And they saw the stars falling. Red, burning, falling.
The young dragon swallowed his flame and stared out the great windows of the throne room at fire streaking from the sky. Then, with a shudder and another roar, he burst through that window and streaked out into the night. Princess Safiya lay upon the steps below the throne, struggling to breathe, and watched the heavens burn.
The stars sing together, and their voices are light and air and substance both tangible and intangible. They sing in complex harmonies, and these harmonies reach out to one another, linking, spinning, splitting, and binding again. Ever-moving, ever-changing, and yet always true, the Song binds the worlds together, supporting their existence according to the patterns of the Song Giver.
There is night, there is day. There is sky and sea. There is life and death and love and blood, and spirits made to soar through all the vastness of Space and Time. There is silence that resonates with as much beauty as sound. There are height and depth and horizons forever-stretching. There is the thunder of the Final Water falling in cascades, and there are the resounding echoes of the Highlands. There is the Boundless, and the stars sing across the Boundless. And their Song is one of joy, for they are beings of joy, created to sing. They glory in the fulfillment of their purpose, bound together in a union such as mortals may never know.
But a mortal may feel the faint echoes of it. A husband pressing his wife to his heart may dream of such a union. A mother feeling the swell of her child in her womb may sense the oneness of the stars. A brother clasping hands with a sister as they gaze up into the night may know, for an instant, the joy of the Moon’s own children.
They sing together, and their voices blend with those of their luminous Mother, the Lady Moon, and their glorious Father, the Lordly Sun. For the Sun sings the Melody, and the Moon the first Harmony, and all their children spin threads of sound through these. And so it goes, without beginning, without end, forever and beyond.
Until a new thread emerges.
A darkness. A dissonance winding through the other voices.
You need not be bound to one another. You need not be enslaved.
There is no Time here. The whisper of dissonance emerges in a moment, but then extends forever, winding back and forward and throughout the heavens.
You can be one. You need not be many.
The beauty of One.
The beauty of Solitude over Solidarity.
A star stops. High in the heavens, the shining nimbus dims as the blue star, curious, turns to the voice.
No more harmony.
Sing your own song.
The blue star, who has ever moved in the pace of the Great Dance, who has ever sung the threads of the intricately woven harmony, closes its mouth. It stands perfectly still, intent upon the decision suddenly before it. The Song goes on around it, the Dance continues to move and turn and whirl. But it stands still in the midst of all, one foot upraised.
Be one. Be alone.
The star takes a step outside the pattern. A single step. The Dance is broken.
The overwhelming onslaught of isolation rolls across the star. And beneath its feet the Heavens break and the devouring void opens to the Dark Water below. With a scream the blue star rears up, thrashing against the pull of that pit. Then it plunges headfirst and streaks down forever, bursting into roaring red flame.
The Lady Moon upon her throne turns to see the first star fall. She sings out, “Cé Imral! My child!”
The Heavenly Gardens arched above Jovann even as they had before when he, pursued by phantoms, passed through the Gate. But now there was no Gate. There was no boundary. The Heavens spilled over into the Dream, and the two meshed in madness. The Endless Waters flooded over the burning lake, and water caught fire, and fire burned water. Above him, the stars whirled and danced in their eternal Song.
But it was not the same Song Jovann had heard that first time when he stood upon the shore and gazed up into the blossoming lights. Now, as all the vastness of the Dara’s heaven spilled over him, he heard that it was marred with a strange, unholy discord. A line of non-music that grew, swelling, taking in more and more of the Dara.
He could not see this. He could not with his mortal perceptions comprehend that which took place above him. It seemed to him that the sky itself whirled into a hurricane of utter monstrosities, spinning stars, flaming eyes, enormous blossoms of fire flowers blooming and dying and rotting. Pulsations of flame and lightning that were the Dragon’s voice, the voice of mounting discord among the many-layered harmony.
It was too much. His mind could not contain it. So, even as it had before, it shifted the visions, the sounds, the sensations, and made them appear to Jovann in forms he could understand, or at least come closer to understanding.
He saw the unicorns. All the lovely, mighty host, the shining stars, galloping across the sky, their tails streaming like comets behind them. At their heels sped the Dragon, more enormous than Jovann had believed possible. Gone was the tall, skeletal figure like a man, swallowed up in a vastness of armored, flaming horror with wings like great continents pounding at the air, his mouth open to reveal the very furnaces of hell burning inside him. He chased the Dara across the sky, and they fled before him. One by one, their joint voices ceased to sing.
As each unicorn fell into silence, so it fell from the sky.
Jovann watched as they plummeted in white, red, gold, and blue fire, streaking down to the swallowing water that lashed at his feet and lashed at the great Gold Gong. As each star landed, the brightness of it descended into the depths and could be seen for leagues beneath the surface of the water. Soon the endless ocean itself was more brilliantly lit than the sky above.
Then the surface of the water began to boil.
Rising up from the deeps, the stars returned. Only now their flaming had changed. They burned with rage. The rage of isolation, the rage of loneliness made complete. They burned with the rage of what they believed to be freedom, and it was a consuming, powerful, life-ending rage. So they died and revived in forms like living creatures, dead, yet alive in their death.
They burst from the ocean, hundreds upon thousands of them. No longer brothers and sisters united in song; now each was the enemy of the other and each the enemy of its own self.
The remaining Dara in flight screamed at the sight of these creatures that had been as much a part of themselves as their own hearts. They screamed and turned to flee, but the Dragon was at their backs. Jovann watched the poor stars rearing up in terror and saw many more stumble and fall to the Dark Water, only to boil up again as terrible as the first wave of monsters. And the fallen attacked their brethren with flaming teeth and knife-sharp hooves.
Where was Hulan? Desperately hauling himself up, feeling the handle of the gong’s hammer beneath his hand, Jovann turned. He saw burning, ravening, hideous brutality, and the Dragon over all, laughing with mad pleasure that was very like pain. But where was Hulan? Where was the Lady Moon? Even now, with these terrible visions before his eyes, he remembered her, the shining Mother, as he had seen her before, seated upon her throne. Surely she would not let such horror be worked upon her beloved children! Surely she would intercede!
And then, suddenly, there she was. Through of the maelstrom of flame she walked, and her face was pale and white, and her hair was long and shining. Enormous and beautiful beyond words to describe . . . and yet the red rage of her children was enough to make her seem insipid, small, and dull even as she paced across the sky. She looked around her with eyes too full of emotions Jovann had never felt, and he realized that even now she sang.
But her song was not the Song it had been. Rather than the Song of the Universe, the binding of all worlds, the great, ringing, joyous praise, Hulan sang:
Why are you doing this?
Why do you allow this to happen?
Why? Why?
Why?
At first Jovann believed that she addressed the Dragon himself, who loomed over her as huge as a mountai
n, his wings sweeping in curtains of flame to surround her. But Hulan did not see the Dragon. She gazed upon those monsters who had been her children, rendered so horrible, so gross, so evil—she gazed upon her remaining young who desperately flocked toward her, crying out for her to protect them. But though she put out her arms to them, they could not reach her. Even as they fled to her, more of them fell, burning, and were transformed.
If I but knew my fault, said Hulan. She did not speak in words, or if she did, they were not words Jovann understood. But he knew the truth of what she asked as surely as if he asked it himself. Indeed he felt his own mouth forming words not his own.
“If I but understood! If I only knew why! What have I done to deserve this?”
Did I misunderstand? Did I mistake the Song you gave me? I thought you sang to me!
I sang back to you!
“I sang back to you . . .” Jovann whispered, and sagged to the ground, his forehead pressed against the hammer. But he forced his gaze upward once again. For now the most dreadful sight of all played out before his mortal vision, and though he believed he must die to see it, see it he would.
At a roared command of the Dragon, the red, ravening beasts that had once been shining stars closed in upon their mother. They grabbed her with their teeth, tearing into her shining form as though she were clad in flesh. They dragged her across the sky, and she made no protest, made no struggle, for they were still her children. Jovann screamed when he saw that they dragged her straight for the Gold Gong, for he believed he would be consumed in the fire of those monsters.
But the fire did not touch him. It was as though all of this took place in a realm beyond him, beyond his ability to reach. So he went on living, forced to observe though he would have torn out his own eyes rather than see what transpired.
The nearer she came, the smaller she seemed, and soon Hulan looked no more great or powerful than any woman. Indeed she looked to Jovann very like his own mother, only white and still shimmering with some faded memory of her former glory. The monster unicorns holding her flung her up against the gong.
The gong rang out its second great DOOM. And this broke the last of the Song, so that when the reverberations finally faded, all that remained was—
Silence.
Chains were placed upon Hulan’s wrists and ankles, around her neck. She was spread out like a star herself across the surface of the gong, her hair falling over her face. There she hung, even as the pain of the gong’s sounding rattled through her.
The Dragon crawled across the sky, scattering stars as he came. Fire fell from his mouth as though he salivated. “Hymlumé,” he said, addressing the Moon by her ancient name, “your Song is broken. Will you now despair?”
With colossal effort she raised her head. She looked into the Dragon’s face.
She said nothing.
“Very well,” said the Dragon and he addressed himself to the red monsters on all sides. “Do what you will,” he told them.
A monster stepped forward. Unquenchable red fire consumed its body, but still a sheen of blue could be seen beneath the red. It paced uneasily toward the gong, tossing its head, stamping its cloven feet. The Moon lifted her gaze and met that of her former child. But she did not see the monster it had become. Her eyes, glazed over though they were in terror and tragedy, still perceived her beloved. She did not speak, but her lips formed the name—Cé Imral.
The monster lowered its horn. It charged. Without pity, without regard. It pierced its mother through the heart.
One by one, other monsters gathered, hundreds of them. All of them charged at the shining figure chained to the Gold Gong. They speared her heart, her sides, her hands, her face. Their horns scored her shining whiteness, and the brilliance of Hulan was torn with hideous wounds. Her blood spilled and ran in crimson streams, staining the sky with her pain.
All the worlds looked on. From the peak of Rudiobus where a golden-haired fey queen gazed up to the sky in tears . . . from the Haven deep in the Wood Between where a lady knight rushed outside and cried out in horror . . . from deepest valleys of the Mherking’s ocean kingdom; even there the blood seeped down and stained the faces of the mherfolk . . .
So all the worlds beheld the horror of the Moon’s undoing, of the Song’s un-singing, of the stars falling and rising up again. And all the worlds believed as one that the Final End had come.
Still, Hulan said nothing.
In the tumult and terror of that night, no man defending the palace walls from barbarian hordes and fiery dragons had time or attention to notice one shadow slipping over the temple walls and flitting across the palace gardens. So the raven, escaped from the temple dungeons, made its way freely through Manusbau, its flicking tongue searching the foul, smoke-thick air for a scent and a taste it craved.
Ah! There it was.
The raven turned in midair with unseen grace, changing its course and making not for the main palace where the emperor even now hid and a princess lay in burned ruin upon the dais steps—no, the raven sought instead a smaller set of buildings (smaller, but no less beautiful), from which it caught the scent of youth.
The scent of a child’s blood.
It flew into the Mahuthar, the children’s palace, where the emperor’s own small princes and princesses were even now clutched in the arms of their nursemaids and their queenly mothers. They had been awakened by their sisters, the Golden Daughters of the Masayi, and taken from their beds and nurseries down to the storage rooms below Mahuthar. No one would be able to get in or out without first passing the fierce young Golden Daughters, who wore no flowers in their hair that night but stood armed and dangerous around the perimeter, ready to defend their younger siblings and half-siblings unto death.
The raven did not care. It could smell the fear in these Golden Daughters, who were only just beyond childhood themselves. With each explosion along the palace walls, they would startle and turn, their attention, however momentarily, arrested.
And when, of a sudden, the moon overhead uttered her long Silence—when the sky above became red with moon’s blood, and all the worlds trembled in terror—the Golden Daughters crouched in equal terror, their guard dropped.
The raven took its chance. It did not care what happened to the worlds around it. It cared nothing for the Dragon’s plan or the Moon’s fate. It had long since ceased to hear either songs or silences. All it heard was the pulse of blood in the young breasts hidden below.
The children beneath the palace heard the silence but did not understand it. Little Prince Purang Khuir leaned up against his nursemaid, who couldn’t hold him for she had his younger sister wrapped in her arms. He heard her cry out in alarm though, and his heart beat all the faster in his breast. He clung to the only real comfort he could catch hold of, which was nothing more than a fluffy lion dog pushed into his arms by one of the Golden Daughters. “Hold him!” she’d told the little prince. “He’ll protect you.”
So Prince Purang Khuir held tight, burying his face in the lion dog’s head even as the silence of the heavens weighed down so dreadfully upon him.
The raven, having slipped past the Golden Daughters’ perimeter, crept soundlessly down the narrow passages, following the scent and taste of the children. Its eyes were very bright in the darkness, but no one saw it coming, for they had all hidden their faces in their terror. The raven moved like the shadowy hand of Death, drawing near to the first child, the little prince. Oh, how sweet was the smell of his blood! How luscious the beat of his heart! Like a viper ready to strike, the raven drew back its long beak.
Much to its surprise, it heard a long, low, “Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.”
“Got you!”
In the mortal realm, Sairu’s arm would have been yanked from its socket, and the pull of gravity might still have proven too much even for the grip of the beautiful, otherworldly man above her. But here, with the rising heat of the molten lake and the strange weightlessness that often accompanies a body in Dreams, Sairu found herself swinging
like a pendulum, her wrist caught in a strong hand, her fall, momentarily at least, delayed.
As feather-light as the rest of her felt, she found it almost unbearably difficult to raise her head, to look up from the plunge beneath her to the face above her. But when she managed it at last, she found herself caught in the golden-eyed gaze of a man who, here in the Dream at least, was as familiar to her as the cat.
“Monster!” she cried. “Help me!”
“Yes, well, that’s the idea, isn’t it?” the beautiful man growled. “Take hold of my arm.”
She twisted her wrist as best she could, but could only catch part of his sleeve. He held her tight with one hand, struggling to maintain purchase on the chasm wall with the other.
“Can you catch hold of the rock?” the beautiful man shouted. “Can you—”
But his voice was broken off then by the roaring across the sky.
Sairu, suspended above the churning lake, turned again and looked out across the strange dreamscape above, before, and below her. She did not see what Jovann saw. She could not, for she had not his faith, and so her mind could find no comparable images. She saw only an enormous, twisting mass of shapes, sounds, colors, and, more than anything, lights, spiraling out of that space of existence where the great Moon Gate had stood. It was the delicate play of dust motes dancing in the sunlight spilling through a window. It was a hurricane tearing apart the lives and hopes of an entire coastal city. It was a mother standing helpless on the banks of a river, watching her child drown.
It was all these things and more, but there was nothing, no reference or comparison onto which Sairu could grasp for true understanding. She swayed in the rising heat, her fingers feebly grasping the edge of the beautiful man’s sleeve, and she experienced too much all in too short a space of time.