Dark Moon Daughter

by J. Edward Neill

  “The Needle.”

  Grimwain nodded. “You’ve seen more than any man has a right to. And now I think you’ve seen enough.”

  Garrett sucked in a deep breath and raised his Thillrian longsword. Chips of steel rained to the ground, but one edge is still sharp. “Honor compels me to destroy you.”

  “Honor?” Grimwain snorted. “Don’t talk to me of honor. I once knew a king. Four and sixty this hollow creature was, but stronger than most of the thousands I’d felled before him. With my swords in his stomach, he asked me, ‘Is honor dead?’ Later, as I made a pyre of his bones, I answered him, ‘Dead? Everything is dead, old man. Honor most of all.’”

  With three quick strides Garrett planted himself on the shore between Grimwain and his tiny boat bobbing in the water. “Enough,” he said.

  “Move.” Grimwain rose.

  “No.”

  Grimwain came for him, his ghoulish eyes blazing with frigid light. Garrett countered the first hews with ease. Angry, he knew Grimwain to be. In a hurry to be anywhere but here.

  Though his need for vengeance had evaporated, Garrett fought with no less fury, making war like a single soldier surrounded by a host of his foulest enemies. He knocked aside Grimwain’s weapon countless times, deflecting the moon swords almost gently, preserving what remained of the Thillrian blade. He played at swords as though Grimwain’s two were matched against his twenty. Many times, he speared through gaps in Grimwain’s steel tempest, and though he felt his sword sink into flesh, the ghoul never slows. He is mad with bloodlust. Patience, Garrett. The next one will fell him.

  Flawless, untouchable, and so like water, he fought Grimwain away from the shore and drove him to the edge of the darkness beyond the Ur torch. He felt a breath away from dealing a deathblow, a heartbeat removed from biting deep enough into Grimwain’s hide to end it all.

  His Thillrian blade broke.

  The longsword snapped, the blade shattering against the ground. Grimwain swept his feet out from beneath him and hammered a cold pommel against the side of his head. With his senses fouled, he clambered to his feet, but Grimwain kicked him square in his sternum. He staggered backward and tumbled into the lake, whose frigid waters claimed him up to his chin. As an ocean of pain swallowed his mind, his thoughts remained crystalline. Let no pain undo you. Close your eyes. Remember Ona. Remember Rellen. Remember Andelusia.

  A black curtain drew down over him. He floundered in the water, imagining voices in his head. He heard Rellen shouting, Saul lecturing, Andelusia calling his name. His fingers went numb. Forked lines of blood ran down his cheek and dripped from his beard. He heard splashes beside him, Grimwain’s feet, but the fog in his eyes blinded him, and he saw nothing. He waited for death to fall upon the back of his neck, and he wondered what he would see once Grimwain separated his head from his body. He tried to murmur, “I will find you, even after death,” but the words never left his tongue. He dreamed many epitaphs, but uttered nothing.

  The walls closed in around him. In a stupor, he crawled and collapsed at the water’s edge. He plummeted toward the void, not knowing whether he had already drowned or if Grimwain had been swift about his work. His last thoughts before oblivion were of Rellen and Andelusia, and his fleeting hope they might await him when he arrived.

  In death.

  To the Victor, no Spoils

  Her shirt clung to her cold, sweating body. Her skirt dangled from her waist, rotting at the hem. Her feet were filthy, her hands black with ash, and her hair damp with water and blood. Her heart thudded like a funeral drum in her chest, boom, boom, boom, rattling her ribs.

  With tendrils of pale smoke curling from her fingertips, she stood over her defeated father.

  His screams had stopped, thank the stars. All she heard of him now were his soft sobs and ragged breaths passing through his bloodied lips. She knelt before his puddle of robes and pulled the hood away from his face. Old, she thought when she saw him. Ancient. My true father.

  “So this is you,” she whispered.

  He no longer looked the part of the handsome aristocrat, sly Thillrian soldier, or bloated sovereign. He is no nobleman. He was never a majestic, world-conquering king. He is a skinny old man, a pitiful, sallow-eyed sack of skin and bones. I might have known.

  His cloak and hood became dust when she touched it. His true attire was no more than a moth-eaten shirt and filthy, kneeless leggings. As he curled and wept, his delicate white hair fluttered with each of his breaths. She touched his arm and recoiled at his scabs, the tiny scars riddling his skin, doubtless made by a decade’s worth of nervous picking. That the miserable old thing had done such great harm felt unthinkable, for he was nothing, no more menacing than a grey-toothed, bedridden grandfather.

  The shackle around his upper arm, Rellen’s anklet, still smoked. She felt no need to inspect it. Fused to his skin by Ur fire, melted into a solid ring of iron by a Nightness spark, she knew it would never come off. Never. Not ever. Not until he dies and it falls from his bones. Made of iron, Rellen said. He was right. Muted father’s magic. Ended the battle I was destined to lose.

  Soldering the anklet to the warlock’s arm had been an act of desperation. His spells had swallowed her Ur darts and his black winds had driven her away whenever she became shadow. When at last she had run out of ideas and he had driven her back to the sea of Sarcophage bones, he laughed, and she knew her life had ended. But in that direst of moments, she had imagined Rellen’s smile shining upon her and his arms encircling her after making love, and she had decided not to die. Throw the anklet at father, she had decided. Become shadow one last time. Fly toward him. Elude the wind. Catch the anklet. Melt it around any part of him I can reach.

  She stood above her father, who wept from the pain. The charred circlet of iron cooled, turning grey around his flesh. With his defeat, the world seemed to sigh in relief, pleased to have one fewer warlock to so unhappily endure.

  “Daughter?” she heard him rasp. “Where have you gone? My eyes have failed me!”

  The island lay in utter darkness. He is blind, she knew. With no magic, he sees nothing. Her first thought was to finish him swiftly and mercifully, to drop a bead of Ur magma upon his head and watch him boil away, and yet she held her hand back.

  “It’s dark, so horribly dark,” he wailed. “Daughter, have you left me? Will you not stay long enough to kill me?”

  She remained stiller than stone. The Ur voices begged her to destroy him, but I cannot.

  “Father...”

  “You’re here!” he rejoiced. “Thank you. Oh, thank you!”

  “I will not kill you.”

  “No? But why? It is what any other would do.”

  “You deserve to die, but I am too weak to do it.” No. A lie. I would not even were I strong.

  “Will it be Croft, then? Perhaps Lord Gryphon? How will you dispose of me? Ah, but this hurts!”

  She shut her eyes and searched her soul down to its bottom. “Thillria must judge you.”

  “Thillria.” He sounded as though he barely recognized the name.

  “We will return to Aeth,” she said. “Whoever is left shall gather and decide your fate. You had best pray the country is whole again. If not, if your deeds have broken the land, you will answer for it. Not to me, but to them. The people will see you for who you really are. They may execute you or they may forgive you. I cannot protect you from what they decide.”

  “You would…let me live?”

  “I would.” She swallowed hard. “But on one condition. You must understand it above all else. Whether you are spared or sent to die, you will live to your last days in iron chains and shackles. You will never know power again. Your days as a warlock are done.”

  “It will be a mercy,” he shuddered. “I never wanted this.”

  She looked down upon him, and though she knew he could not return her gaze, she understood he had surrendered. A sad creature, he is. How long has he lived like this? Did the Ur make him this way? Grimwain? Or did he
choose it?

  “Why?” she asked. “Why did you imprison my friends? Why did you submit me to these terrible things?”

  “Grim.”

  “Grim?”

  “He turned my eyes to you. I’d set you and Ona free as babies. For your protection, I’d scattered you far and wide. But Grim knew, and where he walks, the voices follow. I only wanted power, never all this…death. The Pages Black…I never knew. I dreamed of a different end.”

  “You cannot seriously say you blame all of this on him?” She knotted her fingers into tiny fists.

  “No…I…” He suffered through each syllable. “The fault is mine. I empowered him. I gave him hope, when for so many years he’d had none. I located the Pages. I told him of the spell to open the tower. I should never have mentioned you, but he tricked me. He asked if there was anyone I might save should the Ur awaken. I said your name…and Ona’s. I gave you to him, and you became a part of this. Please, please forgive me. I’m not a killer. Every death belongs to him.”

  She boiled with anger beyond her ability to express. She stung his face with a slap and backed away. “You could have stopped him,” she cursed. “You could have snapped your fingers and cooked him to a crisp! A word is all it would have taken, a lone breath to end it all!”

  “No…” Ashes fell from his face from where she had slapped him. “It was never so easy.”

  “How not?”

  “He is not like us, not like any mortal man. He is descended of our enemy, the Niviliath, the destroyers of magic.”

  “Who?” she snapped. “What are you talking about?”

  “The Nivil…” he quaked. “Our enemy. He is the last of them. We are nothing to him.”

  “We must be something. He needed us, after all.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  She wanted to burn him away. She hated him, for who he is, for what he has done. But something about his story chilled her marrow and made her eyes glisten with fear. He tells the truth. Grim is not a man. He…he is a…

  “He said I would be King,” her father wept. “He promised. He said when it was done, when the Ur were free, you and I and Ona would be the only ones left. I knelt before him, and he swore.”

  “Silence,” she whispered.

  With a touch of Nightness and a tap of her finger, she put him to sleep. Not enough to kill. Just to dream. Until I wake him again. Like a baby, he drowsed beneath her spell, and she stood above him, as much his guardian as his destroyer.

  With a sigh, she let her gaze fall and her body go limp. She desired nothing more than sleep, to slip into sweet reverie without warlocks or black towers, without the Ur or Grimwain. But no. I am not the dreamy, doe-eyed girl from Cairn, nor the wishful thinker gazing from my window in Gryphon. This is my destiny. I must embrace it. Finish this, Ande.

  She opened her eyes. The underworld gloom burned away before her gaze, the darkness no dimmer than a clouded winter day. With purpose, she rummaged through the Sarcophage graveyard, collecting iron rings from their skeletal fingers. She returned to her father’s side, and as he fitfully dozed she slid one ring over each of his digits, pushing them down to the last knuckle. To touch raw, uncured ferrite irritated her fingers, but her discomfort only served to remind her. These will work. If ever his shackle should fail, these will remain.

  Finished sliding the rings in place, she tapped each one with a tiny Ur spark, fusing them with her father’s flesh. Only one way to get them off, she mused. A knife, a jug of mead, and a willingness to have no fingers at all.

  She stood again. Her body hurt, and the Nightness coursed in cold rivers through her blood. Shrugging off her pain, she lifted the Pages Black from beside her sleeping father and faced the Ur tower. Its mighty door lay open, but no Ur drifted in the void beyond. Empty, she knew. Though not always so.

  At the edge of her senses, she heard the distant ring of Garrett and Grimwain’s swords. She ignored it, just as she ignored her desire to find Saul and Rellen. She crept closer to the door. She expected frosted winds from inside the tower to engulf her, or for claws of shadow to tear her heart from her chest. Swallowing her terror, she realized the tower contained only a vast hollow space, an emptiness climbing forever upward.

  Clutched the Pages, she stood on the threshold and peered inside.

  The floor, smooth and dustless, she saw. No coffins on the walls. No writing anywhere. No effigies or attendants. No bones of other sorcerers who opened the door only to die. Empty. Entirely empty. How long to build this? If this is a conduit, where to?

  The Ur voices sighed within her. She saw nothing, but heard everything. A presence unseen, watchful and sinister, uttered words in a language she knew, but did not want to. She backed away from the door. She knew she was being watched, aware that thousands of eyes from a realm unknowable had turned in their sockets to find her. The whispers in her mind sharpened. She closed her eyes.

  She understood.

  An artifact, this tower. Built by a single Ur. The others were imprisoned. Their purpose, to punish the wicked dead, the unfaithful, the evil. Their jailers, men, holy men from cathedrals made of black glass. They wanted rid of the Ur, but in locking them away gave the demons new purpose. Punishment. Purgatory. Hell. We were lucky tonight. The open door means nothing if the timing is wrong. A planned event. A single spoke in the wheel of time. Father did not know. How could he have? The Ur want me, need me. They desire me to return here at the chosen hour.

  And if not me, they know of others.

  No.

  She opened the Pages and turned to the fourth, the Page of Tongues, which her father had taught her so little of. A million words it seemed, curling and twisting on a single sheaf of human flesh. She narrowed her eyes and plucked the Spell of Closing from amongst a thousand others. Too simple. She almost laughed. Easier to close than to open.

  She uttered an ancient word, and the door closed. The sound of it shook the island, the Undergrave, and the world. Again, she braced against an evil wind that never came. In the silence afterward, the Ur voices abandoned her.

  She returned to her father and dropped the Pages beside him. Time to be rid of this place. Please, everyone. Be alive. She bounded through the Sarcophage bones and made for the island’s edge. She trailed patters of cold blood, not knowing who they belonged to. The blackness felt thicker away from the tower, the cavern air parting like fog before her fingers. Many times she thought to stop and scream her friends’ names, but her fear that Grimwain might be waiting was enough to silence her.

  What if he killed them all? She slowed her pace to one tentative step for every heartsick breath. She very nearly turned back, but managed to go on, making promises to herself she knew she would not keep. Only five steps more. I will call their names. If no one answers, I will know they are fallen.

  She crept across the island glass. The cold stuck to her, tenacious as a wolf. She glimpsed the water, inking the realm beyond the shore. At the ends of her sights, she saw the Ur torch she had made. It smoldered upon the shore, its indigo radiance casting a pallor across the nearby water. Terrified, she darted for it.

  “Garrett?” she screamed. “Garrett? Where are you? Garrett!”

  She found him in the water. Dead, she feared. Slaughtered and drowned. Felled in the shallows, his skyward gaze was glassy, his face white as marble, and his beard streaked with scarlet. May I die a thousand deaths, she thought as she knelt beside him. I sent you to your doom. Garrett…

  “Ande,” he murmured.