feet. She whispered again, and the Nightness smoldered beneath her skin. She and he became as one, bodies and possessions reshaped as shadow, flesh the same as a roiling midnight cloud. The Nightness flooded her mind, but she reined it in. No longer bound to the material world, she floated beside and within Garrett, two minds with a single body.

  It worked.

  This feels like death, she wanted to tell him. It is not. We are shadows. We are the wind. It is the only way.

  She knew he could not hear. Mustering all her mind’s power, she entangled his shadow hands with hers, melting closer to him than during her life’s most powerful moment of passion. We could leave here if we wanted. We could take to the night and fly to the far side of the world. Perhaps the Ur would never find us. Perhaps father would let us be.

  No.

  Bound with Garrett as her ethereal lover, she hurtled down through the floor. The cavern fled her sights, and the way to the world’s bottom became a blur. She plummeted through hundreds of crooked corridors and dozens of city-sized caverns. Neither stone nor water nor airless void slowed her, for she and he were as spirits, no more material than a dream. The more she saw of the Undergrave, the more she understood the labyrinth had not been fashioned by nature, but carved with grim forethought, each passage graven for a dark, dark reason. To reach the bottom.

  Faster and faster she descended. Stone and water screamed past, parting like clouds. She tunneled lower, and her fear frosted her smoky blood. She realized her horror was a beacon calling her to her father’s side, and so she chased after it, gusting through lightless hollows inhabited by all manner of nameless, faceless creatures. She flew faster than rainfall, tumbling like a meteor as her fear drummed like death upon her mind. Father is near, she knew. I hear his heart beating. His and many others.

  She found the bottom.

  Sailing like a storm into the largest of all the Undergrave’s abysses, she remembered something Rellen had told her. A lake. Black water. We dug our way in. The world’s bottom. She glimpsed the lake beneath her, its mirrored surface unbroken for as far as she could see. She held Garrett all the tighter. She no longer saw him, but sensed his presence within her. She only hoped he was still alive.

  Far she flew, soaring above the water until a craggy shore came into her sights. She spied a lantern, its yellow light fluttering atop a pole. Floating down to it, she folded out of the shadows amid the rocks and returned reluctantly
to the world of the living.

  This is the place. She eased her companion from phantom to flesh. Be alive, Garrett.

  She and he materialized in the knee-deep shallows. She landed, inhaled a single sharp breath, and collapsed helpless upon the rocks. The Nightness. I burned it up. Ah, but it hurts.

  Drained of all her power, she wallowed in the water. She looked for Garrett, but the lantern’s light seared her eyes. She crawled through the frigid shallows to reach the shore, bruising her elbows upon the sharp stones, desperately clumsy.

  Through the haze, she glimpsed the Sarcophages.

  With empty eyes and wasted jaws they stood in a half-circle on the rocky shore, clacking their teeth and flexing their fleshless knuckles. The lonely lantern illuminated their faces, their deathly grins, and their empty sockets as they gazed upon her. No… She floundered at the water’s edge. Not now. Not here.

  She saw Garrett rise. She tried to stand and scream to him, but her voice came out a whisper and she slid back into the water. Garrett came to consciousness in the shallows, looking only half certain he was alive. The Sarcophages became aware of him. Clacking their jaws, shaking the dust from their plate-armored shoulders, they hoisted their blades and closed in on him. Wake up! Wake up! she wanted to scream.

  In a pool of light, the black water sucking at his heels, Garrett tore his blades from his belt. The Sarcophages’ bones popped and rattled as they encircled him, their rusted swords swaying in the light. Andelusia raised her palm, hoping for an Ur spark, but nothing sprang from her fingertips save a puff of grey ash. I have killed us.

  Too weak to fight, she pried herself from the water, slunk behind a rock, and watched. Destroy as many as you can, she hoped for Garrett. And die without pain. Whirling a Sarcophage butcher blade in his left hand and a straight Thillrian longsword in his right, Garrett drove back the first flurry of Sarcophage hacks. Yes, she saw and remembered who he was. Do it, Garrett. Kill them all.

  The first and most brittle of the skeletal horrors hacked at Garrett. He drove back several withering strokes, and in a flash swept his longsword through the monster’s skull. Fragments of its bones whistled through the air, falling into the water like rain.

  One.

  Six others closed in. Savagely efficient, Garrett drove back a hundred of their mechanical hacks and spiritless slashes. The Sarcophages tried to hem him in, but he ducked and parried and dove, beating his retreat to a great rock whose bottom half lay drowned beneath the water. The Sarcophages shambled after him. He mounted the rock, goading them, “Bones and brittle broomsticks,” he ushered them closer. “Kill me if you can.”

  Slinking from rock to rock, Andelusia trailed after the battle. She felt the Nightness regenerating inside her, but at too slow a rate to matter. The Sarcophages crowded around Garrett’s rock, stabbing at his knees and clawing for his calves. She winced as showers of sparks lit the gloom and clapped her palms over her ears against the sound of Thillrian steel meeting cold iron. Her hope soared and sank with each clang. Garrett’s strokes were far more calculated than his enemies’, but the dead were so many. He hewed skeletal hands and fingers, gouged holes in the Sarcophages’ rotting mail, and smote chunks of mummified flesh from between their ribs. After a flurry, the nearest three monsters fell away from his rock, their arms whittled to stumps, their swords fallen, and their skulls bobbing in the water.

  Four.

  More of the dead came. Shivering behind her rock in the shallows, she bit her middle knuckle until it bled. Look at him. Maybe he can win. No. Impossible. Too many of them. But…

  Fury smoked from Garrett’s eyes. Blood streamed like rivers of fire down his calves. He looked the same as the Sarcophages: ruthless, relentless, possessed of a world’s worth of stamina. The dead clawed their way up his rock, and he bounded down into the shallows behind them. They chased him, and he slapped away their swords and sheared off their limbs as though their bones were made of paper. What twenty ordinary men could never have done, he made into a child’s game. Not without cost, feared Andelusia. She sensed the hatred behind his strokes, the vengeance living at the ends of his swords. Carving through their ranks, he clipped the heads from three and severed the spine of another. When the slowest, most heavily armored backed him against a boulder, he knelt and cut the creature down at its knees. As the Sarcophage fell, he dashed its skull to dust with the pommel of his Thillrian sword, and she swore she saw him smile.

  Nine.

  Behind the battle, she slunk out of the water. She supposed she should be freezing, wet as she was from neck to toes, but she felt nothing. The sounds of Garrett’s butchery rang in her ears, and for the briefest of breaths she pitied the Sarcophages, or at least the men they once were.

  Limp as a leaf, too weak to fight, stand, or even cry out, she crawled to a niche between two jagged rocks and slumped. Shattered bones, hewn tatters of rusted chainmail, and scraps of broken armor littered the grounds beyond her toes. She heard the fight raging, but more than anything she felt inevitability closing in on her. This is not the right place, she knew. This is one shore, but father moves on another. Somewhere out there on the water, he wakes the Ur. How many monsters can Garrett kill? Where is the black tower? Where is Rellen? I might as well close my eyes and die.

  She felt her eyelids crashing down. The hiss and clang of swords died in her ears, and the whispers in her head narrowed to a solitary voice from the nether realm. Join us, it said to her in a language she did not want to comprehend. Stand. Drink of the dark. Fly into the pitch. Take what is yours. The moon is high tonight, but ours will wait. Join us.

  She clapped her palms over her ears. The one voice became many, vibrating in her head. Stop! she wanted to scream. Get out! Please! Strike me dead if you want! Just please, stop!

  Mouthing her silent pleas, she curled in the darkness and begged for the end. All sounds save the Ur voices faded into the cavern’s awful void, all the world drowned out by their demands. No matter how hard she squeezed her eyes shut, no matter how loudly she tried to wail, she heard only them, and they spoke only for her.

  Silence took her.

  She sat up in a daze, dripping wet and cold as a corpse. How much time had passed her by, she did not know. The battle is over, she believed. Garrett is dead. If I stand, the skeletons will find me. If I lie down, the tower will open and the Ur will burn me away.

  For breaths unknowable, she lay shivering on the cavern floor. She dared to peer into the void, and the Nightness allowed her a glimpse of a skiff rocking in the water beyond the shore. How did I miss that? she wondered. What is it for? Not that it matters now.

  “Ande,” she heard someone say her name and nearly leapt out of her skin. She hoped for Rellen, but knew better.

  “Ande, stand up.”

  Trembling, she rose. She saw Garrett, lantern in hand, hovering over her. A ghost? she wondered. “Alive?” she whispered.

  “As ever,” he answered.

  “The dead?”

  “In pieces.”

  “The boat?” She pointed.

  “A way to cross the lake,” he said. “Stay here. Recover your magic. You will need it after I am gone.”