“Curdsandwhey!Curdsandwhey!Curdsandwhey!”
And indeed they pulled from their ration boxes cheese, curds, and whey and began nibbling furiously.
“Would you care for some?” asked First Officer Muffet, regaining his normal, less squeaky speaking voice.
“Just the cheese, please,” I responded politely.
The mice began to sigh contentedly, then returned to their radios as they munched.
I turned to the moonbeam. “I think those light waves come from Nightlight. I think something remarkable may be happening as he dreams.”
The moonbeam flickered in a way that seemed like he agreed with me. I wished Ombric were here. He knew how to translate moonbeam-speak. I wished all the Guardians were here. North. Tooth. Sandy.
“In the battle that is surely coming, we must be braver than we’ve ever been,” I said to the moonbeam.
He dimmed a bit, as if sharing my concern. Then he flashed worriedly. Something was wrong. We again felt a low rumble coming toward us. Emerging from the Moon’s dark side, we saw Pitch’s giant spider craft coming toward us.
“I think we best make a speedy getaway,” I told the moonbeam.
“Away! Away! Away!” the mice agreed in unison.
Thankfully, the engine of the obtruder restarted immediately. Officers Muffet and Tuffet, along with the other mice, tossed down their curds and whey, the moonbeam piloted us away from Pitch and his giant mechanical spider, and I swallowed the last bite of Mooncheese I may ever eat. Such frightening goings-on!
We made our way to the Ten Bluffs, but not without incident. There had been several more bright flashes in the sky, and each time our ship had lost power, forcing us into perilous landings. The mice had consumed more dairy than seemed possible or healthy, but they continued to function ably so . . . What did I know?
To my great relief, the Ten Bluffs formed the most formidable fortress imaginable, with every Moonbot, mouse, worm, and moth in place, armed and ready for battle. MiM had indeed received our messages. Everyone at the Bluffs knew the nature of the force that was coming. They knew Pitch was on his way.
The mice quickly reversed my size to its original with one zap of the shrink ray’s override button, and I ran with MiM to check on Nightlight.
But Nightlight still slept.
MiM and I stood on either side of him. The moonbeam rested on MiM’s shoulder. We were worried for our beloved friend. What strangeness was going on inside Nightlight’s dream?
We watched for what seemed hours, then I started to notice that the room was no longer glowing as it had been. Had Nightlight’s dream ended? I glanced at MiM, and we both looked down at Nightlight—he, too, seemed to have dimmed! The remaining jewels on his magnificent uniform had gone dull; they caught less light than a wax doll. His skin no longer glimmered with its lovely inner light. The moonbeam flew and hovered just above Nightlight’s face, but Nightlight did not stir or wake. His breath pushed and pulled the moonbeam’s soft glow, but this was the only sign of life we could see.
MiM caught my eye. “We must let him continue on his sleep journey. Let’s leave him in peace, shall we?” I felt too anxious to leave, but at that very moment—
Bells rang! Horns blared! The general alarm was sounded! Pitch and his army must be approaching. I scrambled with MiM out of the room, and we headed to the highest peak of Ten Bluffs. From there, we could see the flat plains of the lunar landscape that surround the Bluffs. There are no other mountains or ridges to give cover to the enemy. But that enemy was vast, inky, and seemingly endless. With it came a deep, unnerving rumble that grew louder and louder, layering us with sound that we could feel! Everything was vibrating. It felt like fear itself.
I stared, stunned.
This army of Nightmares was too huge. They were simply too many for us to fight.
I reached for MiM’s hand. I’d never felt so afraid. I battled Pitch many times, but this felt different, more sinister. MiM looked me in the eye, this curious, valiant little man, as round as the Moon he defends. Dressed not as a warrior about to face his mortal enemy, but dandified from head to foot in the most resplendent suit I had ever seen. He broke into a perfectly cheerful, jack-o’-lantern grin. His eyes were bright, almost merry. I didn’t understand how he could be unafraid.
And then I too felt unafraid. Suddenly, I believed that there can be a goodness so pure and bright and strong that no darkness could ever extinguish it. MiM nodded. He knew what I was thinking. Then he spun around to face Pitch’s army. He put his spyglass to his eye with a confident snap. He swung the scope to the right, to the left, then, without looking away from his glass, he told the Moonbot Illumineer beside him, “Let loose the Lunars.”
Commands were shouted. The Moonbot troops began to toot their war horns, and the sky filled with Lunar Moths diving toward the dark hordes that were beginning to surround us. The moths strafed and bombed the enemy, diving in low to make sure they hit their mark. Light bombs detonated as bright as meteors. With each explosion, a dazzling spot appeared on the lunar landscape as Nightmare Men were wiped clean, but their replacements refilled the void far too quickly.
And then we saw Pitch’s giant Nightmare Cyclops Spider. It was bounding over the rushing mass of Nightmare troops, then took the lead as it clambered at the edges of Ten Bluffs. Its many legs scrambled at a freakish speed and stabbed at the ground with a savagery terrible to behold. The Moonmice would soon be under its treading.
“He means to overwhelm us by sheer numbers,” MiM observed, handing me a second spyglass from his waistcoat.
And indeed this seemed likely. There were so very, very many of every variety of Pitch’s wicked troops. With our spyglasses, we could see Pitch clearly. He sat at what appeared to be the controls of a large, oddly shaped, cannonlike gun.
“That’s it! The four relics combined,” I told MiM, for I was sure it was the thing I had glimpsed when we were on our mission. MiM was impressed by my observation, though he was less than pleased that I had disobeyed his orders to stay behind. He frowned at me in the way a loving grandfather would. And then his expression softened. I felt he was more proud of my accomplishment than he was angry at my disobedience.
“So it seemed Pitch has covered himself in a cloak of dark matter; that’s how he can use the light of the relics against us. The combined light of all the relics was too powerful even for the Guardians. The cloak will protect him,” muttered the Man in the Moon. Then his smile grew beatific. “He will not succeed.” The mice were clustered in rocky bivouacs along the slopes.
“Tell the mice to fire,” MiM ordered.
No sooner did he say this than thousands of moon missiles streaked through the skies and decimated the first wave of Nightmare cavalry. Then the second wave. And the third. But Pitch charged on, acting as a protective screen for all his troops behind him, forming a sort of gigantic spear of Nightmare soldiers, with the spider craft as the deadly tip. With startling swiftness, the spider scaled its way up the steep rise of the outer peaks and to the rim of the mountainous wall. The Moonbots sent a hail of fire from every angle, and the spider paused, but only so the Nightmare soldiers it carried could leap down upon the Bots. They battled hand to hand.
The fortress of the Ten Bluffs was now like an island completely surrounded by a moat of Nightmare Men. Hundreds of Lunar Moths dove and raked the dark monsters that pressed relentlessly toward us. Thousands of light bullets and bombs shot out at the waves of Nightmare troops, turning the night into a terrible, constant pulsing of blinding light and flames.
Then an awful sort of hum cut through the chaos of sounds. It must have been the relic weapon powering up. Pitch was aiming it at us!
“Engage the mirror shields,” MiM commanded sharply.
Giant, round, mirrorlike devices emerged from the ground and angled themselves toward Pitch’s vessel. A beam of scorching bright light blistered out from Pitch’s weapon—he had fired! But his aim was faulty; the beam hit the rocks below us. The force of it, h
owever, pulverized a hunk of the fortress, sending a deluge of rocks and boulders down upon the battlements below. I feared that another hit of that strength would cause our whole bluff to collapse.
But MiM remained calm.
A second blast erupted. This time it was blocked by the mirrors and was instantly deflected. It angled back toward Pitch.
He’ll be destroyed for sure, I thought, but I was wrong.
The beam engulfed the spider craft and shattered the rock wall beneath it. But with one awful jump, the machine escaped the light and landed halfway up our bluff. MiM and I ran to the edge of the bluff wall. Smoke poured from Pitch’s ship as it clawed and stabbed its way up to us. The top portion was scorched and peeled away. Pitch, too, was scorched and smoldering, charred almost black, but the whites of his eyes shimmered. He was still secure beneath his protective cloak. We could see him smiling as his hideous machine quickly closed the distance between us.
On every side of Ten Bluffs the battle thundered. The clash of Nightmare and Moon troops was intense beyond measure. How any creature of darkness or light could survive, I could not imagine, but the Moon defenses held in all but one small breach—where Pitch and his vessel scaled the outer wall. It was like a hole in a dam, but enough of a hole to allow Nightmares to stream into the fortress. They were a force that could not be contained.
The Bots were shoulder to shoulder, firing their light rifles in unison. Each volley vaporized the leading line of the Nightmares but stopped their advance only for a moment. They managed to creep a few precious feet closer. With lightning speed, the Bots formed into more rows. The front row kneeled and fired. Within an instant, the row behind them fired. Row after row, firing, firing. The Nightmares still advanced, but now only by inches. Pitch could not tolerate this pace. He gunned his motor. Ten thousand light bullets rained down upon him. The spider craft was being chipped away, but it still held. And Pitch’s dark matter shield withstood the onslaught.
Then Pitch was upon us. He made it over the bluff edge. MiM pulled me behind him. The spider’s legs pierced and stabbed at the valiant Moonbots, tossing them away like toys. Moonbots quickly turned the half dozen reflectors to protect us, but the spider’s front legs jabbed and shattered the reflector mirrors. Pitch halted his vehicle a dozen feet from us, aiming the relic weapon directly at us.
“You’ll go no farther, Pitch!” shouted MiM above the din of the battle. “You’ll never get the boy!”
MiM raised his lunar staff as the spider’s legs lunged at us, but MiM was more than up to the task. The little round man deftly deflected each jab with his staff, then broke off the spider’s front two legs with one neat sweep. Pitch was surprised. He paused his attack.
“It is no boy I seek, but a Nightlight!” he bellowed down at us. “The only Nightlight. He is the last relic! And with his heart, I will finally rid my own soul of the last glimmer of light that lives within me. I will finally be rid of any feeling other than hate. Hate for all things good.”
MiM stood his ground. “One more step, and by all the powers of my parents and the stars above, you will be destroyed!”
“I fear no star,” Pitch roared back. “I fear no power! And I don’t fear you!
“THEN FEAR ME,” came a laughing voice from behind us. A voice both familiar, yet not.
It was Nightlight!
With the speed of a hawk, Nightlight dove and landed on one knee between the spider and us. I could not see him well—the light that glowed from the relic cannon was nearly blinding. Then he slowly stood to face Pitch. His uniform was gone. He was dressed plainly in only a blue hooded shirt and brown leggings, and no shoes at all. His white hair was still wild but shorter. With his clenched fists on either hip, his stance was almost insultingly calm and defiant.
Nightlight looked over his shoulder to MiM and me and smiled. It was a smile like no other. It was not the childlike smile of the Nightlight I have known. There was something a bit wild and prankish in it. But it was a good smile. A jovial smile. A “follow me” smile.
He turned back to Pitch and pointed to the relic weapon. “You shouldn’t steal other peoples’ toys, Pitch. Especially if you don’t know how to play with them!”
Then he pulled his diamond dagger from his shirt and seemed ready to spring at Pitch. The blade glowed bright. And I saw the moonbeam! Nightlight’s moonbeam was in the blade and was ready to guide the sharp tip to Pitch’s black heart.
Pitch laid his damaged hand over his heart as if to protect it—the hand that still held the locket with the picture of his daughter. “You’ll never bring light to my heart again, little man. I’ll burn you like coal and use your blackened bones to make my evil complete!”
Then Pitch aimed the weapon directly at Nightlight. But something stopped him. He looked past Nightlight, and seemingly past us. MiM and I turned as well. Everything around us seemed to be moving in slow motion. Then we saw a most welcome sight. Arriving on a fleet of hastily constructed airships were Ombric, North, Bunnymund, Toothiana, and Sandman, and pouring down from the sky were all the armies they command. Legions of tooth fairies, elves, Yetis, and Warrior Eggs of every size. My heart surged. Even old friends like Petrov, North’s valiant horse, and the great bear of Santoff Claussen had come! They had somehow broken away from stormy Earth and made their way to us. They joined the Moonbot troops and, within moments, were overwhelming the Nightmare hordes.
And still every movement was unnaturally slowed down. I saw Ombric leading the way, and it dawned on me: The great wizard was slowing time.
Pitch triggered his weapon. Its blinding light emerged in slow motion, like a column of glowing clay. Using all of his powers, Ombric waded through this slowing of time to block the ray from consuming Nightlight. Raising his arms above his head, he fanned out his cloak until it made a near-perfect circle that shielded us all from the death beam that crept closer. From that moment, we who were behind Ombric regained our normal sense of time while everything in front of him grew slower still. North and the other Guardians stood with us.
Nightlight looked to the open sky, his diamond dagger held aloft with its moonbeam glowing. And in a fraction of a second he vanished, vanished into the heavens. I stared after him. Where was he going? Why?
Pitch stared as well, and his fury became unhinged. The old wizard was struggling against the intensity of the relic weapon’s ray as Pitch fired again and again. North waved for us to join him in readying one of the reflectors so as to give Ombric aid. But I could not keep from worrying about the full meaning of Nightlight’s leaving.
The reflector jammed; it was stuck and would not move. North and Sandy were pushing at it with all of their might, but Ombric seemed to be disintegrating in the savage brilliance of the ray. Then an even brighter light filled the entire sky. It was a dazzling, unnatural light, brighter than a dozen suns. All fighting ceased. No being, good or evil, could help but be mesmerized at the sight of a light so confounding.
I could hear Pitch’s coarse breathing in the sudden quiet. He sounded . . . afraid. Afraid of what was coming.
As we all looked skyward, the light splintered into seven separate points, like stars, but more radiant than any star I’ve ever seen.
“It is the Seven Stars of the Nightlights,” said MiM in awe.
And as he said this, the seven stars arranged themselves into what appeared to be a giant constellation of a single face. From it came a voice so deep and full that I could feel it as much as hear it.
“Our brother Nightlight will not be yours, Pitch,” the voice boomed. “Your schemes are finished, and we are finished with you!”
Then from the constellation came a great enveloping of their light. It wrapped around the Nightmare Armies, melting and molding them into giant clots that began to encircle Pitch. These clots condensed and calcified until they became super concentrated darkness. They became dark matter. A single lashlike strand of the light knotted around the relic weapon and snapped it away from Pitch’s clutches, instantly separat
ing it into its four distinct pieces. The egg on its staff, the sword, the Dreamsand, and the ruby box. The relics spiraled into the waiting hands of their true owners, Bunnymund, North, Sandy, and Tooth. In the unsettled air their capes and coats billowed. We were all thinking the same thing: We are the Guardians of Childhood, and we will fight to the last if need be.
But we did not need to. The waves of light continued to turn the Nightmare Army into a mass of molten darkness that engulfed Pitch until only his face and chest were left exposed. He seemed to be struggling to free one hand.
With one tremendous thrust, his arm broke through the thickening mass that was imprisoning him. Then we saw his hand. It still held the locket with the small cameo of his daughter. It had been melted, fused to his palm and fingers. Wild with panic, Pitch looked to North. He pounded his chest. “Please! I have failed every being I have ever held dear! Use your sword! I cannot bear this goodness that still lives in my heart.”
It is hard to have sympathy for a creature that has tried to destroy you, but in that moment I did. I felt sorry for the pitiful thing Pitch had become.
We all felt pity for Pitch in that awful moment. But the Seven Stars of the Nightlights did not. They had seen the ways of evil. They knew its many tricks. Good hearts will always have sympathy, but the wisdom of stars is clear and powerful and more true. They knew that death was not the answer for Pitch.
The melted essence of Pitch’s Nightmare Army spun round and round the Nightmare King. His hand that held the ruined picture of Emily Jane was now pinned against his chest at the spot just over his heart. “Pleeeeease,” he moaned to North, to all of us. “Pleeeease let me die.”
North could take no more. If there was any hate in North’s great heart, it was for Pitch. But to be imprisoned with the heartache, pain, and sorrow that Pitch faced seemed a misery worse than any creature should bear.
So North gripped his relic sword and marshaled every power it possessed. He lunged forward, his sword’s tip bright with the ancient power of the Golden Age. There was no force known that could stop it.
Guardians Chapter Book #5 Page 7