While Shadesorrow watched Noran escape into the night, Alira wondered how she would retake her body and force Shadesorrow’s retreat. Henry was too far absorbed by the goddess to be any use save for the greenery he lent her to hide behind.

She flared the light she held and watched his leaves pulse open in response. He was silent though and that quiet made her feel lonely. She looked out across the darkness around her, the roiling power of the Unmaker, and felt the sadness wearing her down.

Shadesorrow was running again, back toward the burial mound. The night animals seemed to animate when she was near, but fell silent as she passed. They were drawn to her power but cowed by the magnitude of it up close. The forest answered her black call and nature seemed to excite and withdraw in response to her flight. The dark rectangle of open earth appeared before the goddess and she slowed.

Alira watched, both through Shadesorrow’s eyes and internally with her own senses. She watched the darkness around her change and move as Shadesorrow navigated the world.

Along the edge of the darkness, a flash of brilliant green.

Shadesorrow paused, feeling a…disturbance within.

She shook herself like a wolf, letting the discomfort roll across her thin, pale shoulders. Her silver-white hair slithered across her naked skin and fell into her too-wide eyes.

The moon was high and glittered along the gilt head of the hammer that lay across the chest of the fallen Galvyn. Shadesorrow sniffed, his blood still warm in her nostrils. The sharp, metallic blood of man mixed with the false god’s Light. A hiss escaped her and she leapt into the grave.

The book lay on the plinth.

Her book. Her warning and direction to her Witches.

With steady hands she lifted the ruined tome and was instantly transported to another time, another realm, another life…

The Light is false. Man has created this false power to combat Nature. It is in defiance of Aethra, the Mother, and it is blasphemous. –Page One of The Word of Shadesorrow.

“Man’s ambition threatens the balance of Nature. When the time comes that their hubris reaches its zenith…” Aethra said to her sister, Shadesorrow, as they strolled the gardens of the Spirit Vale. The Mother trailed a hand in the waist-high grasses, flowers blooming as they passed. “That’s when you must strike. Be wary of their gifts, for even if they are false, they are powerful. They have no place in our world, or theirs, and must be erased.”

Aethra, the Mother, was wrought of sunshine and birdsong. Her ever-flowing robes gave the impression of crashing seas and sparkling rivers. Her long hair fell in golden waves from a crown made of actual starlight, the light blinding for all but the Divine. Her kind, round face turned to look at her sister beside her. As her dark sister eyed her, she saw how her light had dimmed in recent centuries. Man was forgetting their Mother.

Shadesorrow was the opposite of Aethra’s beauty. Where the Mother had light, Shadesorrow harboured nothing but darkness. Aethra was created to make life and Shadesorrow was created to end it, allowing Aethra to reform life as she saw fit. Her pale skin and hair were the absence of life and her black wings were the night that must come for all.

She inclined her head to her sister, her own head crowned with the waning moon. Her moonbean hair was still in the Spirit Vale and her wings trailed wisps of the darkest night in the eternal sunshine of her sister’s home.

“The Father knows he is false and thus he poisons man against us.” Shadesorrow’s voice was the fury of nature, Aethra’s wrath given form. Her black chainmail, ringing softly as she walked beside her sister, reflected dark rainbows in the brightness of the Vale. The daggers she wore were forged of fallen stars and quenched in the blood of the followers of the false god.

“And his Light shall not endure,” Aethra said as she tucked her delicate hands within the folds of her robes.

“Night must come,” Shadesorrow said in answer and her black eyes flamed white. She touched the daggers on her hips in a silent promise to her sister.

Aethra held her hand out to her other half. The black-taloned hand opened to receive the offered gift.

“Choose your followers wisely, sister. When the Unmaking comes, they alone shall remake the world of man again.” Aethra set a huge blood-red gem into her sister’s hand and closed her fingers around it.

Behind the sisters a green flash caught their attention and Aethra’s son, Hrulinar, bowed.

“Mother,” said the spirit, his red-gold hair like flames. The Mother reached a hand out and laid it on her son’s head, smiling warmly. She removed her hand and a living circlet of flowers and vines rested on his brow.

“I crown you Prince of the Beasts,” Aethra said and he bowed again. “You will guard the creatures against man’s abuse and teach man how to respect the gifts of Nature.” Hrulinar rose and kissed his mother’s hand in thanks.

With a wave, she sent her son to the realm of man. Shadesorrow watched him descend, a bolt of green lightning and then turned to her sister.

“You cannot abide here with me,” Aethra said with woeful sadness. “You must find your way into the hearts of those that are willing to turn from the Light.”

With another wave of Aethra’s hand, Shadesorrow was plummeting toward the earth, a beam of moonlight.

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For ten thousand years, Shadesorrow had been on earth, awaiting the time when she would be summoned to mete out Aethra’s justice. She had amassed followers, women who were of pure spirit, who believed, remembered, and worshipped the True Gods. Fracturing her sister’s bloodstone into small gemstones, she gave them to her Witches and taught them how to fashion blades of moonlight and starlight and to bind their bloodgems to the blades. Using their Witch Knives, they were able to syphon the goddess’s own power, doing her work of eradicating the false Light.

Eventually, though, Shadesorrow realised she had spread herself and her power too thinly and her control over the Witches waned. As the Light shattered her followers, their dark gifts too weak against the might of the false god, Shadesorrow retreated, powerless to return to her sister and unable to create a corporeal form to aid her Witches. They began to fall from the path she had laid before them.

She was failing Aethra. She called her kin, Hrulinar, to aid her.

“Let my Witches know your power. Grant them the use of your Beasts and it will turn the tide of this war.”

He did as she requested and the Witches gathered around them all manner of beasts as familiars. But Hrulinar, too, had spread his gifts too far and wide and he also faded, unable to control the beasts.

Soon, the Witches could not hear Shadesorrow and her demands and they turned from the path she had laid for them. They began to crave more power and enslaved the lesser spirits.

Terrified of being captured himself, Hrulinar fled into the wild to live with the last True Witch, Ohira Nunjuli.

The false one saw Shadesorrow’s power waning and knew he was within reach of winning the war for the souls of Man. To flaunt his approaching righteous victory, he created the Tome of Heroes, a book destined to hold all the names of the fallen Paladins.

“Each Paladin that falls, a Warrior of Light, shall be judged Pure and his name shall be written in this tome. When this book is full, I shall have claimed all of Man,” he said, brandishing his mighty hammer at Shadesorrow. “Only then will they have no need of my Light, for your darkness will have been banished, forevermore.”

With his victory ensured, he bestowed his warhammer and the Tome of Heroes to his High Lord, Morinn, and sat back to watch his followers destroy Shadesorrow.

But Shadesorrow saw the enormity of the false god’s vanity and struck true. With her daggers, Starfall and Lightbane, she pierced the mortal High Lord’s soul, rending it in two, cursing him.

“Every child you sire will join my ranks, becoming a Witch.”

The High Lord struck back, his holy Light shattering the weak power reserves of Shadesorrow. As he bound the fading goddess in chains of pure Light, Morinn called on the Father to bless him.

“Only when a Child of Morinn and a Child of Aethra join will you ever be freed,” decreed the false god, for he knew that Hrulinar was Aethra’s only earthbound child and he had grown wary and afraid of the Witches.

The dark goddess extended the last of her power to enter the minds of those most pure, the best of her Witches. The surge of darkness ruined their minds but she instructed them to write out her warning, the clues to her freedom obscured by the Light that bound her:

The Light is false.

Arrogance undoes the man who reaches for the Light.

Shadesorrow stalks the night, biding her time.

Man walks the line of Divinity, the mantle of mortality heavy upon them.

Shadesorrow takes those that forego the Mother.

Nature begets nature begets nature begets nature…

The Son of Nature and the Daughter of Man summon the Unmaking.

The Son of Nature.

The Daughter of Man.

The Wooded Witch keeps the Son.

The Daughter is the child of Shadow, begotten by Light.

Their shattered minds were unable to comprehend her fully and as her darkness faded, she hoped it would be enough. That one day, some witch would find the way to unchain Shadesorrow, the Unmaker…

Shadesorrow dropped the book, and gathered her darkness around her. She was not free to change shape and this unsettled her. She was bound to this form and it was weak. She could feel the Son, the way he roared and screamed and twined within her, the power of the Mother within him. She watched as he teetered on the edge of sanity.

She settled Hrulinar, soothing his wrath. Something else was wrong though and Shadesorrow could feel a damper on her power, a blockage in the channel of her dark gifts. The Daughter was silent, perhaps destroyed by Shadesorrow’s eruptive entrance into her body. Had her soul been damaged? Is that what unsettled Hrulinar? She tightened her grasp on the Princeling spirit.

Aethra had failed Man. She had failed Shadesorrow. She had failed Hrulinar.

Aethra has abandoned us. She told her kin. We must remain together to ensure we are strong. We shall have our vengeance, Prince of Beasts. None shall survive our wrath.

But Hrulinar was too scattered to form thoughts. He was now a roaring bear, now a mighty oak, now the flight of an eagle. She soothed him again and surveyed the grave.

As Alira watched from her hiding place within, a horrified thought came to her.

All the years Shadesorrow had spent chained up had caused her to go mad. She was no longer the purifying darkness. She was a bloodthirsty blight, a winged death that came to end and destroy. Shadesorrow was no longer the salvation that Aethra had promised.

Alira suddenly saw what Henry–Hrulinar–had done in shielding her light. He had shown her the only way to stop Shadesorrow. He had reminded her that she was human, that she was the Daughter of Morinn, both the High Lord and the Witches he spawned, the culmination of years of children born in secret.

As she let the Light glow brighter, she saw the vines shielding her seep into her gilded spirit-flesh. Hrulinar lent her his power, feeding her starved soul. The Light she bore flared, brighter than the sun.

Shadesorrow froze and felt the heated Light within her expanding. Against the goddess’s will, she bent and laid her pale hands on Galvyn’s warhammer. Light flooded her and she screamed, the sound of every animal roaring, every beast in pain.

The Light from the mace joined Alira’s flowering warmth and like a bolt of lighting, she exploded inside the goddess. She expanded into her limbs, binding the goddess in bands of pure light.

Unearthly screams erupted from the shared form. Shadesorrow fought back, clawed hands opening to drop the holy relic in her hands.

Alira held on as long as she could, blazing that Light that was gifted from her father, her father’s father…

Just as the Light threatened to wane, she heard the bestial roar of Hrulinar and felt his consciousness awaken. He saw her binding his dread kin in Light and joined her, wrapping thick, thorny vines around the dark goddess.

Finally. He said to Alira. What took you so long?