Ep. 16: Monsters of Her Own Making

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 Sixteen.

New to the story? START HERE.

Previously: Mae, Bram, Blythe, and Ten meet in a confrontation that has disastrous consequences, while Hesper uses her shades to craft her most dangerous creation yet.

Up ahead: Mae battles the she-wolf and receives unexpected assistance that allows her, Bram, and Ten to take on Hesper and her formidable array of defenses.

Excited for the adventure to continue? Let me know with a like, comment, or restack.

MAE

The giant wolf is unexpected.

We’re all caught off-guard, and she uses this to her advantage, rushing forward out of the trees and into the meadow, swathes of green grass crushed under her massive paws.

The wolf, hackles raised, ears back, and black lips stretched over her glistening fangs, is out for blood.

Her gaze never wavers from Blythe as she streaks forward, but I’m so close to her on the ground that any attack on Blythe is an attack on me.

My mind scrambles for options. I could use my wings to fly away, but that would leave Blythe exposed, and I need her help if we’re going to stop Hesper. Instead, I turn my back on the ferocious creature, stretch my wings out wide, and then wrap them around us, creating a cocoon.

I’m not sure what good it will do—the thin skin of my wings against the razor-edged teeth of the beast—but they’re infused with Sluagh magic, so I take my chances.

I crane my neck around, peering through the small gap between my shoulder and wing. The wolf’s maw is open, ready to rend and tear, and my heart stutters as her jaws snap closed. But before she can sink her fangs into us, my dad is there, boot-clad feet on the wolf’s tongue, twin scythes sweeping up and over, cutting deep into the roof of the creature’s mouth.

The wolf howls in pain as my dad leaps free of her jaws. The sound is chilling, full of real anguish and real anger. Purple-black blood pours from the sides of her mouth and runs in rivulets down her legs, but she doesn’t back off. Instead, the wolf lowers her head and crouches on her back legs, those haunting yellow eyes trained on me.

“Mae, you need to leave,” my dad shouts, the scythes crossed in front of him. He’s not looking at me. His eyes are fixed on the beast, trying to gauge the best way to attack. He glances in my direction when I don’t move, and a flash of surprise registers on his face when he finds me still at Blythe’s side. “Leave her; the beast is here for her blood. Leave her and go somewhere safe.”

“No place is safe,” Blythe rasps, still clutching at the wood in her chest. 

The wolf springs forward then, blood flying behind her. My dad springs forward too, but he was looking at me and lost a split second of reaction time. He won’t reach us in time.

I tense my shoulders and brace my wings for impact, but a dark shape flies into the side of the wolf’s head, knocking it to the side.

Bram.

The wolf lands hard. She lifts her shaggy head, but Bram is on top of her, his good hand dug into the fur between her ears, his eyes black with effort.

I remember that look.

It’s the same one that darkened his face right before he broke the Sluagh throne, and I realize he’s trying to do the same thing to the wolf’s skull. The creature, stunned from her fall, doesn’t seem to register the threat at first, but then her eyes widen with the unmistakable panic of real pain, and she staggers to a standing position, throwing her head back and shaking hard. Great ropes of dark blood fly, coating Bram and the meadow.

Bram tries to hold on, but with one side gravely injured, he loses his grip and tumbles to the grass below, his good wing crumpling beneath him with a sickening crunch.

Before the beast can make another move, my dad is on him. He stabs a scythe into the beast’s shoulder blade and uses it as an anchor to swing himself up onto the wolf’s back.

He raises the second scythe up, preparing to bring it down hard on the wolf’s spine, when the creature rears and twists. Dad falls to the ground, and the wolf is on top of him, her giant paw pressing him into the ground.

He’s held onto the second scythe, at least, and he uses it now to block the wolf’s snapping jaws. He’s fast and strong, but the wolf matches him, and I’m afraid of what will happen if he makes even one wrong move.

I stand, leaving Blythe where she is. She shouts something to me, but what she says is lost to the rush of wind in my ears as I take to the sky. The wolf is relentless, her teeth crashing together over and over, inches from Dad’s face, but she seems to sense me as I draw near. Her head snaps up, and her jaws open wide, reaching for me. I don’t try to avoid it.

Instead, I fold my wings and dive into the beast’s black throat.

The darkness inside is overwhelming. I reach out, grasping for a toehold, a vulnerability I can attack. But there is nothing. Just a crushing emptiness, a terrible void. No tender bruise, no hidden world at all, only desolation so complete I can feel myself being absorbed by it.

I try to fight, but it only exhausts me; nothingness wraps itself around me like a straightjacket. My mind races. There has to be a way out. But even as I’m thinking of escape, the incessant pull of the dark drapes itself around me in ever thicker swathes of night.

Soon, I can hardly tell where I stop and the dark begins. With each moment, I slip further into the abyss, terrified and comforted by the relentless, hungry shadow at the heart of the wolf.

The light is tiny at first. So small that I wonder if it’s an ersatz spark generated by my light-starved eyes. But then it grows in size and intensity so that I find myself blinking against the brightness of it.

Suddenly, I can make out a shape, a form.

A goddess.

Blythe.

She’s awash in a glow so dazzling that it nearly takes my breath away. I feel like I should avert my gaze, but I can’t take my eyes off her. She’s magnificent.

“You’re brave, girl,” Blythe says, her voice reverberating with power. “Brave, but stupid. You’re a ghost. You can possess the living. But you can’t possess another ghost. Shade absorbs shade, foolish child.”

Blythe’s presence seems to pull me back from the brink, and I swallow back the screams that lodged in my throat as I sank into the dark. “You came,” I manage to gasp.

Blythe’s face, awash in that awful ancient light, twists into a petulant grimace. “You saved me from this beast, I’m obligated to do the same. Gods don’t often need saving, but when we do, we pay it back in kind.”

She smiles at me then, and something like respect, or at least recognition, flits across her face before it disappears into blinding light. I watch for as long as I can, not wanting to take my eyes away from her beautiful, dangerous glow.

But finally, as she disappears into the white glare and the darkness dissolves around us, I have to close my eyes. When I open them again, we’re in the meadow once more, the remains of the wolf melting into the morning light like mist.

“Consider us even,” Blythe says, her voice thin and reedy now. As the last of her glow fades, her knees buckle and she falls to the ground. Only then do I remember she’s injured, badly. 

“Mae!” Dad runs to me, scoops me up into a hug, and then he pulls away, grabbing my face, my arms, and checking my legs, assessing me for damage. But without the awful weight of the wolf’s darkness pulling me under, I feel almost weightless.

Not insubstantial; I know that feeling all too well. But unhindered, free.

More myself. As though being submerged in shade made me more material somehow.

“I’m fine, Dad.” I give his shoulders what I hope is a reassuring squeeze. “More than fine, actually.” He looks down at his fingers, a small smile on his face as he realizes we’re making contact. “But Blythe isn’t.” I kneel down next to her, avoiding the pool of thick blood that’s puddled around her. The wood in her chest is gone.

“Forget her,” Dad says, his tone brutal. “Let her bleed. It’s what she deserves.”

“He’s right,” says a voice behind us.

I turn to see Bram limping across the grass. He looks terrible, and a wave of guilt washes over me at the sight of him. I hadn’t spared him a thought when I surfaced from the beast’s darkness.

“Bram,” I whisper, bringing a hand to my mouth, trying to bite back my shock at his appearance. “My god, are you okay?”

One of his arms dangles uselessly; the other he holds across himself, clutching at his side. I can hardly bear to look at his once-magnificent wings, now torn and broken beyond recognition. But if he’s in pain, his face doesn’t betray it. He looks fierce, determined.

“I’ll survive,” he growls. “We dead are hard to kill. And those that fashion themselves gods even more so.” He waves his good hand in Blythe’s direction.

I open my mouth to intervene, but Blythe speaks before I can get the words out. 

“They’re right.” Her voice is quiet but calm. She’s still beautiful, even mortally injured, like the pale light of a dying day, no longer burning with the fire of fury but aglow with the peace of acceptance. “You must go, the three of you. Go to Hesper and end her. End what I began before she fetches another nightmare from her past to attack us.”

Despite everything she’s done, I find I don’t want Blythe to die. Uninjured, she could help us defeat Hesper, but it’s more than that. Her death is an extinction, the end of an ancient way of life. With her gone, the balance will be permanently destroyed.

Into the void, new forces will certainly find their way. And while Blythe and Hesper have each wrought havoc and sorrow, what replaces them may be so much worse. Beyond all that, there is the Sluagh and my place with them. What the end of this all means for my future among the Dark Horde, I can’t even begin to guess.

“The gods,” Blythe says, so quietly that she almost seems to be speaking to herself. She raises her gaze from the ground and finds mine. “Before I entered the wolf, I prayed to the gods. My brethren. Janu and all the rest.

“I hadn’t done so in a very long time. I hadn’t needed to, and more importantly, I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of my groveling. But, maybe because of what you said, or maybe because I knew I would need all the strength of the Dawn on my side to burn away so much darkness, I called out to them.”

Blythe swallows hard and glances away. Her fingers flex instinctively over her wound.

“There was nothing,” she says, finally. “Not even the silence that I expected. There was simply nothing. Do you understand?”

I nod, but say nothing, my mind and heart too full of complicated, conflicting thoughts to utter anything coherent.

“Go,” Blythe says again. 

I stand on unsteady legs. Dad is already leaving, striding off toward the edge of the meadow. Bram is by my side, his good hand reaching out to hold mine. I let him pull me away, but I keep my eyes on Blythe. Her crumpled form and pale face are jarring. That so much power, so much energy, could be sapped by just one shadowy part of Hesper makes my stomach twist.

Blythe blinks and looks away, turning her gaze to the cerulean sky above. Her wine-dark blood seeps steadily from her, soaking the ground. To me, it seems as though the blades of grass stretch higher where her blood has spilled, like they thirst for more. It’s an intimate image, somehow. Sacred.

I turn away, slipping into the forest.

Leaving Blythe to the meadow.

TEN

We walk through the forest on high alert—the boy with the broken wings, my daughter, and I—ready for more horrors conjured by Hesper to find us in the silent wood.

The three of us make a strange crew. I know Mae has powers, that she’s important. Hell, the Wright and Blythe have bet everything on her. But to me, she’s still young, naïve, too quick to forgive. She was ready to save Blythe rather than let her die like she deserved.

She’s a peacemaker at heart. Not a warrior like me. And that’s what worries me. If that giant dog back there was any indication of what we’re walking towards, her penchant for mercy might just get us all killed. Or whatever substitutes for dying when you’re already a ghost.

Our trek through the forest is disconcertingly quiet. Ditto the trail beside Hesper’s lake. Nothing springs from the ground or leaps on us from above. I know this tactic. She’s drawing us in. Why waste her resources on skirmishes when she can take all of us at once inside the place where she’s most powerful, that damn cavern of hers.

We hit the rocky beach and climb the stairs up from the water, reaching the flat lawn in front of the house. We’re about halfway to the door set into the great glass wall that takes up a large portion of the façade when the whole thing suddenly explodes outward. Mae screams in surprise, but thinks fast, releasing her wings so that they cover Bram and me from the tsunami of shards. 

But instead of falling like rain, they coalesce on the ground in front of us into rough human shapes: one a hulking ogre of a man, another the crude figure of a woman. Behind them an array of smaller forms, childlike in their proportions.

“Get back,” I growl, pushing Mae behind me. But as I do, the ground erupts, and those devil dogs I battled before push from the ground, ugly and snarling, trapping us between them and the glass figures.

“Give me the girl.”

All of the figures speak at once. It’s Hesper’s voice. I’d recognize it anywhere. But it’s torn and ruptured by the sharpness of the glass family’s throats.

“I have a name,” Mae says before I can respond. “And there’s no need for me to be given to you. I’m coming by choice.”

“You have a name,” the glass figures say in unison. “That’s true. But it’s not your real one, is it? Your dearly departed mother traded that one to me.”

She’s right. Of course she is. It’s part of the process. Give up your name, shed your old identity, and become something new. But I’d forgotten, somehow, that I called my daughter by a different name when she was a living, breathing girl.

The realization is a punch to the gut. I’d forgotten my own daughter’s name. If I can lose that, what else am I missing?

I look at my daughter as if seeing her for the first time, and a thought steals into my brain, terrible in its simplicity. Who is this person next to me? Is she even my daughter still or just a ghost with her face? She feels my gaze and glances in my direction, and I quickly look away, anxious to hide my treacherous thoughts. 

“The girl I was died,” she says, still looking at me. I meet her eye. I could never hide anything from her; she knows what I was thinking. “Mae is who I am now.” She looks back at the glass figures in front of us. “You put too much stock in names, Hesper Wright. Stop distracting us; let us get on with why we came here.”

“Names are powerful, girl,” the figures say. “This is no distraction, only a reminder. We all used to be things that we are no longer. I do not intend on going back.”

Behind us, the hell hounds growl and slink forward. I’m reluctant to turn my back on the glass demons, but the fang-studded maws of the dogs seem to be the more imminent threat.

I reach for my scythes and hold them in front of me. There’s too many of them—a half dozen at least—their muscles bunched and hackles raised. But my blades have already tasted blood today, and they thirst for more. I can feel their pull to battle.

“Join me, girl. Think of what we could do together.”

“You’ve only ever seen me as a pawn. You took advantage of a mother’s fear, and you were prepared to turn my father against me. For what? A centuries old feud? Revenge? Dominion over some desiccated realm filled with dead gods and the broken pieces of desperate people? I won’t be coerced into your sad fight, Hesper.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I’m here because I choose to be.” Mae’s voice rings out, filling the small expanse of grass. I turn my head to the side to catch a glimpse of her. Her face is calm, but her eyes are fierce. I recognize the look: determination made plain. I’ve been the recipient of it many times.

A knot in my chest loosens. Of course it’s her. My daughter. I was a fool to doubt it. Even for a moment. Take away the name, her ties to this earthly world, even the blood we share, and still she perseveres.

“And choice,” she continues, “is something I’ve had very little of in my short life. The same can be said for my even shorter death. I want space to make my own way and my own destiny. I want it for my dad, for Bram and the Sluagh, and I want it for the thousands of shades that you’ve trapped here for so long. All the ones you made. The ones like me.”

Definitely my daughter.

Mae.

Idealistic and naïve, yes. But with the resolve to back it up. God, it’s good to hear that clear, strong voice again.

I take a breath to appreciate what a miracle that is amid this whole messed-up situation. I notice Bram staring at her, and I know that look too. He’s kept quiet this whole time. The fight in front of Blythe’s cabin nearly destroyed him. It must be costing him everything to even stand, but he’s here, by her side. 

“A pretty speech, girl,” the glass voices say in unison, “but I told you already, I’m not going back to who I was. I fought for my power. I made myself a god. I won’t apologize for wanting more. Help me, and I can show you what it’s like to be a real queen. Or get out of my way.”

“You’ll never stop,” Mae says, almost to herself.

“And why should I?” The glass figures scream the words, their voice, Hesper’s voice, assaulting us with its intensity. The shards that make up their bodies vibrate. One shakes loose and flies forward, a scintillating dagger in the midday sun. It grazes Mae, lifting her hair as it hisses past. She raises a hand to her cheek, but it takes me a moment to understand what’s happened. Blood.

Mae looks up from the purple stain on her finger, her face a mixture of anger and surprise.

“That’s right, girl, I can even make the dead bleed.” The air is filled with awful, broken laughter. “I can make you all bleed.”

The smallest glass figure explodes. Mae throws up her wings in defense, even as Bram yells for her to stop. Some of the smaller pieces bounce off the liquid black and gold. Others tear through it, ripping holes in the webbing.

I step toward the remaining glass figures, forgetting the devil dogs behind me until one sinks its teeth into my calf. I swipe down hard with my scythe, lodging the metal in the beast’s thick neck, then wrench the blade upward, slicing the sinew and snapping bone. 

The other dogs lunge at me, their fangs bared. I swipe and stab, drawing blood, maiming, and killing when I can. But there are so many. When one falls, another rises from the ground, snarling and howling for death. All the while, great masses of glass thrum through the air, carving whatever flesh they find, not caring if the dark hounds suffer as much as we do.

“Get inside,” Mae screams to Bram.

He hesitates, but only for a moment before limping toward the shattered wall. Mae lifts off the ground, and for a moment, I think she’s flying away. But then she turns and dives, releasing her wings inches from the ground so that she soars forward with terrifying velocity.

She aims for the most massive of the glass bodies, hitting them with the leading edge of her wings and scattering their shards. A moment later, she flexes her wings back and lands, then thrusts them forward, generating enough wind to blow the glass across the grass and over the edge of the rocks into the lake. 

“Dad, go!” Mae shouts to me. She lands at a run, her wings folding away.

The black bodies of Hesper’s dogs litter the ground around me, even as others push up from the ground, displacing their fallen mates in the process. A strange jangling fills the air, and I realize with a sinking feeling that it’s the glass pieces rising through the air, forming into the rough-hewn shapes they had before at the edge of the yard.

I sprint across the grass leaping carcasses and dodging splinters of glass that whistle through the air like so many crystalline daggers. Hesper’s hounds growl and bay, their jaws snapping as they strain toward us, powerful legs flying. 

I swipe my blades at the ones closest to me as I catch up with Mae. A vicious point of glass slides past me and sinks into Mae’s upper arm. She lets out a pained shriek, but keeps running, even as she grips the shard’s broken edges with a shaking hand and throws it from her, blood the color of midnight oozing from the wound.

We reach the massive foyer. Mae sprints to the door tucked behind the grand staircase, but it doesn’t budge when she wrenches on its handle. 

“Back away,” I shout, and run into it at a sprint, shoulder lowered. Nothing. The wood doesn’t even creak. I back away from it, preparing for another assault.

“Behind you,” Mae yells. The hounds have caught up with us. I catch one in the chest with my scythe as it flies through the air, ready to sink its fangs into my back. I shove it off my blade with my boot, sending its limp body into several more that crowd the hallway behind us. Glass surges out into the space, around and through the sable knot of bodies, heedless of the damage.

I stand, blades at the ready, trying to keep myself between Mae and the onslaught of hounds and glass, when the door to Hesper’s cave suddenly bursts open.

A beast unfolds itself from the narrow passageway. Long, spider-like legs support a chest riven with twisted sinews the color of pitch and a head dominated by pincer-like jaws and milky eyes.

It stretches muscled arms, digging clawed fingers into the wall to propel itself into the space. When it finally emerges fully into the room, even the devil dogs cower away, the stink of murder and malice filling the room. 

“The door,” Mae says, and I follow her eyes to the threshold behind the monster. It’s open; the rocky passage is just visible beyond the creature’s swollen abdomen.

“Go,” I say. We exchange a glance, uncertainty clouding her face, but I nod my head toward the opening. “Go,” I repeat. She hesitates a moment longer, then dashes through the forest of legs and into the darkness behind.

I know I’ve just sent her from one dangerous situation to the next, but at least she’s away from the dogs and glass. And whatever this latest thing is. I back up into the center of the room as the monster stalks forward. The shards slide through the air, encircling us, the dogs slinking uneasily just beyond, their hackles raised.

I heft the scythes in my hands and cross them in front of me, my muscles tense, ready.

The creature hesitates at the sight of my blood-stained blades. It cocks its head, examining me with its unblinking eyes. Then it rears back and screams, its jaws crashing together at the end with a sickening snap. Then the monster scuttles forward with surprising speed. I dodge to the side and swing one blade and then the other, tracing deep grooves into one of its legs.

The creature screams again. I use its pain as a distraction and run full force at the wall, propelling myself upward with a few powerful strides before launching myself out and over, landing astride the monster’s back. I cross the blades above my head and then slice them down where they sink into the beast’s hide and lodge there in the thick, ropy ribs of its skin.

I try to dislodge my scythes but the monster bucks, and I lose my grip, my hands slipping free of the blood-slick handles. I fall to the ground and roll to a stop, and the creature is on top of me in an instant, one of its legs pressed hard into my chest, pinning me to the floor. I struggle under the weight of it, certain it will crush my chest or slice through my neck with a single bite from its powerful jaws.

The monster screams again in triumph and then snaps its head down, jaws open. There’s no time for thought, only action. I reach past the pain and panic and find an unexpected power.

Blythe’s brutal light still burns within me. I let it fill me. 

I catch fire.

The monster’s jaws, close as they are to my skin, melt instantly in the pitiless heat of my blaze. The thing screams, and its pain seems only to fill me with more power. I burn brighter as the monster turns to ash, its death cry filling the room.

When the last of it turns to smoke and the blood I spilled boils on the floor, I stand and find my blades amid the charred wreckage. I have time for one breath, two, and then the glass stops its dizzying spin around the room and coils like a snake. A moment later, thousands of shards are slicing through the air like so many wicked blades, ready to pierce and rend.

I yell as they fly toward me. It’s a primal, aching howl, full of my pain and sorrow, my anger and desire, my newfound strength. I scream all of it out, and as the sound of it fills the space, I glow brighter than ever, so bright it threatens to blind me, but I don’t miss the way the glass melts in midair when it reaches the edge of my terrible light. 

When my lungs finally run out of breath, my voice dies away and the light fades. My arms are still tense, blades at the ready. But I stand alone. All that’s left of the monster is a black slick on the floor. Of the glass, just ash studded with glittering sand. And the dogs are nothing but shadows burned onto the wall. 

I turn and sprint for the door behind the stairs. I cross over its threshold and fly down the narrow stone corridor, bursting into the cavern.

“Perfect,” Hesper drawls. My sudden entrance has drawn her eyes away from Mae who stands before her, a look of pure hatred setting my daughter’s eyes ablaze. Bram is on his knees in front of Hesper. She has his arms locked behind his back and the knife she used on me is at his throat. “The whole family is here. Let’s get this over with.”

And she presses the knife in a swift, sure line across Bram’s neck.

MAE

I don’t understand how the dead can die.

I only know that when Hesper’s knife slides across Bram’s throat, whatever life force is in him slowly starts to drain away. She drops his arms and he crumples to the ground, a look of confusion on his pale face.

Hesper’s gaze never wavers, and I know as she steps casually around the spasming Bram that she’s coming for me. A panicked voice inside urges me to fight or flee, but my body refuses to budge. I stand there frozen as Hesper prowls forward, the knife clutched at her side dripping Bram’s blood. 

Suddenly, Dad is there, fighting Hesper with easy ferocity, as though he’s been battling demons all his life, which in a way, I guess, he has. They parry and thrust, wicked blades glinting in the strange light of the cavern. It’s not until one particularly vicious exchange that draws golden-tinged blood from my Dad’s shoulder that I finally remember to breathe, remember that I can move.

He's strong and incredibly fast, but it’s clear Hesper is more than a match for him. I think hard, wishing I could come up with something that might help, but I know she’s too powerful, that she’ll kill us all in the end, and we’ll be devoured by the oncoming shadows of a forever dark. 

She catches Dad in the thigh with her blade, and he drops to his knees. She swipes down hard. He catches her arm mid-strike and manages to hold her off, but it’s taking all his strength to do so, and Hesper keeps pushing. Another moment or two and the tip of her blade will slide straight into Dad’s eye.

I scream and the walls of the cavern, heavy with their onyx load, begin to vibrate. For a wild second, I think I’ve caused the tremor, but as cracks begin to form in the rock, I trace them back to a single source.

Bram.

Blood the color of lead, lustrous and slick, seeps from his neck, soaking the front of his old-fashioned shirt and coat, running down his arms and mixing with the cracks he’s making in the floor. They fan out from his pale fingers, a web of fissures that sing across the floor, multiplying and dividing.

Soon the cracks are climbing up the wall, and fault lines begin to form across the onyx stones, until first one, then two, then tens and hundreds are crumbling away, their burnished surfaces reduced to dust.

I watch with a dazed sort of wonder as Bram’s handiwork spreads like wildfire through the onyx. A shriek of rage brings me back to reality. Hesper throws my dad from her and rushes at Bram, her knife ready, her eyes burning with a mad fury. 

“Stop!” she screams, her voice ragged around the edges, her thin veneer of humanity cracking along with the stones. 

Bram doesn’t even look at her, but his gaze intensifies, and his fingers flex harder into the floor, even as his pale face grows paler and dark veins spider across his cheeks.

The clefts in the onyx grow larger and spread faster. The destruction has run halfway around the space by the time Hesper reaches him. But I’m there to meet her, finally overcoming the shock that had my feet planted on the floor. 

She raises the knife above his arched back, but it never finds its mark. Instead, I’m there, hand outstretched, fingers wrapped around her wrist. We lock eyes and the anger I find there is tinged with fear. As each stone breaks I can feel a little of her strength slip away. Yet even then she’s ferocious, and I’m not sure how long I can hold her back. Luckily, dad is there. 

He might have ended it all there if my eyes hadn’t betrayed his arrival. As it is, Hesper sees my gaze slide away and turns to parry the double-fisted thrust of his blades. It costs her though, much more than it did before, and the reverberations send her to her knees. She’s up again quickly and on the attack, swinging and stabbing her knife with terrifying ferocity even as the final stones crumble behind her.

A wet noise at my feet draws my attention away from Hesper and Dad’s fight. Bram is on his side on the floor, the last of the onyx stones turning to dust on the far side of the cavern. He’s shuddering as the slow flood of dark blood continues to seep from his neck. His face is a network of veins, as though Hesper’s knife gave him the life he lost only so she could take it away once more. 

I kneel by his side, grab his hand. He holds onto it for a moment, and even with everything in chaos, I feel an unexpected ache in my chest. Then he pulls his fingers free and points at the swirl of black and gray and white behind us.

I glance at the vortex, but the energy emanating from it is hard to bear, even for a few moments. It’s not a feeling of evil so much as despair. A sadness so heavy it’s curdled, rotted under its own weight. 

I look away, pretending not to understand, but Bram only thrusts his finger more emphatically toward the eddy of shades Hesper created. His eyes plead with me. He doesn’t need to speak for me to understand what he wants me to do. Hesper’s monsters have used it as a point of entry.

I can, too.

I glance up at my dad and Hesper still locked in battle. With the onyx stones gone, Hesper isn’t as strong, but there’s enough power left in her that she’s still dangerous. Their fight could go either way.

“I need to stay here,” I say. “Dad needs my help.” But even as the words leave my mouth, I realize there isn’t much I can do to help with tattered wings and no fighting experience. At best, I’d be a distraction, at worst, a liability. Bram watches me come to this realization, his finger still in the air.

“Find the bruise,” I say, and Bram nods. 

I take hold of his outstretched hand and give it one last squeeze, relishing the feeling for a moment before letting go and running across the cavern straight into the swirling mass. 

I’m plunged into suffocating darkness. Panic rises in my chest, but I remind myself I’ve been here before. This isn’t the first time I’ve entered Hesper’s inner world. My instincts urge me to fight, but there’s no point in struggling against this crushing misery. Like last time, I need to give into it, sink to the bottom, and find the source of all this pain.

Everyone’s got bruises, even monsters. Especially monsters.

As before, the images come just as I’m certain I’ll be lost forever in the dark, and I know I’m close.

A moor in winter.

A secret place amid the rocks.

A beautiful boy.

A stolen smile.

The visions press down on me, filling me with pain and loss.

I’m drowning in them, and I need to fight to remember who I am and why I came. 

Then a flash of deep green among the white and black.

I struggle to hold onto it, as it threatens to slip away into oblivion. I reach out to touch a face, to run a finger down a streak of purple, to wrap my fingers around a hand, rough from work and cold.

And I’m there at the edge of a forest, the snow crusted with hoarfrost under my feet. Ahead of me, a girl crouches over a figure in the snow. I know it’s Hesper. Her memories made this place, after all. But the callous creature from the cavern is hard to reconcile with the girl in front of me. 

Her face is different, marked by a midnight stain that runs from her forehead across one eye. It’s startling, but gives her an arresting beauty, like someone anointed her with the night sky. But more than that, it’s the look on her striking face that makes it hard to recognize her.

She’s in love.

And the figure on the ground, not a boy any longer but not yet a man, gazes at her with equal intensity, even as his cheeks pale and his lips turn blue.

He’s dying.

As soon as the thought comes to me, the whole scene feels heavier and harder to bear, as though the black trunks of the trees and the cold sparkle of the snow might collapse on themselves and swallow me whole.

I force myself toward them, even as sorrow overwhelms me.

A step.

Another step, and the weight of this pain will surely break me.

But I see the ribbon wrapped around their hands, bright against the surrounding darkness, and I know what I need to do.

I reach down and untie it, unwrapping it from their clasped fingers, and as it finally slips free, Hesper’s head snaps up, and she’s looking right at me, pure hatred erasing her mark and clouding her eyes.

There’s no love on her face now. Only rage.

She swipes at me, grabbing for the ribbon, the end of it just missing her clawed fingers. I turn, then, and run, my footsteps oddly silent on the icy snow. I don’t need to look to know she’s close behind. A desperate scream follows me. It’s a constant cry of words in a language I don’t know but can understand. Pain and hurt and sadness—a tyranny of agony.

I will myself to go faster, but it’s like running in a dream, each step a lifetime, and all the while that soul-sucking sadness is there, desperately trying to pull me under. I reach the trees at the edge of the snow, and their dark trunks slide past me, growing closer together the further in I go until finally all I see is black. 

I struggle forward, unsure if I’m running or swimming, if the rushing in my ears is the wind or waves. And all the while, she’s there, just behind me, grasping and reaching. Not the girl at the bottom of the abyss and not the cold villain back in the cavern, but a desperate creature driven by fear and haunted by loss.

She doesn’t want to let me go.

The darkness around me thickens. The rush of sound blossoms into a near-constant roar. I don’t know when I realize there is a word within the howl, but suddenly I can hear it, the syllables matching the beat of my heart.

A name.

Not a word.

A name. And I know without knowing how that it’s her name, the real one given to her once upon a time. Before she learned the power of sorrow and dread, before she learned how to weave a world out of shadows. 

The night has crystalized around me, and I remember what it’s like to struggle for breath. But I force myself to say the name, to speak it into the abyss.

I say it again. And again. Repeating it with more strength each time until I’m screaming it into the shadows.

Each time the darkness loosens its grip, imperceptibly at first, then in one great sigh, and I can move once more. Forward or up, it’s impossible to tell; I only know I’m moving out, away from the version of Hesper that nurses her rage. The pitiful version that longs to keep the ribbon in my hand knotted tightly to the past.

I come away from the portal like I’m slipping through the surface of a dark ocean, the last of the shades sliding away from my skin as I enter the cavern. I scan the space, trying to make sense of the chaos. Bram lies on his side facing away from me. He’s too still, that impossible slick of blood surrounding his insubstantial form. Something inside me stutters at the sight of him, but then an urgent scuffle draws my attention.

Dad and Hesper are on the raised dais. Dad has the advantage. He’s on top of Hesper, his knees locked around her. Hesper’s awful dagger, gripped in both his hands, hovers above her heart. She presses against its downward path. They’re so equally matched that there’s little movement—just a slight vibration in the knife as it thrums with power meeting power.

My fingers flex with nervous energy, and I’m surprised to feel the softness of silk caught in my grip. I look down at the length of ribbon clutched in my hand. It glows with the gentle light of memory, creating an orb of genuine warmth amid the strange half-light.

But the ribbon’s too heavy in my hand.

It doesn’t belong to me. 

I cross the cavern floor in the space of a breath, certain, suddenly, of what I need to do. Neither one of them sees me approach, and I only need a moment to wrap the ribbon around Hesper’s hand. Only a moment to whisper a name she’s forgotten in her ear. Only a moment to remind her of the girl she was before she made herself a monster. 

The glow of the ribbon spreads from her fingers to her arm. It sweeps up her neck and across her face, trailing a swath of starry night sky in its wake. Hesper’s dark eyes soften, her expression melting from fury to surprise to something more complicated, and I can see for one glorious moment the human she must once have been.

Beautiful, broken, loved.

Then the blade, held in equilibrium for an impossibly long time, sinks into her. Dad holds it there, a look not of triumph but of something bleaker written into the lines of his face.

When he slides the blade free, Hesper gasps. Ruby-red blood flows from the wound. Dad peels himself away from Hesper and the dais and comes to stand beside me. Neither of us move. We only watch as Hesper raises her hands and trails a finger along the ribbon’s path as it crisscrosses her pale skin. 

She gets up from the dais with effort, wrapping her fingers around the green silk and pressing it to her chest, her blood staining it dark. She moves to the far wall, stumbling once but righting herself and continuing on, slowly and with dignity.

Then she slips through an almost imperceptible gap in the stone and is gone.

---

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

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ONWARD TO EPISODE 17 ===>

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