Ep. 1: A World Full of Weeping

Dark as Dawn | Bright as Night, a dark fantasy serial

DARK AS DAWN, BRIGHT AS NIGHT is a dark fantasy novel serialized in seventeen episodes. This is Episode One.

Deep in a Pacific Northwest rainforest, where Ten goes to make peace with his demons, he finds himself pursued by a presence he can’t easily explain away.

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TEN

The bullet was meant for me.

The bullet was meant for me, and every step I take in these woods I try to outrun the guilt, the rage. But it’s always there. A dark specter haunting my every waking hour and coming to life in my dreams.

That’s why, when I first get the feeling that something’s following me, I don’t even turn around. I’m so used to being hounded by my terrible choices I figure it’s just my conscience weighing on me again.

I hike on, trying to lose myself in this moving penance. But I can’t shake the feeling of being watched. A few minutes later, I stop, heels sinking into the soft loam of the forest floor, and take a swig from my canteen. I’m half-turned, and that’s when I catch sight of something hovering in my peripheral vision. I can almost explain it away as a trick of the shadows.

Almost.

I’ve come over a rise and down the steep side of a wet gully. Back at the top, something hangs in the air, ripples of darkness and light blurring the ancient cedar just behind.

I blink, blink again, but it’s still there.

I take another swallow, the round bottom of the canteen obscuring my view for a moment. When I bring the canteen down again, the thing’s still there, but now I swear it’s a bit closer. Faceless, limbless. It’s not much more than a splash of glistening atmosphere, but somehow no less sinister for it.

The base of my spine is tingling, my old battlefield senses kicking in.

They’re telling me to run.

I start heading away, ready to escape, but afraid to turn my back. I increase my pace to something just below a jog. Any faster and I’ll twist my ankle on one of the thousands of roots that writhe out of the ground here like primeval serpents.

I risk a look back. The thing’s still there. Closer now. A malevolent haze, swelling and surging through the air. My heart rate’s up. I’m sweating from the increased exertion and the dread roiling in the pit of my stomach. I pick up the pace, kicking up dead needles and black dirt, fern fronds shushing against my pant legs.

I reach the next rise and the forest floor angles steeply up. The thing’s closed the gap between us and my lungs are burning in my chest as I scramble up, boots slipping on the mud and lichen-covered rocks.

My thoughts mirror my feet, sliding around my brain, looking for someplace to stand firm. And the funny thing is the first stable ground I find is a memory. Not of my survivalist training or weapons drills, but of Helena. She’s soft and open in the gilded light of remembering. Nothing like the distant shell she would become. No, in this memory she’s my Helena, the one I fell in love with, the one I thought I’d forgotten.

There’s more to this world than you can understand.

I hear her voice in my head, like she’s standing next to me. It’s a whisper and a roar; her sweet rasp shot through with a phantom growl. I shiver, and the tremor makes me stumble. I go down on one knee, throw a glance over my shoulder.

It’s there, an arm’s length away, and for all the world, it seems like it’s reaching for me, grasping, searching, and all I know is I can’t let it touch me. So, with Helena’s words still in my head, I lunge forward, clawing my way up the embankment, and I can’t tell if I’m running from her voice or from the thing.

It doesn’t matter at this point. I just need to move, fast.

One more step and I reach the top of the ridge. But then there’s nowhere to go. The ridge is just that, a spine of rock at the top with a slope sliding away on the other side. I whirl around, my heart in my throat, and it’s there, not even a hair’s breadth away.

I edge backward, my foot finding nothing but air. My arm flings forward in a desperate attempt to regain balance. Instead, it slides through the shimmering phantom, my hand briefly covered in a shifting kaleidoscope of opal grays, pearly blacks. It would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been terrifying.

There’s more to this world than you can understand.

Helena’s voice again, barely discernible amid the static of fear.

She always felt there was more to life than logic and reason could explain. She’d sensed it in her bones in a way I could recognize but never match. With my hand sunk elbow-deep in that mass of shadows, I quite literally felt what Helena had always hoped I would: horror and wonder at what lies beyond the world.

I don’t really know what would have happened if I hadn’t kept falling. If, somehow, I had righted myself and stayed connected to that shimmering presence. But as my arm windmilled out of the thing, my moment of awful clarity evaporated into the inevitability of my imminent tumble down a hillside studded with unforgiving rocks and tree trunks.

Just as I gave in to gravity, there was a flash of silver billowing out and then closing up tight, and the thing disappeared. In its place was a woman. In a far-off corner of my mind, I noticed she was beautiful; she nearly glowed in the murk of the forest floor, but her hazel eyes were cold.

She made no attempt to reach for my flailing arms. Didn’t even appear surprised to see me dropping through the misty air. I tried to shout, but no sound could make it past my panic-choked throat.

It didn’t matter anyway.

She was gone.

***

I wake up sometime later. Hours must have passed. I can’t be sure how many, but the trees are beginning to fade into the growing gloom and the blood from the wound I find on the side of my head has dried. I try propping myself up on an elbow and immediately regret my decision. The forest floor tips at an unnatural angle. A stab of pain tears through my brain. I lie back and wait for the ache to subside, then consider my options.

I could stay put through the night. Rest. Maybe sleep a little, then try moving again in the morning. Along with an untended concussion, this option comes with the added bonus of hypothermia and potential wildlife encounters. Nothing I haven’t handled before, but not ideal.

Option two involves attempting to navigate the woods at night with a splitting headache and a serious case of the spins. Again, been there, done that, but I’m not exactly looking forward to it. Plus, stumbling along in the pitch black almost guarantees I’ll break something by coming down wrong on a root or rock.

So I stay, burrow down in the needles and moss, and close my eyes. Night sounds start soon after. Branches creak, sticks snap, things hoot and howl and scratch close enough that I think I could reach out and touch them. It should unsettle me, but I resigned myself to death a long time ago. I just thought it’d be at the bottom of a beer can, not the bottom of a ravine. But it doesn’t really matter, does it?

I’m bone tired, sick to my stomach. The throbbing in my temple threatens to turn into something deeper, more permanent. I close my eyes, but sleep doesn’t come. Just a kind of space between. A waking dream.

Or nightmare.

And she’s there. Like always. Swimming up to me through my confusion, through my pain.

Sometimes when I see Helena, it’s as she was when I lost her. Visions of blood and guilt.

Sometimes it’s dreams, soft and gentle and so real I wake with tears on my cheeks.

If my boys from the unit knew I have nights where I wake up crying, they’d give me hell. Even though a lot of them are just as fucked up as me, they’d just never admit it.

There was a time, hard as it is to remember, when we were all promise and arrogance. Bodies hard from the relentless physio, the only bruises on us from the training.

And I was the hardest. The best. Ten out of Tennyson. And then, eventually, just Ten.

Fucking Tennyson. My mother was a poet; Tennyson was her favorite. She never thought of it as a damn stupid name for a kid, but my mom never cared much about what might make my life easier. She was wild, flighty. I always thought of her as an exotic bird, beautiful but fragile, arrogant and mercurial, prone to take off if I came too close.

I have no idea how she kept me alive as a baby. Some instinct that wore off the farther into childhood I got, maybe. I want to say she tried her best as a single mom stuck out in our backwater town, but she was never cut out for motherhood and didn’t rise to the occasion.

One thing you learn from raising yourself is how to be self-reliant from a young age. By the time I was a teenager I was so used to taking care of myself I didn’t realize there was any other way to do it.

It wasn’t until I somehow graduated high school and joined the military that I realized what it meant to be part of a team. I wouldn’t have survived without those boys. I wouldn’t have survived without an iron-hard will either, a fighter’s mindset. I can thank my childhood for that. Everything else I learned from my brothers-in-arms.

They worked us hard, and when they let us loose, we played hard too. I never had to worry about going home alone on our nights out. I was young, fit. The boys gave me shit about my good looks, always threatening to bust my nose so they’d stand more of a chance with the ladies. Ten out of ten, and damn if I didn’t take advantage of that fluke of genetics. It was a charmed existence for a lonely kid from the sticks, and I loved every fucking minute of it.

Then I met Helena.

The boys and I had some rare time off from the base in San Diego, and we’d decided to go to Vegas for the weekend. It was late, and we were already several bottles of tequila in when I saw her dancing with her friends at some slick club.

It was obvious she knew what she was doing, her perfect curves moving in perfect rhythm to the thumping music. All of her friends were gorgeous, but there was something about her golden skin, her curtain of black hair. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I didn’t waste any time, just walked right up, and she grabbed my hand, put it behind her head. We swayed on the floor like we were the only ones in the world.

We kissed there for the first time, hips pressed against each other, sweat mingling on our skin. We spent the night together. I knew then that my wild days were over, just like that. But we both had lives and jobs to get back to.

We kept in touch as much as possible. Meeting in little moments we scrounged out of our schedules. Each time it was harder to leave her. She was like no woman I’ve ever known before or since. There was magic in her eyes, in her touch. And she moved with an otherworldly grace.

Helena was a prima ballerina, and it used to make me burn with a strange jealousy, thinking of all those rich snobs drinking in her body from their box seats. It kept me awake at night, the darkness closing in on my bunk, threatening to suffocate me with that old, aching loneliness.

When I was deployed, I thought we were over for good. There was no way she’d be that patient. Not someone like her. But I was the one she waited for. I was the one she loved. Between deployments we hardly left the house.

It wasn’t long before she got pregnant. Stupid, with me gone for months at a time and her livelihood dependent, in large part, on maintaining a certain kind of body. But she’d always wanted to be a mom. She was overjoyed. I was a bundle of nerves, scared out of my mind. But also thrilled.

Our baby girl was born in the spring, and her arrival turned my world upside down. I knew my love for Helena was deep. The kind of love that anchors you. My love for the kid was boundless, expansive. I understood the difference when my baby learned to walk.

She took her first tottering steps away from me and fell, the first in a long series of stumbles as she grew from that adorable toddler to a girl on the verge of adulthood.

Lovers grow together. Children grow up. Up and away.

We named her Mae, for her birth month mainly, but also for some secret promise she carried within her, that lit her up from her first breath to her last. She was warmth, and light, and life.

I know lots of parents think the world of their children, but I wasn’t the only one that noticed it. She seemed to literally enchant people, beguiling them with a smile, enthralling them with her laugh. ‘Mae’s magic’ Helena and I called it, grinning at each other, drunk with sleeplessness.

Those first years were sweet. We basked in her glow. So much so that, at first, we could both ignore the uneasiness that grew within us. Back then, it was just a hunch, a weird feeling, the merest tinge coloring our days.

Not surprisingly, Helena noticed it first. She’d always been more sensitive to the world, open to its possibilities. She was spiritual, a lover of astrology, a believer in fate and tarot cards and the healing energy of crystals.

My combat experience and upbringing left me skeptical, grounded by the realities of a harsh world. But even I noticed it eventually, a foreboding that had grown from a whisper to become a quiet pulse, the heartbeat of our lives.

Mae could see things.

When she was still just a bit of a thing, we’d find her jabbering at an empty corner or a bit of blank wall. She told us it was the Lonely Man or Sad Girl, sometimes just a thing called the Gray.

We tried to write it off as imagination, a way to ease her only-child boredom. But it happened everywhere and often. Our whole world became populated with the things Mae saw.

Helena called them spirits. I called them make-believe and grew more annoyed, angry even, each time. It was distracting and ridiculous, but I missed both of them and their ghosts every time I left for another tour.

Mae and I had a ritual we did every night before I was going to leave on one of those long missions. She had a favorite story, a poem actually, from a book I’d saved from my mom’s collection, one of the few things I’d kept from my childhood. It was a W.B. Yeats poem: The Stolen Child, and I’d read it to her. Something about the way it made leaving seem both exciting and sinister felt right for the occasion.

In it a kid is tempted away from his home by fairies. At first, he’s excited by the prospect of life among magical creatures, but after it’s too late, he realizes everything he’ll miss about his human existence. It was like the old versions of fairy tales. Pleasure and peril wrapped with a bow.

It wasn’t necessarily a happy read. I suspect only a kid like Mae would find it comforting. A kid who was never totally at home in this world, someone who constantly saw things that shouldn’t exist. I don’t think she ever really thought of it as a bit of fiction. For her, it was evidence that other kids had felt the pull of other worlds and sometimes even gave into the magic calling them away.

We never talked about whether those kids came back.

One time, before I headed out for another months-long tour, I read the story as usual, and I gave her a little glass fairy. It was at rest on its knees, its delicate wings edged in gold. I perched it on a shelf near her bed so it seemed to be keeping watch. She loved it. I thought it would eventually find its way to a shoebox in the back of her closet, but even as a teen, that fairy was sentry and totem.

Maybe it was an omen, too.

In my sweet dreams, that’s what I see. Mae, tucked in tight, her black hair framing her open face. I close the book of poems, kiss her head. Just before I turn off the light, the golden wings of the fairy catch my eye, and I’m sad, but I can believe she’ll be alright, my beautiful, strange, enchanted girl.

In my nightmares, that boundless love becomes a bottomless pit of guilt and shame and blood.

So much blood.

---

BLYTHE

Damn it. He’s probably going to live.

The slope had been steep, but it was no certain death. With any luck his skull would catch one of those rocks on the way down. Maybe he’d break his neck. Humans are fragile. But despite his careworn features and a demeanor that belied some inner anguish, the man had looked strong, capable, regardless of whatever was troubling him.

He’d certainly been able to outrun the snag for longer than I thought possible, especially over this unpredictable terrain. At first, I’d taken him for a typical deep-woods backpacker, but all my years among the humans have taught me a great deal about the way a person’s profession carves itself into their body. And that man had ex-military written all over him.

Strong, capable, trained. And now touched.

It could be worse. Thankfully, it’s rare for a human to have physical contact with my wards, thank the Dawn. I have enough to worry about as it is. When they do, it’s almost always one of the snags. Something about the turmoil they experienced in life makes them especially volatile after death. Usually, they hover about places that had meaning for them, but they don’t often demonstrate anything you’d call purpose.

They’re attracted to melancholy. And it’s usually the clinically depressed or angst-ridden teenagers that have run-ins with them. People who are nearly always useless to me.

Certainly, the man exuded the gloom of that complicated feeling more than most, but chasing him down showed a kind of focus that frankly, I couldn’t recall seeing from a snag in the past.

Puzzling. But more interesting is the possibility that he survives and, if he makes it, how he’ll handle all the things he’s about to see. Potentially, a person with his background could be an asset. Dawn knows I could use all the help I can get right now.

I glance down at my gossamer. I’m holding it tightly, the fine silver mesh bulging as the snag inside pushes against its confines. Very interesting. Once inside the gossamer they’re usually quiet, inert. This one is frantic. Let my grip slip, and I’m certain it will be out and away from me in an instant and probably angry.

I’m not really equipped to deal with wards that become disturbed, a fun way for the Dawn to continue to screw me over even after my banishment. So I tighten my fingers, the impossibly fine gossamer becoming a cord of velvet silver in my palm, and quicken my pace as much as possible in the thick undergrowth.

I want to get to the mornrill before it gets dark. This particular one has a keeper that isn’t very fond of me. Well, let’s be honest, none of the keepers are big fans of mine at the moment, but because this mornrill is so close to the Wright it’s become particularly inundated with souls.

As a keeper, of course, she’s been granted protective capabilities by the Dawn, and unlike some of her sisters, she has no qualms about utilizing her Dawn-given gifts. Any kind of self-defense I may have has come from centuries of surviving in this harsh world. Immortal doesn’t mean impervious, and I’m not anxious to test myself against a cranky keeper.

The gray mist of the forest has thickened and darkened by the time I hear the first soft burbles of the mornrill in the distance. The more space I’ve put between myself and the ridge where I encountered the man, the calmer the snag’s gotten. By the time I spy the mornrill’s crystal waters, my gossamer hangs heavy and still from my fist. I step lightly now. With any luck, I can get the snag across without a confrontation.

“You dare bring another of the fractured to my waters, Warden.”

I wince at the sound of the keeper’s voice. I know what lies beneath her silken timbre.

“Keeper, may the Dawn always glow within you,” I say and bow.

“Save your hollow blessings. We both know why you’re here.”

I can feel annoyance rising within me. The keepers are of low rank and love that I must bow to them. Centuries have gone by, and they still won’t let me forget how far I’ve fallen. I swallow my urge to remind them of my origins, of the blood that still glows in my veins, even if it’s been tarnished from neglect.

“Of course, Keeper. I have heard your complaints. I understand the mornrills of this area are overflowing with the fractured. I have promised to address it.”

The keeper huffs her disapproval. I try to remember the time when I believed them to be beautiful creatures. This one is green, and once I might have found her moss-bright skin and trillium-leaf hair enchanting. Now, I can only see the decay lingering just below her beguiling appearance. Only her eyes belie the truth of her. They flash now with a cold, black light.

“Promises are meaningless, Warden,” she hisses through her too-sharp teeth. “You were sent here to work. The Dawn may find this world a convenient place to send its delinquents and disappointments, and you may scoff at your punishment, but we do not find the job you have been given to be trivial. It is not something that can be ignored. We have long since moved past the point of promises.”

“The Wright is powerful,” I say, trying hard to keep the edge out of my voice. “You know as well as I that her shadow keeps me at a distance. I have sent those that I thought might defeat her, but I admit I have underestimated her resources and her will.”

“We find your excuses to be as satisfying as your promises,” the keeper says. Her eyes are so alight with disgust I have to look away. Once upon a time, I would have killed a creature such as her for much less. The shame of it makes my stomach turn. “You will find a way to stop the Wright. Not someday. Not soon. Now.”

I can feel my shame turning to rage. When I speak I can hear a hint of my old self, and it gives me courage.

“What would you have me do, Keeper? It’s very well for you to threaten me, tied as you are to this river of death. I never asked for this job. I never deserved it. But even so, I do the best I can. It is not my fault your mornrill runs so close to her.”

“Ah, but it is your fault that she exists in the first place, is it not?”

Her eyes are burning black holes now in her perfect jade face. A smile of triumph plays around her lips. We both know what she’s said is true.

“We have been accommodating,” she continues, “but our waters run foul with fractures, and we grow sick of wading through the muck. What is more, some of my sisters report their mornrills threaten to break their banks, an unprecedented event that would surely wreak havoc in this world and reflect rather poorly on your bid to return to the Dawn. Find a way to stop the Wright. We will accept no more fractures until you do, beginning with that one in your gossamer.”

I look down at the length of silver still clutched in my hand. I’d nearly forgotten it was there. No longer accepting fractures. I wonder briefly what might happen to a world where fractures are allowed to roam freely. The ones that I haven’t caught already cause enough damage. Luckily, the one in my gossamer isn’t a fracture.

“It’s a diessence,” I say, feeling a smirk of satisfaction lift the corners of my lips. I can see the keeper hates even admitting her small assumption was wrong.

“Really?” she asks. “A complete soul. How unusual.” The black fire in her eyes has died down, and she rearranges her face into what, for the uninitiated, might be the anticipation of welcoming a new soul to the Dawn. I know it’s only poorly concealed avarice that gives her features the semblance of warmth.

“Before you get too excited, though, you should know it’s a snag.” I watch as my words turn her emerald glow to olive drab, then throw open my gossamer.

The snag blooms out of its confines like an orchid, slow and beautiful. The keeper, face once more distorted with disgust, lunges forward, wreaking the sense of propriety her kind is always so keen on keeping up. Her hand grasps hold of a fold of the scintillating light and shadow, her knuckles turning the color of spring leaves as the snag begins to twist and wrinkle. She drags it to the mornrill, her legs melting into the stream as she enters the rushing water.

I know she hates the feel of the snag’s muddled diessence in her fingers, hates that it will be near-worthless in the Dawn and therefore hardly worth the added trouble. Mostly, I expect, she hates the reminder that for all her conceits, she is nothing more than an intermediary between this useless place and the next, a fringe player beholden to a system built on an ancient hierarchy.

I watch her wrestle the snag further into the mornrill. It tries to escape, but the keeper’s grip is special, the only thing I know besides my gossamer that can trap what remains of humans once their earthly bounds release them. Nevertheless, the snag corkscrews violently around the keeper’s grasp, shattering the water into a thousand glittering pieces.

I’ve never seen a snag fight so hard, and suddenly I feel a strange urge to go after it, wrap it up once more in my gossamer and set it loose back in the woods where I found it. But the keeper’s grip is unbreakable, and the attempt would certainly kill me. So I watch, swallowing through the tightening in my throat. I know what it is to feel trapped. It pains me to see something fight so hard against the inevitable.

We’re all beholden to the Dawn, but the certainty of that doesn’t make it easier.

The keeper struggles forward. Her mornrill isn’t wide, but the snag is slowing her progress. Finally, she reaches the middle of the fast-moving water and the broken facets of the snag begin to shift and merge. I should leave now while the keeper is distracted. Her mood was already foul, and it will be worse after crossing the snag. But I stand rooted to the spot, unable to tear my eyes away from the human shape coalescing in the keeper’s grasp.

It’s a woman. Her face is clear now. High cheekbones, almond eyes, soft lips. Gorgeous, even with the snag’s tangled flashes of light and shade still visible on her skin. All souls appear delicate, but she is even more so. Yet there is a strength to her, a litheness in her limbs and, more than that, a kind of inner power. A dancer. A mother. I can see it the same way I could tell the man in the woods was a soldier.

She glares at the keeper. Most of the souls she crosses are compliant, inert. The keeper herds them across like sheep. They seem ready and willing to cross. But not her. Her stance is taut, her eyes defiant. She seems to have agency still, and it’s clear she wants to stay. I admire her resolve, but the keeper’s crossing can’t be fought. I watch as they negotiate the midpoint of the mornrill. The woman’s form begins to dissolve, growing blurry at the edges.

By now I expect her to give up, but she only thrashes harder against the keeper’s inescapable pull. Despite any sense of self-preservation, I edge closer to the water, hungry to keep my eyes on her for as long as possible. Her body isn’t much more than silver mist now, but her face is still discernible. She turns back, her eyes searching, desperate for anything that might anchor her to this world.

Then she sees me, surprise amplifying the intensity of her regard. Her mouth moves, but I hear nothing. She throws a desperate glance up at the keeper who moves ceaselessly forward, gliding over the water without so much as a shred of comfort softening her jade face.

The woman looks back at me, and her mouth moves once more before it too melts into haze. I take a step forward, surprising myself with how much I want to hear her words, but then I feel the burn of the mornrill’s water against my foot, and I jump back.

At last, it’s just the woman’s eyes, horrible and miserable in the consuming haze. They’re speaking to me, sending me a message that’s lost across the rushing water of the mornrill. What does she want? The concerns of this random human shouldn’t affect me, but I find myself unsettled.

I will those terrible eyes to transmit their message, but another moment and they’re gone, subsumed into the gray of the mornrill’s far shore. Nothing but keepers return from that lifeless place.

Whatever she wanted to say is lost now.

Lost to the Dawn.

---

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