Ep. 14: Machinations and Revelations

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 Fourteen.

New to the story? START HERE.

Previously: Bram regains the power that was lost to him while Mae comes to terms with her role as riona.

Up ahead: Blythe comes face-to-face with Mae’s soul, while Ten learns valuable information from the mornrill keeper and receives a strange but potentially powerful gift.

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BLYTHE

Sunrise.

The raking light paints the ripples and eddies on the surface of the mornrill in shades of fuchsia. I stand at the water’s edge, wondering if the keeper will come. 

There is frost on the grass, and a late-fall mist swirls around my feet. The air, I know, is chilled, the sun still too weak to make a difference, but I don’t notice.

I’m warmed by a different light, a different Dawn.

As always, my eyes are drawn to the far side of the rill. From here, it appears ordinary: a scrim of fog obscuring black hawthorn and ninebark, dry cattails rattling in the breeze.

If I could cross, though, I’d find a different shore on the other side. 

I’ve imagined what it would feel like to go home.

It’s been so long now, but I’ll never forget that golden world. A place of cruelty and artifice, of menace and cunning. It was dangerous, but simple. Survival of the fittest. A beautiful, brutal, straightforward world that rewarded acuity and ambition.

Soon, though. Soon, I’ll return. Stronger than before. I won’t be a lowly courtier, playing my part in the success of the elders. 

I will reign.

Just a few more pieces to put into place.

My arms are growing tired from the votaries I carry in the crook of both elbows. I set Mae’s down in the short grass at my feet and take Rhett’s in my hands.

His is dove grey, slim, and angular. The face is just a collection of simple lines and curves, yet there is profound sadness written into each one. 

It’s a stunning likeness for something so minimal.

Demon or no, the Wright does beautiful work.

I think back to the man I left at the cabin with a new set of double scythes, a collection of stumps, and instructions to practice his combat skills.

For all his newfound power, sadness is written into his very marrow. Not even the Dawnbound third I gave him can erase that kind of profound sorrow. 

I bend down and slip the votary beneath the surface of the mornrill, ignoring the way my skin burns at the water’s touch. I feel a gentle tug and am surprised to see long, thin fingers clasping the edge of the statue.

One of them is missing. It’s only this detail that allows me to recognize her. The keeper.

Her skin is ghostly pale beneath the water, and her face is hidden behind a murky swirl of hair. She does not meet my gaze, does not rise up out of the water, back rigid with arrogance, to spew insults at me. She seems shrunken, wasted, a craven creature.

I let Rhett’s votary go, and she shrinks away with it in her arms to the center of the rill. It will be safe there below the surface of these sacred waters.

I turn and take up Mae’s votary.

If Rhett’s was beautiful, Mae’s is spectacular: jet black, so sleek the surface nearly thrums, with a face made from the same clean lines.

But instead of sadness, there is something altogether more complicated to be found there—a fascinating combination of charm, nobility, mystery, and something wild, too. Something dangerous in the set of her mouth, the look in her eyes.

I hesitate to consign it to the mornrill, so lovely does it feel beneath my fingers and under my gaze. But there is too much at stake to leave it anywhere else. These votaries must be protected at any cost. 

With infinite care, I slide Mae’s votary beneath the surface of the rill. The water burns, of course, worse this time than before, as though it wants to be sure I’m reminded of my place.

Once again, I ignore the acid bite, keeping a firm but gentle hold on the votary and waiting for the keeper’s diffident figure to reemerge from the rill’s depths.

Finally, a movement disturbs the surface, but the form that emerges is hardly more solid than the fog that still hangs above the rill. It slips through the water like an exhalation and blooms into the air just before me—a lavender-tinged mist with a face I recognize.

I should have expected this. Of course Mae’s soul would be attracted to her votary. They’re parts of a whole, after all.

Looking at her now reminds me of the frantic effort I put into the capture and containment of that piece of her diessence. I’d had to use my special pigments and expend every creative impulse in me to find her. When I was done, I had a masterpiece and her soul safely in my gossamer, but the hunt had been utterly exhausting.

I’d hardly paid attention when I finally poured her into the rill, so glad was I to actually have accomplished something real and tangible after years of waiting and hoping. 

Seventeen long years.

Because seventeen years ago, I felt it—the moment when Mae was born. It was a shift in the fabric of the world, a loose string that longed to be pulled into a tear, an opening toward something new.

Something significant.

It didn’t take long to understand what kind of prize Mae would be. She wasn’t just of the Sluagh; she was destined to be their queen.

This was my chance. I couldn’t defeat Hesper alone. But with the Sluagh on my side, imagining victory was possible for the first time. I could return home with two prizes. The demise of the Wright would be my penance fulfilled, and I’d be, if not welcomed back, at least allowed across the rill.

And with the Sluagh queen answering to me, I could harness the Dark Horde’s power. Then, if given half a chance, I could conquer the Dawn. 

Exile to exalted. 

I had to see her, had to lay eyes on all that potential. So I followed the pull.

Mae was a tiny, squirming thing, but I knew then that she was beyond any of the offerings that had ever been made to us in our age of glory. Even pink and wrinkled and small, she was redolent of power.

She lit the fire in my blood, and I longed to devour her whole. Her soul was sure to be crisp and sweet, her shade succulent. But with great difficulty, I harnessed my bloodlust.

An early death would foil my plans; no infant could rule a horde. I needed Mae at her full strength. A woman, not a baby. Her death must wait, although it seemed she practiced for the inevitable from the time she took her first breath. The world is not kind to those that exceed its narrow confines.

But I had faith she would make it to adulthood, and I was willing to be patient. To watch and wait until the end. To my infinite regret, I misjudged her mother’s desperation, understanding little of the ways of humans and their spawn. I never anticipated that the woman would seek out the Wright on her own.

By the time I understood what was going on, it was too late. Mae’s votary was finished. Her shade belonged to Hesper, and I’d lost my advantage.

I was furious, incandescent with rage. But when I could think straight again, I realized that all was not lost. That, actually, the problem of how to bend Mae to my bidding had been solved for me. Because I always knew governing her would be a problem, a snag as powerful as Mae would not be easily cowed.

But now I could capture Mae’s soul and commit it to the mornrill. And a votary was easier to seize and command than a shade. And now, with her father safely under my guidance, I had three forms of leverage. Familial bonds, eternal soul, and shade. 

Standing face-to-face with a part of Mae glaring at me from the rill, I think she must sense her predicament. There’s a weight to her, something darker and more dangerous than any of the other souls I’ve dealt with through the years.

Her eyes are black smudges, her lips charcoal smears, her hair ashen coils adrift in an unseen breeze. She is hardly distinct, but she doesn’t need to be finely wrought to make her feelings known. Her ghost doesn’t rest easy.

Most shades can’t speak, Mae’s being an exception to the rule. Souls typically don’t either, but I wondered whether hers might defy the norm once again and say what was already abundantly clear: confinement didn’t suit her, and my destruction would please her. Very much.

But Mae’s soul keeps quiet and lets those burning blackhole eyes do the talking. I leave the votary in the shallows of the rill and back away, reluctant to turn my back on her even though I know I’m safe on shore.

There’s a flash of pallid flesh, and I see the keeper as she sinks out of sight, taking the votary with her.

Mae casts me one last baleful glance and then turns and melts into the mist.

I make my way back through the forest. The further I get from the mornrill, the more like myself I feel. But the memory of Mae’s soul is hard to ignore. I’ve been careless in the past. I’ve underestimated the Wright in many ways and failed to account for just how powerful Mae is. 

All the more reason to have Rhett on my side. The girl loves her father. That much is clear. And where there’s love, there’s weakness. She’d clearly do anything to ensure Rhett’s safety, including possessing the Wright and attacking her from the inside.

It was a clever trick. Mae is smart, and, just as importantly, she has good instincts and more than her fair share of determination. Once she realizes the extent of her powers, she will be a truly formidable force.

It’s just a matter of keeping her under control.

I think of Rhett. His subservience is vital to my plan. I’ve never given anyone a Dawnbound third. The experience with Rhett was…intense. I can understand why Janu reserved it for only the most worthy of the sacrifices. Yet, beyond their surpassing beauty, physical prowess, intelligence, or charm, there was one other thing that Janu always insisted upon.

The perfect candidate must be childless. 

A child is an anchor to the world, a grounding force, a reason to live. Already, in the short conversations I’ve had with him, I saw glimpses in Rhett of insurgence. His mind and body may have forgotten their connection to Mae. But his heart remembers.

I’m confident there are ways around it, distractions can be presented in the form of flesh and blood. His heart may remember, but if that worthless organ is awash in an ocean of the Dawn, those memories will surely drown.

The sun has risen fully now, and slanting rays of autumn light cut through the dense overstory. Yet the fog remains, wrapping itself around my ankles and tangling itself in my hair, only to burn away when it lingers too long.

For I am not like the trees or the ferns or the needle-strewn ground: cold and sleepy with the lateness of the year and longing for a blanket of mist. 

I am fire. A fire that has been banked for far too long. But I’m ready now to burn, hot and long, until it’s all just ash and tears.

TEN

I attack the wood Blythe left for target practice with violent delight, throwing a scythe so that the blade sings into the dense trunk. I follow it up with a powerful downward slash from the second. The blades are both buried several inches deep into the hardwood, but I pull them free like they’re sunk into butter, not bark.

Then I’m running across the meadow, feet flying over the grass, before I leap into the air, soaring higher than I’ve ever been able to jump before, body glowing gently with a light that feels distressingly new and achingly old at the same time. With both blades raised over my head, I bring them across and down with such force that I easily split a second stump in two.

I continue on this way with only the thunk of my blades in the wood to disturb the quiet. When I finally pause, there’s nothing left of the logs but sawdust, yet no weariness knots my muscles, and my breath comes easily.

Still, I find I’m plagued by a strange restlessness I’ve felt since Blythe pulled me to this place, and it urges me on.

I slip the blades into the holster on my back and break into a swift run. I’m soon clear of the meadow and into the trees. Their trunks fly past me as I leap fallen logs and splash through puddles. With the thickness of the fog, I should be soaked to the bone, but the glow of my skin, stronger here in the shade of the conifers, keeps me dry, the drops evaporating into mist before they can even touch me.

I run so hard I’m practically flying. Ever since I woke up in Hesper’s cavern, I’ve felt practically invincible, like I could fight and run and live forever. I couldn’t sleep last night with that feeling in my bones.

Yet something below all this power eats at me. Something that I can almost remember, but that slips below the surface of my understanding every time I get close. 

Something tugs at Blythe’s peace of mind, too.

She didn’t sleep either, although whether she needs to is another story. She wanted me to believe her agitation came from her interest in me, but I could tell it was something more.

At least her methods of distraction were pleasant enough. What we did was wild, dangerous, even. I lost myself in her for most of the night, our bodies on fire. 

But nothing, not even Blythe’s intense carnality, can erase the feeling of profound loss that penetrates to my core. Something was taken from me. Something important. And the certainty of that rankles.

Here, in the woods, though, with the cool morning air on my face and the emerald mosses cushioning my steps, I can breathe easier. The forest feels like home, with well-trod halls and walls warmed by a life I once lived. Here my memories come more easily. 

And I remember, in shimmering shards of insight, these were the trees where I came to lose myself. In the silence of these deep forests, I could let my misery and guilt wash over me like waves pulling me under. I wandered that sea of hopelessness as a penance for what I’d done and a refuge from what my life had become.

What I lost must have been profound, I know, but without it, I am no longer burdened by that guilt, no longer cursed to wander these indifferent woods. I have a purpose now, a guiding light. 

Retribution.

The word is my fuel and fire. It strengthens my muscles and lengthens my stride. The feeling urges me on, and I let it guide me. When I finally stop near a sparkling stream, so clear I can see the tiny pebbles that crowd its bottom, my skin is ablaze, my mind clear. 

I wait, but not long.

When she rises from the water, I’m intrigued more than surprised. The pale creature in front of me is a part of the water in a way that nothing of this world could ever be. There’s a faded majesty to her, but whatever respect she might once have engendered is gone. She seems small, weak. Her eyes are glazed, her brow heavy, her shoulders stooped. There is only a whisper of danger behind her eyes.

We stare at each other for a moment, then I see something pass across her face. Fear maybe, or reluctance. Whatever it is, she seems to resign herself to our meeting and reaches out a hand to me. It only has four fingers. The fifth is broken off at the knuckle, a blackish scab covering the splintered end. The gesture is strange, both an invitation and a warning.

“You just missed her,” she says, “your mistress.”

“I wasn’t looking for her,” I reply, and it’s true. I wasn’t looking for anything. Only following the pull of the liquid fire in my veins. The creature stares at me for a long moment before she seems to make up her mind about something. When she speaks, her voice is soft, but there is an edge to her words. 

“I am the keeper of this rill,” she says.

“Keeper?” I lift one brow, puzzled. How can anyone keep something that’s always changing?

“I don’t keep the water,” she says. Her voice is quiet and her manner reticent, but my question seems to have softened her and she nods. “Waters like this should run free. I would never attempt to stop them. No, my job is to keep the souls that the hunter brings to me safe while they wait for their mate. Or to cross them if they are paired. But that is a rare occurrence for many seasons past.”

I scan the water, half expecting to see it crowded with phantoms, but there is nothing there but the river rocks and a few slick logs.

“You can’t see them,” she says, following my gaze. “But they’re there. Souls mainly. The Wright keeps the shades, you see.”

I didn’t see, nor did I especially care. I’d found myself at the water’s edge for a reason. The only reason that matters to me now. I sense the keeper wants me to engage, to ask more, and when I don't, she drops her gaze and turns her head away. Her voice hardens.

“Why are you here?” she asks.

“I’m here to right wrongs,” I reply. The simplicity of my response pleases me as much as it dismays the keeper. The simple satisfaction of it turns the corners of my mouth upward even as the keeper’s face twists with anger. 

“Right wrongs?” she growls. “Why do you stand before me, then? The wrongs are the work of the Wright and the one who made her.”

I stare at her, my smile fading. She seethes, hate stirring the black depths of her eyes. 

“Ignorant man,” she scoffs, “if I can still rightly call you that after what they’ve done to you. It’s Dawn that runs through your veins now, not blood. A strange handiwork indeed. Blythe has made you, it seems, even as the Wright tried to take you.”

She laughs then, a violent, bitter bark.

“Still fighting the same fight, after all this time,” she says through gritted teeth. “Hopeless. Neither of them cares for anything but themselves. No matter what they may say. And look what their selfish war has wrought. Nothing but suffering for rills-full of innocents. You not the least.”

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“Of course you don’t. Theirs is an ancient conflict, and you are but the most recent in a long line of tools they make and use and throw away.”

She pauses, her rage rolling away into resignation. Without the fury animating her, she seems even more fragile than when she first appeared before me. 

“What is your name?” Her voice is faraway and when she turns her gaze on me once again, I’m taken aback by the misery I see there.

“Rhett,” I say. It’s what Blythe calls me.

But it wasn’t the first name that came to my lips. There was another one there, on the tip of my tongue, but it was gone as soon as the thought crossed my mind.

The keeper’s eyes narrow and she seems to be deciding something. I meet her eyes and wait, untroubled by the intensity of her gaze. Finally, she blinks and looks away with a shrug of her shoulders.

“There’s something you should understand, Rhett,” she says. “It’s blasphemy to even think it, let alone speak it, but I tell you because the game the Wright and Blythe are playing is a dangerous one with consequences that will be felt across worlds.”

The keeper turns back to look at me. The sun filters through the high clouds, leaching the color from the water and from her face. I’m suddenly acutely aware of how old she must be.

“The last paired soul and shade I crossed was someone known to you,” she says, her voice like the rustle of dry leaves in the breeze.

I inhale sharply, swallow hard. I steel myself for the words coming next, an automatic response to a feeling my body remembers but that my mind has locked away.

“Her name was Helena,” says the keeper. “Your wife.”

“I know who she is,” I say.

“You know, but you don’t remember. Knowledge and memory are two different things. One comes from the mind, the other from the heart. Blythe and the Wright have stolen your memories, wiped clean your heart. It’s a monstrous thing, really. But it matters not now. I can’t help you except to tell you what I have learned.”

The keeper glances behind her. I follow her gaze, half-expecting something to be lurking there in the shallows but the water is calm, the opposite shore empty.

“It had been some time since I’d taken a diessence across,” she continues. “And your wife was a special one, vibrant and strong even in death. Helena was a prize. I knew the ones I serve in the Dawn would be thrilled with her after receiving so very little for so long.”

The keeper pauses here, gauging my reaction, perhaps. I keep silent, wait for her to continue, but the sound of Helena’s name stirs something in me. I try to reach for it, a silver fragment in the dark, but the memory slips through my fingers, too fast to take hold of. The keeper frowns. She seems on the verge of taking the conversation on a different tack, but then thinks better of it and continues.

“Helena didn’t want to go. It had been some years since a diessence fought me so hard, but I prevailed as I always do. Once a crossing starts, the end is inevitable. Or so I thought.”

Her gaze drifts once more to the other shore. I scan the slick black trunks and evergreen shrubs that crowd the far side of the water, but even with my sharpened senses, nothing appears out of the ordinary. The keeper draws herself up, sets her chin, and turns her gaze back to me.

“There was nothing there,” she says, her voice clipped. “I crossed your wife and on the other side…Nothing.”

She sinks back into the water, and I watch it slip around her skeletal body, wondering what to make of this revelation.

“You don’t understand,” she says on a sigh, “but it would be like walking through a door and finding that the place you expect to find there has suddenly vanished. The bright world of the Dawn was gone, and in its place was, what, a void, I suppose. An all-consuming oblivion. 

“It pulled on us. The kind of pull that you know you should resist, but that calls to you with the seductive voice of destruction. And for the first time in my long existence, I truly felt fear. Staggered, I let go of Helena’s diessence, and she threw herself into that awful abyss. She was gone instantly. No dust, no smoke, no lingering haze. Just gone.

“I felt the urge to do the same. I was able to fight it only because the waters of the mornrill still lapped at my legs. I let the water guide me back from the edge, but it took all I had to fight that strange nothing where the Dawn should have been.”

The keeper has retreated so far into the water that her chin grazes its surface. She wears it like a blanket, and I can tell she longs to disappear into its depths.

“What does it mean?” I ask.

“There is no Dawn,” she says, and I have to strain to hear her voice over the rushing of the water. “Blythe fights for a lost world. And we are all relics, the final specimens of an extinct species.”

“There is no Dawn,” I repeat. It’s a simple statement, but even to my ears, I sound uncertain. Nothing that has happened to me makes sense.

I didn’t even know other worlds existed a few days ago. And now one that was there is gone. I don’t care. About any of it. Or anyone, really. Apathy sits in my stomach, the weight of an ocean crushing down the ghost of a feeling that something’s at stake for me in this mess. 

I only want one thing. The thing I was made for. The reason I’m here.

I tell the keeper as much. She watches me, keeps silent. Her eyes hard. When she speaks again, her voice is thick with resignation.

“It matters not to you, I know. You’re too new. I forget what the freshly made are like. No better than animals. Driven by instinct and untempered by nuance. The Dawn is nothing to you but a story. The problem is that to Blythe and the Wright, the Dawn is the reason for everything they do. And their relentless conflict grows more serious now that I hold your daughter’s soul and votary in my waters.”

My daughter. The words echo in my mind, following familiar pathways but finding nothing but dead ends. She was young and sickly. Then she died. She was there in the cavern when I woke, fighting, allowing me to escape. I wanted to help her, but now I can’t remember why. 

“Look what they’ve taken from you,” the keeper whispers, staring at me hard. 

I say nothing. There’s nothing to say. There’s only the way I feel: unburdened, powerful, purposeful. I know that I’ve never felt this good. And knowing that is better than any memory I may have lost along the way. 

The keeper seems about to disappear fully under the water, but then suddenly reverses direction, the water streaming from her bent body in rivulets. As I watch she lifts the hand with the missing finger and reaches out with her other, grasping one of the long, crooked digits and snapping it off at the knuckle. 

Thick, dark blood oozes from the jagged wound, yet her face remains impassive as she dips the finger below the surface, filling it to near-overflowing. She presses the bloody stump against the finger so that it’s briefly whole again and only then does her face belie any pain. When she removes the finger, it’s capped by a slowly blackening seal of her own blood.

“Take it,” she says, holding the finger out to me. 

It looks like a curved and pointed stick now that it’s no longer attached to her, sharp and twisted, the black blood at the end hardened into a knotty cap containing the liquid inside. I take it from her with a steady hand, and something complicated crosses the keeper’s face. 

“They made you a weapon,” she says. “But when the time is right, this will be yours.”

I stow the twisted wood in an inner pocket. The surprising weight of it pulls the fabric down so that the exposed top rests against my skin.

It’s ice cold and remains so as I leave the water’s edge and make my way through the woods to the cabin and Blythe. I find her in bed, the fire in the hearth blazing, painting her bare skin shades of amber and vermillion. 

“Where have you been?” She drawls the words, but I can hear the sharpness beneath her honied tone.

“In the woods.”

She smiles but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

“Funny, I was just there myself,” she says.

Her smile widens, revealing sharp teeth, milk-white and shining in the fire’s light—a mountain lion’s grin. I say nothing more, only meet her gaze and wait. 

“Next time you go exploring, let me know, okay? Wouldn’t want you wandering away now, would we? The farther you go, the more it hurts when I pull you back.”

She pats the empty space next to her, and I slip out of my clothes and join her in the twisted sheets. 

Later, as the fire dies down to embers and the night wraps itself around the little room like a velvet curtain, I lay awake and imagine the finger-full of the keeper’s water I’ve carefully hidden at the edge of the forest.

I should have thrown it away into the wilderness. Forgotten everything the creature had told me. But somehow it seemed important that I remember her words and keep her gift secret and safe.

Closing my eyes, I imagine it pulsing in the darkness with that same strange light that glows in my veins, and I worry for a moment that it will be obvious to Blythe. That she’ll find it and destroy it. But she seems to slumber, silent and still next to me, and the midnight meadow outside the window glows only with the light of the moon.

I relax, close my eyes, but I don’t sleep as much as let my dreams play out in the quiet of my mind. In them, I follow the keeper’s stream through the autumn wood to a snow-covered moor, then a cool spring afternoon in a hospital room.

Water sloshes underfoot as a baby screams until the sound is finally extinguished by the water that fills the room and snuffs the light, enveloping me so that I’m sinking in an ocean of darkness.

Down and down. The water is heavy and dark until pinpricks of light shine through the inky brine, and I’m tumbling through a summer’s night, the updraft of a magnificent fire breaking my fall.

Blythe pulls me from the flames, a crown nestled in her auburn hair. She reaches up and places a heavy circlet on my own head, and her face flickers in the firelight, first lovely and finely featured, then predatory and fierce, but always beautiful. 

The keeper’s finger pulses against my chest in time with my own heartbeat. In time with hers. In time with the pounding of the drums and the chants of the people that surround us. It’s calling for me; it’s telling me what to do. Retribution. 

It’s what I was made for.

---

It’s a privilege to share my work with you! Thank you for taking the time to read the fourteenth episode of DARK AS DAWN, BRIGHT AT NIGHT.

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