Ep. 10: Origins
Dark as Dawn, Bright as Night, a novel
DARK AS DAWN, BRIGHT AS NIGHT is a dark fantasy novel serialized in seventeen episodes. This is Episode Ten.
New to the story? START HERE.
Previously: Mae follows Bram to the realm of the Sluagh and Hesper decides it’s time to make Ten’s votary.
Up ahead: As Blythe recovers from her journey to the waterwild, her dreams take her back to a time before she was an outcast. With the memory of her downfall fresh in her mind, she decides the time is right to take action.
CONTENT ADVISORY: This episode would probably be rated TV14 if it were made for television due to some sexual content. Reader discretion is advised.
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BLYTHE
I’ve never been so glad to see my little cabin.
The journey back from the waterwild was exhausting. It required all my concentration to return from that place on the margins of the world.
And several times I almost fulfilled my cavalier wish to wander forever among the enchanted trees of that border realm. But every time I felt myself losing the path, I gripped the fingerful of waterwild a little tighter, and running my own fingers over the knotty knuckles, I would remember the reason for all this, and vengeance would once again light my way.
Now, I stumble across the tall grass of my meadow, knees shaking with the effort. I wonder for a moment if they’ll support me up the few stairs to my door, but I manage.
I wrap a pale, shaking hand around the handle of the door, but I hardly need to push. The cabin knows me, and the heavy door swings in with a shush against the smooth floorboards.
I’m across the threshold, and I sink back against the door’s solid wood, feeling the thunk of the latch catching and the lock sliding into place.
A breath.
Two.
Just a few more steps to the bed, but it might as well be a hundred.
I stumble across the braided carpet as the fire springs to life in the stone hearth, and without pausing to undress, I sink into the welcome softness of the sleigh bed pushed against the far wall of the single room.
Usually, I hate this place. When I’m here, it’s because the Wright has been particularly troublesome, creating a flurry of fractures that require days to round up. But today I’m glad for the little comforts I built into it with whatever dregs of magic were left to me, and my eyes close almost as soon as my cheek hits the crisp cotton of the pillow.
I feel my mind loosen its grip on the here and now.
I sink into the soft blackness behind my closed eyes and give into sleep.
Into the realm of dreams.
It’s a place I rarely visit.
When I do sleep, it is the sleep of all my kind: short, empty, efficient. Just what’s required to survive another brutal day. Spend too long with your eyes closed and they may stay that way forever.
But I’m safe here.
For now.
And I let go to the pull of memory.
***
When I open my eyes, I’m in the old country. I know it immediately. The impossible green of those springtime hills rolling away into the distance, the white-blue of the sky.
It was a golden age for those of the Dawn. The people believed in us. Feared us. In this place, in this time, we needed no hunters. No wardens eking out a puny harvest of diessences from those too weak or damaged to evade our gossamers.
Here, they offered themselves up willingly after death.
And we feasted.
Oh, we feasted.
Gorging ourselves on the diessences of thousands. My mouth waters at the thought of the flavor of soul and shade mingling on my tongue, filling me with the hopes and dreams and fears, the love and hate and ecstasy, the despair and all the rest of the strange delicacies that make up a human life.
But it was nothing, nothing at all compared to a quintessence.
On sacred days, they gave us their best and brightest and we devoured them.
Swallowing names, infusing ourselves with their desires, drinking down their blood flowing thick and rich from veins they opened themselves.
In return, we promised the Dawn on those darkest days of winter. In the summer, we gave them hours in the sun so that they might feed themselves. And in between, we reminded them of the balance of light and dark. Satisfy us, and we would keep the darkness at bay.
For if there was one thing they feared more than us, it was the Dark Horde, the night walkers, the Sluagh.
I walk, relishing the feel of the soft grass between my toes.
The world of the Dawn is hard, in all ways. There is nothing there so soft and luxurious as this thick emerald carpet, and I indulge my senses.
Why not? I’m already not supposed to be here. It is not yet time for the midsummer festival when the humans call us down to their ceremony among the cairns. But I can’t wait. I’ve grown fascinated by them. The creatures that feed us and fill us with such wonderful things that the Dawn would never know otherwise.
But there’s one that interests me more than the others.
He’s lovely. Not in the perfect way of the Dawn, but in the unexpected way of humans.
Most are dull and plain. But others are undeniably attractive, their strange, irregular features coalescing into an unlikely beauty. He is dark-haired and dark-eyed, with the lanky frame of youth. Not yet a man. And though I am ages old, I am still young in the realm of the Dawn, an adolescent really. Just like him.
It was last midsummer that I saw him for the first time. He was seated to the right of the human king, a circlet of silver nestled among his dark curls.
They sat atop their stone plinth, surrounded by others—their court, I suppose—watching with grim mouths as their yearly offering was led out and presented to us amid the hypnotic beat of drums and the chanting of the other humans, the flickering light of the fire twisting their faces into savage masks.
Six men and six women only just come of age stood before us, each honored to be chosen as a sacrifice but terror-struck nonetheless by the predator gods that stood before them.
That heady mix of fear and pride pounded in their veins, and the smell of it in the air stirred our animal natures. I could feel our civility, carefully built but fragile nonetheless, falling away.
I wanted to feed.
Needed to feel their essence run between my teeth.
But it wasn’t my turn.
Janu, the eldest and most ruthless of us, chose first. He selected one with striking features, a roundness to her curves. He took her name, swallowing it whole as soon as it left her luscious lips. Then he took the rest of her, bringing her easily to the height of pleasure before he sank his teeth into her neck, drinking down her vibrant blood.
But that was all this time.
Once in a great while, he would not stop there.
Janu would continue the ritual, long and painful though it was, to give one of the sacrifices new life. Godmaking was particularly sacred. It was how our ranks grew. But only Janu made the selections.
Only he could create children of the Dawn.
He would perform no such act this time, though.
And as the last of the life drained from the human before him, the rest of us could wait no longer.
We followed Janu’s lead, losing ourselves to the pull of our true selves.
But all the while, I kept my eyes on the young prince, and when his flame-lit eyes met mine, he never once looked away.
No human had ever been so bold. A quick glance, not more. But an open stare, never.
It was wildly insolent, but I was mesmerized. I betrayed my youth by imagining it was something like adoration. It was only much later, after it was far too late, that I realized it was nothing of the sort.
When the drumming finally died away and the blood dried on the blood-splattered cairns, we faded away with the rising sun, seemingly satiated.
But a not-small part of me still wanted more. And as soon as I left, I longed to return, to lay eyes once more on that strange, audacious prince.
I walk in my dream, toes in the grass, eyes on the horizon, eager to catch a glimpse of what I can smell so clearly on the breeze.
He’s close, maybe just around the curve of this hill, and it matters not that Janu and all the rest might murder me for deigning to show myself in this realm on a day not designated as holy. We do not consort with the rabble of humanity otherwise.
There is the great balance of things to consider.
But I am strong, unflinching. One day, I know in my bones that I will best even Janu. They understand this too, and buried in their admonishments is fear. Fear of just how powerful I am, of how magnificent I’ll be.
So with the careless courage of youth, I flout the rules.
And there he is, where I often find him, on a little hillock covered in emerald moss that overlooks the place where a small underground stream bursts through its rocky bounds and cascades over a ledge of broken stones.
The wind sweeps up the gentle slope and plays with his curls like a secret lover, and I wonder, not for the first time, if he isn’t merely mortal. There must be some magic in him.
“Hello, again, goddess,” he says.
I don’t reply, just incline my head, careful, I like to think, not to give too much away. I’m always vigilant about appearing too familiar with him. I may be breaking the rules by consorting with this human, but there’s no reason to disregard the natural order of things. He owes me deference, even if he is a prince.
“It’s beautiful today,” he says, tipping his head toward the sun and letting its golden rays set his face aglow. “You always choose the loveliest days to visit me.”
“You assume too much, human,” I say. “I wander where I like, and if you happen to cross my path, that is but happenstance.”
He lifts his mouth in a half-smile, unconvinced. “Then let me not detain you any longer. Please, continue your wanderings.” He steps to the side and swings an arm in a gracious arc to the side, bowing slightly. When I don’t move, his half-smile grows to a mischievous grin, and I feel the slow and steady beat of my immortal heart leap.
It’s this peculiar feeling he stirs in me that keeps me coming back. I have no idea what to call it. I only know that it is not something I have ever experienced in the Dawn.
Hearts in the Dawn beat with the measured assurance of domination or with the quivering uncertainty of the hunted. But this, this pull in my chest, drawing me up and out of the endless cycle of prey and predator, is new.
And it is intoxicating.
“You are, if I may say so, an enigma,” he says as he steps down from the hillock and leaps the stream, drawing up next to me so that our hands brush. By accident or design, I can’t be sure, but I immediately recoil at his touch, thrusting my hand behind me.
“You dare touch a goddess?” I hiss.
His easy smile fades for a moment, but in the next, I feel his fingers find mine once more. I try to pull away, could do so in an instant if I wanted, with my great strength and speed. But he tightens his grip, entwining his fingers with mine, and I find myself not wanting to let go.
“You are an enigma,” he says again, his voice low, “because no matter what you say about gods and mortals and our insurmountable differences, no matter how often you remind me of my lowly humanity, your eyes tell me a different story. And they have since that midsummer night I first saw you through the flames.”
“You’re wrong,” I say, but we both know that’s a lie. I pull away, but with no real intention of going anywhere, and he draws me nearer to him, wrapping his arm around me so that our bodies meet.
“You want me.”
It’s little more than a whisper, but the sound of those words thrums through my veins, setting fire to my ancient blood. His lips are so close to mine, but he doesn’t kiss me. He is brazen, takes liberties that no other human would dare, but even he knows when to stop.
We’ve never been this close, and until now I could pretend I was only curious, that he was just a diversion, that my visits were only a distraction from the interminable Dawn. But up close like this, I can deny it no longer.
I want him to be mine in the same way that Janu makes others his. The way he chooses some to rise and live among us as gods. I’ve seen him do it, and I think I understand how it works. Why should he be the only one to decide who may join us? I will have this human now, and very soon I will make him a true part of me, of the Dawn, forever.
I kiss my prince then, with a desperation born from desire and fear. It is one thing to visit the human realm out of turn. But it is quite another to be locked in a human’s embrace, to be breaking our most fundamental law. No one may commit a human to the Dawn but Janu. And yet, I know we won’t stop, can’t stop. I want all of him.
Now and always.
He lowers me gently to the ground, but his kisses are hard against my mouth, my neck. I feel his hands at my skirt, raising it above my thighs. Soon, I lose myself to the rhythm of our joining. It feels dangerous. And it is.
We of the Dawn are hard to kill, but for this transgression, the elders would certainly make it happen. Yet I find I don’t care. Not now. In this moment, I only want to satisfy my craving.
I can feel myself coming close to the edge. I twine my fingers into his curls, dig my fingers into the firm muscle of his back.
“Look at me,” he growls.
I lift my eyes to meet his, but what I find there startles me.
It is not the dreamy gaze of euphoria nor the penetrating stare of desire. His eyes are cold. Cold but not distant.
There is longing there, and I think it must be for the same passion that drives me deeper into our frantic union. His golden eyes go black as I ride the cresting wave of my desire until it breaks.
For a moment, I’m lost in pleasure, until a searing pain rips through my throat.
A blade flashes in the afternoon sun. It’s covered in purple-red blood.
I lift a shaking hand to my neck, and my fingers come away crimson.
“You are the first to die, but you won’t be the last,” he says.
I try to speak, to scream, but it only makes my sluggish blood flow faster. I look into his face, confusion and a growing sense of fear flooding my brain.
My prince, ablaze with charm and light and loveliness, is gone. The person before me is consumed by hate, vengeance fueling the dark flames of his heart. And the shock of his transformation, so easy, so sudden, sends a tremor through me—the kind that shifts your core and remakes you entirely.
“My people have been beholden to your kind long enough,” he says, and stands, the long blade in his hand slick. My eyes widen when I see it. It’s not crafted of metal at all, but a light blonde wood. Rowan. There’s no telling where he got it. Hardly any trees grow in this remote place. And I wonder how my prince knew what he needed to deal me a death blow.
I try to stand too, as though I might prove my strength still, as though I might fight back. My knees wobble, and I reach for my prince, grasping for something steady, but he recoils, and my hand only finds a necklace around his neck. An opal pendant that comes away in my grasp as I collapse.
I fall back into the grass, my fingers playing desperately around the gash in my throat, even though I know there’s no way to staunch the bleeding.
“I wanted you to experience it, goddess.” He says the last word as though it were poison on his tongue. “I wanted you to know, to really understand, the desecration you inflict on my people year after year. For generations, we have endured this humiliation. But no longer. It starts with you. But it doesn’t end until the blood of the gods washes our people clean of your twisted tyranny.”
I shake my head. What he says is sacrilege.
We are the Dawn. The humans worship us, and in turn, we bring the light. The natural order will be maintained, our needs will be met, or there will be chaos.
This is the law of the land from time immemorial. And, to my shame, I feel tears slide from my eyes to mingle with the blood. I weep because I am dying, I weep for the betrayal, I weep for the prince I thought I knew. But mostly I weep because somehow I know he’s right.
The world is changing.
He drives the rowan blade into my chest. The pain is excruciating, but then it eases.
The blue of the sky fades to grey, the grass turns a dull white. My prince stands above me, and a smile—a real, beautiful smile—lights his face before he, too, is lost to the black behind my eyes.
***
I wake with a start, my hand to my throat.
The bedsheets of the great sleigh bed are twisted around me, and I throw them off. I’m filled with nervous energy. The dream was too real. It felt like reliving that great humiliation, and my heart races even as I wrench the door open and breathe in great gulps of the cool night air.
I survived, of course. Someone found me, these long centuries past. A lesser god or goddess from the Dawn sent to track me down.
But it was Janu who saved me.
Janu, known for his temper, for his wild jags of fury that could only be tamed by violence. I knew from the moment I opened my eyes back in the Dawn that he saved me only so he could expend his rage on me. That nothing I had experienced yet would be as bad as bearing the full brunt of his anger.
It took longer than I thought for him to exhaust himself. And it was longer still before I was strong enough to drag myself from the dark place he’d left me.
By then, he and the ancient ones had greater concerns. My prince had made good on his promise, attacking them all on midsummer with a large cohort of others from his people who believed the time of the gods had come to an end.
The great ones survived, but only just.
They were stronger than humans, faster and quicker to heal, but they were outnumbered and outmaneuvered. Most of all, the humans had lost faith in our divinity. It was clear they would no longer willingly give themselves over to the Dawn.
I think it was this, more than the rowan wood blades or the fury of the humans’ attack, that brought us down.
Power is only real if you accept it as such.
Janu and the others retreated to the Dawn.
They mended themselves as best they could, but the flow of diessences they needed was dwindling. It was soon clear that our world and our way of life would never be the same.
They blamed me, as I knew they would.
I was the one who had not only debased herself but had brought her entire people low by giving herself to a human. Humans were our fodder, simple and submissive, and by allowing myself to be ravished by one of them, I had opened the door to catastrophe. Lay with the pig and it will think itself a prince. I had violated the balance, and all the Dawn was paying the price.
I was stripped of my title and my position of honor, but not before I was degraded and defiled in ways that still fester in my memory, a putrid wound that has never healed. Then I was cast out.
“Go,” Janu had said. “Be among the beasts, worthless one. Let their lowliness swallow every last memory of the glory you once possessed. May your divine glow be forever extinguished by the filth of humanity. And may you spend the rest of your long life serving us as the humans once did: with the understanding that you are nothing more than chattel in the charnel house they call Earth.”
And for a long time, I lived his words like a prophecy. The world has never been kind to a woman without a home, but in those early days, it was an especially dangerous position to find oneself in. And before I learned to fight and wield weapons, I learned just how beastly humans could be.
A breeze carrying the breath of the coming winter plays over my bare arms, and I shiver, as much from the chill as from the memory of those endless abject years. But I rub away the cold and those hopeless memories. I think instead of what I have accomplished, what I’ve learned through the long, lonely years.
I eked out what little magic I could find in this terrible place. Even this wasteland world held some secrets. There was power to be had from the earth and the things that grew there, from the roots and berries, from the rocks and crystals found in dark caves. But they needed to be awakened, to be touched by something otherworldly.
I could make them magic.
I turned them into potions and powders, and, when that proved too dangerous, I made them into colors and painted them into portraits and landscapes. They were just as powerful, but the medium proved more palatable for the humans and their limited understanding.
My paintings saved me.
They became a way to support myself and a means of finding the diessences of those recently deceased humans I thought might particularly please the Dawn.
But of all the stones and gems, it is the opal, the one I ripped from my prince’s neck, that holds the most power. It has always showed me the way, a reminder of what I have lost and what I have gained.
I reach up and let my fingers play around its rough edges until they slip down to the new chain holding a misshapen bit of wood, long and crooked, and full of waterwild.
I turn my thoughts back to that triumph. My beautiful, terrible glow, the power of the Dawn reflected in the horror-stricken eyes of the keeper. I swell with a kind of pride that I haven’t felt in an age. After all this time, after all my humiliation and hopelessness, the goddess remains in me still.
I let my eyes follow the rising sun across the opaque waters of the lake to the Wright’s home. The glass and steel are half-entombed in the jagged ridges of the mountain and the razor edges of the roof and walls catch the early morning light, their glint a promise and a threat. But it’s nothing compared to what lies below my skin.
The Dawn has much to answer for, and their time will come.
But first, I must attend to the matter of the Wright. If it wasn’t for her, I may have escaped this hellscape centuries ago.
***
I wait in my tiny cabin across the water from the Wright. Wait and heal and plan.
Luckily, I have patience built by centuries of practice.
The hunter, as they like to call me, is at home in her web. And nestled among my silken threads, I’d felt Mae’s inevitable approach. Like a particularly heavy bauble set in the delicate net of the afterlife, she’d slid toward the Wright with satisfying inevitability.
And now it is time to act.
I approach cautiously, but the cankers don’t rouse from their subterranean slumber and no other shade-born creatures block my path. I feel encouraged even as the effects of being so close to the Dusk begin to take their toll.
The Wright’s home is noxious. The whole place makes me feel ill. The air is poison, the walls radiate toxins. Even the floor is a minefield of evil.
When I finally fight my way through the nausea and weakness to the cavern beyond the Wright’s glass and steel home, I’m ready to collapse.
But the scene that greets me there: Ten’s votary complete, the Wright and the girl locked in battle—it’s all more perfectly played out than I could have hoped.
I assumed the girl would be enough to distract the Wright. But I didn’t realize just how strong she is. Stronger than even I realized. They’re locked in some kind of internal battle, and I only hope it lasts long enough for me to do what I need to do.
I have to act quickly, though. The girl is all potential, but it remains mostly locked away. And the Wright has centuries of practice exercising her power.
I can’t see where the votaries are, but I can feel them—a horrible, sucking sort of melancholy that grows worse as I move toward the back wall of the onyx-studded cave.
A miasma, redolent of sorrow, permeates the air so that I can hardly navigate the narrow passage I discover in a recess of the wall. It’s like swimming through misery, and I choke on the feeling as it floods my senses.
When I finally reach the rotten core of that place, surrounded by those horrible votaries, I think perhaps I have misjudged my capacity to endure the Dusk.
This is the beating black heart of the Wright’s world, and I’m nearly overcome by it. Yet I press on, on to the very center of the figures, where one calls out to me from amongst all the others, pulsing with a dark energy that dims the rest.
It has to be Mae’s.
I reach out tentative fingers, wincing in anticipation of how an element of the Dusk will feel on my skin, but I find the clay to be surprisingly cool to the touch, with an inviting silkiness that makes me long to caress the bell-shaped curve of its base, the oval cheeks and tiny, folded hands. But there’s no time, and the oppressiveness of the surroundings still weigh heavily on me.
I slog my way forward and back out to the main room. I pass by Ten on my way to the alter that still holds his votary.
Death becomes him, I decide. He somehow seems restored to his former glory, even as he lies nearly lifeless on the dais. But I don’t have time to admire him, not yet anyway.
All in good time.
Right now I need his votary, which I scoop off the alter with careful hands. It seems warm to the touch, electric almost. But the feeling isn’t unpleasant.
I pause. Breathe.
Tucking each votary under an arm like a pair of midnight-made baby dolls, I sidled up to the Wright, still wary that she may suddenly snap out of the trance she’s trapped in and use her considerable power to end me right in the middle of her onyx-choked cave.
This is the closest I’ve ever been to her, and I can’t help but study the dark pools of her eyes, the improbable whiteness of her hair, and the youth of her skin.
I could kill her.
The glint of the blade I gave Ten still sparkles from its resting place on the dais. I could run it through her now. Slit her throat. Saw off her head.
And I would do it if I thought it would work.
But the Wright is long past such facile tactics. If death came to her so easily, I would have done it long ago. No, there is only one path forward, and it leads straight through Mae. And the only way to get to Mae is lying like a fallen warrior just behind me.
I stare into the Wright’s eyes a moment longer. You could get lost in that gaze, trapped in those obsidian depths.
Then something moves behind them. Something violent and fast.
I take a step back, thrown, for a moment, with surprise and a little jolt of fear. But just as suddenly, a movement in my peripheral vision draws my attention. Just one finger at first, and then another, and then the stone the Wright holds slips free.
Without thinking, I dart my hand forward and catch it. The stone, unlike the votaries, does cause me to wince in pain. I need to be rid of it, and almost without thinking, I smash it into the small open spot just in front of the Wright’s outstretched fingers.
There’s a moment of eerie stillness, all of us locked in some strange tableau.
Then several things happened at once.
Behind me, I hear an awful kind of gasping sound, dry and strained. I whip around and realize it’s Ten, or the shade of him, fighting its way up and out of his lifeless body in a kind of sick parody of birth.
Next to me, a scream. It seems to have come from the Wright, but it wasn’t her. She would never be capable of a sound filled with so much genuine feeling. Twisting my head back, I catch the same dark glimmer in the back of the Wright’s eyes, but this time it seems frantic, desperate to escape the confines of that cruel gaze.
The girl. She knows, can sense probably, that the stone has been placed. And her anger is overriding any sense of self-preservation, even as the Wright is sure to exact revenge for having been violated so shamelessly.
My time is short. There is every chance the girl will escape and the Wright resurface from her inner turmoil at any moment. If I’m still here when that happens, it doesn’t bode well for me, even if they are both weakened by the fight.
I must finish what I’ve started.
I dash to the dais, grab the blade and step quickly to Ten’s side, kneeling. Doing my best to ignore the shimmering, sucking darkness of Ten’s shade as it struggles forth, I use the sharp edge of the knife to open his chest.
There’s no blood, it’s already been emptied from the wound at his neck. Instead, there’s just the purpled-red of sinew and the shiny ivory of bone. I slip the necklace from my neck and slide the raw opal from the chain into the waiting flesh.
I hold the puckered edges of the skin together, and they knit themselves into a neat scar under my fingers. Behind me the Wright’s body twists in violent arcs, and in the space between, I think I can glimpse the girl, face dark and terror-filled, wrestling to free herself from a possession that’s become more incarceration than control.
It’s only a matter of time, now, before they struggle free of each other. I need to be well on my way before that happens.
I slip my fingers beneath Ten’s chin and tilt it up. His lips part revealing a row of straight white teeth, the tip of his tongue. I retrieve the now-shriveled finger of the keeper from an inner pocket of my coat and touch it to Ten’s lower lip, tilting the precious waterwild into his mouth.
His throat is motionless, but it doesn’t matter. Waterwild is potent, the human mouth soft and vulnerable. It will work its magic of return, of new beginnings.
New dawns.
Already the shade seems to be retreating back into Ten’s body, the horrible slickness of the freshly emerged form receding into his unbreathing chest. It’s working, but I can’t forget the twin adversaries behind me.
I take a steadying breath, then bring my lips close to Ten’s ear. I whisper the word I’ve so often rehearsed in my head.
“You are Retribution.”
It’s done.
The Wright can take the earthbound third, but the Dawn can give it.
A simple, purposeful name, the water of gods running through his veins, and my opal as his pulse, pounding out the rhythm of rebellion.
His shade, caught on the anchors of a new identity, disappears, swallowed by skin that glows with youth. He stirs, turning a creaseless cheek toward me, and I long to touch him, my creation. I want to let my fingers bump across muscles wrought from a divine power, want to say his name, bend him to my will.
But there’s no time.
I leave him on the dais, drawing in the first breaths of his new life.
It’s a privilege to share my work with you! Thank you for taking the time to read the tenth episode of DARK AS DAWN, BRIGHT AT NIGHT.
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Wow! Again! That's a beautiful and dark origin story there. So evocative, and so easy to visualise.
I totally love it.