(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
3. How They Lived After
‘YES,’ HE ANSWERED, ‘for one Night.’
Darkness and heat blotted out the stars, and Lady Agatha coiled in the great carved bed with Master Aengus. There was a brilliance in the south, there was a rain of fire. Thick showers steamed with the smell of ash. Heavy, hot-breathed clouds caressed the earth.
Hour after hour it was lasting, long into what should have been day, until at last the clouds were parting, and a placid flow of light emerged out of the east, of the second moonrise of that Night.
Master Aengus took Lady Agatha by the hand, and led her out of the great carved bed. Fires burned in all the manor’s hearths, and candles shone on the walls and ceilings. Bright was that house, and warm. Ceol-sidhe of pipers and harpists was heard from far-off rooms, while the table was spread with rare delights, and the bricks glowed ruddy with cheer. She kissed him, and he smiled. They went back into bed. She was wanting him still; but was it not a lie?
The Moon rose a third time, and a fourth. But the Sun rose no more. The Sun had burst into a million bits of fire; the Sun was gone; the girdle of light was unbound.
The Moon, alone among a million strange stars, lighted new contours on the old Earth. By bubbling seas, blackened hills, and shrunken lakes, there was only darkness where light had been looked for, where the cities all had been.
It was as if an age of man had passed.
The great cities of the world were still. London, Paris, Vienna, Rome, were that many crags of stone. Their doors were shut; behind those doors, in sealed, dark chambers, the former rulers of the world slept on.
Others, the Wakeful, went out of their rooms. They stepped silently into their Night. Beyond the black outlines of towers and houses they saw the land beyond, rust red and violet in the silver light.
What was it had marked them, that they few should wake while all the rest slept on? There is no telling. Cataclysms render no accounts. But many of them were children.
The Wakeful left the stone-paved streets behind them, and went out scattering among the fields and hills, to build what had never yet been built, and make anew what had been forgotten.
Now, as to Master Aengus and Lady Agatha, the miraculous had taken place. His song went on and on and she was happy at his side. But sure, it was a lie.
Now the first month of the Night ended, and another took its place. And thirteen Moons went over, till the stars wheeled round to touch the Samhain mark, when all souls and dreams are loosed. And for four and twenty hours the Moon did not rise nor shine.
