When the moon became full, the maiden, too, made new life bloom in her womb, and the sea sighed as it welcomed this blessing, content to bask in the mother’s light.
And finally, Quies, a crone as beautiful as the decaying autumn life around her. Her dark gray hair rippled down to the frothy waves that seemed intent on dragging her into the sea, death or sleep or dreams waiting to claim her at long last. She held a single poppy in her bony hands, and her violet eyes were turned toward the sky, where three dark moons reigned among a dizzying array of stars: the waning gibbous, the last quarter moon, the balsamic moon.
With the last remnants of light before the inevitable dark, the mother-turned-crone looked at the last whisper of moon and shared with it all the secrets of the seas. “Now I am ready for death to claim me.” But the moon did not wish them to part. “I will govern the seas through your capable hands, my tides,” it decreed. And as it once more went dark and its cycle started anew, the child and the maiden and the mother and the crone rose together and remained, watching over the seas that had birthed them as one.
Baz ran a reverential hand over that starlit sky above Quies.
“She’s my favorite,” Romie had declared once when they were children.
They’d been perched in the branches of the willow tree that grew behind their house. Baz couldn’t remember how old they were, only that it was before their father Collapsed. He had laughed, the sound almost foreign to him now. “You only say that because you’re Waning Moon.”
“So?” Romie had shot back, eyes sparkling as she’d glanced at the illustration of Quies again. “She’s like in my dreams. So many stars.”
His heart twisting in his chest, he flipped to the next illustration.
The Shadow was a stark contrast to the other sacred figures. The patron deity of House Eclipse was depicted as a man with cruel and imperious features, his fathomless black eyes ringed with silver and gold. The moon and sun in eclipse hung above him, and in the darkness that threatened to engulf the page were things of nightmare, bodiless creatures made of shadow and bone and blood that reached skeletal hands toward him.
“Sometimes I see those in my dreams too,” Romie had said that day. “The bad ones.”
The umbrae. Monsters that dwelled in the sleepscape—the realm of dreams and nightmares those like Romie and Kai could walk into. The umbrae feasted on dreams, warping harmless reveries into something more than nightmare, like black holes of despair. Dreamers were trained early on to recognize the signs. If they found themselves in a dream the umbrae decided to feast on, they needed to pull themselves back to the waking world before their own consciousness was devoured—before their soul could be trapped in the sleepscape forever, leaving behind bodies in a state of permanent slumber.
Kai had power over the umbrae that Dreamers did not. To wield nightmare magic was to master fear, in a sense; he could draw the darkness away from dreams, cloaking himself in it until it built and built around his heart. It risked consuming him in a different way, but Kai had come to realize that pulling nightmares into the waking world helped. As if, once they manifested in the real world, they lost any sort of power.
Baz read the two lines below the image: The Shadow was born in the imbalance between sun and moon, rendering the seas so restless that the Tides themselves knew not how to govern them. He was ruination, and with his cunning brought the Tides to their doom.
The words had always left a sour taste in his mouth. As the myth would have it, the Shadow stole the Tides’ sacred magic to give to those born on eclipses, with whom the Tides refused to share their own power. After the Tides vanished, trapping the Shadow with them in the Deep—the realm of death beneath the sea—their worshippers, once able to call upon all the Tides, found themselves limited in their use of magic. A fate the Shadow’s disciples escaped.
Tidecallers, people would call them begrudgingly. Tidethieves. Unworthy of the stolen magic in their blood, a version of which Eclipse-born today still carried.
“See, this is why I hate this version of the myth,” Kai had said to him once. “It’s bullshit. In the Constellation Isles, we tell a different story, where neither the Tides nor the Shadow are portrayed as evil.”
Baz had come to know the story quite well. It was one of love and sacrifice, in which the Shadow, cast aside by the sun god he had sprung from, found sanctuary with the moon-blessed Tides. They shared with him the power of their loving moon goddess, and when the vengeful sun found out, he twisted the Shadow’s power, turning it against those he had come to love. The Shadow begged the Tides to send him to the Deep, willing to sacrifice himself to keep this power in check. They decided to leave these shores with him, thus appeasing the moon and sun gods and saving the world together.
It had been Kai’s favorite story to tell.
Something pressed against Baz’s leg. He looked down to find a gray-and-black tabby nuzzling against him.
“Hey, Dusk,” he crooned, scratching behind the cat’s ear.
His sister’s cat—a stray that Romie had found on school grounds one day and adopted as her own, which Baz had taken under his wing after her death, meowed at him before darting off to the windowsill, where he sat looking back at Baz with piercing green eyes. Baz joined him at the window that overlooked the cove, giving Dusk a little scratch on the chin. Outside, actual dusk painted the sky in various shades of purple mirrored on the Aldersea’s surface.
The Eclipse commons offered the best vantage point at Aldryn, built as they were in the cliffside the college stood upon. When the tide was particularly high and the waves especially strong, Baz could poke his head out the window and feel the spray of salt water on his face as the sea broke loudly against the rock below. He did so now and noticed the bonfires littering the beach, the students amassed around them.
“Guess I won’t be going there tonight,” he grumbled to the cat.
Since Romie’s drowning, he’d made it a habit to go down to Dovermere Cove on every first day of the new moon, a way to sit with his grief, his regrets.
You just like torturing yourself, he imagined Kai would sneer at him if he’d still been here. And maybe he’d be right, but Baz found it strangely cathartic, despite the horrors of that place.
He reached for the note in his pocket, reading his sister’s handwriting for what felt like the thousandth time today. He’d spent all day debating if he should find Emory, show her the note, get her to talk. She had to know something, and perhaps that was why she’d acted so shifty around him earlier. But he never did find the courage to go knock on her door, and not because he didn’t know where it was—he remembered the way easily enough, having been there once at the beginning of last year when he helped Romie move her things in, and again at the end of last spring, when he packed up all her possessions to bring home to their mother.
No, it was fear that kept him from seeking Emory out. Irrational, stifling fear.
This was something he was all too familiar with: to become so overwhelmed when confronted with a difficult situation, he simply shut down, fear keeping him confined to the prison of his own mind. Time would slip past him mockingly in those instances, as if to say, You have the key, idiot. Let yourself out.
Time sounded a lot like Kai, he thought. A trigger switch to bring Baz back to himself. But Kai wasn’t here to push him to action, and Baz didn’t know how to do it alone. He’d been trying to snap out of this stagnant state all day without success, and thus he was here, hiding away in the Eclipse commons instead of looking for Emory on campus.