Issue #241 • Dec. 21, 2017

“Trette’s Bones,” by Grace Seybold

“Forever Night,” by Dana Beehr

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TRETTE’S BONES

by Grace Seybold

         When Trette was thirty, she gave her skull to the Ossuary, which was exactly the sort of thing she would do. I’m not angry—no, yes, I’m angry about it, but I want to tell it all, how it went. I don’t know who I want to tell, who I’m writing this for. For memory, I guess. For ghosts. So: let the ghosts hear.

         She was always showy. Everything she did, she had to go just that bit farther than anyone else. Even the first time she gave to the town, it was like that. We were born twins and made our bone-pledge together, with the rest of our cohort, the summer we were fifteen. We talked about it for months beforehand, of course, the same as everybody.

         “What’s wrong with a toe?” our friend and tagalong Yebell asked us one day, kicking her heel aimlessly against the seawall where the three of us sat, warm in the double sunlight. Below us, boats bobbed at their moorings or scudded across the harbor, blue sails for the town, flags of all colors for everyone else. It was a Rule, the blue sails, like the placement of buildings in the town and the way foreigners couldn’t come past the outer docks, and ten thousand other things besides, so we didn’t give it much thought at the time.

         “It’s just so ordinary,” Trette said, wrinkling her nose. “It’s like you’re saying, I’ll never do anything interesting, I’ll never stand out. Toes. Bleh.”

         “Ma and Pa both gave toes,” I said mildly. “Maybe I’m saying I appreciated the goodness of their lives and wanted to be like them.”

         That was disingenuous and we both knew it even as I said it, because while I did appreciate our parents very much and was grateful for all they’d given us, I thought their lives were generally very dull. Pa worked in the customs house, where he dealt with the goods and problems of foreigners; and Ma worked in the Ossuary, where she made glass. Trette knew I wouldn’t last a month in either place without going mad and glared at me. “You’re seriously thinking of a toe then?”

         “Maybe a finger joint,” I admitted. “Tip of the left fourth wouldn’t be so bad. I don’t really need that finger for the flute, except for trills.”

         “You’d still be able to use it,” Trette pointed out.

         “Yes, but—” I didn’t finish; I knew she knew what I meant. Ghost-flesh isn’t like born-flesh. Some of what it does is unpredictable. We’d all heard stories of people giving one of their legs and then being set on journeys they’d never have taken, and of ghost hands writing terrible things while their bodies slept, and all that. Mostly that was only stories we told each other—there were a few people in the town with significant ghost parts and I’d never known anything really dangerous to happen to them—but still. It would be a risk, and therefore a worthy sacrifice, but that year I’d just started to feel I was coming into my music, and I didn’t know if I wanted to chance compromising it.

         “Maybe all you’d be saying with a toe is ‘I’ve got toes I don’t need,’” Yebell suggested. “Not everything has to have some deep significance.”

         “In which case, why bother making the sacrifice at all?” I asked.

         “Because I want to move out of my parents’ house,” Yebell answered with a grin. “It’s fine for the two of you, but I have three younger brothers. Taroque Boatbuilder’s going to let me live on his boat for the summer, as soon as I’m an adult.”

         I punched her shoulder, grinning back, and she retaliated with equal enthusiasm, nearly knocking me off the wall. “Taroque. Good for you! Full apprentice?”

         “If it works out. He’ll take me on as boatbuilder-trainee for three months and then put my name in the shop book in the fall if I do all right. I might be making my second sacrifice before either of you. Yebell Boatbuilder, how about that!” She laughed. “Good thing I have plenty of toes.”

         In the end, she really did offer a toe, and didn’t seem to care that about half our cohort did the same. I went back and forth for a long while, dithering like I generally do on anything important, and eventually pledged the finger joint, the left fourth, like I’d said. I just wouldn’t use it, I decided, if the ghost-flesh turned out strange.

         I wasn’t the only one; finger joints or whole fingers were the next most popular choice after toes. One girl gave her entire right thumb, which we all privately agreed was ridiculous. We were much more impressed by a boy named Kleid, who offered a rib, which was both daring and sensible. Although he did spoil it somewhat afterwards by going about all summer with his shirt off so the stripe of ghost-flesh showed, even indoors.

         Thinking it over, I guess what Trette did wasn’t exactly showy, as such. Kleid’s rib was showy. Trette didn’t end up with any visible ghost-flesh at all; but we all saw it happen, so we all knew.

         There were eighteen of us crowded into the first chamber of the Ossuary, the first time we’d been allowed past the great doors, plus two dedicants and Ma with her tray of little glass knives. She did the best glasswork, everyone said so. When the dedicant took my finger it hardly hurt at all, the knife was so sharp.

         That’s a lie, actually. I told myself I wasn’t going to change things, writing this down. It’s for remembrance, to get things straight in my own mind, and it has to be right.

         The cutting hurt worse than anything that ever happened to me before that. I didn’t exactly scream but I wasn’t silent either. Yebell had been, and I wanted to be too, but I just couldn’t. But the knife was sharp and it was very quick, one stroke to take the fingertip off at the first knuckle and no more than three or four to strip it of flesh. Then the other dedicant held my hand to stop it bleeding while the one officiating cut the letters into the freshly flensed bone. 

         They walked me forward to the center of the room where the ceiling was open, and I was glad then that I hadn’t chosen a toe, because the ones before me who had, had to take those steps limping and leaning on the dedicant beside them. I was much more dignified and stood straight as they smashed the glass knife and lifted the bone-offering and my cut hand together into the shaft of pale sunlight.

         I didn’t see the ghost-flesh appear; it was just there, not suddenly but inevitably, the way trees in spring seem to bud while you’re looking away for a moment. Between one breath and the next my finger was whole again, no different from the rest of my fingers other than a kind of shimmering, except that when I stepped back out of the shaft of pale light the tip was gone and the shortened finger capped with a white scar of born-flesh as though the injury had happened years ago. That was how it would look in lamplight or the light of the bright sun, but the pale sun would show what was really there.

         Three others came after, one of them the girl with the thumb, and then it was Trette’s turn. The dedicant checked his book and said something in a low voice to her, as if for confirmation. She didn’t answer but laid her head down on the cutting slab.

         It turns out ears have bones in them. I had no idea, before that; I thought they were flesh all through. But the knife came down and the blood sprayed, and Trette screamed and flung herself against the hands of the dedicant holding her in place while the other dug inward with the knifepoint and after a long terrible time brought out the tiniest of bones.

         When they broke the knife the bleeding didn’t stop right away. I figured out later that they’d had to cut through some flesh that was too far from the excised bone to turn ghost, so it didn’t heal when they dragged her half-conscious into the pale sunlight. At the time, though, all I could think was that she’d been rejected somehow, that the Ossuary didn’t want her and she wasn’t going to be ghosted at all.

         The two dedicants angled Trette’s head this way and that to catch the light and argued in fierce whispers, while blood seeped steadily down her neck and into the yoke of her dress. Then they told Ma to watch us and hauled Trette away into the recesses of the building. Eventually another pair of dedicants came out and resumed the ceremony with the rest of the candidates. The whole time, Ma’s face might have been a skull for all the expression she showed, and her hands as she passed the knives over were steady. I’d have found her calmness comforting—Ma had worked in the Ossuary since before Trette and I were born and surely knew what was happening in those forbidding depths—but I knew Ma, as well as any child can know their parents, and knew the reverence in which she held the mysteries of the town. She’d carry out her duties even if Trette or Pa or I were bleeding to death in front of her.

         Even once we were home, it wasn’t different. The Ossuary kept Trette three days. During that time, Ma and Pa went about with eyes like barricaded doors, saying almost nothing. Being newly adult, I was supposed to take myself out of the house and stay away for a week, showing myself able to live appropriately without my parents’ guidance. Most new adults in the town lived in tents on the beach for that period, celebrating, cooking fish over fires and showing off their new ghost-flesh to each other before being welcomed back into the community at the high-summer festival. It was what Trette and I had planned—we’d made our tent in the winter, stitching the canvas together beside the stove. But now we’d never get to use it, because she’d been selfish and ruined everything.

         Instead I went to Yebell and begged her to let me join her on Taroque’s houseboat. I couldn’t stand to stay in our waiting house, but joining the merriment on the beach, pretending everything was fine, was too much effort for me. Yebell, I could tell, didn’t wholly understand, but she went to Taroque and petitioned him on my behalf and came back with word that he’d agreed. I moved my few belongings aboard that same hour.

         I’d never had the remotest interest in boatbuilding, but Taroque made it clear he expected me to work for my keep. He showed me where to stow my things and then directed me to the straking shed, and for the rest of the day I tended the coals and kept the water-level constant in the steaming box, as one of the apprentices supervised the tension of the boards that were being slowly bent into the curve of a new hull. It was dull, sweaty work, but it was at least different from our parents’ house, and the monotonous whistle of the steam tanks made a kind of slow, blurry music that suggested new melodies to me.

         When Trette came home I heard about it third-hand, from some foreigner who pulled his boat alongside Taroque’s mooring to complain in a heavy nasal accent about the inefficiency of the customs house. “Just closed down and left, no explanation,” he was growling when I came on deck, “and me with half my goods lying unsealed and three more ships behind me, and what’s your prentice doing?”

         Taroque looked at me, and I looked at him, and then I realized the foreigner meant me. My left hand was pointing onshore, fourth finger glimmering as the pale sun rose over the hills. I felt light and urgent, as though I could bound across the water and never so much as wet my ankles. “Go,” Taroque told me kindly and I ran home.

         Trette was on the roof, where we often slept in summer. Ma met me at the ladder. “She’s well,” was all she said. “Be gentle with her, though. It was—”

         “A worthy sacrifice?” I finished, greatly daring. That was what the dedicants always said, and by and large they were not mocked. I wouldn’t have dared to be irreverent if Trette had still been at the Ossuary, but I’d seen her feet dangling over the roof’s edge as I approached the house.

         Ma made as if to swat my head, then thought better of it, perhaps remembering that I was adult now. “Just be gentle,” she said instead.

         I climbed up and plunked myself down beside Trette, studying her frankly. The side of her head looked normal. Where we sat was in the bright sun’s shade, our walnut tree’s leaves turning its light to lace, but the pale sun hung right before us. I should have seen what there was to see, if there was anything.

         “Don’t bother,” Trette said. “It didn’t work.”

         “What were you doing?” I burst out, which wasn’t at all what I’d intended to say. “How stupid could you be? Where did you even find out about ear bones? What did—what were—” With difficulty, I stopped myself, breathing hard. “Trette,” I managed. “Don’t ever do something like this again.” I punched her shoulder for emphasis, hard, and she staggered off-balance as she never would have before, and I realized that she wasn’t fully healed after all, that her injury was an injury still.

         “I wouldn’t,” Trette assured me. She caught my expression. “Really, I wouldn’t. It didn’t work. I’m not that stupid.” She glanced down at my ghost finger. “You had the right idea. How’s the music?”

         “Haven’t tried yet.” I didn’t want to tell her about pointing my way home. It was her right to know, but suddenly I had no idea how to talk to her. One adult to another, and one of us maimed—that wasn’t a relationship I knew how to be easy in. “What are you going to do next?” I asked instead.

         Trette shrugged. “Find work. Find something. Ma says I can learn glasswork if I like.”

         “In the Ossuary?” I said stupidly.

         “Here, for now. There’s more to glassmaking than sacred knives. I can do profane work.” She looked uncomfortable. “I could do a lot of it sitting down, I wouldn’t have to worry about falling. There aren’t a lot of people who’d take a prentice who’s dizzy all the time.”

         “Trette Glassworker.” I tasted the name. It was odd but not bitter. I poked her in the ribs, but gently this time so as not to unbalance her. “You just make sure you give a toe for your second!” She laughed, albeit unwillingly, and things between us were all right for awhile.

         It was only later, thinking back on it in the rocking darkness of Taroque’s forward cabin, that I realized it was my ghost finger I’d touched her with.

         That was summer. In late fall we grounded most of the boats, and Taroque and Yebell and I and the rest of the shore people went to live in the workshop and plan the next year’s boatbuilding. No new keels could be laid while the large space was being used for living in, so we made ropes and mended tools and carved small intricate pieces of hardware. I found I had a knack for knifework, and soon I was carving porthole frames and oarlocks and other small pieces in complicated sprays of fish and flowers. Yebell was made full prentice, and two months later so was I; so she matched her other foot to her first, and I took another joint from my finger. I didn’t notice much difference.

         My flute went unplayed for days at a time, it being hard to find a quiet moment in the crowded confines of the boatbuilding shed once the deep snow came. I wondered why we couldn’t have another building for living in—one of the ones belonging to the masons, say, whose numbers really didn’t warrant the three they were allotted by Rule. Or even why we couldn’t build a new building, as Pa had told me foreigners sometimes did; but upsetting the symmetry of the town, if symmetry it could be called, was not a thing one proposed aloud, even if one was fully adult and had Boatbuilder-apprentice affixed to one’s name. The town was the town, with its intricate nested geometries and the Ossuary at its heart. And I don’t know that I’d have wanted to play anyway; I still hadn’t yet tried using the ghost finger on the flute, and was reluctant to do so when it had demonstrated so clearly and quickly that it could tell me things whether I meant it to or not.

         Winter lightened and spring began to come in, and our year-fellow Kleid who had given a rib for his adulthood pledge managed to overturn a sledgeload of firewood on himself, trying to shift a balky horse. His arm and shoulder were crushed, and by the time he staggered white-faced back to town they were beyond healing. Trette told me later that the dedicants used every one of Ma’s stockpiled knives and were still two short for all the bones they had to do, so that Kleid’s new ghost arm was missing two fingerbones they hadn’t been able to incise.

         “He was lucky he got back to town so quickly,” she said as we walked slowly along one of the town’s many piers. Now that the ice was breaking up it was my task as the newest prentice to check for winter damage to the docking slips, before the boats were launched again. “If the arm had started to die, there wouldn’t have been anything they could do.”

         “What do you know about it?” I asked, more rudely than I’d really meant to. I was in a black mood, restless and irritable with the long winter confinement and a little resentful of Trette’s presence. I’d hoped this day’s task, cold and dull as it was, would at least be a chance for some badly needed solitude, but Ma was shut up in the Ossuary making a new batch of knives and Trette wasn’t skilled enough yet to help, and so she’d invited herself along with me. Her slow steps, the clack of her stick on the pier, the fact that she knew more gossip than I did, were all getting under my skin.

         “I know enough,” Trette said. She didn’t sound offended but I could tell she was. “I listen to Ma. I pick up things.”

         “Things?”

         “Things the dedicants say. Things other people say.” She tapped her stick for emphasis. She didn’t really need it for walking, just for balance. “Ma lets me go as far in as the third bone chamber, since I was there before anyway, and I hear what they say to each other sometimes.”

         “They?” I repeated uneasily.

         “The dedicants,” Trette clarified, frowning at my obtuseness. I didn’t tell her I’d thought she meant the bones. She was wholly deaf on her left side now, but sometimes she looked as though she were listening. I’d asked her right out, once, if she could hear ghost things, and she’d denied it laughing, but still I sometimes wondered. It wasn’t a thing I’d used to wonder, whether Trette would lie to me.

         “So what do they say?” I asked, pausing to examine a split board at our feet. It would need to be replaced; I knelt and marked it with a line of yellow paint I carried. “What kind of secrets are you learning?”

         “Don’t be like that,” Trette snapped. “Nobody made you be a boatbuilder.”

         “I like my work,” I retorted. Her words stung. I was good at the work, but it wasn’t what I’d expected to be doing. “At least I chose it on my own. I didn’t let myself get forced into it because no-one else would have me.”

         She didn’t answer, and when I looked up her face was white with fury. She opened her mouth as though to speak, and then abruptly snapped it shut again and whirled and fled stumbling back toward the town.

         My ghost finger was drawing in the setting paint, parallel curves that met each other over and over, mimicking the roads around the Ossuary. I swiped them away with my paintbrush and resolutely returned to my task.

         Trette started keeping company with Kleid after that, and by midsummer it was generally known that they were courting. I didn’t take much notice. We’d been mostly ignoring each other since our fight on the pier, and besides I’d been coming to an understanding with Yebell and most of our free time was spent together. I’d wondered if she resented me tagging after her to Taroque’s boat, but the fact was she was better at boatbuilding than I was (other than the carving work), having aimed toward it for much longer. So she didn’t mind me being there too. We’d talked about it, not in those words of course, but we had; but mostly we just accepted things as being the way they were.

         That was also the summer of the bad storm. I don’t want to write about that; but I will, because of what Trette did. Showy is still the wrong word for it. I don’t know why I wrote showy earlier. But I don’t know what to call it otherwise.

         We had half a day’s warning of the storm, the clouds building black towers over the water through the morning. All the town boats were in by the time the clouds were close enough for us to see lightning flickering between them. Everyone was twitchy, uneasy, and doing more ghost things at the same time than anyone had seen in years. I found myself digging through my trunk on Taroque’s boat to find my flute, which I hadn’t touched in months—the coming storm hurt my hand, it hurt my throat like I’d swallowed glass, and I wanted to play wild songs I’d never heard.

         When I came up on deck, the sky was black, the bright sun gone, the pale sun blazing. My ghost finger twitched violently and I had to grip my wrist with my other hand to hold it still as I crossed to the ladder. Waves slapped the dock like whales’ tails, and the salt spray stung my lips; I realized I’d been biting them bloody.

         I ran up the beach and across the sward to the town. There had been three foreigner ships at the customs dock that morning, but they’d been warned off as soon as we’d seen the storm coming, so they’d had plenty of time to get clear. No foreigners were allowed even at the outer docks at a time like this. It was a Rule.

         The door of the boatbuilding workshop was wedged open, and Yebell met me on the stoop with a fierce embrace in the spill of warm yellow light. “You’re last,” she told me, and pulled me inside and shut the door. It was crowded: Taroque and his workers, a wife and two husbands belonging to them, Yebell and me and the other two prentices, and a clutch of children, boatbuilders’ and not, who had likely just been closest to this building when the storm rose.

         Rain drummed on the roof and spattered hissing down the tin chimney and into the firebox. The other two prentices were going around the room checking the latches on the shutters; everyone else was sitting still and quiet, even the children, on the floor or perched on the workbenches and upturned hulls. Yebell and I wedged ourselves into a corner under one of the oil lamps and waited.

         The rain sounds stopped. As one, we all turned our gazes upward toward where we knew the pale sun was, unseen beyond the roof. Yebell’s bare feet tapped against my legs; my hand tapped the same rhythm on her shoulder. The lamps went out all at once, and there was a muted clang from the firebox as the tin housing contracted, the coals gone suddenly cold.

         We couldn’t see what was happening outside, of course, but we could feel it: the curved roads through the town making channels for the Ossuary’s power, the buildings marking focal points and junctions to block and release it, in ways that the dedicants alone could articulate but that every adult in the town knew inside our skins. The children watched us, fretfully silent, as I’d watched the adults around me in all previous storms. Only ghost-flesh moved. Far away beyond the town, I knew, the storm raged, the wind screamed, the ocean tore at the shore; but we were safe, our homes and our boats and our families were safe. If I had ever resented the Ossuary and what it had done to our family (and I had, oh, I had) there was nothing but gratitude in my mind now.

         I don’t know how long we sat there, caught in the eddies and backcurrents of power, gazing at the unseen pale sun. Hours, certainly. Too long. By the time we emerged, it was far too late.

         Trette, I learned later, had been in the customs house with Pa when the storm broke and so had seen the foreign ship returning. They’d been warned, of course, told that they had to stay past the breakwater at all costs, but foreigners don’t always understand the inflexibility of the Rules, and the foreign captain hadn’t taken the warning seriously, or else had panicked when she saw the black wall of cloud bearing down on her vessel, and she’d turned about and tried to make for the dock again. By then it was too late, of course, the Ossuary was awake, and as the ship passed the boundary of the town’s power it was simply ripped apart.

         I wondered afterwards—I still wonder—if Trette was trying to prove something to me, if she did it to refute the last thing I’d said to her. There was no good reason for her even to have had the knife. She’d been allowed to start making glass knives a few months before, I’d heard from Ma, but they were never supposed to be taken out of the Ossuary. She shouldn’t have known what to do with it, either, but of course she’d seen more of the dedicants’ work than anyone not pledged to the Ossuary usually did. No dedicant would have tried to ghost a foreigner, even a dying one, not ever; but Trette wasn’t constrained by any oath or mystery not to try what she did.

         We heard the screaming as we came out into the open. The foreigner was still alive, horribly alive. The wave that had flung him out of the water must have smashed him right against the stone wall of the customs house for Trette to have gotten to him quickly enough, and she must have run outside a soon as she heard the impact. The dedicants counted that as mitigation, I heard afterwards; that she couldn’t possibly have had time to think the whole thing through. (But she had the knife. I still wonder.)

         I could see her kneeling on the pier, hair stiff with blood and salt, the foreigner’s hands clenched around her upper arms as he screamed and screamed. Glass shards glittered on both their skins, and where his throat and collarbone had been there was—something—not ghost-flesh, not properly anything I’d ever seen, but there was enough of something there that he was not dead. Trette was weeping; I could barely hear her over the foreigner’s howls, but it stabbed my heart to see her face.

         Yebell, more practical than me, realized at once what had happened and went running for the Ossuary. I ran toward Trette instead, less sensibly. I don’t know what anyone else did. The foreigner shrieked and thrashed in her lap, his nails hooked into her skin, and I tried to pull them apart without looking at him. As soon as my ghost finger touched him, Trette’s sobs turned to screams, and she clapped her hand to her ear. I don’t know what she heard. At the time, I couldn’t even guess. I can now.

         Two senior dedicants came running down the beach at Yebell’s heels, yellow coats flapping, and hauled the three of us apart. I didn’t watch after that. Eventually the screams stopped.

         So Pa and I went home, to my parents’ quiet house, and Trette disappeared again into the Ossuary. It was six days this time that she was gone. Ma followed her through the great doors as soon as Pa told her the news but was back home again by evening, walking on ghost feet. I’d never heard of someone pledging both feet before, and I was frightened then like I hadn’t been even on the beach, because Ma knew the Ossuary like no-one else we knew, and if she thought it needed her feet to influence or atone, then just how grievous was Trette’s sin?

         I lay awake in my attic room those nights, writing songs in my head that I didn’t dare try to play. Somewhere close by, I thought, they were torturing Trette for what she’d tried to do. Or they’d saved the foreigner after all and given Trette to him as punishment. Or they’d exiled her, severed her from the town and driven her away, and she was already gone and they weren’t going to tell anyone.

         Or they’d done worse, were doing worse, and how could I even imagine it, because I didn’t go sneaking around after the dedicants trying to learn things I had no business knowing? And learning them wrong, to boot. That was what made me angriest, I thought: that Trette wasn’t just a sneak, but an incompetent sneak. If she’d been cleverer, she’d—well, she’d still be in serious trouble, with a ghost-fleshed foreigner to account for, but it would be different trouble.

         I honed my anger to a fine edge, those nights awake, those days waiting. Pa went back to work, dealing with the other foreign ship that came to fetch the bodies and sift through the wreckage, explaining to them over and over that they couldn’t be allowed to come into the town. Ma glided around her workshop on ghost feet and made bottles and lamp-globes. She made no knives while Trette was gone.

         I stayed in my room and waited. Yebell came twice to the house, and Taroque once, but I refused to see them, and they went away. I wasn’t angry at them, but I couldn’t talk to them. It was as though I had a ghost tongue, out of my control. That was an impossible thing, I thought, tongues being boneless and wholly human, but I couldn’t get those last moments out of my head, the foreigner trying to speak, Trette seeming to hear. Ghost-flesh gave signs, it gave warnings, it acted—but it didn’t speak, not ever.

         On the seventh day they brought her out, pale and subdued, in the yellow-white coat of a new dedicant. I should maybe have guessed; if they weren’t going to kill her, it was the only thing they could safely do to her, now that she’d shown she knew as much as she did. I went running to meet her, on the steps of the Ossuary, ready to forgive everything and beg to be forgiven. She was alive, she was safe. I think I loved my sister more in that moment than I ever would again.

         She saw me and stepped away from the others attending her. Her mouth formed my name silently. I stopped just beyond arm’s reach, somehow unable to take those last few steps. The air around us was lambent, the pale sun washed away by the bright, but there was such a strangeness around her that I thought I felt whole ghosts thronging. “Trette!” I cried in sudden agony. “What have you given up?”

         She shook her head slowly, her eyes fixed on me. “Go back to your boats,” she said. “Go back to Yebell and the rest. Live your life. I don’t think I want to see you anymore.”

         “That’s it? By what right—you— I don’t believe you! How can you be so, so arrogant—to—” The words choked me. Trette’s eyes were shadowed. Was it only exhaustion, or had they always been that color, like skull-sockets? Mine weren’t. I didn’t think they were.

         “Go back,” she repeated. There was no warmth in her tone. I had been blaming myself, my last words to her, for what she’d done, but it truly hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that she might blame me too. Somehow, that thought turned all my self-recrimination into anger. What right had she to blame me? She’d put herself on this path. Fine; let her walk it then.

         “Fine,” I said aloud, and turned my back on her, and walked away.

         I didn’t see her again for ten years.

* * *

         People didn’t leave the town much—almost never, really. It wasn’t a Rule, but it nearly was. Maybe it was Trette’s having done what she did that gave me the courage to go. Somehow none of the town’s customs seemed to have that much force anymore, now that I’d seen a foreigner die covered in blood and glass, and seen Trette rewarded for it, if that was what had happened. If no-one had stopped her in time, or punished her afterward for everyone’s fear, for Pa’s silence and Ma’s ghost feet, then—well. Then no-one was going to stop me either.

         No-one did. I walked onto the deck of the foreigner ship, stepping around the canvas-shrouded bodies, and told the foreigner with the most complicated coat that I could do carpentry and make barrels and was unafraid of the sea. The bright sun and the pale were both high overhead, and I don’t know whether as a foreigner she could see my ghost finger or not; but there were other sailors with wounds and scars, and when the ship left I was on board.

         There isn’t much point talking about the world beyond the town. It’s just a place. Three days out, the pale sun disappeared over the horizon and didn’t come up again, and after that I was just another sailor with a missing finger and a home I didn’t talk about.

         I stayed aboard the ship—the Keveti Tower—for a year and a half, as carpenter’s mate and then as head carpenter, and then I got drunk one night in Bandermouth and woke up in the Drecetic Navy. Most of what I saw of the Sundown War was blockade duty off Shenmeke, and then after the King Odros burned I drew a shore posting in the shipyards in Drece itself. I stayed there through two harsh Drecetic winters, decided a third would be too much, and skipped town on a Calvian privateer and with them cheerfully plundered Morid supply ships (and Drecetic ones, when no-one was near to see us) for quite some time. Then one morning I woke in my cabin, which I’d rated since my promotion to Angel of Kire’s second mate, and the pale sun was shining through the porthole and my hand was whole again.

         I hadn’t known we were near the town of my birth, not really. It doesn’t show up properly on maps. Once in Drece I’d tried to draw a nested spiral where I thought it was, on a coastal chart we had in the shipyard, a spiral since the parallel lines I drew refused to meet; but it didn’t seem to like that and kept wandering away, and eventually disappeared off the edge of the chart altogether. But now here we were, suddenly, and I walked off Angel of Kire’s deck and back into my old life as easily as I’d left it.

         Pa was still working at the customs house, grey and silent, and Ma still made glass, though for the town only; she’d done no work for the Ossuary since that day. Yebell was chief boatbuilder and by Taroque’s death a widow. She welcomed me back without fuss. Some boarder had been sleeping in my attic room, and two prentices in Taroque’s boat’s forward cabin; but both places were empty by the time I went to them. I could feel the town closing like a warm sea over my head.

         Trette didn’t come out to meet me. I don’t know why I’d thought she might. At first I thought I’d stay away; then I decided that was petty and spiteful, and a little too close to how I’d acted when I’d run away in the first place. I wasn’t exactly ashamed, but—well. Anyway, I was the only person my age in the town with just two bone-pledges made, and I decided another finger-joint would do well to mark my safe return.

         I presented myself at the Ossuary. It was the middle of spring and I waited outside in one of the receiving gardens amid familiar flowers, under an arch of bones. Because it wasn’t a scheduled ceremony, I was alone, but after awhile someone came out to meet me. Not a dedicant: Kleid.

         “I hoped you’d come when you heard,” he said without preamble. “Maybe you can talk her out of it. She won’t listen to me.”

         “Trette?” I asked, stupidly. Of course Trette. “What, exactly?”

         “It’s like she’s gone deaf in her other ear,” he continued, pacing back and forth along the border of the garden, as though continuing a conversation from the day before, or from ten years ago. “No, it’s like she’s listening to ghosts with both ears now. She’s been talking about it for days, and yesterday she said it was time, and then you came back, and I thought, it’s fate, you can convince her not to try it, she won’t listen to me.”

         “What about Ma and Pa?” I asked, still entirely in the dark.

         Kleid grimaced. “Your Pa won’t get involved. Says it’s dedicants’ business and he won’t interfere with that. His own daughter. And your Ma can’t listen—I mean can’t. Any time I try to see her about it, her feet just carry her away. She shouldn’t have given both. Your whole family’s mad.”

         I grabbed his arm to stop him pacing. “Kleid. What’s Trette doing?”

         He told me.

         Ghost feet walking Ma away, ghost finger drawing me home, pale sun over the harbor, Trette being, as always, Trette—I could see the Ossuary’s arm in all of it, but not the pattern it was tracing. It was plain it wanted this, though, because I waited in the garden for hours, till both suns set, and the great doors never opened, and no-one else came.

         They announced it the next day, publicly, crying the town the way they did for the high-summer and deep-winter ceremonies: four dedicants in formal coats, their wrists and throats tied with red ribbons, walking the roads of the town from the Ossuary around the spiral and back, shouting the proclamation each place the roads crossed. Showy isn’t the word, not even close; she’d gone well beyond that. No-one had ever given a skull. Not even pieces of one. It would never have occurred to anyone that you could.

         Trette, though—Trette thought of things, she always had, always took that one step further. And she’d had the ghost bones in her ear all those years, letting her hear who knew what. But that wasn’t to blame, because after all it was Trette who’d thought of doing that—Trette herself who said: why can’t we give ear bones, if they’re there? What happens if I do? Why can’t a person be saved with ghost-flesh if they aren’t from the town? What happens if I try? In other places, other countries, I’d heard of alchemists who asked questions like that, and made potions and wonders; and of wizards who asked other questions, and made wonders of other kinds. But the town was no place for either, and the Ossuary wasn’t something to question. I listened to the call of the dedicants and the rising murmur of my neighbors, and I feared for her.

         It was that evening, with the bright sun just resting on the horizon and the pale sun, whose rising and setting were never charted in the town, perched just above the Ossuary’s great dome. Everyone was there—how could they not be? The dedicants, all of them, stood in solemn rows before the cutting slab they’d brought outside, and waited.

         Trette came out, pale and proud, her head shaved and the back of her neck inked for the knife. Here and there, in the crowd, people tried to speak and were slapped silent by ghost hands over their mouths, their neighbors’ or their own. Seeing that, I didn’t try to say anything but only stared at her, willing her to back away. It wasn’t too late, even then, and I’d never been sure what she could hear. Secret things, maybe. Quiet secrets like me wishing my sister would come home.

         She laid her head on the stone and said something very quiet to the dedicant holding the chest of knives. Last words, or as near as, and no-one heard them but him. I’m trying not to be angry about that.

         Everyone heard the next words, though, and this is the part I’m not sure I can write. The knife, all right, I’ve seen blood. I’ve seen killing, seen people die, and it’s probably true Trette hadn’t, but even so. They caught her head as it fell and stripped the skin so easily I wondered if they’d practiced, and if so, on what. The one who’d severed her spine took the cleaned bones and incised them with rapid precision, skull, jaw, uppermost vertebrae, tiny ear bones from the side that had them—all while two others held her body lolling upright against the stone, and the pale sun burned, and the silence went on and on—

         Then abruptly it was dark; the bright sun had set, and in the afterlight we could see the ghost-flesh forming. It was Trette, it was her face. I think I was almost proud of her then. She’d done it after all, the thing no-one else had ever thought of doing.

         And then she spoke.

         I can’t write this part.

         We went mad for awhile, I think, all of us. Part of the town as we are, acclimated as we are to ghost things, there’s a point past which living people simply cannot go. The—words, call them that, that came from Trette’s solidifying mouth—

         I can’t write it. It’s not my ghost finger stopping me, that’s all done with; it’s the rest of me.

         We surged forward, the crowd, all at once, rushing toward the altar. Ghost limbs tried to stop people here and there, and were fought aside; I saw Ma shoved to the ground, saw Kleid frantically smashing at his shoulder with a rock to stop his ghost arm working—all in flashes, as I charged ahead with the rest.

         They grabbed Trette, five or six of them, Yebell among them who had been her friend for always, and hauling her with us we crashed through the ranks of dedicants, who mostly stood stunned and cowering. The great doors behind them gaped open, and inside we ran.

         The corridors of the Ossuary are spiraled like the roads of the town, geometries of bafflement, but in our madness all paths were straight. Bones fell to bar our way and we trampled them underfoot. Walls shifted and we crashed through them, and they turned out to be brittle and fell to dust. There were vaults and pits and secret places there, where the bodies of the town’s dead had always been taken for their final mysteries, and it was into one of these that we cast her, a narrow deep well reeking of old blood, and we dragged the stone cover over, and we fled.

         Let the dead listen to her, we cried to each other, running.

         Let the ghosts listen.

         It’s dark as I write this. I think this is the second night after. The third? I’m not sure. We haven’t exactly been comparing our reflections, and there’s only the one sun now.

         I wanted to write it all down now, here in my attic room, before memory begins to trick me. It already fades. I try to picture the pale sun, the look of ghost-flesh, and my imagination fails. It was the same way for me all those years over the horizon. The town is part of the rest of the world, now.

         We still don’t know why. The dedicants, those few that live, refuse to guess. Did we disturb something, destroy something, blundering through the sacred places that way? Did whatever spirit animated the Ossuary and the pale sun realize there was a limit beyond which we couldn’t be taken, even acclimated to its presence as we were, and give up on us and leave? Or was Trette, what Trette became, its ultimate objective, some pure synthesis between it and us, and once it had her it didn’t need the rest of us anymore? Are we some discarded husk left behind, some split seedpod abandoned on the ground, and where has the seed now gone?

         Now we creep through what remains of the town, and we wonder. Some of us have gone, on foreign ships or their own boats, or on foot up the coast. Yebell and her son are gone with Taroque’s boat and most of her workers. I could likely take Yebell’s place as head boatbuilder, if I want to stay. With so many boats fled there’s a lot of work for a boatbuilder to do, and fewer hands to do it than there were, even among those that stayed, now that all the ghost-flesh is vanished.

         I imagine my finger twitching at the thought, but it doesn’t. Ma sits in her chair downstairs with a blanket over her missing feet and stares at nothing. Since she was trampled in the crowd that day she hasn’t spoken or seemed to know me. Pa has learned new kinds of silence, and won’t speak of it, except to tell me I won’t be welcome in their house again if I mention Trette’s name. There’s a place for me here, of sorts, but I’m not sure I want it.

         I started writing this to remember, and to decide. I was angry when I began, at Trette, at everything. I’m not now. She and I hurt each other, and ourselves, and sometimes we meant to and sometimes we didn’t, and maybe this time we’re past forgiveness or return. Alive or dead or ghost or gone, Trette’s wherever she is, and I’m here.

         When the bright sun rises—the only sun—I’ll go back to where the Ossuary was. The bones are crumbling fast, most of them gone to dust already, exposing the building’s foundations, scars in the dark earth. People go around, trampling new paths in the common grass. Already we can see where the new roads are going to be, when people have walked them for awhile. Already the nested patterns of the old roads are sprouting green weeds in their dust. They don’t seem to lead anywhere, or start anywhere, anymore. A few people have talked about new buildings, now that that’s possible, now that the Rules are shattered past mending—more work I could do, having seen how they build elsewhere. I don’t know.

         I’ll go in the morning to where we buried her. Let the ghosts listen, we said, and so I’ll take my flute and play for her, there in the sunlight among the bones. No way to know if she’ll hear me, wherever she is; but it’s a way to say goodbye, the only way I can think of. I thought I was free of this town when I left ten years ago, but it was only that my anchor chain was longer than I thought. Now I float untethered, only this one last thread holding me. Tomorrow I’ll say goodbye to her, and break it, and then decide in freedom whether to stay or go.

         I love you, Trette.

         Let the ghosts hear.

Copyright © 2017 Grace Seybold

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Grace Seybold lived in Montreal for most of her adult life, but she has recently moved to Kingston, Ontario, on the advice of her bicycle, which has decided it wants to get out more. She works as a copy editor for McGill-Queen’s University Press. Her fiction has been published in ChiZine, AE, Machine of Death 2, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among other places. Her name is pronounced “SIGH-bold”.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

FOREVER NIGHT

by Dana Beehr

         The line of darkness cut across the daylit field as if drawn with a knife. On the ridge where Tomas and Elseir stood, the sun was shining; the sky above them was an intense beautiful blue, broken only by the wisps of clouds. The grass waved gently in the breeze, dotted here and there with yellow flowers. The scent of spring filled the air. Yet as Tomas looked down the slanting field, he saw, not five hundred yards from them, a roiling wall of black. It was as if a curtain of twilight had been lowered over the world from horizon to horizon.

         The darkness looked like a giant wound in the fabric of reality; it hurt Tomas’s eyes. A terrible sensation of wrongness set his nerves to screeching. Let’s go back, he wanted to say to her. He did not.

         If Elseir felt that wrong, she did not show it. She simply stood, resolute, staring over the field down to the darkness below. She was tall, taller than he was—taller than most of the men in his village—with light blonde hair pulled back into a knot. Tendrils had escaped and played around her face in the wind. Her features were cleanly chiseled as if out of marble—an illusion lent greater force by her sickly pallor. There was a grayish tint to her complexion, and her eyes were ringed with shadows.

         She looked as tired and ill as Tomas knew she was. She stood with her fur cloak wrapped around herself as if she were cold even in the heat of the day. After a moment, she spoke.

         “This is it. There’s no turning back now.”

         He nodded. “I know.”

         She studied him for a moment, then said slowly, “I have to go on, but you—”

         “I’m going where you go, Elseir. To the end. Just as my great-grandfather did with your grandmother.”

         She hesitated again, and he bit his lip; he could sense she was evaluating him, and he hoped she would find him worthy. “How much do you know about... what happened?”

         “I know enough,” he said stoutly.

         “Do you?” She studied him. “It could get... very bad. There are things I may ask of you...”

         “I’m not afraid.” He did his best to look strong, courageous, though his heart quailed within him. “Whatever comes, I’ll be ready.” Oh, that’s a lie.

         The gloom hanging over Elseir’s face broke. She smiled, as radiant as the sun coming out from behind the clouds. By all rights, a smile like that ought to be able to clear away any darkness.

         She reached out and squeezed his shoulder. He could feel the chill in her hand even through his clothing. “Let’s go.”

         As she started down the slanting field, Tomas felt his heart quail, then steeled his spine.

         Elseir needs me. I can do this. Whatever it is, he told himself, and he desperately hoped it was true.

* * *

         She had arrived at their small village one day, late in the afternoon: a tall woman wearing a simple traveling tunic and breeches, and a heavy fur cloak. Even then, she had looked obviously ill, pale and sickly. But what set the whispers buzzing was the emblem she wore around her neck: a simple trefoil of serpents’ heads. The elders murmured that they had seen that emblem before; and even if they had not, Tomas would have recognized it from the tales he had heard at his parents’ inn on long evenings when the snow flew outside.

         She had given her name as Else, and Tomas had seen how the eyebrows of the few oldsters rose at that; in truth, Tomas had to admit, she looked just as the stories had told, the spitting image of Elseir the Light-bringer, who half a century ago had ridden forth against the Forever Night pouring over the land. There had been not a few men and women from Tomas’s village in Elseir’s vanguard, and there were still a handful of them left, who sat in places of honor on the long tale-filled nights at Tomas’s inn. Lady Elseir had fallen in that final battle; it had been Tomas’s great-grandfather who had been beside her at the last. Or so Tomas heard from others; his great grandfather never spoke of it, keeping the tale of Lady Elseir’s last moments locked behind a tomb-like silence. Yet, when this new Else passed him on her way up the stairs to her room, Tomas’s grandfather watched after her, with a strange intensity that Tomas had never seen from him before.

         Before long, rumor and whispers were spreading throughout the village:

         Elseir... Elseir... Lady Elseir...

         Her granddaughter...

         She’s back...

         They all had heard news from travelers passing through of late—that the Forever Night was not gone; that once again, a dark cloud was spreading over the land and threatening all that lived, that the sacrifice of the first Lady Elseir had not been enough, that the ancient enemy had arisen. And that her daughter or granddaughter should be here now, at this time...well, what else could it be than that she was here to stand against the night?

         Else stayed at their inn a fortnight. During that time, the rumors only grew. Even her obvious illness fed the rumors: for had it not been said that in destroying the Forever Night, Lady Elseir the First had brought down a curse upon all those of her blood, a curse of illness that they would carry to their graves? Gifts began to pile up for her at the inn door: foodstuffs, weapons, flowers, wine, jewelry. And all throughout the fortnight, Tomas waited, trying to gather his courage.

         Finally, the last day of her stay he came upon her as she was making ready to leave and asked, his heart in his throat, “Is it true? What they say about you?”

         She had stopped and turned to look at him, a deep, intense, searching look. “What is that?”

         “That you are... Lady Elseir’s granddaughter. That you’re here because of... of the Night. The Forever Night. It’s returned, so they say.”

         Her eyes seemed to bore through him, all the way down to his bones. He felt he was being weighed, measured and tested, and he held his breath, hoping with all his heart that he would pass. And it seemed he did, for after an eternity, she said, “Yes.”

         There were more words after that—as he begged her to take him with her; as she cautioned him about her illness, about the curse she carried upon her, that her time was very short—but really, all that had needed to be said was in that one exchange. And when she departed at noon of the next day, Tomas went with her, to the tearful looks of his parents and the pride of the entire village.

         His grandfather had pulled him aside before they left. “You’re going with Lady Elseir,” he had said. “We have a reputation with her folk. Make sure you live up to that. Whatever it takes.”

         Whatever it takes. Those words rang in Tomas’s memory as they approached the wall of night.

         The black curtain loomed before them; he could see through it enough to make out vague shapes in the gloom. A chill was coming off the wall, one that prickled his skin, and for a moment, he felt there was no possible way he could cross that barrier; his legs would not move, his feet would not carry him, not against the deep instinct that told him to flee.

         “Are you ready?” Elseir asked.

         He pressed his teeth together. “I’m ready.”

         “All right,” she said, and stepped through. The night swallowed her almost completely; he could see only a faint outline and the dim gleam of her blonde braid on the other side.

         He hesitated.

         I can’t do it, part of him wailed. Then he steeled his spine. You have to. It’s what your grandfather would expect of you.

         What Elseir expects of you.

         Summoning his courage, he forced himself into motion.

         As he stepped past the boundary to the darkness, that icy cold chilled him down to his bones, as a frigid lake on a burning day, and seemed to leave a thin layer of grime on his skin. That filth seemed to sink into him, as if he would never again be clean—

         Then he was through, and he saw Elseir waiting. His eyes were slowly adjusting to the night, and he began to make out other shapes—tree trunks, boulders, a crumbling road weaving off into the forest. Deeper into the dark.

         “Is that where we’re going?”

         “Yes,” Elseir said. “Come.” And she started down the road with a purpose in her stride. Tomas looked back once, over his shoulder. The outside world appeared filmy, all its color washed out, as if he were seeing it through a dirty window.

         He turned his back on the light and followed after Elseir.

         The dark under the trees was not complete. Though no light reached them from sun or moon or stars, the air was filled with a strange blue luminescence; glowing vines and fungus wrapped around dark tree trunks, and shining mats of creeper carpeted the ground. The broken road they were following lay like a scar through the glowing beds of vegetation.

         Yet even with that dim illumination, the blackness surrounding them was oppressive. The air was damp, rotted; it lay greasily against his skin. With every breath, he felt grime collecting in his lungs. As he followed Elseir, her skin bluish-white in the strange light, he wondered if she felt it as he did. Yet he could read nothing in her thin features but a tremendous powerful intent.

         “We’ll stop here and sleep,” she said.

         The crumbling road was a bit wider here; the strange trees grew more closely, like guardians, and their branches laced overhead, forming a small chamber. Still, this was not where Tomas would have chosen to spend the night.

         He wanted to voice his discomfort—but the set expression on Elseir’s face kept him silent. Her illness seemed more apparent, as if the bones of her face were pushing through her pale, almost grayish skin. He was worried about her—and afraid of what might lie ahead.

         Whatever it takes. His grandfather had been alone with Lady Elseir at the end; he had been the only one from their village to stay with her all that way. He’d never spoken of her death, but there had been whispers...

         Tomas did not know what had happened there in the dark, but the possibilities chilled him.

         He shrugged his pack to the ground as Elseir foraged off to the side of the path. Returning with her arms full of deadwood, she laid a fire in the center of the pavement. As she struck a spark from flint and steel, the flash illuminated charred logs from many previous fires.

         “We’re not the only ones who have camped here,” he said without thinking.

         “No. There are... others... who live in this forest.”

         “What do you mean... ‘others?’”

         The yellow and red light of the fire flared across her features, deepening their sickly grayish hue. “You surely didn’t think we were the only ones who walked among these trees, did you?”

         Tomas swallowed, suddenly afraid. “Are there other—people?”

         An obscure expression crossed her face. “Not as we know them. No... you live long enough under the darkness, and eventually it starts to change you. It changes everything...” She trailed off, looking down at her hands.

         “What is it?” he asked.

         “Nothing,” she said with a somehow-despairing laugh. “Nothing at all.” And she held up her hands. Tomas recoiled. Because in the light from the fire, the tips of her fingers were solidly black. As black as night and shadow.

         “Elseir—” he said, breathing in hard. “What’s wrong with you?”

         She gave that awful laugh again, and Tomas shivered. It was as if he were hearing his own death. “It’s just the curse, that’s all.” She shrugged, an attempt at nonchalance hiding enough despair to wring his soul. “I saw it in my mother, my sister—I suppose now, it’s my turn.”

         So it’s true then. Tomas had known it already, but he hadn’t thought it would be like this. “Oh, Elseir,” was all he could think to say.

         “I think the darkness strengthens the curse somehow. It’s started to work its way out to the skin. I knew this was coming, I just—” Her face twisted into a grimace. “I thought I had more time.”

         Sitting across from him in the firelight, she looked as small and helpless as an animal in a trap. Tomas suddenly longed for them both to leave this place behind and go somewhere safe, far away from the awful night. “Can you go on?”

         “I have to.” Her jaw set, resolute. “It’s my only chance. If I have the strength enough. But you—” She met his eyes steadily. “It’s only going to get worse.”

         Tomas was already shaking his head. “I told you before,” he said, and endeavored to sound strong, for her sake. “My grandfather went with your grandmother to the end. I can do no less.”

         He dared not tell her about the sick fear in his gut.

         She hesitated. “Do you promise?”

         “I promise,” he said at once.

         She smiled again, and the gloom of the forest fell over her eyes.

         They shared a cheerless supper. The leaping, dancing firelight cast wild shadows that made his spine tingle. Elseir retreated into a strange, reserved silence that made him reluctant to speak to her; but as his unease deepened, he couldn’t keep it back.

         “Are you sure we should have the fire?”

         “What do you mean?”

         “It seems like— Something’s watching us. Like the fire is—is drawing things to us, somehow.”

         “Something is watching us. The darkness that lurks in the Forever Night is drawn to our life force. In fact,” she said, gesturing toward the fire, “this is keeping them away. Without it, the lurkers would be much more willing to come closer... perhaps to try and take us. And that can’t happen. Not yet...” After a moment she seemed to come back to herself. “They won’t hurt you. Not as long as the fire is here. And—” She smiled. “Not as long as I am here.”

         Tomas managed an uneven smile in return. He wrapped his arms around himself, trying to take some comfort. The thought came that if Elseir’s grandmother had been defeated years ago, then the whole world would now be like this. He thought of his familiar village—the warm friendly houses, the peaceful tranquil fields—all blanketed under this darkness, and it made him shiver.

         And what will happen this time—if Elseir fails? What will happen—he scarcely dared to think it—if I fail?

         Suddenly the frailty of Elseir’s body seemed all the more apparent, the bones of her face standing out more sharply, the grayish hue of her skin more pronounced. He could almost see the curse eating her alive, from within, and the peril of it—to Elseir, and to the world if she succumbed—chilled him. No, he told himself. We will succeed. I won’t let her down.

         “What can we expect? Of what lies ahead?”

         She sat up as if startled. “Why?”

         “Just trying to be prepared.”

         She looked away. “We’ll walk to the end—should get there in about a day or so. And I... I’ll do what I must.”

         Tomas considered that. At the back of his mind hovered the unspoken question: will I prove worthy?

         “Elseir.” He was almost afraid to speak, scarce daring to name his fear. “What do you need from me... at the end?”

         She looked at him kindly, yet the shadowy sadness in her eyes made him catch his breath. “Your grandfather was a great help to my grandmother, Tomas. At least, so I heard. I trust you’ll help me as well.”

         The nameless dread in Tomas’s heart deepened into cold terror. “Elseir, if—”

         “Enough, Tomas. Go to sleep. I’ll take watch.” She saw his hesitation but seemed to mistake it for concern. “Don’t worry for me. The dark—” Disgust crossed her face. “It strengthens me. By the Goddess, I wish it didn’t.”

         The pain in her voice tightened his chest, and in that moment, his misgivings, his doubts, his dreads seemed petty and shameful. She is taking all this on herself for the sake of the world.

         He could have demanded answers, explanations, but in that moment, he was abashed; something about her was unreachable. And would I really want to know the answer anyway? Instead he said only, “If you’re sure you won’t need me,” wishing that he could do something for her.

         “I’ll wake you if I do. And Tomas—” she began.

         “What?”

         She hesitated, almost as if she were afraid now.

         “Tomas, I’m—” Her face reddened, into an illusory flush of health. “I’m grateful to you for joining me.”

         Her gratitude warmed him, but not enough to melt the chill in his bones. He wrapped himself in his cloak and laid down. The darkness was filled with noises—scurryings, scuttlings—but he knew Elseir sat up, keeping watch.

* * *

         His dreams were strange and deeply unsettling; he was searching for Elseir, sure she was in grave peril, but somehow every time he thought he drew near her, she pulled away. His grandfather was standing over him, a terrible grief in his face, telling him, “You must help her. Whatever the cost to yourself, whatever it takes...”

         He woke with a start, opening his eyes to pitch blackness.

         Then out of the corner of his eye he caught a faint glow of embers. Elseir was sitting near the fire, sharpening her sword.

         “Tomas,” she said, unsmiling. The bones of her cheeks seemed more pronounced, as if the decay eating her away had advanced. There were gray shadows along the planes of her face. It made him frantic to see her like that.

         “How long have I been asleep?” he asked, sitting up and rubbing at his eyes childishly.

         “A while. Perhaps the length of a night.”

         His insides knotted. He’d let her down. If you can’t even take a watch for her, how can you possibly be of help to her at the end? “I said you could wake me—”

         “There was no need. I am not tired. I’m...” She paused for a moment as if considering. “Ready to go. Are you?”

         “I—” He gathered his legs under him. “Can we have something to eat first?”

         “If you like. Here.” She passed him a tightly wrapped bundle, bound in leather and waxed paper. “It’s safe to eat; it’s been sealed since we entered the dark.”

         He unwound the bundle and ate in silence; the air felt oppressive and thick. Elseir touched nothing but simply gazed out into the darkness, resting her hand on her sword hilt. When he had finished, Elseir nodded to him.

         “I’m going to douse the fire,” she told him. “Be ready.”

         Ready for what? Tomas might have asked, but before he could speak, Elseir kicked earth over the fire, extinguishing the glowing coals.

         All at once, the darkness flooded in, gleefully surrounding them. It was stifling, choking the air from his body; he cried out in surprise and shock.

         A hand closed over his own, and he recoiled; the touch was actively unpleasant, cold, damp, somehow loamy. Then as his eyes adjusted to the faint bluish light coming from the vine-wrapped trees, he saw it was only Elseir’s hand, gray and pale and inky dark at the fingertips. The light gave an eerie cast to her features, and for a moment he could not recognize her.

         “Are you all right?”

         “Yes,” he replied stoutly. “It just—took me by surprise, is all.”

         “We’d better get moving.” She turned down the broken, rutted cobblestone road. “Not far now.”

* * *

         As they slogged on throughout the day—if day it was—Tomas felt as if he were moving through a nightmare made real. The Forever Night, lit only by the glowing blue vines strangling the black pillars of trees, seemed to dazzle his eyes so that he could not be sure of what he was seeing.

         Elseir drifted on before him like a ghost, her form seeming to bend and distort strangely in the gloom. The unearthly light turned her hair and eyes black and her skin to blue, so that her features looked utterly inhuman. Sometimes she seemed to be nothing more than a disembodied face and hands floating along in front of him.

         His mind circled obsessively as they moved onward. What will happen when we reach the end? What will she ask of me? And will I be able to do it?

         The cold knot of fear tightened in his gut. What had happened that final day between his great grandfather and Elseir? That vast silence had hung over his family like a shadow, and he had learned early on not to ask about it.

         Whatever it was, it must have been bad.

         A terrible dread was taking shape as he began to think about exactly what he would have to do to live up to his grandfather’s legacy. He’d never thought of himself as cowardly before, but...

         Do I have the courage for this?

         When the first gleaming white object came into view, it jolted him like a slap. “Elseir!” he shouted in warning.

         Elseir turned. Her eyes were stretched and black, her skin had the rotting hue of a corpse. “It’s all right, Tomas,” she said. “It’s just a bone, caught in a bush. See?”

         She pulled a torch from her pack and struck it alight. In the firelight, things made sense again; the pearlescent white glow was a human jawbone, caught in the brittle, dry branches of a dead bush. He shivered and glanced at Elseir; in the light, her face did not look so terrifyingly alien. “Where did it come from?”

         “A soldier. Look,” she said, pointing to a rag of chain mail. “One of those who accompanied my grandmother, decades ago. We’re close.”

         Elseir forged on ahead, but Tomas lingered a moment, looking at the jawbone. That poor soldier. I wonder who it was...

         It might even, he realized, have been someone from his own village. Maybe one of his ancestors. There was something he didn’t like about the way the bush’s twisted tangled branches grew around it. There was a sentience—a malice to it—that made him shiver.

         But then he noticed that the light ahead was retreating. He hurried after Elseir.

         As he followed her through the blackness—she extinguished the torch, and once again, they were left in the underworld of blue strangling vines—slowly more and more white objects began to appear. Most were human, but there were some horse and dog skeletons... as well as other, strange-looking remains that he couldn’t identify. Many lay as they had fallen: clad in the rusted, corroded remains of armor or clutching fragments of broken swords.

         It was hopeless, he remembered hearing Old Wat say. Those things had us a hundred to one. We weren’t expecting to survive, you see. We were just trying to protect Lady Elseir, knowing our own lives weren’t worth anything as long as she could do what she came for— It was your grandfather who— But his grandfather had glowered, and Old Wat had looked away, abashed.

         “We’re close.” Elseir interrupted him. “See this wall.”

         The wall she touched was only a wall in the kindest sense: a crumbling waist-high pile of stones, with a gap where a gate had once been.

         Passed the wall, we did, his grandfather had said. A wall around the clearing, higher than a man’s head, marking off the center of the Forever Night. Protecting the source, you understand. The stronghold whence it came. ‘Twas there your great-aunt fell. She was wearing a small gold bracelet, set with amber—a troth-gift— She told me go on— “The Lady needs you,” she said...

         And Tomas looked down and saw a small gold bracelet, set with amber, on the wrist of a disarticulated skeletal arm; the arm was so twined with vines that it looked vile and alive. He reached out to take it—then with a glance at Elseir drew his hand back.

         Elseir needed his help to climb the slight ascent to the gap in the wall where the gate had been. With her leaning on him heavily, they stepped into the crumbling ruin, and the shadow around them seemed to deepen. Elseir’s eyes were dark holes in her dead white face. Tomas had thought her beautiful from the first moment he’d seen her, though he never would have told her, and she was beautiful still—but it was a strange, frightening beauty. The bones of her skull seemed about to protrude through her skin; black, spidery lines traced the veins in her cheeks and neck, her hands, and arms. Her legs were weak, and she leaned almost all of her weight against him, yet still she pressed onward, with an indomitable will. She seemed to weigh as little as a tiny bird; the fire of life in her flickering, and the night around them dark and terrifying. A sickening dread coiled in Tomas’s gut: the thought of the end of their journey, and the unknown task Elseir would ask of him.

         I can’t do this.

         But he had to. Elseir needs me. The world needs me. So he told himself, and hoped he would find the courage.

         Remember your duty, boy.

         Duty. Duty. Tomas hated the word in that moment, for what it meant, and for what it portended. He wanted to take Elseir by the hand, run together from that awful forest, to a place far away where the sunlight shone and the dark could never touch them. We should never have come here—

         You do what she needs of you, son.

         But can I?

         “Almost there.” Her breath gurgled in her throat; her voice was edged with rot. “The top of this hill was the site of the last battle.”

         The ground sloped upward, his grandfather had said, to the crest of the hill, where a bore had been drilled; they say it went down to the center of the earth...

         Indeed, the ground was slanting upward; the trees seemed to bristle from the slope like strands of hair on some giant lumpy head. More bones shone through the dark, obscenely white, wreathed with vines and leaves. There were rusted fragments of weapons and armor; splintered arrows protruding out of trees that had grown around them.

         They picked their way up the hill slowly; Elseir had to stop and rest every half-dozen paces, her breath rattling in her chest, and every rasp tearing at Tomas’s heart. As they manuevered around tangled skeletons and shards of armor, Tomas could only imagine what it must have been like the day of the battle. When the woods rang with the shouts of warriors, the screams of the dying, the clash of arms... And he realized the end of their journey was rapidly approaching.

         Elseir clung to him as he pushed his way through the dense, tangled undergrowth. Her fine blonde hair was falling away; she left long gleaming strands on every bush. She can’t go on much longer—she can’t...

         The darkness of the night pressed down on him against all sides. With every step he grew more afraid. And very soon now, he knew he would be called on to do—whatever it was Elseir needed him to do. What is it? Terrible thoughts and worries preyed on his mind in his weakened state. Will I die? Will Elseir die? How badly will it hurt? What if I’m not brave enough? And then he thought about what would happen if he did turn and run, how Elseir would die and the world would die, and he would let his family down. He swallowed down his fear.

         I have to be strong, he told himself, and desperately hoped he would be.

         For some time, the ground had no longer been sloping upward, but Tomas had been so lost in his thoughts that until now he had scarcely noticed it. He stumbled and almost fell.

         “Here,” Elseir said, and her voice was so thick and decayed it was almost unrecognizable.

         They stood on a flat pavement of flagstones, perhaps twenty paces across. In the very center of the pavement was a strange chest-high plinth, capped with a stone sphere. It was made of a dark, oily rock; it was blacker than black, blacker than any color he could have imagined. Looking at it hurt his eyes.

         “The birthplace of the Forever Night,” Elseir said. “It is that which my grandmother gave her life to seal.” Threads of night were running down her cheeks, steaming away in the dark beyond dark.

         We’re here. Yet he felt not relief but numb dread: a craven, cowardly fear of the unknown task that lay ahead of him.

         “Now what?” His heart was pounding in his chest, because the time was now, of that he was sure. He did not know if he was more afraid of the task Elseir had for him or of the possibility that he might fail her.

         “I need to find my grandmother’s remains. She had something—something I’ll need to use.”

         He looked around. The dark was pressing close to them horribly, and at the edge of his hearing, he sensed strange sounds, scufflings, shiverings. They sounded... eager.

         The lurkers—the things that lived in the dark. The sounds added to his fear. He knew that when it had been just his grandfather and Elseir the First, they had been attacked by hordes of creatures.

         Those lurkers. Are they the challenge? He felt he could see them just out of the corner of his eye, and the thought terrified him. I’ve never been in combat before, I’ve never lifted a sword in anger—is that what Elseir will need me to do? Keep the lurkers off her while she does whatever it is?

         He glanced at Elseir, but her face was drawn, taut, as if focused wholly on her thoughts. He suspected—and it shamed him but also made him feel a secret, sneaking gladness—that she was keeping quiet about the looming ordeal in order to protect him. Does she think if I know what it is, I’ll run?

         “What are you looking for?” he asked her, keeping half an eye on the dark.

         “Never mind. You wouldn’t know it. I must find this for myself.”

         I have to show her I’m not afraid. “Is there anything... anything I can do to help you?”

         Bluish light reflected like tears in her dark eyes. “You already have.”

         She laid a finger on his lips, as cold and squirmy as an earthworm; she tried to smile, but seemed to realize how horrible it looked. “Stay here. Wait a bit. It’ll be easier for me on my own.”

         She pushed herself upright and staggered away across the pavement. He turned his back on her so that he would not have to watch her struggling like that and began to pace restlessly, trying to calm his nerves. The rustling of the lurkers had died down, but he had a sense that things were out there in the dark, watching. Waiting.

         When those creatures rushed on us, ‘twas those from our village that stood by Lady Elseir till the end. We gave our blood for her. I did what was needed, and I’d do it again.

         Always before Tomas had thrilled to his grandfather’s tales of self-sacrifice, but now he wished he never had. Maybe if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have felt so ashamed of his own fear. Was it like this for you, Grandfather? he wondered. Did you feel as I do? He couldn’t imagine such a thing. Surely his grandfather—the others of his village—had never felt this afraid, this uncertain. Am I a coward? Is that it?

         He had to go through with this. For Elseir—my village—the world—

         “I’ve found her,” Elseir said, and Tomas started. A sharp thrill spread through him, and he hurried to her side, wanting to get a look at this great heroine who had shaped the world.

         “That’s her?” he asked, coming up alongside Elseir. She nodded, and he studied the skeleton before him. Clad in the remains of tarnished silver armor, it was fully articulated, lying on its back as if it had been struck down in a moment. Struck down... A helm rolled, empty, some distance away. Strands of hair that had once, perhaps, been blonde still clung to the skull; now they were weathered to a dull gray. And there it was, on the cuirass: the same symbol that had caused such commotion back in his village. The trefoil of serpent heads.

         And right through the trefoil, the fatal wound. A sword stroke.

         Lady Elseir the First. Tomas could see her as she had been during the battle: a figure of brilliance, her armor shining like the sun, casting the light of day through the gloom as she slashed furiously with her silver sword at hordes of enemies. He could see her in her glory—and then, in a moment that sent shivers down his spine, could see his grandfather at her side. The sword-stroke in Elseir the First’s chest; his grandfather with sword upraised.

         Turning that weapon on her.

         Things began to make sense suddenly. His grandfather’s words; Elseir’s reticence; how she had spoken about being grateful he had come with her...

         She was standing before him, face hollow, complexion corpselike, simply watching.

         The time is now, he realized. The moment that had been waiting for him ever since he had entered the darkness—since before, since he had left the village; possibly since his grandfather had stood at this spot next to Elseir the First.

         His breath rattled in his throat. Grandfather, give me strength.

         “Are you all right?”

         “Yes,” she said. “I’m fine.” She bent to where a skeletal hand clasped the corroded silver sword. As her fingers closed over it, the bony grip gave way, falling to dust. A terrible smile crossed her face, distorting her features beyond recognition. “I’m just fine.”

         She raised the gleaming silver sword so that it bisected those haggard, frightening features. “It’s time.”

         Something about the way she said that chilled Tomas’s blood. As he looked at that strange face, he realized it didn’t look like Elseir at all; somewhere along their journey, his Elseir—the Elseir he knew, the Elseir he had agreed to follow back at the village, what seemed like a lifetime ago—had slipped away, replaced with this thing in front of him.

         He closed his eyes, trying to gain a grip on himself. Be strong. Be strong, be strong, be strong... When he opened them, she was just Elseir again. She’s right. It is time. And he prayed his resolve wouldn’t fail.

         “I’ll do whatever you need.”

         Elseir was studying the gleaming blade, turning it this way and that. Now she looked at him dead on, her eyes seeming fully black under the strange blue light. Her face lit in that horrible, beautiful smile. “Thank you, Tomas,” she said.

         And the air cracked as great tendrils of darkness lashed out from the stone plinth in the middle of the courtyard. Tomas had just time to scream as they closed around his wrists.

         The tendrils turned his skin turned black with corruption and rot. They were cold and yet somehow they burned, sinking into him like icy fire. Bright, metallic pain seared his bones. The tendrils tightened, dragging him over the broken courtyard to smash against the pillar, knocking the breath from his body. The pillar felt decayed, stone yet sickeningly soft and yielding; a chill seeped into his body, turning the blood in his veins to rotted ice. I must be brave— I must be brave— I must be brave— the words raced meaninglessly through his mind, yet it was so much worse than he had imagined—

         His eyes found Elseir, seeking reassurance amid this insanity. Yet there was none there to be found. She was simply standing and watching him, expressionless. Shadows were crawling all over her. Her eyes were a solid blackness, like the sockets of a skull; her face the bluish white of corpse skin; her hair a rotting, colorless gray. Her lips were black; yet her teeth glimmered between them, bone-white. Wisps darker than smoke were rising off her; she looked as if she were steaming darkness into the night.

         Is this a test? Am I supposed to do something? As terrifying as the pain biting into his bones was the fear that he wouldn’t know what to do—that somehow he would let her down due to his ignorance. “What’s happening?” he cried, seeking some reassurance that whatever was going on, it was somehow according to plan. “Elseir, tell me what to do! How do I fight this?”

         “Fight it? You can’t. Relax, Tomas. There is no need for courage here,” Elseir said, her voice a terrible, soft soothing. “You are helping me just as you are. Just as the men and women of your village helped my grandmother years ago. They helped her to save the world; now, you’re helping me to save myself.”

         Tomas felt a shudder run through the horrible stone plinth at his back. The black tendrils were pressing him into the pillar, trying to fuse his flesh with the stone.

         “Elseir, whatever you need help with, I can do it!” he cried. “I know I can. I’m ready to help you! Together we can fight this— I can be brave enough to do whatever—”

         And then he stared, for there was something in Elseir’s face that he did not understand: a strange sadness in her eyes.

         “I don’t doubt it, Tomas. It’s because I know you’d fight that I have to restrain you.”

         Her words didn’t make sense. “I don’t understand— Just tell me, so that we can fight this, defeat the darkness—”

         That distant sadness in Elseir’s face deepened. “I never said I was coming to defeat the darkness. I said I was coming to lift the curse on my family. My grandmother gave her life to end the Forever Night, at the cost of cursing her bloodline through eternity. The only way to lift the curse... is to undo what she did. To restore the darkness.”

         No—it can’t be true— But as he looked at her dark eyes, he could see it was. Terrible pain ripped into him, shredding his bones—and yet it was no worse than the pain in his heart.

         “Elseir—” He fought, through his fear, his disbelief. “You don’t have to do this. I’ll help you, we can find something else— We don’t have to bring back the darkness—”

         But Elseir was already shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Tomas, I don’t dare risk it. If you saw your mother and sister turn black with rot, their flesh falling from their bones, and knew that fate would be yours in time—you would understand. I would rather loose the darkness again than live with this decay one moment longer. It’s neither fair nor right that all my grandmother’s descendants have to suffer for a choice she made. I was never asked to make that choice, and I refuse to carry the burden. The world will have to look after itself, and I—I will look after myself.”

         Then, Elseir stepped back, raising the gleaming silver sword, and his thoughts froze. The sword’s sharp edge shone, and he could imagine only too well how it would feel cleaving into him.

         “Your grandfather slew my grandmother, Tomas, that the world might live. Now, I must slay you, so that I might live.”

         Her eyes were as black as the world. They fixed on him with hypnotic effect, draining everything from him—terror, desperation, anger. In the empty silence left within him, Tomas could hear his grandfather’s voice: whatever it takes. And his heart was suddenly filled with a terrible, awful pity.

         It welled up inside him and completely overcame him; a profound grief such as he had never known, as he imagined what it must have been like to carry this darkness with her forever, to see her mother fall to it and to know that she would fall to it as well— What must that have done to her? That terrible compassion almost struck him to his knees.

         The fate of his village, the world flickered through his mind, and he knew somehow he should try to find a way to stop her. But the impulse was distant, fading. Others would come to save the world; there was no room in his heart for anything other than Elseir.

         All along he’d been afraid he wouldn’t be brave enough to bear his part at the end, to undergo whatever ordeal awaited him. Well, this was the end, and perhaps this was the ordeal after all. Was he able to bear this dreadful compassion?

         Yes, he realized. I can.

         As she drew her sword back, preparing for the blow, Tomas managed, “I forgive you.”

         That gleaming blade paused a bit. She smiled, her old heart-rending smile, perhaps the last of the old Elseir. “Thank you, Tomas.”

         As her sword swept forward, Tomas did not flinch; that pity gave him strength. Darkness had overcome her, turning her skin completely black and her hair a horrid gray. It spilled from her eyes to encompass the world.

         Like tears—

Copyright © 2017 Dana Beehr

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Dana Beehr has a degree in anthropology and has been writing since she was in high school. She has published several short stories, including previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and is working on a novel. She currently lives with her husband in southern Michigan and works in real estate.

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COVER ART

“Fortress,” by Dimitrije Miljus

Dimitrije Miljus is a concept artist and illustrator from Belgrade, Serbia. He has been working as a freelance artist for the past six years on various projects in games, film, and illustration, focusing on environment design, world building, and visual development. His background is in Fine Art (a bunch of canvases and just slapping acrylics and oils all over the place). His passion is creating worlds that people want to be a part of and want to explore every nook and cranny of. View more of his art at www.artstation.com/dimitrijemiljus.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

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