Dark Moon Daughter

by J. Edward Neill

  “No.” She staggered past him. “Father is out there. I am going with you.”

  Invocation

  Across waters still and black, toward an island lit with floating Ur candles, Andelusia stood on the prow as Garrett guided the skiff. As the slender craft slid between two identical ships and ground to a halt on a glass island, she hopped down onto the smooth, wet shore and thought, this is where it will happen.

  Still powdered with white Sarcophage dust, Garrett vaulted over the skiff’s side and hauled the boat two paces up the shore. “Nothing good will happen here,” he remarked. “If you are afraid, hide.”

  “I am very afraid. It hardly matters.” She closed her eyes and felt the Nightness infiltrate her blood. Her body hummed with dark energy, a gift of the long trek across the lake. “Four people are already here. I cannot see their faces, but I hear their hearts beating. A fifth beats also, but it belongs to something other than a man.”

  “Grimwain.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “He dies as well.”

  We can hope. She shivered. “Come with me,” she said. “No sense in hiding. The warlock knows we are here.”

  She strode up the island shore, quiet as the breeze. No matter Garrett walking beside her, she lived alone with her thoughts. My feet are frozen, but no other part of me. The island is glass, black and polished. I see the Ur language etched upon it. This feels like the Furyon citadel, like Malog, only sharper, cleaner, nearer to the enemy. Why did the Ur make this place? Where is the…

  …tower.

  She halted, and Garrett stopped beside her. Her breath left her body, her heart as heavy as iron. Here at the world’s bottom it lay, the tower of the Ur. Even at thousands of steps removed, the seven-sided monolith lorded over her, spearing from the glass island’s heart to unknowable heights. Its perfect sides were smooth obsidian, its black surface consuming all light. No man could have made such a thing, she knew, nor dream any part of its creation. A tomb, she reckoned, huge enough for a million dead. Terrible, and beautiful.

  She gaped. She shuddered. She swore she heard the tower respire, its breath flooding her head with memories of a darker, direr era. Narrowing her Nightness vision to a pinpoint, she glimpsed its door. The gate was ten men wide and twenty high, graven with skeletal symbols not unlike the Pages Black. She wanted to touch it, to trace her fingers along it, to seduce it into opening.

  No.

  “We have to hurry,” she said to Garrett.

  She ran. She felt exhilarated in the tower’s presence, the Nightness smoke streaming from her shoulders. The isle’s surface fled past her feet like air, the floating Ur candles glowing colder as she sprinted by.

  Halfway to the tower, she skidded to a halt again. “Stop,” she hissed at Garrett. “Look.”

  No other man might have been able to see what she saw, no other but Garrett. He gazed through the same darkness as she did, the Ur candles not nearly bright enough, and yet he sees everything.

  “You counted five beating hearts,” he said. “I see a crowd of many.”

  “Look closer.”

  “Ah. I see the dead, some thirty. Skeletal soldiers more heavily armored than the others. I see three men kneeling, watching and waiting with ropes about their wrists. And I see…”

  “…Orumna,” she exhaled.

  She knew the bloated thing shambling toward the tower doors could not be the Thillrian king. Or could he be? He wore robes lush and lavender, and when he raised his hands as if in worship to the tower, his fingers were as thick as she remembered. Ten sausages. Just like Rellen used to say.

  Suddenly fearless, she ran for the tower, for Orumna, and for the host of Sarcophages. She lost sight of Garrett, forgetting him utterly. In a cloud of Ur candles hovering a hundred steps from the tower, she cried out, “Rellen! Rellen, where are you?”

  The Sarcophages wheeled to face her. Orumna lowered his arms and smirked. The three kneeling men, bloody and bound with ropes, strained to see her. Ghurk and Saul. She felt a shock of warmth course through her body. And Rellen, my love, alive!

  She remembered him being haler. He squinted through the Sarcophage ranks, looking pale, gaunt, and tired. For as thin as he had been when she pulled him from his prison pit, he looked far weaker now. The march down here, she knew. What took me moments took them days. How long did father make me sleep?

  “Ande?” she heard Rellen creak, but then Orumna boomed. The Sarcophages parted, and the bloated king faced her. Even at fifty paces, she knew him well.

  “Father.”

  “Child.”

  “Why wear a mask now?”

  The smile fell from his jowls. He glanced once to the tower, the spire dwarfing him and everything else, and he faced her again. “I was you, daughter. My finest performance. Would you believe I lured these three fools to march behind me? I wore your face, and my dear Sarcophages wore those of the Thillrians. So trusting, your suitors. Why do you love them?”

  “You mock them.” She ignored his question.

  “I remind them,” he growled, “of who is king. Me.”

  He clapped his hands, and was Orumna no more. When the smoke cleared and the corpulent king vanished, she saw a striking, aristocratic man standing in his place, verdant robes cascading from shoulders broad and strong. He looked nothing like he had in her dream. He was taller, prouder, as handsome a man as ever the world had known. She wondered which version was her true father, the dream…or this?

  She dared two steps closer. Her father clapped his hands again, this time deafeningly. She felt the world shake, the island move beneath her, and the weight of the Ur tower fall across her mind. The dead air echoed with the scratching of corpses in their coffin, the raking of cold claws against perfect obsidian. She feared her blood might freeze, that she might fall dead to the ground with her very next breath. He wakes them.

  Worse still were the Sarcophages. Their arms were open and waiting for her, their swords clutched by fleshless, ring-riddled fingers. The sight of them filled her with despair, for as she watched, three of their rank shambled up behind Saul, Ghurk, and Rellen, snared the men’s throats, and pressed wretched blades to their backs.

  Her father, no, the warlock, stripped the Pages Black from the Sarcophage closest to him.

  “Father!” she shouted. “Let them go!”

  He pretended not to hear. With a shrug, he flipped open the Pages Black and faced the Ur tower. She slinked ten steps closer, but the Sarcophages are so many, she slowed. If I attack, Rellen and Saul will die.

  Join us, said the voices in her head.

  The voices crashed against her skull, paralyzing her. She staggered and dropped to a knee. As she knelt, the Sarcophages gazed at her. Their armor, dry and moldered, crackled like parchment against their naked ribs, their rusted iron rings and mottled bronze bangles hanging from their fleshless fingers and wrists. Ghastly, toothless smiles rent some of their faces, while the cheeks and chins of others were stretched with just enough desiccated skin to make them appear as marionettes, the putrid puppets of a madman’s play.

  She wanted to stand and fight, but the voices held her down. Father! she tried to scream. End this! Garrett, help! Save Rellen! Please!

  Grimwain emerged from the darkness.

  She saw him striding through the shadows, and the last of her hope died. Him, she thought as he stalked into the Sarcophages’ midst with an Ur candle in hand, two swords on his belt, and his black braid swaying with each step. Ghoul. Ghost. Servant of the Ur. Of all the creatures, living and dead, ambulant in the Ur tower’s presence, Grimwain seemed the only one not to shrink. Because he belongs here.

  “Bring me her head,” Grimwain told the Sarcophages. “Throw the rest of her in the water.”

  Father is the master, not you, she would have said had the voices not silenced her. She wanted to stand and cook Grimwain to a cinder, but when she tried, her body betrayed her.

  “We might have finished this years ago if not for you,” she heard him qui
p to Rellen, who struggled in the grasp of two Sarcophages. “You did well to protect her.”

  Rellen snapped.

  She heard his iron anklet jingle. She heard a shout and a bone snapping. Rellen bolted to his feet, tore a Sarcophage’s sword away, and smote the monster’s skull from its shoulders. Free! Her heart pounded. Too strong for his bonds! They made him dig, and now no ropes can hold him!

  Grimwain dropped his candle and stripped his swords from his belt. Rellen fell upon him, a thunderhead of rage. They met not ten paces from her, the embers from their crashing blades showering the island glass. Rellen roared, and every soul on the island trembled. With wrath alone, Rellen drove Grimwain back against the face of the tower. Kill him! Andelusia found the strength to stand. Throw all of him in the water.

  Her father, the tower, and the Sarcophages melted out of her sights. Beyond Rellen and Grimwain, she saw nothing else in the world. The two fought with furious abandon. She felt her bones shake every time their swords rattled. When Rellen dove inside Grimwain’s guard, her heart soared. When Grimwain clipped Rellen in his ribs and shoved him away, she staggered as though she had been cut.

  Deep inside, she knew how it would end.

  Frozen, she watched. Rellen pressured Grimwain with strokes that would have cleaved ordinary men in two, but the tide turned against him as the monster she remembered from Nightmare Forest came alive. Again and again, Grimwain hammered his silver blades against Rellen’s Sarcophage sword, driving him into the darkness beyond the Ur candles. Exhausted, Rellen flickered out a handful of feeble counters, all of which Grimwain swatted away. The gaunt, ghoulish Captain moved in half-circles around her love, pricking his arms and thighs. Toying with him, she felt her heart sink to the bottom of the abyss. Killing him slowly.

  At length, Grimwain lowered his swords and kicked Rellen in his gut. Rellen crashed calamitously to the ground, his breath blasted out, his prison anklet breaking off and clattering to a stop beside his head.

  “Now!” Grimwain boomed at the warlock. “Open it. Let them out.”

  She blinked. Why it was the Sarcophages had yet to kill her, she dared not guess. She gazed to the tower and the tortured sigils on its door. As every floating Ur candle on the island guttered and dimmed, she heard her father speak.

  His words were unmeant for the living to hear. This is it, she thought. He begs for them to come. She could not know it, but his spell drummed in the ears of every living creature in the world, the haunted sounds thundering such that people on the far side of the earth sat up in their beds and wondered what evil noise could wake them so. His was the spell meant to rouse the Ur. The invocation. The end.

  She listened.

  She understood:

  Call our name. We have waited long to hear it. We are grief. We are the pain beneath your bones, the crater in your belly when all love is lost.

  Call our name. We will bend the Father and bury his children. We will curl the roots of every tree and strip the clouds from heaven. This is what we adore: the midnight, the bottom, the end.

  Call our name. There is no beginning. There is no circle, no meaning, no reason to continue. There is only us. You glimpse our shadow when Father Sun falls below the horizon. You weep us when you visit your lover’s grave. You taste us whenever a lie passes your lips. We are the end. We are all ends.

  Call our name. Once and once and once again is all we require. Crack us from our prison and reap us for eternity. Use us, for we are vengeance, pain, and punishment for all the deeds of mankind. Let us breach happy hearts and turn Father’s children to kindling. Let us breathe. Let us out. Let us avenge ourselves for what your forefathers did. Let us roam the earth anew and cast our long and lightless presence into forever.

  Call our name. Close the last curtain. Break the moon. End the world.

  In the total silence following her father’s spell, she knelt and gaped at the tower door. Nothing happened at first, no wave of escaping shadows, no groan from the waking horrors within. The drumming in her heart ceased to be. The Sarcophages stood in a ring around her, swords held high and motionless. The Ur candles burned brighter than ever. Did he fail? she wondered. No.

  Then it came, the sound she expected. The island quaked. She heard stone grinding against stone, cracking the perfect quiet. Her father backed away, arms still raised.

  The door opened.

  Emptiness

  The slab of obsidian, weighing more than a thousand men could move, swiveled from the Ur monolith’s face. In a ring of Sarcophage swords, Andelusia stood and stared and died countless deaths in her mind. Look away, she told herself. Close your eyes.

  No.

  The door ground to a halt. Neither light nor sound came from within the tower. She saw Saul and Ghurk cringe, the warlock back away, and Grimwain stride for the solid sliver of darkness in the barely open door. Her face grey, her heartbeat sluggish, she waited for pain to arrive. She saw only the void, and though she breathed, she knew it was only a matter of time before the end.

  An eternity seemed to pass. The warlock remained outside, the Pages Black hanging in his grasp. His eyes gleaming a hellish white, Grimwain walked alone into the tower. Him? Her heart sank for the hundredth time. All of this, father? For him? I do not understand.

  When Grimwain vanished into the tower, she felt the Nightness flood her mind and her focus sharpen. “Father!” she shouted through the Sarcophages. “What have you done?”

  He faced her. His skin looked graven of white marble, his eyes wide. “I saved you,” he uttered.

  “Saved me? How?”

  “The dead…they should’ve killed you. Flee from here, daughter. Before the Ur come.”

  “No.”

  She parted the nearest four Sarcophages with a flick of her wrist. They reached for her, but grasped only smoke and shadow. When she emerged beyond them and reclaimed her fleshly form, she stalked within ten paces of her father.

  “Close the door,” she demanded. “Grimwain is inside. Close it and lock him in forever. This is your chance, father, your last chance. Do it!”

  “You don’t understand,” he said.

  A tear trickled down her cheek. “You know what is right. This is not it. Close the door. Leave this place. No one will pursue you. Please!”

  “I…can’t.”

  Through sadness and rage, she decided. Now. While he is vulnerable. Take the Pages. Close the tower yourself. With a whisper, she called to the Nightness and to darker powers still. She felt the Ur flame growing in her fist, the black smoke undulating between her fingers. With a cry, she hurled the tiny mote of death in her father’s direction. The voices inside her laughed. She had never felt so treacherous in her life.

  The warlock was ready.

  Faster than she dreamed possible, he jerked his left palm into the air, extinguished the Ur mote, and summoned a wall of black wind. The fell gust ripped her from the island and sent her soaring high into the darkness. Her last sight was of Rellen, crawling not far from the tower, clutching for her as the wind tore her away.

  She hit the water well beyond the three skiffs. The oily black broth swallowed her, driving all the breath from her lungs. How deep she plunged, she could only imagine, but her instinctual terror of death forced her to swim. Up through the depths she rose, knifing her way back to the surface. She erupted from the water a wet, gasping mess. After catching her breath and paddling to the shore, she collapsed and retched out more of the lake than she imagined possible. I should…be dead, she gasped. He could have killed me.

  And he should have.

  The Nightness steadied inside her. Her pain fled. As swiftly as the wind had scrambled her powers, darkness invaded her anew. She saw everything, sensing every soul on the island. The Sarcophages, Garrett, even Rellen. I still have time.