A Lament of Moonlight

Prologue

The storm came in the night. It wasn’t a storm of rain, or thunder and lightning but it was a bad storm none-the-less. It was a storm of fire, of loud explosions in the sky and tremors in the earth.

The first blazing ball of fire rent the atmosphere well after the moon had risen, and it woke nearly everyone the continent over. People stumbled from their beds and homes, standing in front lawns, verandas, or palace balconies to watch as one fiery ball after another lit up the sky in oranges and reds.

Even before some of the smaller balls of fire struck homes and cities, creating craters and burning livelihoods there was fear. Sleep was soon forgotten in the blind terror that gripped O sending some into panic, while others remained frozen in their steps staring with mouths wide in shock.

There was something different about this fire, something nearly otherworldly, though none could precisely put their finger on what was so different about the fire.

Certainly the fire was made the same way, with air and heat, but the air was different, the heat was different. There was also something strange about the core of the fire. It burned hot, just like any center of fire, but it was stone, or something like stone, which carried the fire rocketing through the night sky, streaking across the clouds to alight on the far horizon, illuminating the distance as if the sun were rising.

The flash was so bright that many of those who witnessed the act had to shield their eyes from the intensity.
T
he
re was a trembling in the air, a
r
oar
that greeted their ears even as the ground below them buckled and heaved.

The light flickered and wavered for what seemed like hours, but eventually time passed, as it always does, and even the longest night had to bow before its power. The flickering wavered out, and once more darkness reigned supreme over the night sky.

Try as they might, all who had seen the blazing storm in the sky could not find sleep again. They lay wide awake, deprived of sleep and dreams, wondering if the storm was going to repeat, wondering if maybe the fire in the sky would come for them next, wondering, perhaps, if death were waiting for them just outside their hovels and huts.

And more than a few
of the people worried that the Goddess
was angry at them for some reason. Was
s
he angry enou
gh to have sent the fires of her
wrath upon them? And so they turned to prayer, try
ing to appease the angered
Goddess
.

Soon another fire was brewing on the horizon, and startled, people began to stir only to find that this was a natural fire, one that had lit the sky since the beginning of time: the sun.

In times past wyrders would have been able to cast out their minds, floating along the air like birds and griffons and wyrms
to
spy what had caused the blazing rain. With the power of their wyrd they would be able to know what had happened,
and where it had happened. Now
their
wyrd was
plague
d and many dared not touch it
for touching the wyrd
would invite that plague into their bodies visiting sickness and infirmity to the mind
.

Eventually, as years passed and no more fires came from the sky, people began to pu
t their lives back together. The Goddess
, it appeared was not angry with them.

But now,
in the night a terror lurked, for in the night the shadows came. The people began calling these beings of darkness and malcontent shadow people, but as the months and weeks passed and more and more encounters came with the ruthless shadow people they realized they were not a race or a people at all, for they were nothing more substantial than shadows themselves. So they became known as shadkin: kin to the shadows.

Tribes of priests,
warriors
, and wyrders
rose up against the dark legion
s and fought bravely with
prayer
, sword
and
spells
against the shadkin
.

The wyrders began going mad
for the power within them, the wyrd that had been corrupted the night the storm happened grew in them, creating a malaise that polluted their minds and their gifts until the smallest of helpful spells created the most destruction. Wyrd was out of their control, and so they were hunted as well. The luckiest of them escaped into the exile of forests and mountains to live out the rest of their days in
tenuous
peace.

It was a time in which O could have greatly used the aid of wyrd, but that was not available to them, and so they
clung to the other powers of the Goddess
, casting the shadkin out of their lands, but a shadow is a hard thing to kill.

It would take a far more powerful weapon, and a far more catastrophic event to rid O from their plight, and so the true saga begins.

Chapter One

It was on a warm summer afternoon that a strange event occurred, an event that, at the time, Abigail and Melvin did not find all that strange, though the creature they gazed upon was like nothing they had before seen. They paid no attention to the swirl of excitement through their bellies, nor the slight tilting in the earth.

“What is it?” Melvin asked as he peered over Abigail’s shoulder, their dark hair stirring in the warm afternoon breeze that was clotted with the noise of buzzing insects, chirping birds, rowdy youths and on
e frustrated, yelling teacher.

“It is a butterfly,” Abigail answered and with extreme force of will stopped herself from rolling her dark eyes and scoffing at her older brother.

“It is a strange looking butterfly,” he pointed out itching the back of his head in the bewildered way he normally did when presented with something he did not understand.

It was true; the butterfly looked rather queer with its clear gossamer wings, veined and outlined in a luminescent plum color that looked for all the world like it was swirled with diamond dust.

Abigail, who was completely fascinated with insects, snakes, frogs, and nearly anything else a young lady normally found repulsive, smiled at the creature and held her hand out to it.

Now Gretchen was
about one of the nastiest children
one could ever imagine being around. She was a terror to gaze upon with her long, knobby appendages, her gaunt
bluish
face, and bulbous eyes. She was also their cousin who lived with the Bordeaux family. Constantly she was trying to get them into trouble, so it came as no surprise that when her bloated eyes fell upon them she made a grunting noise the teacher recognized and snapped her fingers in the direction of Abigail and Melvin, hunched over in the bushes, next to a small, fern covered fountain, where they observed the beautiful insect.

“What is going on over there?” Mrs. Clemp demanded, and they could hear her heavy footfalls pounding over the ground toward them. Abigail, not wanting their teacher to find what they were looking at quickly lied.

“We were searching for the ball we lost,” and grabbing the leather
ball
they quickly went back to playing with their sister Ruby. The teacher sniffed, made a noise that told them she did not believe them for one minute, and went back to the school-house.
             

Almost instantly Abigail went back to where she found the butterfly, and was shocked that it was still there. Now it was the nature of Abigail to try to keep any insect she found, and that is precisely what she tried to do with her new friend, whom she had come to call Luna in her head, for the butterfly reminded her oddly of moonlight: moonlight on smoke.

She held out her hand, and making noises like one would a dog or cat encouraged the butterfly toward her hand. Surprisingly it worked, and the butterfly, in a most unlike-a-butterfly-way, fluttered from the base of the fountain to her hand.

That was enough to startle Abigail, though she recovered quickly, and placed the butterfly under the hem of her dress as Mrs. Clemp came around to see what she was doing.

Again Abigail pretended she was looking for the ball and, hoping the butterfly would remain where it was, played much
more carefully with her sister
.

Well before dusk school was dismissed, and the town paladins escorted the youths home. On their walk home Abigail pulled up the hem of her dress and found the butterfly in the precise spot she left it, though the minute she touched it the butterfly fluttered up out of her reach, and circled the heads of the three youths.

Abigail tried several times jumping here and there in an attempt to catch the butterfly with her overly large hat, but each attempt failed, and instead she reluctantly watched the butterfly drift lazily through the air on the soft summer breeze that rippled the branches of the surrounding pines in a symphony much like the ocean.

Ruby, as was normally the case on their walks home, would talk to the trees. Giggling as the wind played with her hair. Ruby claimed the wind was the trees responding to her attempted conversation. She had began naming the trees sometime ago after she had read a fairytale about dryads, and she believed the same tree spirits she read about existed in the trees they had clotted all around their home. Melvin had said several times that there were no such thing as dryads, and that was why they were in books of fairytales and not in books of science, simply put, he went on, there would come a day when she would just have to grow up and accept the fact that if there was anything abnormal in the woods it was to be attributed to the shadkin.

Ruby always won these arguments by telling Melvin maybe he was a little too grown up, a point which shut his mouth tight for the rest of the walk home. She went even further to remind him that the Fey Forest was so named because it was the habitation of many fey creatures. And it had been named that many years before the Falling, thank-you very much. Melvin would scoff and mumbled under his breath that it was filled with imagination only, and if such creatures lived there, why were they never seen?

They loved the summer with all its scents and noises. The forest is a different world all together than life in the cities and townships in other places. It is most easy for one to believe that fairytales and folklore exists when presented with the alien nature of country life. This could be the very reason that Ruby proclaimed she often saw trees walking in the background, but none could hear noise that made evidence of her claims. The only sound they heard was the peaceful blowing of the wind.

That sounds of nature, however, turned frightful before long, for there was soon a voice carried on the air, a voice that, while beautiful, whispered the most deplorable word they had ever heard, and though they didn’t know what the word meant, or if it was even a word Melvin and Abigail could not help but feel the shiver of cold dread that slithered down their spines.

“Helvegr,”
the raspy, air born voice skittered across their skin like insects, creeping through their bodies, raising goose bumps on their skin and drawing a shiver from so deep inside of them it seemed to quiver their souls.

All of them, including their paladin escorts stopped dead in their tracks.

“Did you hear that?” Melvin asked, and it became apparent once he asked it that he was not the only one to have heard it, for the paladins were mumbling to themselves looking around, and Abigail’s face was white as snow. It couldn’t bode well
if paladins, the warriors of the Goddess
, took pause at a whispered name.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Ruby said pushing on past Melvin and Abigail who were standing stock still, goose-bumps dancing along their arms at the sound of the vile word that was rippling on the air as it stirred the great pine trees all around the dirt path. Pine needles and various leaves from other trees drifted down around them, and Melvin shrugged as the voice faded.

At the abruptness of Ruby’s movement everyone came back to themselves, and the paladins continued on, now with a renewed solemnity, and a prayer on their tongues.

“That was strange,” Melvin announced and carried on seemingly nonplussed. Abigail, who had heard it more than once that day was not so easy to turn away from what it could mean. Now she walked the wooded path the rest of the way home musing on what the name could mean, losing all interest in the insects around her that vied for her attention, even Luna.

The school was to the south and slightly to the west of their home, so when walking home they took the main wagon road north for twenty minutes, and then cut east along a more wooded walk fifteen minutes home. Needless to say it did not take them too long to reach home, a comfortable two story house which contained all the bedrooms on the ground floor: one belonging to Melvin, one to Abigail and Ruby, one to Gretchen and the last belonging to Rorex their father.

The upper story of the house was a near mystery to them all. Normally when aunt Mattelyn or uncle Fortarian would come over Rorex and they w
ould gather up there. Abigail
figured this was the place where grown-ups normally met to have their adult drinks and conversations. They had heard of parlors before in school, so they assumed that is what the second floor contained, a parlor and all of fathers ledger and business work for the leather shop he owned in Dorvenshire
, the town their home bordered.

Abigail made sure as soon as she got home that Luna was been removed from the hem of her dress (for Luna had surprisingly settled there again moments before they had entered the house). She emptied a dead moth from a jar she had kept on her nightstand and refilled it with grass from outside her window and a little water from the well before slipping Luna into it, screwing on the top, and replacing it on her nightstand.

So it was that the rest of the day passed with various odd jobs, Ruby and A
bigail
taking over the household chores since their mother’s death and Melvin helping their father. Gretchen would lock herself in her room, and refuse to come out. Such a burden was their cousin that none cared as long as she was out of their way.

Dinner was taken, with slight conversation about the storm Rorex could feel brewing, and after the
y had cleaned up they
sat down to do their homework. About halfway through their homework it started raining, which
meant there would be no enjoying the
outside before dark, the storm did more than dampen their spirits, it also bored them senseless.

Abigail decided, seeing how they could not go outside, she would play with Luna, so she removed the lid from the jar and coxed the purple butterfly from within with coos and clicks of her tongue like it were anything but a butterfly.

Luna didn’t come out with her hand though, but instead shot out of the jar as if urged by the lightning flashing outside. She fluttered out of Abigail’s room she shared with Ruby, and down the hall, Abigail in hot pursuit. She stopped beside the laundering room, and fluttered upstairs to the second floor where the teenagers were not allowed to go.

Abigail cast around, looking to see if anyone was watching, and miraculously with a household that large no one was around to see, so she quickly climbed the stairs and searched through a series of storage rooms, looking for Luna before she found her at the end of the hall, perched on a wizened door carved and bordered with strange, blocky symbols that to her seemed like a language she had seen somewhere before, but couldn’t read.

“Bad Luna!” Abigail scolded, lunging for the butterfly, but Luna fluttered up out of her reach, and all Abigail achieved was knocking open the door into the room. S
tronger came the sense of dread
that any moment her father would find her apparently snooping, and send her to bed with a harsh scolding and a stout lashing.

The butterfly fluttered into the room the moment Abigail had opened the door and streaked to the window that was sat curiously into the round oaken table in the center of the room. There Luna perched, and Abigail imagined that she was studying her reflection in the black window, watching the purple veined wings beating deftly at the murky surface.

It was the strangest room Abigail had ever seen, and she found it slightly bewildering that her sensible father would even have such a room. It looked more like it belonged in her aunt Matty or uncle Forts house, not in Rorex’s.

The window standing in the center of the round table was not the only oddity in the room, but all along the edge of the table was carved strange, blocky symbols like on the door, and still she could not tell what they were. Part of Abigail truly believed that this was a language of some sort, but then another part of her didn’t want to believe that, for it would imply that her father was able to read the language, and that would mean she didn’t know him as well as she thought.

There was no denying now why they were not allowed in this room, it gave Abigail the creeps, and in more ways than just its odd nature. Everything she stared at from the dusty anvil to the painting on the wall of a tree with different human habitations decorating it spoke to her in a manner that words could not. The tree seemed to de
pict philosophy ranging from the Goddess
at the top, human life in the center, to death and a strange well at its roots. Though she feared it, Abigail felt at home within this room, more so than she felt in the rest of the house, and that bothered her even more for she couldn’t describe why she felt that way.

Lightning flashed outside
and rain pelted the outside window
, making her jump and her heart thump harder in her chest. Still Luna observed herself in the black window that seemed more
a mirror
than anything else.

Abigail didn’t want to walk around the room to see the curious objects she could not describe, but she found herself drawn on. Here a picture of a well ringed by three women in varying stages of life. The women were clad in grey and their clasped hands encircled the well, for while it supported the root of a tree it was small enough that such a feat was possible.

There were a couple images that disturbed her; one was a woman giving birth to an unimaginably large snake. Another was a giant wolf held fast to a tree by what appeared to be gossamer thread which he was struggling to be free of so that he could chase after the moon. The last was a woman, half rotted, half living, her face seeming to go from youthful and beautiful to decaying corpse in the flash of an eye.