Chapter Sixty-Nine
ELARA
‘I’ve tried to avoid telling you this story for as long as I’ve known you,’ Eli sighed, smoking furiously. He was sitting with them in the dining room of the lighthouse. Candles had been lit everywhere to stave off the shadows, thanks to Enzo, and everyone sat gravely around the table with a drink.
‘I thought that if I didn’t speak her name, if you never knew your past, then she would stay buried. But it seems darling Piscea found a way to wake anyway,’ he finished bitterly. ‘So now, it’s about time you knew the story…the story of your creation.’
Elara looked in worry to Enzo, clutching his hand.
‘Once upon a time,’ Eli began, ‘there was nothing but the Dark. She was that from which everything came and to which everything would return. The Dark had many names over the years, but she could not be boxed into a single word. She wasn’t a goddess, nor a titan even.
‘She was something more primordial, something completely wild and shifting and powerful, something that had always just…been.
‘She was used to being alone, quiet and slumbering. Until, out of the nothingness, silver light shone and changed the world. The Moon, the power was called. And for a time, the Dark was the Moon’s companion.
The Moon was quiet like her, but brilliant and clever and shining, always shining.
Sometimes she could be as dark as the night, and in other phases she was so full and bright that the Dark shied away.
‘And then, on a day the Dark would rue for as long as she lived, the Sun was born. He blinded her, and he was loud and fiery and brash. Yet when the Dark looked at the Moon, the Moon was looking at him. And to the Dark’s utter horror, he was looking right back.
‘The Sun’s rays drifted through the darkness and created the world—Celestia.
‘In a matter of days, other worlds joined it, spinning and tilting alongside Celestia.
The Sun gifted each of these worlds a drop of life.
Then mortals were born and walked them. Another Celeste was born, the Earth, and from her sprang greenery, fruit and flowers.
She helped build beautiful lands and mountains.
Animals walked the green space, and the Earth adored the Sun too and grew under his rays.
‘And then something called Water flooded the land in bright blue.’ He flicked his gaze to Adrian, who was studying him furiously. ‘And the Moon befriended him, to pull the tides.’ It was then that Adrian broke his focus on Eli, looking at Elara in surprise. She gave a small reassuring smile.
‘Air allowed the animals and humans to breathe, brought wind to the world and made storms with the Water, as well as ice. Though she was flighty and a thing of whimsy, she was also beautiful and always just out of reach.’
Eli’s voice had taken on a different quality as he spoke of this Air, and Elara’s heart went out to him.
‘She was not attached to anyone for long, but still, she worked with the others.
The people grew in numbers, forming communities together.
And they spoke of how they adored the Celestes. And how they hated the Dark.
‘Because of their reverence, in a place now named Helios—though aeons ago it went by another name—the Sun, who had already gifted the worlds life, gifted the people within the first world, Celestia, the ability to wield fire and light.
He was the first to bestow his gifts on a part of the continent that loved him the most. As the rarest magick, he allowed only a few the gift of sight—a pale imitation of how clearly he could see with his bright light.
Then the Water gifted the lands that worshipped him the power to conjure water with their bare hands, manipulate bodies of it and even travel through it.
The Earth loved her people so much that she gifted them with the ability to shift between forms, to manipulate the flowers around them and the ground beneath them.
Air, with her sly ways, granted her people the ability to move the wind, to fly within pockets of it, to control breath.
‘And finally, the ones who worshipped the Moon looked up at her with hopeful eyes. She readied her moonlight to shine below, but first turned back to the Dark, her oldest friend.
‘ “They won’t want my gifts,” the Dark muttered, skulking away from the Moon’s light.
‘ “Then send one with me,” the Moon said gently. Moonlight streamed from her to Celestia, bestowing on her people the ability to walk through dreams, and cast illusions and create magickal worlds, the way she did in all her phases.
‘ “Go on,” she encouraged. The Dark sighed, reaching out a tentative hand and streaming her shadows through the Moon on to the world. And so, shadows and nightmares and the creatures that come from the dark places were born. And with a final reluctant sigh and a glance at the Sun, the Moon also gifted death to all the worlds. For that was the cycle of life, and the Sun’s magick needed the Moon’s balance. No man could live forever.
‘The Celestes thrived, and the Dark watched as the Sun fell in love with the Moon across the sky while she…she retreated into the void from which she had come.
‘Yet, as these titans worked in their flow, in their paradise, the Dark began to observe the mortals that they cherished. She noticed how these mortals had their own traits, their own virtues and vices. And as they grew, she realized they had their own will, one set apart from the titans.
‘They began to fight, to compete, and it was to the Dark’s delight that she realized they couldn’t help it. It was in their very nature. Some would go to war, and others would fuck and cheat, and more would play mind games with each other or dole out pain or let pride ruin them.
‘The Dark took a perverse delight in seeing this side of the perfect humans the Sun had created, and enjoyed seeing the distress it caused in the Celestes, too. She began to spin her noxthread—the substance she used to weave the fates of these humans—upon her spinning wheel. These mortals, whom the titans couldn’t control—the mad, the vengeful, the sinners—she would manage.
So the Dark began to collect lost souls.
‘She started first with a demon from a world far from Celestia.
A little boy with red eyes, whom she watched carefully, who had been abandoned and shunned by his own kind.
The Dark became his friend, whispering to him while he slept.
And the little demon found solace in her whispering voice, twisted by bitterness and loneliness, that encouraged revenge, revenge, revenge.
Until the day he finally called upon her, and she answered.
‘On and on she went to other worlds, until she had twelve souls. The Dark decided to call them Stars and gifted them with riches and powers beyond their wildest dreams, as well as eternal life, for one price only.’
‘Their hearts,’ Elara breathed, glancing at the patch of white skin on Eli’s chest.
Adrian had leaned forwards, eyes wide.
He nodded. ‘Their rotten, withered hearts for immortality. What downtrodden spirit wouldn’t accept that bargain?’
Elara had been so enthralled by Eli’s tale that she hadn’t realized he had stopped speaking for a moment. She blinked out of her daze, goosebumps prickling her arms.
‘So what happened to the Dark?’ Enzo asked.
‘Well, when she brought the Stars back to Celestia and told them they could rule the skies with the other Celestes, of course the Celestes refused. So she settled for making them gods among the titans—a step below, but still able to be worshipped. The Celestes could do little, for they had always feared the Dark—the oldest and most powerful among them. Now that she had her own family, a place she finally belonged, she called herself Piscea—the last Star—so that she could be worshipped too, after being feared for so long as the primordial.’
‘And the coffin?’ Leo asked.
Eli sighed.
‘As Elara will know well, the coffin is Piscea’s symbol.’
Elara nodded. ‘There is one dedicated to her in Asteria, built within her temple.’ She thought back to it—to the obsidian temple she had never liked going to, to the stark prayer on the outside, one still branded behind her eyes: So worship her, so fear her.
‘It’s where she was bound,’ Eli said quietly. ‘In a coffin in the Graveyard, the realm of purgatory between the Hallowlands and the Deadlands, on the same night that the rest of you were.’ He looked between Enzo, Elara and Adrian.
A panic began to claw through Elara. You’ll need to bind me, the others too.
She screwed her eyes shut.
‘I didn’t know what Ariete had already planned to do to you all.
He had just been to Piscea’s kingdom, the Umbryss, and stolen something from her.
Her noxthread. It was forbidden for anyone to touch it; save her, of course.
When he knocked upon my door, wild-eyed and holding it, I could hardly believe it.
Then he told me his plan. He was going to use it to bind her to a mortal body.
He knew we couldn’t kill her in her primordial form.
And he also knew how I felt about the Dark.
She had borne us into this world, into Celestia.
She possessed our hearts. And while the other Stars had sat at her feet, Ariete, Torra and I saw something different within her. Something evil.’
The shadows upon the walls seemed to flicker, and Elara sidled closer to Enzo, who began to glow softly, as though trying to keep those shadows at bay.
‘I agreed to help him. So that night, we held a banquet and invited all the Celestes to attend. Ariete said it was so as not to raise suspicion in Piscea. I was a fool, and I should have known better. But I believed him. You all attended—though, Enzo and Elara, you were forbidden to touch by the Dark, always consigned to opposite sides of the room. Though it never stopped you looking for one another. And into your cups of ambrosia, Ariete slipped a hypnom petal. It put you all to sleep, and it was then I feared what Ariete had done. But still, he lied to me, promised me that you would all wake, that it was so we could get rid of Piscea. Again, I was a fool. I followed him to the Graveyard with Piscea’s body—and watched as he cut his palm and dropped his blood on to her noxthread.
It turned bright red, transforming into star-thread, and tied her fate to him instead, willing destiny to bend, to make her mortal.
When the spell was done, with the blood magick from the realm he had fallen from, we built a coffin and put her in it.
‘If she woke from the hypnom, he said, she would be mortal. And would die, buried alive within that sealed coffin.’
He shook his head. ‘We left her there, in that land between the living and dead, the one place with no way back to Celestia. Until now. Until you.’
Eli looked straight at Elara. ‘I truly thought she was dead. That she would never harm us again. Then I began to see the signs, but still I wasn’t sure, I didn’t dare think…
’ He paused. ‘Until Isra’s vision. Because you are the path, Elara.
As the Queen of Death, with you awake, the entrance to the Graveyard is open once more.
And next week, on All Hallows’ Eve, when the veil between worlds is at its thinnest, and your heavenly body in the sky disappears—’
Elara glanced out of the window at the sliver of moon in the sky, battling, weaker and weaker, against the night.
‘She will try to walk through.’