Ep. 7: Sanctuary
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 Seven.
New to the story? START HERE.
Previously: Hesper listens to what Ten has to say, but has a proposition of her own to make.
Up ahead: Hesper invites Ten into her Hall of Onyx and the things he finds there evoke painful memories and new sensations.
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TEN
I followed Hesper like I followed Blythe.
Tugged around like a puppet on string by strange forces I’m only beginning to understand.
But what choice do I have?
I’d do anything for Mae. Whatever it takes to bring her peace. And going along with the plans proposed by these women or demons…or, or goddesses—whoever they are—that seems like my best shot at the moment.
But they don’t make it easy.
When Hesper started talking about Mae’s name and blood, I wanted to murder her. I felt like I could have ripped her apart where she stood, held a piece of her in each hand, and crushed it till her own blood ran through my fingers.
I am, at heart, a warrior, after all. A good one. So I get that there are times to attack, but I also know there are times to tame the rage and wait. Victory comes more easily if you know your enemy.
And both Hesper and Blythe are obviously in command of forces beyond my experience. I need to understand the full extent of their powers.
And then I need to find their weaknesses.
That requires patience.
The waiting game takes time. That’s obvious. But learning to exploit slow and steady determination isn’t a skill you can hone in a day. The new recruits that used to come into my unit didn’t get that. They were all fire and flash, but that kind of energy is easy to overwhelm. Like extinguishing a candle between your fingers.
The lesson they learn eventually is that the most dangerous man is the one with endurance, the one whose fury has gone icy and compressed in that space right below his heart. In that secret place a kind of cold fusion happens.
Press the right button at the right time, and the explosion is phenomenal.
So, yeah, I follow Hesper, but I’m not doing it blindly. There’s a clear intention behind my compliance.
It doesn’t take me long to decide all that, but by the time I rise from my chair, I have to stride quickly across the living room to catch up with Hesper’s rapidly disappearing figure. She moves fast for someone so small.
When I finally reach her, I feel like a giant towering over her. But she moves with the confidence of a killer, her long silver-white hair swinging across her back with every footstep. Despite our size difference, the energy in the room tips decidedly in her favor.
We exit the wide hallway and enter a magnificent foyer with soaring ceilings and a glass-fronted entryway facing the dark forest beyond. After skirting the main staircase, we stop just behind it in front of a nondescript door that, after another bit of fancy fingerwork by Hesper, opens on silent hinges.
I let out a little gasp as we step through and find ourselves in a hallway seemingly carved straight out of the bedrock of the mountainside.
“My home is built into the slope,” she says, responding to my surprise. “The mountain, as you’ll recall, is an important piece in the creation of shades. I’ve been working out of this cave for some time. I always thought sheltering here was temporary, but as the years stretched on, I decided to make my living situation a bit more permanent. So I put my shades to work and built the modern structure you see now.”
She looks at me sidelong as she closes the door. The dim light from the foyer recedes until, as the mountain wall melts together, we are shrouded in a darkness so complete I wonder if my eyes are open or shut.
A quiet rustle just ahead of me and a row of finely wrought lanterns spring to life. I blink and rub a hand over my eyes, trying to understand the strange cast of the soft light.
“I manipulate shades for all my needs here,” Hesper says, glancing back at me. “Even illumination. The light they cast is strange, but beautiful, I think, once you get used to it. And it’s certainly easier than running electricity from the house.”
She smiles a bit at this, but I’m too busy studying the flames inside the lanterns to care much about returning the gesture. The flame isn’t like any I’ve seen before. It’s not a blaze or even a smolder of coals, but an orb of deepest black. It radiates with a power that feels primal in its intensity. I raise my hand next to it and study my fingers. I seem to feel them more than see them, like my senses have switched places.
“Wonderful, isn’t it?” Hesper says, sidling up next to me. “And this is only one part of a human’s essence. Amazing to think of the power and potential locked within your flesh.”
In the bizarre light of the lantern, Hesper’s skin is opalescent. Her white hair falls around her shoulders in shiny pools. And suddenly, despite myself, I long to dip a finger into those quicksilver tresses, find the hollow of her collarbone, trace its curve.
And in the light of the lantern, it’s not just a longing; it feels like it’s happening, my eyes and hands doing that dizzying exchange again. I inhale sharply, swallow down the fire building inside me, close my eyes.
I hear Hesper shift away from me. When she speaks there’s a knowingness in her words. “Like I said, it takes some getting used to. The lanterns are powerful. They don’t illuminate so much as reveal. Shades are longing and desire. The primal part of humanity. Some see them as wicked. But for me, they are the most genuine part, the most real.”
She pauses to study my face, and I find I can’t yet meet her eye. “Don’t fight it,” she whispers, and I shiver. “The light of the lanterns touches everything here. There’s no way to resist it, and no need to try.”
I nod, unsure of what to say or do. None of this is natural, but what’s most worrying is that it doesn’t feel wrong. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt more alive.
She grabs my hand and draws me down the hallway. At its end, we step into a large chamber, and I stop dead, the dazzle of a thousand thousand black stones overwhelming me.
They’re everywhere, embedded into the rock walls, studding the towering columns of stone that soar to the craggy roof, pebbling the violent thrust of gray rock rising at an angle from the cave’s center to form a kind of slanted dais.
“What is this?” I rasp, my voice thick with awe.
“My sanctuary,” Hesper says. “The Hall of Onyx. Each black stone is a name spoken aloud and freely given to me. Part of the process of shade making.”
I let my eyes roam the chapel-like space. Here the lanterns have given way to dozens of candelabra, each filled with black candles radiant with shades. Their black brilliance finds the shiny surfaces of the stones, reflecting and amplifying the strange power that fills the room.
The fever of craving I experienced earlier grows. But now, outside of the claustrophobic confines of the hall, with the shock of it worn off, I feel like I can loosen the reins. Let it run. Just a bit.
“I know how you feel,” Hesper says. Her black eyes seem to read the yearning beginning to boil beneath my skin. “I still remember what it was like. Knowing the power of a shade for the first time. It’s not something easily forgotten. And this place. It’s full of them. Even I find it awe-inspiring. This is my holy ground.”
I don’t say anything. Just nod. I can feel her gaze on me, but I can’t tear mine away from the stones. I hadn’t realized how long it’d been since I felt human. And here, I feel it with an intensity that’s intoxicating. I realize I don’t want to leave. Not now. Maybe not ever. This place and everything in it feel like all I need.
“I don’t want to leave,” I say.
“You don’t need to,” she whispers.
I feel her hand on mine. She’s leading me to the dais.
“Lay down. Sleep. It’s been a long, strange day for you, I’m sure.”
I let myself sink down on the angled stone. Hesper removes my shirt, and I venture a glance at her as the folds of the fabric slide past my eyes. She stares back at me, her eyes pinning me to the onyx alter.
The stones feel warm against my skin. I let the heat sink into me, into my blood, my bones. I reach one hungry hand up, try to draw Hesper to me, but she grasps my wrist and lays my hand across my own chest, runs a hand down my cheek instead.
“Not now,” she whispers. “Sleep. Let your dreams lead you.”
I don’t want to sleep; I want to drink her in forever, her mother-of-pearl skin and bone-white hair. But, with gentle fingers, she closes my eyes.
Lost in the dark radiance of the shade light, the echoed power of the stones, I let go. Not a little this time, but wholly.
I let the brilliant blackness wash over me, and for the first time in years, I sleep the sleep of the living.
***
Everything I need is here.
All that I could ever want.
Just here in the soft blackness behind my eyelids.
Floating in that nowhere place between sleep and waking.
But life has other plans, and my senses slowly come awake. Tender skin beneath my fingers. The smell of vanilla and earth in my nose. A quiet sigh. It's not much more than a whisper, but I know without seeing that it’s Helena.
Always Helena.
I blink, eyes bleary with sleep, and she’s there, cradled in my arms.
But it’s too bright.
I close my eyes again, and back in the darkness, I gather her up closer, feel the litheness of her body against my chest. I would hold her forever, just like this, and never let go.
A high-pitched screech, a sharp jab in my side. Small hands circling my arm.
“Morning, Mae,” I say, cracking an eyelid and removing her knee from my ribs.
“Daddy,” she says, “I missed you.”
“I didn’t go anywhere, Maesie Daisy.”
“But I didn’t see you all night.”
I smile. Wrap my arm around her. Everything I need is right here.
I close my eyes.
I’ll take my time waking up.
There’s no rush.
***
A beeping, shrill and insistent, pulls at me. I reach to shut off the alarm, but my hand meets empty air. I open my eyes.
That dream, a memory of a faraway time when we were together, happy, and whole, fades. In it’s place is a nightmare world of doctors and the antiseptic smell of the hospital.
Mae is older now, but her body is as small and fragile as it was then, more even. She moans a little in her sleep, and I wrap my arms around her, hold her tight despite the mess of wires and tubes that seem more likely to swallow her than save her.
“She can’t die,” Helena says. “I won’t let her.”
She’s standing at the window. The one that looks out over the hospital courtyard. From my place on Mae’s bed I follow her gaze to a couple walking slowly around the perimeter. The woman’s belly is swollen, a pained expression twists her face. The man beside her looks pale, uncertain.
I remember that feeling all too well. It wasn’t that long ago that Helena and I were doing the same thing in the same place, pacing out the hours, walking toward a future more wonderful and awful than we ever could have imagined.
It had been a difficult labor. No, that was putting it too lightly. It had been terrible. Prolonged, intense. From the very beginning, it seemed the message was clear: this world wasn’t meant for Mae. But we were too happy to realize it then and too relieved when that red, wrinkled, beautiful face finally made its appearance.
From that moment on, there were innumerable close calls, countless incidents of toddlerhood that could have ended in tragedy. We laughed it off. Our Mae was precocious. Too curious for her own good. Don’t all children get into these predicaments?
But we learned to become hypervigilant parents. We seldom let her out of our sight. When it was time for school, we decided to teach her ourselves. She was too smart for regular school we told each other. And Mae was undoubtedly intelligent, but if we were being honest, the real reason we kept her home was fear. There were too many things that could go wrong, and Mae would certainly find them all.
Helena loved Mae more than anything. But she suffered. I was gone a lot serving tours of duty, and when I left, the burden of keeping Mae out of danger fell squarely on her shoulders. She was strong. So strong. But Helena was an artist, a sensitive soul.
She quit dancing when she was pregnant with Mae and never went back. All that creativity, all that depth of understanding needed a place to go, so she poured it into Mae. She was an amazing mother, but motherhood took its toll on her more than most.
Then, as if to underscore the futility of all our efforts, the universe took matters into its own hands and planted the seed of destruction into the marrow of Mae’s bones.
Leukemia.
The cancer diagnosis almost broke Helena. Would have done, I’m sure, if keeping Mae alive hadn’t become second nature to her over the years. After the initial shock wore off, cancer became another hill for her and Mae to climb together, albeit steeper and more dangerous than any of the others.
“She won’t die.” Helena holds herself rigid, all her grace and flexibility gone. One wrong move, now, and she’ll snap.
I don’t say anything, just hold Mae tighter.
The coming weeks are a blur. In my memory, Helena never sleeps. She is a constant presence. She knows every doctor, every nurse. She demands answers, and when the medical staff fail her, she turns to the Internet. Cancer forums. She learns of other doctors. She learns of experimental treatments. It’s all expensive. We take out loans. We refinance the house. We beg friends and relatives. We find every last cent we can. And when even that isn’t enough, Helena finds another way.
Some of her old dancer friends did drugs occasionally. Cocaine, sometimes molly. They had connections. Those connections needed fixers. I had the skills they needed. And they paid well. I was good at getting the job done. I was thorough, discreet. One job became five. Five became ten. It was enough to pay our bills and then some. It was all below board, but it didn’t matter because Mae got better.
***
Home again after Mae’s final cancer treatment. The nightmare’s subsided and now we can rest easy for a time. And the thought echoes in my head again, a constant refrain: Everything I need is here.
I’m tucking Mae in. She’s getting too old for it, but neither of us care. We both know our time together is a fragile thing. I run a hand across her head, relishing the feel of the new, soft hair under my fingers.
“Daddy,” she says, and stops. Her eyes are grey-blue pools in the dim light of her bedside lamp. I grab her hand, run a thumb over her knuckles, wait for her to continue.
She sighs and closes her eyes. Blue veins etch a lattice of life across her eyelids. How many times have I traced their pattern, following it from her closed eyes to her pale cheeks, to her temples?
“Daddy, I don’t think I’m meant to be here.”
I suck in a shaky breath, hold her fingers a little tighter. The truth is I’ve thought the same thing. So many times. I let the air out of my lungs slowly, thinking of the best way to respond, but Mae speaks first.
“Remember that fairy you gave me?” Her voice is quiet, but strong, and I send a secret prayer to whoever’s listening for that, at least. A few months ago she was too weak to speak.
“Of course,” I say, following her eyes to the little figure on her shelf. I half stand, reach a hand out and carefully retrieve it, then give it to her.
She runs a finger over the delicate wings. I watch her. An old soul. That’s what Helena and I have always called her. For someone who was forever cheating death, there was an ocean of life behind those storm-cloud eyes.
“I always thought she was so beautiful,” Mae says. “But not because of the way the glass glows, not the color, or the details of the pretty face. She’s more than that, you know. To me.”
I give her a little smile, a nod, but keep quiet, not wanting to interrupt. What she’s saying feels too important.
“That poem I made you read to me so many times, The Stolen Child, from grandma’s book. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.” She keeps her eyes fixed on the fairy, the light glinting on its wings reflecting in her eyes. “Remember when I’d tell you about Lonely Man and Sad Girl?”
I nod, trying to keep my face neutral.
“I still see them,” he continues. “You thought I outgrew them, but I just stopped talking about it. They’re still there. I don’t know how to explain it, Dad, but they’re pulling at me. They always have for as long as I can remember. But lately it’s been more, I don’t know, urgent. They want me to go with them.”
“Oh, Maisie Daisie,” I whisper, my throat growing thick with unshed tears.
She looks at me, and it breaks my heart, that face. She’s too young to look so knowing.
“There’s more of them now too,” she continues. “It started in the hospital, and it’s happening here too.” She pauses and glances around the room. I feel a shiver go down my back. She’s so earnest, it’s hard not to believe her. “They’re not scary though. They’re here to protect me, I think. Just like my glass fairy.”
“I’m here to protect you, Mae,” I say, and feel a tear slip down my cheek.
“I know, Dad,” she says. “But there are some things even you can’t save me from.”
I don’t reply, just press her fingers to my forehead and weep. I don’t want to say it, but I know she’s right. Helena and I fought for her all her life, but we’ve always known, even if we never acknowledged it, that Mae was special. That she seemed both more than this world and less, so vibrant she might effervesce.
“The weird thing is it seems like I should be afraid,” she says.
“Of what, love?”
“Death.” She says it with no reservation, no hushed tones, or awkward glance. “You and mom are afraid of it.”
“Oh, Mae,” I begin, but she interrupts me.
“No, Dad, I know, I see it. And I hear things. Stuff you and Mom talk about when you don’t think I’m listening. Mom’s sick with worry, and you’re off doing dangerous stuff. And it’s all for me. To save me. And I want you to know I don’t need saving. I don’t want to leave you and Mom, but when I do, it’ll be okay.”
“No, Mae,” I say, swallowing more tears. “It will never be okay.”
***
I reach out a hand to run a finger over Mae’s cheek, and crimson blood trails in its wake. I look down and we’re outside the house, blood pools on the walk. The bullet was meant for me. A job I’d done gone bad. And Mae was the one that paid for it.
I’m screaming, screaming for help. I hate this memory. Hate that it lurks at the edges of my dreams, turning them to nightmares without warning.
“It’s okay, Daddy,” she whispers, before slipping away. She died there. The doctors told me later that she died on the pavement there in my arms. The paramedics brought her back, and they were able to stabilize her in the hospital for a time, keep her alive with machines. But that aliveness was only a technicality. My Mae was gone.
And I was right.
It would never be okay.
HESPER
I stare down at him. The human in my midst. His eyes slide beneath his lids, the muscles in his jaw twitch, and he groans. I reach a finger out to his forehead, gently smooth the tension away until he rests easier. I let my touch linger longer than necessary, wondering what it would be like to caress his cheeks, his chest. To feel his hands on me. To take him body and soul.
Shade making is no science. The art is in the taking of the earth-bound third: name, blood, passion. For some, the third must be seized, for others, I tease them away so that they hardly even know what’s happened. All come to me as willing participants, full of the things tying them to this world. And all leave ready to die.
I used to relish the process, delight in growing my collection of votaries.
With each one, the Dusk grew more powerful.
I grew more powerful.
But after all these years, it’s hard to get excited with one more shade. And most of them are more of the same. Their names fall from their lips without grace. Their blood spills thick and red, tainted with poisons and pills. Their passions barely strong enough to provide the spark I need.
But this one. This Ten.
I lean down and brush my lips against his, savoring the taste of him. This one is a treat. He reminds me of the first of my takings. They were wild, fierce. War and fighting, love and lust ran through their veins, and still, centuries later, their votaries throb with power. Their shades make up the very heart of the Dusk.
I pull away from him reluctantly and take a few steps backward, keeping Ten in my sight until I turn on my heel, a rare smile on my lips. I stride to the back of the Hall where the space narrows and the walls, heavy with their onyx burden, nearly touch. There’s a narrow fissure there, almost invisible in the strange glow of the shade light, and I slip into it, running my fingers along the stones as I pass.
It’s been too long since I’ve been here, my most sacred of sacred spaces.
A twist of my fingers, and the shade light illuminates a wide brazier stretching across a rock ledge at the far end of the circular space. Below it, there’s a seat of sorts, roughly hewn from the solid rock of the mountain. It took me an age to fashion it.
A self-made throne.
I settle myself on its cold surface and take them in: my beauties, my votaries.
They crowd every ledge and crevice, some no bigger than my pinkie, some nearly as large as a child. I reach out for the one nearest to me. It fits neatly in my palm with a surface as smooth as black silk, a circular base and a bottle-like torso. Its cylindrical arms are raised in supplication.
I brush my thumb over the wide, staring eyes, the simple line of the mouth. Man or woman, it’s impossible to tell, and it matters not. I don’t remember who they were, when they came to me, or where.
I have so many of them. I could crush this one with a quick squeeze of my fingers. Set that single, insignificant shade loose. Let it wander the dark forests until the warden finds it, wraps it in that gossamer of hers, and sends it across whatever mornrill its twinned soul has been polluting all these years.
The Dawn hates the taste of diessences held too long in this world, but some lowly page or pleasure maiden would consume it and make no fuss, happy to be fed.
I press my fingers into it, feeling it begin to give. So many times I’ve thought of smashing them all to pieces, flooding this place with a tidal wave of shades. Go out with a bang. That would have its own kind of satisfaction: a disaster for the warden, not to mention a release from this burden I’ve carried for so long.
Finally, I could rid myself of the sharp blade of hate that’s pricked me for centuries, pull it out fully and let my fury spill out in one final rush. But Blythe is clever. She would be overwhelmed for a time, then she’d find a way to round up every last one of my shades. Dusk knows she has the time. And then I would have done her job for her.
I relax my fingers, return the votary to its place on the ledge. I banish those thoughts. I have to stay focused now that I have the girl.
Mae.
I rise from my seat and cross the small space to stand before a natural alcove in the rock wall. Two large candles come alive with shade light at the flick of a finger, casting their glow onto her votary. It is magnificent: a fine jet black, features that somehow overcome the simplicity of the statue’s lines to feel almost alive. Even a fool could tell there’s more power in this single figure than in a thousand of the others.
I could hardly contain my eagerness when the mother came to me. The Sluagh were long gone from this world. Impossible, then, that this young girl’s earthbound third should be so redolent of them. The Dark Horde was a part of her, and she a part of them. How or why, I still can’t fathom. But the evidence was there before me.
It was unmistakable in the way the name slipped, smooth and clean from the woman’s lips, in the terrible clarity of the blood in the little glass jar she passed me with shaking hands. And then there was that glass fairy. For anyone else, it would have been a cheap trinket.
As soon as I laid my hands on it, though, the strength of feeling the child had imbued it with shocked me so much that I nearly dropped it. There was love there, a deep love of a daughter for her father, but there was also sadness, and hope, and the potent convergence of childhood dreams crashing into adult reality.
Below it all was belief. No, not just belief, but knowledge, certainty even, of the world beyond this world. And most special of all, a sense of belonging to that place beyond.
“Help me,” the mother had whispered. “She’s dying. She’s dying, and this time…”
She trailed off, unwilling or unable to finish.
“There are rules about taking children,” I muttered, but even as I said it, I knew the votary was as good as made. Nothing would pry these pieces of a true Sluagh from my fingers.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Don’t thank me.”
“I can’t lose her,” she said.
I wanted to tell her then that her child had been lost to her from the moment she was born. If I were more generous, I would have returned Mae’s precious ties to this plane. I would have explained to her grieving mother that no one actually cheats death. That all of life is just loss in slow motion. I would have explained to her that living as a shade is no life at all.
But I was greedy. I am greedy. For wealth, for life, and for revenge most of all. So I took those pieces of Mae from that pathetic woman, and I made this magnificent votary so that when Mae died not even a day later, her shade became mine.
I let myself picture the scene. That moment when the mother waited for the ghost of her daughter to appear. Her certain, crushing grief when she never did. It was always pointless to explain the implications of shade-making, and what did I care for the sorrows of one human woman? After all, this world is more full of weeping than anyone can understand. What are a few more tears?
Still, I understand the disappointment now more than I once did. Mae does not behave like any other shade I’ve made, and no wonder given what she is. Instead of bending to my bidding and becoming a pliable thread in my fingers, she maintains a will of her own and uses that freedom to stay far away from me, no matter how I call to her.
But that’s about to change.
I cut a finger through the air, and the stone room goes black. I slip back through to the main cavern where Ten still lies atop the altar.
Asleep, steeped in the power of the shades, he dreams, no doubt, of breathing, and loving, and running, and sweating, and crying, and laughing, and dying and all the souvenirs that make up a human life.
I reach out to touch him once more, and he stirs beneath my fingers but does not wake. Not yet. When he does finally open his eyes, he’ll be ready to lay down those parts of himself he visited in his sleep. For what are they now but pieces of a dream. In exchange there is eternity, or as close as one like him can get.
And Mae, of course.
When I hold her father’s shade in thrall, maybe then she’ll finally listen.
Maybe she’ll finally hear what I need to tell her; that together we can topple the gods, break their kingdom of gold, and rebuild a better one.
It’s a privilege to share my work with you! Thank you for taking the time to read the seventh episode of DARK AS DAWN, BRIGHT AT NIGHT.
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