(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
The New Dawn of Day
In the first new year of Day, those Waking who had no Powers, and who had been Cast Out of the Strong Places, found themselves in the second hour of the Dawn walking down old familiar paths again. To their old front doors. They opened their doors and looked inside. They found their lovers, their kin, their friends, and all the other Sleeping, stretching in their chairs and beds and opening their eyes.
But the Special Ones raised their walls higher against the Sun, and shut themselves away. They walled off the Strong Places forever from the harsh light of the world. They clung to their Powers and the company of their own kind.
The Waking shared breakfast with those who had been Sleeping through all those Seven Years. And the Waking tried to tell the Sleeping what they had missed, the strange lands and unheard-of adventures of the Night of Seven Years. But the Sleeping rubbed their eyes and yawned and said only, ‘Enough of your dreams, now let me tell you mine.’
The Waking held their tongues at that, and the world went on – as if only one night of twelve hours had passed across the world, and not one of seven years.
But some of the Waking never forgot those years, and over and over again they were telling of them, in fairy tales, and painting of them in unworldly colors and strokes, and singing of them with fire and too-great joy. They knew one another by what they read and saw and heard in the new schools of art. And though their children never knew what it was to walk and breathe the airs of Night-Land, all the same they remembered, in their dreams and in their blood, when ecstasy took them, when they danced and sang, whey they heard the tales of the fantastic, when they saw strange building and unearthly paints, what their fathers and mothers had lived through.
And faintly through all the art works born of that impulse, there ran the traces of the Strong Places and the Special Ones, walled away from the world forever by their own devising. Always those traces can be found with longing and a sense of loss and regret. But they are gone to us all the same.
