white-haired regent sighed.
“Could you make it quick?” he asked. “I wouldn't want her to suffer.”
Wu Bei whimpered.
“Why come all the way to Mo Xan Dai?” Silvermoon whispered. “You didn't leave your city when the first explorers broke in. Were your daughter's hands that precious? Her eye? Her diadem?”
“Yes,” Tsung Po said. “But... the second wave, they spoke of you. The men and the women.”
He smiled.
“Some of them were obviously infatuated with your rank more than anything else,” he said, “but many were plainly enchanted with you. They sang songs, wrote poetry about you, to keep up a brave face against the darkness and the rising water, and that forbidden magic.”
He looked at Silvermoon and his voice, already quiet, grew even softer.
“They were right,” Tsung Po said. “You are very beautiful.”
Then Silvermoon heard the Brand speak, and its voice was withered, dry and merciless.
Kill him, said the sword, in an arid whisper that resonated inside Silvermoon's head. Finish this. Kill them both.
Silvermoon shook her head furiously, and fought to keep the sword level.
She thought of Tsung Po wandering the flooded city, decade after decade, and her eyes filled with tears. He talked of the lake being choked with the bones of the dead; had he carried the corpses there himself? And to have found his daughter, but crippled, half-mad, wearing a monster's face – yet to love her despite all that. Was this folly, the lunatic optimism of a desperate man who should have lain down and died a hundred years ago, or was it more like lighting a tiny, wavering candle flame in a vast and trackless cave?
It's folly, the sword insisted. You'd throw away your future, shame your father, for this monster? You think you can undo what he did to himself and his mewling demon-spawn? You'd be condemned, ostracised, ruined! Will you still go ahead with this idiot fantasy, even so?
“I will,” Silvermoon whispered to herself, and with an oath she hurled the Brand across the tower, and at that moment the world went pitch-black.
Darkness, total darkness, and not merely the absence of light. Though the princess could no longer hear the sword's paper-thin voice she knew this was the Brand's punishment. Blind, Silvermoon thought, I'm blind, and for a long moment she knew the purest, most naked terror imaginable.
Tsung Po had lied. She'd misinterpreted everything he'd said. Now Wu Bei would hunt her through the flooded city, snarling, after which the ghastly demon-child would feed on Silvermoon's living flesh, and throw whatever was left to the ghostly white fish forever circling, sightless, through the cold black water. Tsung Po would retrieve her bones, cast them into the lake beyond the tower to settle on the bottom with all the others, and that would be the end of it –
There was a scuffling noise, and a scrambling. Silvermoon stood very still, and fought to control her hammering pulse.
A small hand stole into Silvermoon's grasp, and she gasped aloud. Someone hugged her around the waist. She could hear Wu Bei's breathing, slow and ragged.
“You really are still a child,” Tsung Po whispered softly, and Silvermoon felt his hand beneath her chin as he raised her head.
The white-haired regent put his lips to hers, and his breath was sweet in the darkness and his mouth warm.
Not human, Silvermoon told herself. He's barely even human! She thought again of fallen Lao Feng, of stagnant pools, of grinning skulls amidst the ruins, of monstrous snarls and leathery wings fluttering in the shadows.
But then she remembered a father's tenderness towards his crippled child, his outrage at the thought his home had been invaded, and his agonised contrition at the depth of his terrible error of judgement.
More human, then, than any of her suitors. Silvermoon put her arms around Tsung Po, and slowly kissed him in return, and for a long moment she, the regent and his daughter all stood there in the throne room, saying nothing at all.
“I will come back,” Silvermoon said. She reached out and felt for the walls of the fissure that led back to the lift shaft and the surface at the foot of the Dragon's Nape.
“I know you will,” said Tsung Po. “I trust you. Wu Bei trusts you. It would be difficult not to.”
Silvermoon knew she couldn't stay and simply vanish. Poor Bear Claw presumably still waited in the old shanty town overhead. Were he to return with the news the princess of Kong Du had perished in the depths of Lao Feng, then the next thing the lord regent sent would be an army. It seemed this was to be what she learnt from her midnight ride from Mo Xan Dai to the eastern mountains: how to convince her father that yes, the regent of the fallen city still lived, a century later. That he wasn't the monster they'd assumed, and that Silvermoon wanted to help him.
How, exactly, she was less certain, but she couldn't face the thought of abandoning these two.
“You have the Brand?” Tsung Po asked.
“Right here,” Silvermoon said, and placed one hand on the sword's pommel.
It was Wu Bei who had claimed the weapon from the floor of the tower, and returned it to the princess when Silvermoon realised that strange, itching tug the Brand exerted still remained.
The punishment the blade meted out left the bearer crippled, Bear Claw had said, but still useful. Was this what he'd meant? She could see nothing – Tsung Po had bound a strip of silk torn from his robe around her useless eyes – yet with the Brand hanging from her waist, Silvermoon had acquired some dim awareness of her surroundings.
Over here was a wall, over there another wall; up ahead, the lift, and two days' journey west lay her father, along with a future the princess could scarcely begin to imagine. But what she saw terrified and yet thrilled her at the same time.
I don't think I've got that answer I wanted yet, Silvermoon thought. But blind or not, I feel as if I can see more clearly than I ever did before.
“If anything can be done for Lao Feng,” she said, “we'll do it.”
And she reached successfully for the white-haired regent, put her arms around his neck and drew him to her for one last embrace before they parted.
“Come back, then,” said Tsung Po. “For my Lao Feng. For Wu Bei.”
Silvermoon climbed awkwardly into the mouth of the fissure.
“And for me!” Tsung Po called out.
“For you!” the princess yelled. “For you!” And as she made her way along the stygian passage, past the glowing emerald lights she could no longer see, Silvermoon smiled.
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Cover art, legal stuff:
To the best of my knowledge, all elements of the cover art for this publication were freely available without any legal restrictions preventing me from using them in transformative works or distributing said work under the licensing conditions I’ve chosen. If you believe I’ve used anything of yours in error, please let me know and I’ll address your enquiry as quickly as possible.
Full moon taken from:
https://pixabay.com/en/mountains-night-full-moon-landscape-949425/
Tree branches taken from:
https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=2385
Rook taken from:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rook-Corvus_frugilegus.jpg
(Andreas Trepte, www.photo-natur.de)
Fonts taken from:
https://www.1001fonts.com/scriptina-font.html
https://www.1001fonts.com/alegreya-sc-font.html
https://www.1001fonts.com/honey-script-font.html
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