Chapter 39 The Sun Killed The Moon
The Sun Killed The Moon
ZOLA
E
ira’s death came as no surprise—to everyone but Amun.
Before her death, he scoured the universe for a cure to her rapidly advancing disease: aging. There was no solution. Eira died, and with her mind went his, as he searched again for a different remedy. This time, he decided he would bring back the dead.
Amun began with roses. He picked them from their pristine state and watched them wither into brittle brown decay. At first—still unaware of the true extent of his power—he carried each dying bloom to the Pyre Tree, believing the living fire of the ancient tree would help bring life.
Sitting at its trunk, he forced rose after pitiful rose to bloom again. This is no simple act. This is no gentle mercy. What falls into death, root or mortal soul, is bound to remain there.
Fate may have humor, but I also have retribution.
Amun moved on to bugs, then to animals, forcing life into each wretched creation.
Eira, I fear, was not absolved from the nature of such wretchedness.
It was the power of a stone that beckoned him next. He’d held the Soul Ruby for ages, unaware of its potential. Now, he pressed it to Eira’s temple.
Her fingers twitched, then her hand rose, and finally, she opened her eyes.
“Eira.” Amun could not stop himself from breathing her name. “My beloved.” He caressed her cheek, imagining he was filling her body with the one thing it would never truly hold again.
Life.
“Who—” Eira croaked. “Who are you?” Her voice was as soft as her skin, as gentle as the roses he killed and brought back over the ages.
“It’s me, my love,” Amun said, touching her cheek as if it were a petal.
“No,” she breathed. “No, I beg you, tell me it is not true—say it cannot be so.” Eira rose, moving quickly about the kingdom room, Amun’s fire rising around her like a cloak.
At the edge of the room, Eira stopped and gazed out a large window overlooking Iris, Amun’s home planet. Without turning, she muttered, “Tell me you did not do as I suspect.”
“I brought you back,” Amun said. “Is that not what all dead things desire?”
“You—” Eira gasped, her breath catching as she pressed a trembling hand over her mouth, stifling her sobs. “It is not for you to claim! Death is not yours to decide!”
Amun stepped toward her, holding her elbows and drawing her into a caress, pulling her close as though to shield her from her grief. He assumed he understood her.
He had lost her first.
“My love,” Amun said, “do not despair. We are together once more.”
Eira sobbed into his shoulder, saying nothing more.
One might imagine Amun’s grievances dawning upon him in this moment—a sharp clarity breaking through the tempest of his choices.
Surprisingly, for all his turmoil, Amun had always been a stable creature, grounded even amidst the weight of his sins.
Not stability of the mind—no, his thoughts were ever-shifting and unpredictable.
Certainly not stability of emotion, for his heart surged and faltered like a storm-tossed sea.
But in desire—ah, there he was steadfast. In that singular, unyielding pursuit, Amun dared never to waver.
Such revelations, however, often come too late to those who dare play with fate.
Eira forbade sleep in Amun’s room before she realized she didn’t need it.
That realization came in the third week of her revival.
Afterward, she pretended to rest for Amun’s sake.
Once he surrendered to the night’s darkness, Eira roamed the halls of the fiery kingdom.
It was familiar, appearing as it had in memory, though she felt nothing for her past.
Eira remembered who Eira was, yet she was not Eira any longer.
One night—both like and unlike the rest—she escaped the castle, venturing to the Pyre Tree. Eira remembered it with startling clarity. The tree powered all of Iris, the strongest world in a very powerful universe. At the time, Eira didn’t care for the fire’s power; she cared for its light.
Light that she, too, once held.
Eira held out her palms. She once created a light like no other. That was the power of a Lyrian.
There was a time when Eira’s power had been boundless, a force of nature bending to her will.
With a mere touch, she could blind a creature; with a thought, she could weave illusions so vivid, so consuming, they promised to unravel a mind entirely, should she desire it.
She could transform her very being into pure light—vanishing, becoming a living and breathing ghost.
Now she could do none of these things—nor anything lesser.
Her magic was gone. Eira mourned that light, the warmth and solace it once brought to her hands, down to the bone.
It had been more than power; it was a gift from her mother, the goddess of the moon, Sulva.
A piece of divinity woven into her ribs, now lost, leaving her hollow where radiance had once lived.
Now she was a person disconnected from the gods.
She was, more or less, a monster. As Eira gazed at her lifeless, powerless hands, she thought: no one without a direct connection to a god should breathe, feel, and remember.
She didn’t want to. For what was memory without feeling? What was feeling without soul?
What was knowing Eira, when she could never be Eira?
That night, she climbed into Amun’s bed for the first time. He held her close, mumbling sweet nothings into her ear as he always had. She sighed, she smiled, she did the things she knew Eira had once done.
She felt none of them.
Slowly, she began to plant her seeds in Amun—distrust in the neighboring magic-wielders.
Their ideas, their descendants. For the Nepenthes were not born of a god.
No, they were born of serpents—creatures that would rather endure the agony of metamorphosis than remain the abominations they had been born to be.
Those serpents—monsters bound to a single soul stretched thin across hundreds of bodies—succeeded where very few had: they funneled that fractured soul into a single, solitary form.
Yet that body, no matter how whole it seemed, could never be what Eira was, nor Amun.
They were Lyrian and Phoenician, beings descended directly from the divine.
Creatures of unparalleled singularity, never burdened by a soul shared among many.
No, the Nepenthes would never be like them.
And, as she thought of it, neither would the Draes, creatures of the dragon. Nor would the Eunoia, of the nymph, or the Folk, of the fairies. All of them were beneath the true inheritors of the universe.
All of them were beneath Eira and Amun.
Eira was beneath. This little hint of self-loathing was never spoken. Eira vowed to make it right; she knew this second life must have been gifted to her for a reason. Her existence broke universal laws to save the universe.
It took a long while to get Amun on board. But they had eternity, after all. What was eternity if not the time to do a god’s will?
Each night she fled from Amun to the Pyre Tree, placing her hands in the fire of the leaves and watching as the skin burned off and quickly repatched.
She relished it. It was the metamorphosis she required.
Eira would burn her entire body, rip off every inch of flesh, if she could only reach the soul she no longer held.
Eira so deeply longed for something more.
She so deeply missed what she would never have again.
Over time, Eira grew accustomed to Amun’s touch, familiar with his warmth between her.
He breathed something back into her—but not life.
Perhaps comfort, a soothing balm against the void within her.
Perhaps a blazing fire, burning her from the inside out, only for her organs to replenish just as her skin did.
And on another night, beneath the Pyre Tree, she held her hand in the fire. In those moments, she watched the shadows move with the flame. How beautiful it was that one gave birth to the other. With the flame came the shadow, and she relished it. Eira relished it so deeply she began to move it.
She began to wield it.
Before she could comprehend it, her hands—once vessels of light—now cradled shadow. It surged forward, twisting into the air like a newborn star. The shadow expanded, shrouding the Pyre Tree as the night swallows the sun.
The war within Eira died. Here, she understood what she was. Despite her fragile and disheveled being, she was still above the rest of the magic-wielders. Her shadows covered the Pyre Tree, slowly snuffing it of light until the fire succumbed to her power.
And she knew her purpose.
?
Together, Amun and Eira walked the universe.
She whispered lies into his ears: that the Nepenthes had extinguished the Pyre Tree, that the Draes plotted to topple his rule, that the Eunoia tried to use their gift of emotion to steal her feeling for him, and that the Folk would seize his power of fire.
They ventured between worlds, wreaking havoc.
No one had the gall to stop them. How could they?
Amun was the original descendant of a god.
Yet, no one knew who Eira was. She’d been dead for ages.
She was a story. She watched them revere Amun, begging him for mercy, and barely bat an eye at her.
The first time she was annoyed. The fifth time, she was angry.
The fiftieth time, she raged.
“You dare think me less than him!” Eira roared, twisting her body toward the Drae. His violet eyes widened with fear, sealing his fate. He could not have known it was the very expression Eira would come to crave.
Purple wisps of energy erupted from him, spilling from his eyes, ears, and mouth like molten starlight. They writhed through the air, coiling around Eira’s outstretched hands, drawn into her. She drank deeply, the power flooding her veins, ecstasy and agony intertwined.
In the end, shadows poured from her eagerly, rampaging through the village. Every person in the town fell.
Amun and Eira stepped over the lifeless bodies, their paths divergent even as they walked side by side. Eira strode with triumph. Amun followed, terrified. In time, Amun would learn the art of treachery too.
And treachery was never something Amun wanted for his beloved.
He saw the end was near and worried that Eira would lose her mind before she accomplished her world. Amun did what he had done before: he found a Lyrian, bringing Eira to rest in light. Then he began planning.
He would create the universe Eira desired. When he brought her back again, there would be no reason left for her treachery.