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“The shield!”
Isobel lurches up. Foetid air makes her gag as if Shar’s fingernails run up the inside of her throat; that damn cough is back, welling up from the necromantic rot in her bones. She doubles over wheezing as the world spins around her, somehow too light and too wrong. Gone is the Moonmaiden’s power—at once the hands over hers and the weight that bears down on her shoulders, leaving only her own hollow exhaustion.
Merciful silver, all those people—
A great white wing stretches over Isobel. Far larger than that of any bird, its stiff flight feathers longer than her forearm, but if she stretches out her fingers, they will be softer than a babe’s cheek.
If she turns her head, her most ardent dream hovers beside her.
“What is it, my darling?”
Aylin watches her. Her dear face is moon-pale and cracked through with golden scars that move down her throat in marbled patterns. One muscled arm slides around Isobel’s waist; the hammered silver discs of her eyes begin to glow with the first hint of radiant power, ready to fight any threats.
Isobel lifts a hand to touch her face, only to hesitate. “Aylin…?”
If this is another dream—
Aylin’s voice is softer than she’s ever heard it. “I am here.”
Isobel trembles. Oh, how she longs to close the distance and trace the shining softness of Aylin’s cheek. To throw her arms around Aylin’s neck and breathe her in, tasting nothing but the divinity of love. Yet her knuckles ache with a chill that doesn’t come from the air. Not when Myrkul’s rot fills her marrow.
Aylin’s eyes rest unerringly on her, finer than the silver laid on Selûne’s altar, and never has Isobel felt so unclean.
She swallows. “Am I dreaming? Dead?”
Aylin jerks at the question, and her hand lifts to cradle Isobel’s jaw. “You live, my love. You live.”
Perhaps Isobel falls into her or it’s the other way around, but her arms are around Aylin, weaving between her wings, as her angel holds her close. Where bare skin presses together, Isobel can feel the chiselled lines of Aylin’s body. The path of musculature is the same as it always was, strong where Isobel is soft, while the unearthly scent of cool marble and stardust fills her nose until she might weep.
With each passing moment, more sensations rise in Isobel’s mind. Aylin’s body does not hold the same heat as a mortal body; she’s not cold, certainly not enough to steal the warmth from Isobel’s own body, but neither is she hot to the touch. The air, however, strokes down her bare back with ugly, frigid fingers, and past Aylin’s shoulder she sees itchingly familiar stone.
Isobel knows this tower, even if the chill turns the cool comfort of moonlit grey to shadow. Moonrise Towers, but not her bedchamber. Or any quarters she can place, truth be told: this room is cramped, holding signs of recent occupation and a door firmly locked.
“Oh,” Isobel says.
Aylin moves as if to catch her, but there’s no deluge of memory to drown her. Just a rising tide of awareness, the water neither freezing or simmering around her: the shadow curse, her father, the battle. Her father dead.
“All’s well,” Aylin says. “I so swear it.”
“It is,” Isobel agrees with a sniffle, “because I have you.”
Cupping Aylin’s cheek, Isobel leans in to press their lips together. There are only a handful of times she’s ever managed to startle her demigod darling. Aylin makes a soft noise as if she didn’t expect to feel Isobel’s touch, and then Aylin’s mouth opens under hers with a sigh of such sheer contentment it brings tears to her eyes.
When Aylin draws back, her head tilts with the unblinking attention of an eagle, and the gesture is so achingly her that Isobel’s breath catches. “Pray tell what shield panicked you so when you awoke?”
Isobel rubs her hands together. The chill in her knuckles aches with fresh insistence. Sometimes the pain is ignorable and sometimes it’s not. The finger she broke as a child roughhousing with Thisobald feels like someone has taken an ice pick to the bone. More than once, her hands cramped so fiercely she had to adapt her spellcasting to maintain Selûne’s shield—on her knees, bent nearly double over the knot of her fists in her lap, bathed in a pale mirror of moonlight as she begged. Please, Moonmaiden. Hear me, if only to protect these people…
Even now, Isobel cannot say whether Selûne accepts prayers from someone shrouded in Myrkul’s grave-chill. But if the barrier was a shield, it was one she carried on her shoulders and her soul. Not a weight so much as a grindstone she pressed against with faith long worn thin, but what else could she do except keep on all the same?
Isobel clears her throat. The cough tickles the back of her throat. “You remember the Last Light Inn, on the edge of town?”
“Aye. The proprietor was so awed to stand in the presence of the Moonmaiden’s Sword he near poured wine onto a candle.”
Ah, Barrol. Always ready with a full flagon and a smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. Perhaps he withered into one of the shadows that billowed beyond the edge of her barrier, eyeless face fixed unceasingly on her.
Isobel shifts. “Yes. Well. I fled there after I woke in the mausoleum. By the Moonmaiden’s grace, I was able to summon a barrier that protected all within from the shadow curse.”
Aylin smiles with such pride Isobel’s stomach twists. “Lo, praise be to Mother Selûne—and praise be to you!”
It’s too much. Isobel’s gaze drops to her lap where her hands twist together. “The least I could do, truly. After all, my family was responsible for this. And not merely my father. The House of Healing turned into a butchery for Sharran bladework. The tollhouse a trap for adventuring souls. The Waning Moon—” Her breath catches at the thought of Thisobald. The rogue True Souls hadn’t spared any details in their account of the tavern, not knowing a Thorm was in their midst. More quietly, she continues, “My family welcomed Shar’s wretched embrace. And the people of Reithwin…”
The horror of it rises in her throat. Twice she’s crossed the shadowed ruins—once in her escape from the mausoleum and once in the march to Moonrise. Twice is too much. The remains—humanoid remains—strung up from the walls of the mason’s guild with plaques proclaiming them traitors. The shadows that slithered over the streets they once walked, every single one bearing a memory of a life lost. Sinister growths that warped brick and cobblestone alike, crumbling what used to be strongest of stone, with not a single home untouched. And bones upon bones upon bones. Battles and barricades and dark rot spilt across the ground.
Before Isobel knows it, she’s on her feet, grabbing her clothes as she paces towards the windowsill.
“We had a duty to them,” Isobel says, and the horror of it rises in her throat. “As sure as our duty to the Moonmaiden. My family betrayed them all.”
Out the window, there is little she can see of Reithwin in the murk. Not even on the darkest nights were the shadows so thick from her bedchamber high in the tower, where the lanterns below burnt like fallen stars and the distant hills rolled into fields upon fields of farmland that shivered in the wind.
The words burn. “He did this for me.”
“No.” Strong arms slide around her, pulling her into the bulwark that is Aylin’s body. “He did it for himself.”
Despite—or maybe because of—everything, all the breath leaves Isobel’s chest. She aches for her father, who carried her into Selûne’s temple before she could walk and taught her to ride a horse and stocked their sweeping library with every book she could possibly wish to read. Her father, who did this.
If only she never died. If only she was never born at all, then he wouldn’t have turned his back on the Moonmaiden and her mother.
“Look,” Aylin says. “In the sky.”
The shadows roil as they always have. Quicker now, agitated by an unseen power, but even Shar’s might can’t smother the faint glow of moonlight.
Aylin moves past her to climb through the window with inhuman grace. Her wings scrape the stone frame, then they spread wide to loft her into the air, beating hard, steady, alive. Aylin turns back to her with a smile and an offered hand.
For a moment, they’re both cast back a hundred years where countless nights were spent like this, with Aylin hovering outside her bedchamber window to fly her away.
With a smile that lightens her heart, Isobel climbs out the window.
There’s no jolting moment of freefall. No awkward grasping in midair. Just Aylin’s arms across her shoulders and under her knees, and then wind whistles against her face with a graceful sweep of Aylin’s wings. The night is colder than it was a lifetime ago; this cold is a clawing thing that cuts her skin and digs into the muscle beneath, but Aylin’s body is strong and sure, and Isobel can tuck her head into the crook of her angel’s neck and trace her fingers along her collarbones. Aylin’s grip on her tightens, and Isobel feels more than hears her stuttering exhale. Yet her wings to not falter; every powerful beat makes the shadows swirl around them, her own radiance battling the curse. With every passing moment, she shines brighter and brighter—
Then they break through the black, and the world turns to silver.
Above them, the sky is a rich, unending blue; milky rivers of stars pour from horizon to horizon, their number beyond counting. Even the shadow curse below them is lightened to a softer blue-grey, roiling against the power of the moon.
Never has Isobel seen such splendour. Full and shining, the gaze of the Moonmaiden sees all, illuminating a sky beyond measure, while the Tears glimmer like diamonds in her wake.
Isobel’s breath catches in her chest.
“Mother,” Aylin sighs, exhausted and exultant.
Never has Isobel seen her so radiant. Not even after holy victory in battle, when she burned with fire and righteousness. Now her eyes are closed, her face upturned so the marbled perfection of her skin glows and her hair is spun to pale gold. A beatific smile lights her face.
Yet in this endless sweep of sky, with nothing but shadow below and silver above, Isobel shivers, smaller than she’s ever felt in her life. Here she’s insignificant—worse than insignificant, for a single mortal soul is worth something in an infinite sea of divinity, yet all this suffering was wrought for her. She shouldn’t be alive at all.
How can her life—its weight and price—be anything but an affront to the Moonmaiden?
“My darling?”
Isobel realises she’s pressing her face into Aylin’s neck. “I shouldn’t have been brought back. “I’m—” she swallows hard, “unclean. She can see it on my soul.”
“She sees all, it is true,” Aylin agrees, “and she sees your devotion to the light. Even in the deepest shadows. You did not choose to return from the Fugue Plane in Myrkul’s grasp, but you chose to take the Moonmaiden’s gift and make a shield of it. How can she be anything but pleased with you?”
Isobel opens her mouth, but no air escapes her throat. “I—I don’t—”
Aylin stares hard at her. “Do you doubt I speak with the Moonmaiden’s voice?”
All the bones in Isobel’s fingers may as well be made from frozen blackwater, gritty with sediment and foul excrement. Even with her father lost to his foul clutch, Myrkul doesn’t relinquish his hold on her so easily—to taunt Selûne, perhaps? To lay claim to that which he has no right simply because he can?
Pain needles under Isobel’s skin as she raises her hand. But still she does, cupping Aylin’s jaw. “I don’t doubt you. Ever.”
Aylin lowers her head until their foreheads bump together. “Then bask in the fruits of your faith, o lover mine.”
Closing her eyes, Isobel lets go. All the horror and exhaustion that’s shrouded her since she woke falls away like the most threadbare of blankets, leaving only the finest silk beneath. The Moonmaiden’s light washes over and through her, cool and clean, and Myrkul’s lingering hold dissipates as if it never was. There is no last vicious clawing from the dead god to claim her bones; he cannot withstand Selûne’s silvered heart, and the filth drains from her body as if it never was.
Aylin’s lips touch her brow. “Blessings of the Moonmaiden upon you.”
With a sly smile, Isobel asks, “And what of your blessings?”
Aylin’s eyes lower to the marks on Isobel’s neck. “Why, you already bear them.”
Isobel laughs, and it cleanses something within her. Leaning in, she kisses Aylin again. Her mouth is strong and sweet, and only the dire need for air forces them to part.
Below them, the shadow curse seethes, shrinking away from the moonlight. If she stares—is that the top of the tower she can see through the fog?
“Soon this land will be free of Shar’s wretched grasp.” Grim satisfaction darkens Aylin’s voice. “As it should be.”
Reithwin lingers below, cloaked in shadow. But this is her home; even without seeing, she knows the town square that held Highsummer festivals, the warm evenings lit with hundreds of lanterns as old Kenterly led his trio of fiddlers in song and Barrol opened his finest casks of callidyrran. She knows the Mason’s Guild, its proud stone as strong as Morfred and Halfred’s faith, and the broad rooftop of The Waning Moon, the sound of merrymaking pouring from every window.
Isobel bows her head. “May shadow turn to silver and lost souls go to their rest.”
Perhaps she should go to her rest, too—even now, it’s hard to believe otherwise—but her radiant lover’s arms hold her close and Selûne’s blessing bathes them both in her light. With her heart full of silver, Isobel smiles and kisses Aylin again.