Chapter 149 Borrowed Moonlight
Chapter 149 Borrowed Moonlight
The valley had turned into a churning sea of shadow. Every ridge, every frozen hollow between the rocks, was choked with it — thousands upon thousands of Darkness-born, pouring toward the ravine where Zuri and Yuna stood their ground.
"They've noticed us," Yuna said, unbothered, watching the tide advance. "Trying to overwhelm us with numbers? Very typical."
"Hmm. Quality over quantity, then." Zuri rolled his shoulders, stepping in front of her, eyes fixed on the writhing dark. "Erebus, is this truly the best you've sent? I'm underwhelmed. I expected more of a challenge."
He cracked his knuckles. The air answered — it tightened, then split.
Thunder rolled through the ravine, and lightning tore down in white streaks, meeting every Draugr that dared close the distance.
Mountainsides split open. Snow came down in avalanches, burying what the fire hadn't already turned to ash. For a long moment the world was noise: screaming, breaking rock, the hiss of shadow burning away.
And then it wasn't. Only silence, craters, smoke curling off blackened stone.
"That's better," Zuri said, exhaling.
"That was excessive for something so beneath you." Yuna folded her arms. "I told you not to overdo it."
"Overdo it? I hardly moved." He grinned. "Barely a warm-up." Then his humor cooled, just slightly. "Still, Erebus doesn't waste an army on a test he already knows the outcome of. He's not that kind of fool."
Yuna's brow furrowed. "I thought so too. He isn't the type to test our strength with numbers. He knows what we're capable of, why push his army to obvious annihilation?"
Her eyes widened as the thought landed. "Unless it was never about the army."
"It's a diversion," Zuri said, at the exact moment the mountain behind them exploded.
Rock and ice rained down as something far worse than Draugr climbed out of the wound in the earth.
Psych-Beasts, larger, hungrier, wrong in ways the Draugr never were. Behind them came the Shadow Dwellers, and behind those, Leviathans dredged up from wherever the Darkness kept its oldest horrors, their hides slick with corruption.
"He kept us busy with his finest so we wouldn't notice him unmaking the world somewhere quieter," Zuri muttered. "Clever, truly. I almost respect it." He glanced sideways. "Those Leviathans alone are trouble, now Psych-Beasts. It'll take an army to handle."
"Then it's fortunate you're not sending one." Yuna's three faces bloomed into flame, fire licking down her arms, her spine, until she stood wreathed in it. "Go wake our people, Zuri. I'll hold this end."
"I'll leave it to you then. Don't overdo it," he said, echoing her, and for once his voice had gone quiet with something like worry.
She only laughed, soft and warm despite the inferno rising around her, and touched his shoulder before he leapt from the ravine.
He landed at the foot of Mons Aeturnus in a single stride, the impact cracking stone beneath his boots. Fire rained behind him now, painting the sky orange even as the sun stayed hidden somewhere he couldn't reach.
He walked to the black rock face and pressed both palms flat against it. It hummed under his hands, ancient and half-remembering.
"The earth remembers," he murmured. "It should. I built it to."
A Leviathan the size of a hundred giraffes broke from the fire-rain and lunged for him, and came apart mid-air, a burst of dust and sparks, before it ever reached him. Zuri didn't so much as flinch.
He struck the snow at his feet with Night-bringer, and it recoiled, sliding back to the treeline in one long shudder, uncovering markings carved into the stone beneath, older than the mountain itself, older than the gods who'd carved them.
"Seal of the Darkmoon." He laughed under his breath. "Still holding, after all this time. Old magic doesn't forget how to be feared." His smile faded. "But I'm not strong enough yet to lift it. Not without help."
He looked up at the blank, moonless sky.
"Lend me what you have. Just once."
He raised Night-bringer overhead, and light poured from it, a single beam climbing into the dark until the clouds themselves seemed to bend around it.
Slowly, impossibly, the sky obeyed. It thickened, darkened, and rolled backward, as though time itself were being unwound thread by thread.
Zuri strained against it, teeth gritted, the staff screaming in his grip, until the sky finally stopped moving and the moon hung heavy and full above the valley.
He dropped to his knees, gasping, Night-bringer clattering against rock.
He had turned back the hand of time, not far, only far enough to steal back a moon that had no business being in this sky anymore.
Somewhere below, the earth groaned like something enormous shifting in its sleep. Behind him, Yuna's fire climbed higher, hotter, a second sun rising in the wrong direction.
"Small price," Zuri rasped, forcing himself upright. "I'm not ready to face Erebus like this, not yet. But the moon evens the field. For our people. For you too, Trivia."
The ground beneath the ancient carvings began to glow, tracing every line as though something buried had finally opened its eyes. It pulsed, once, twice, drawing the moonlight down into itself, growing brighter with every beat.
Zuri retrieved Night-bringer, hands still trembling, and pointed it at the black rock.
"Heed me, Rock of Eternal Stars. Open your gates. The Darkmoon commands thee."
His voice didn't rise, but it carried, down the valley, into the stone, into whatever still slept beneath it.
The glow died all at once.
Then the mountain groaned. Ice sheared away in sheets. The ground split with a sound like the world clearing its throat, and the black rock began, slowly, to part.
Zuri laughed, giddy with it. "It worked! The earth remembers!" Torchlight kindled deep within, stretching down a passage that hadn't seen a living footstep in longer than he cared to calculate. "At last. Trivia can come along now, the underlings of Erebus can wait."
The rock shuddered. And started closing again.
He spun back toward it, disbelief hardening into alarm. "No,no, no, not now. The seal just lifted. What could possibly..."
He felt it before he saw it. Something had crossed between him and the m
oon, blotting away it's light.
His eyes went hot with fury as he gazed at the heaven. "Murks."