“Be grateful it is rare for the world’s shadow to eat the full moon, for when it does we must hide ourselves away and fast for eight hours before and eight hours after, and those heavy with child must drink tea of blacktail root and pray to the sun and stars that the babe should be born another night.”

-The Lura Tovha

Book of Ways, 36:13

I’d expected many things of my first days in my new master’s home. Prepared myself for all manner of torments. His absence wasn’t one of them. The need I feel for his blood is a pain more acute than I ever could have imagined, and I have to fight through every moment to contain my moonlight.

I find my way to the dining hall with the help of the house itself, surprised when I see everyone sitting together. Middleborn, Lunarborn, and the single Solarborn girl all at one table. We dine on smoked fish, eggs, rice porridge, fried baua fruit and berries. There are tiny goblets of cold, clotted blood for Bastren and I as well—barely enough for a mouthful, its flavor curdled. But I drink it greedily and in part, gratefully. Another piece of myself rankles at it, though, hissing words like insult and neglect into my thoughts. I ignore it.

When I’ve finished, a construct comes to fetch me—one of the House’s more mobile bodies, a winged lion of brass and teak. It leads me first to a lift that carries us down, and then to a dank, narrow stair which takes us further down still. At last that opens up into something between a cavern and a long cell—a space hollowed out from the mountain itself. We come to a stop at the far end of it, where the light of the sun lanterns hardly reaches.

I take half a step back as the heavy trapdoor before our feet flings itself open. A hole about as wide as three of myself laid end-to-end yawns before us, a thick knotted rope leading down into the inky dark. I look at it, then back to the lion construct, eyebrows raised.

“Get in,” says the house.

I hesitate for only a moment, glancing to the hole and back. Then I turn from the construct and draw in a long breath. My fingers shake slightly as I hike up the front of my skirts and secure them with my belt. Then I make the descent. Thankfully, my leather slippers have a fair grip to them—though I still lose my footing on the knots more than once. By the time I reach the bottom, my hands are raw and chaffed from the rope. I look about, my eyes adjusting quickly to the deepened shadows.

But I’ve barely had a chance to take everything in when there’s a scraping sound and a disturbance in the air behind me. I whirl around to find the rope gone—drawn up and away. The lion face peers down at me from the circle of orange light high above. I glare up at him, mouth dropping open at last, but the house’s voice thunders down, drowning me out.

“This pit is your first tutor, your first lesson, and your first test,” it says. “You will leave it by your own power, or not at all.” Then it turns, disappearing from view, and the trapdoor slams shut.

For exactly five heartbeats, I panic. Allow myself to feel every bit of my own terror, allow the adrenaline to surge. Then I take the reins. Slow my breathing until my heart-rate follows suit. Clear my mind. Wall away the sudden flare of emotions, smothering them.

I keep one of my nails pointed and sharp—a little claw on the smallest finger of my left hand where I can keep it hidden in the drapery of my sleeves. Wielding it like a hook, I dig it into the soft flesh of my right inner arm. The rosy bloom of pain draws the breath from my lungs, calls up my moonglow.

Inhaling deeply, I close my eyes and begin to spin the light. Concentrating the illumination at my fingertips to push it outward and twist it into threads. The ritual calms me—the repetitive movements and slow draining of power easing my agitation, quieting my mind. I spin only a small length, coiling it about my hand to light my way as I examine my surroundings.

There’s a small blanket piled up against the wall to my right. A bucket across from me. Water pools against the wall to my left, where the uneven stone of the pit floor dips downward.

Another deep breath.

As awful as it is, it’s something I understand. I sit on the blanket, drawing my knees up to my chest as I consider my options. I don’t have enough light in me to make the amount of rope I’d need to climb out of here, and even if I did—there’s nothing to hook it to. Though the floor is rough, the walls are damnably smooth and slick with water and slime mold.

If I were a moon child lucky enough to be born rich or unlucky enough to be given over early to the army, I might know how to concentrate my light into things other than threads. Things like blades that I could dig into the stone and use to climb out.

But I have no training in that. Certainly, I could try—but I’d use up all my light long before I managed anything helpful. I sit for a long time. Thinking. Conserving energy. Then I begin to move about the space, examining every bit of it that I can reach. Looking for handholds I’d somehow missed. For secret openings. For I-don’t-know-what. When I finish, I do it again…and still find nothing of use.

By now, the embers of my tempered panic are beginning to flare back to life, my strength to contain them crumbling. I press up to the wall and throw my head back against it, breathing through gritted teeth.

There has to be a way for me to get out. They wouldn’t have bothered with all of this, if it were impossible. And if it is impossible, they’re testing my behavior in desperate situations and will let me out when the time comes.

That’s what I tell myself. I don’t know if I believe it.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I slide down to the floor, relishing the faint blossom of pain as the rocks and fabric scrape over what’s left of my whipping wounds. If I’d had fresh blood, they’d be healed already. Eventually my bladder becomes uncomfortably full, and I’m forced to use the bucket.

Though I know what I have to do, I keep putting it off. Hoping that at any moment the trapdoor will open and the rope will drop down. But a very long time goes by, and no rope appears. In my boredom and fear the time drags, yet still I’m not ready to use up the rest of my light. Not yet.

Eventually I drift out of awareness, waking in a state of terrified disorientation, no idea where I am or why. But my training does its job even then, overcoming the instinct to cry out to someone—anyone—for help. I lay curled in a ball as the wave crashes over and then falls back. Then I remember my situation and almost wish I hadn’t.

I take a trembling breath. Moon goddess. Sun and all the stars. All-God itself. I know I don’t deserve it, but please lend me your luck.

Then I cut into my arm again, drawing a fresh line across the older one, making an uneven cross. Where the two intersect, the pain is especially poignant. My eyes flutter shut, and the moonlight surges to the surface as I call up memories of Sister Nix. She wasn’t the only one in the moon tower of high enough rank to summon a blade, but she was certainly the only one who’d interact with me. But she always made it look so effortless, so immediate, that I can only guess at how she did it.

I focus the power towards my palms, rather than my fingertips. Bringing my hands together, I gather it between them—willing the glow to take solid form, interposing the image of a blade over it with my mind’s eye. It wavers and then condenses. My heartbeat speeds up in my excitement, and the light flashes before losing cohesion entirely, dissipating into the air. I have just enough Solar blood in my system to reabsorb it, but only twice more at the most.

I breathe the light back in, the silver taste and tingling energy of it filling my lungs, spreading through my veins. I try again, this time flattening the light into a sort of sheet between my palms, but then it spreads too thin and I lose it. Again, I draw it in. Again I try.

And again, I fail. The light spreads throughout the air of the pit, the faintest illumination to light my dismal prison.

Despair creeps like a black mold through my blood, the kind that even I—broken as I am—can’t draw strength from.

I don’t know what else to do, and I’m thirsty. So thirsty that I think back even on the clotted blood from breakfast and nearly swoon. Eyeing the water at the sunken end of the pit, I go over to examine it. It’s surprisingly clean looking. Not fed exclusively from the dripping moisture from above, as I’d thought, but from a tiny spring as well. It stinks, but I hold my breath and drink it. Then I sleep.

Time begins to lose meaning. Sometime after the third sleep—feeling sick from the water and now desperate with hunger—I decide to tear up my dress in what I can only describe as a fit of mania. What exactly I think I can do with the pitiful excuse for a rope I make with its scraps and the blanket, I’m not sure. I search about again for fractures in the stone, looking for a chunk I can wrench away and tie to it. I know there’s no way I’ll be able to throw it that high, and even if I did it wouldn’t be enough to knock open the trapdoor—let alone to hold my weight for a climb out. It doesn’t matter, though, because if I don’t do something I’ll go entirely mad.

But there is no crack in the rock, no stone I can pull loose.

I sleep some more, and this time I’m woken by a flash of orange light as something lands with a little thwack on the stone near my feet.

The hatch!

But before I can summon my voice to my lips, it’s shut again—and all the moonlight that was left in the air has fled, leaving me with nothing but my length of thread for light.

I reach out, feeling for whatever’s been dropped.

It’s a pouch with a bit of bread and salted fish inside. I dump the contents into my lap before reaching again and again into the bag, hoping I’ve missed something though I know I can’t have.

No blood. No blood at all.

For the first time in many years, tears heat the corners of my eyes. I let them stream out as I eat my bread and fish and try to comfort myself in the knowledge that even if I die down here, at least it’s a fate I’ve thoroughly earned.

~*~

Sleep. Bucket. Drink. Despair.

Sleep. Bucket. Drink. Despair. Food drop.

Sleep. Bucket. Drink. Despair.

The miserable cycle goes on. I try some of the same things again and again, the futility of it hurting me more each time though I’ve no light left to work with. And every time the food comes, there’s less of it. I give up on my silly rope and dissemble it to sleep in its remains.

It’s at that point, clinging to the very outer edges of sanity, that I decide to eat the thread. I should know that I won’t have the strength to summon its light. I should know that it’ll be useless. And somewhere deep inside, somewhere I can’t quite grasp onto, I do know.

But I eat it anyway. Then I exhaust myself in trying to summon its light, in scratching my arms bloody and raw and screaming my frustration when it does me no good. And then I’m alone with nothing but the almost-absolute darkness, the faint glow of the light threads woven into my collar the only thing I can see. That’s when the hallucinations begin.

“Such a pitiful sight,” says the darkness, twisting around me like a great black snake, sprouting growths like spiky antlers that wither and grow again and again. “Such a pathetic creature.”

“Be quiet,” I command. I squeeze my eyes shut against it, but it makes no difference. The darkness is the same either way.

It laughs, a sound that scrapes across my awareness like fingernails on sandstone, makes my stomach twist with nausea. I clamp my hands over my ears, but again—it makes no difference. The sound is inside my head. In my blood, my flesh, my bones.

“Shut up!” I scream, but the laughter just goes on and on. “SHUT UP!” I shriek at it over and over again. But it won’t, it won’t, no matter what I do.

So, even though my throat’s already raw, even though I know it won’t drown the horrible laughter out, I begin to sing. The laughter goes on, but my focus clings to the one other sound, the one other thing here with me in the black—my own voice. At first, I pour my despair into it. Let my absolute hopelessness fill my words to breaking. And then, once all that’s washed out of me, my voice begins to lift.

As it rises, ragged but gaining in strength, the darkness sighs. A savoring sigh, a satisfied sigh. A sigh that whispers across my skin until what had been like burial dirt weighing me down becomes an embrace. Silken scales whispering across my skin, a sinuous body curled around mine. When I breathe, I breathe the darkness into me, and it fills the hollow at the core of my being.

For the first time in my remembered existence, I know what it is to be whole. I reach upward into the shadow, and the shadow reaches back, builds beneath me. And then I’m flying.

I burst through the trapdoor wearing nothing but the dark. In the light of the lanterns, I see it for the first time in truth. Not in my mind’s eye, but with my real ones. Great coils and wings and antlers of darkness whirling around my body in a flowing blur. And beyond that, obscured but unmistakable—a dark figure with a white mantle about his shoulders.

The shadows disperse in a rush, and I plummet to the floor. General Khavad lunges forward, catching me easily in arms like warm stone.

Then he sets me down to stand before him, naked save the collar and lead about my neck. Damp and dirty, with tips of shadow still dancing in my hair and trailing from my waist like fox’s tails.