Blackveil

Use your ability, daughter of Kariny, it is the key. Use your ability to cross the threshold, the liminal line.

Karigan touched her brooch and the world changed around her, like the turning of a key. The winged statues rotated, grinding on their pedestals like the tumblers of a lock, so they all gazed down on her. The walls of the tower revolved and at its apex, it irised open to the sky. Blackveil’s vapor tumbled inside.

Karigan’s chest cramped and she fell to her knees gasping. The light flaring up around her turned blinding, absorbing Laurelyn so that she was barely perceptible.

The sky above had changed, cleared. A silver moon shined down on them.

“What . . . what?” Karigan didn’t even know what to ask.

Laurelyn smiled. A piece of time. You have crossed the liminal to a piece of time graced by a silver full moon, a gift of the Moonman.

The Moonman, legend. Karigan’s mind raced. It was too much.

Let us go, Laurelyn said.

“Where?”

To the grove. She extended a hand. Karigan clasped it and found it surprisingly solid, warm. She rose and Laurelyn led her from the moondial and through the wall of light.

Karigan recoiled at her double vision, the vision of the tower as she left it, with her companions clashing with the Sleepers, layered over by the vision of the tower still and peaceful, the walls brilliantly aglow, the obsidian floor free of dust, like black ice.

She felt as though a boulder pressed against her chest as she abandoned her companions, as Lynx was thrown against the wall, claw marks striating his face. Ealdaen’s armor was splashed with blood as he relentlessly slashed at the horde of Sleepers, a nythling latched to his neck, wings flapping, tail lashing. Ealdaen tore it off and smashed it to the floor, along with a chunk of his own flesh. She could not see Yates.

“Oh, Yates,” she murmured.

Even as she saw these things, it was as though a great distance separated them from her, layered over by the serene, silver washed chamber. Her tears fell on the dusty floor strewn with footprints and blood. She left tears on pristine obsidian.

She followed Laurelyn into the winding corridor.

It grieves me, Laurelyn said, that your companions should suffer, but we cannot allow an army of tainted Sleepers to enter the world outside Blackveil. There would be much more suffering in your land and beyond. And as I said, this unfolding may change the fates of your friends.

“The Sleepers are awakened,” Karigan said. “I don’t know what you expect me to do.”

You shall see.

Laurelyn’s gown trailed along the floor. More Sleepers, feral, snarling things, ran by them, through them, emanating darkness that brushed against the light of Karigan’s moonstone. The layering of visions nauseated her.

“Then tell me,” she said, trying to ignore her stomach, “did you give my mother this moonstone?”

Laurelyn hesitated before answering. Yes.

“Why?”

It contains the radiance of the moon we now walk beneath. It helped you find this piece of time.

“B-but I wasn’t even born when my mother received this!”

Laurelyn kept striding along. You know by now Eletians can sometimes see beyond the present. Ours is not always a linear existence, but seeing is different from being able to move through the layers of the world. I knew Kariny would conceive one with your ability. I visited with her in that glade, and I sang to her. I had not foreseen that your father was going to be a descendent of one of Mornhavon’s folk, but there was a symmetry in it I could appreciate.

“But you—”

I am mostly not here, Laurelyn replied. I am here less and less as time passes and the forest assaults my strength. You see only the shadow of light.

Karigan squinted as she gazed at Laurelyn’s brightness. She could not say what she did or did not see. She’d encountered so many strange things since becoming a Rider that she shook her head and took whatever Laurelyn was as one more for the list.

“I should just go back in time to tell myself not to become a Green Rider,” Karigan said.

But would you listen to yourself? Laurelyn asked with a glint of amusement in her eyes.

“Probably not. But, if I can do this, I could stop my mother from going to that fair where she caught fever. I . . . I could have a sister or brother. I—”

No. Laurelyn’s voice cracked like thunder, all hint of amusement gone. It would be disastrous, such meddling.

“It hasn’t stopped you.”

I have not changed the course of what is to come.

“You gave my mother a moonstone.”

They stared at one another, but Laurelyn’s brightness hurt Karigan’s eyes and she glanced away.

They continued on, emerging into the first tower. Karigan saw it filled with Sleepers, Sleepers climbing the stairs, crossing bridges on the heights above. Miraculously they had not touched Graelalea’s body or moonstone. Its light reached out to Laurelyn and her, then faded.

The Queen of Argenthyne touched the feather in Karigan’s hair. Enmorial, she murmured. Remember.

Karigan paused thinking back to that snowy evening in Arrowdale, a question niggling at the back of her mind. “Why did you make me forget?” she asked. “Why did you make me forget our first meeting?”

At first Laurelyn did not answer. Then: I feared that if you carried the memory of it, it would have left too great a burden of dread upon you, perhaps causing you to resist my plea to come here.

“Then why bother appearing to me in the first place?”

I left my plea with you as an undercurrent, a summoning that would bolster the wishes of those who command you. Now that I see you, I know my fears were unfounded, and I am sorry I hid the truth from you.