Book One – Chapter 13

As Midnight descended, a shiver of darkness coursing through the jagged mountain face, Sey and Burs emerged. The mother moon and her child began their slow, deliberate journey across the sky. Their pale light faintly illuminated the storm-ravaged mountainscape below, casting long, ghostly shadows over the peaks.

Midnight did not see them — not as she once had, with her midnight stalker eyes that could perceive their presences even through the fiercest of storms; glowing orbs, like two wandering eyes in the sky. In her former form, Midnight had also relied on an innate sense of time, always aware of Sey’s arrival and the surge of energy she brought her. That intuitive connection had been severed. Even her perception of time had become unreliable, distorted by her transformation and the time spent within the timeless realm of the mountain.

Despite this, Midnight was certain the moons must have risen, since the sun had already touched upon the horizon when she had first emerged near the Raja Siena. Now far closer to the Snowtrail than to the heights of the dragon realm, Midnight slipped once more from the embrace of the stone, her form seeping into the open as she waited for the familiar sensation, that comforting yet exhilarating rush of power she had always drawn from Sey.

But it did not come.

Instead, it was the light that sought her. Unlike the volatile, ever-shifting amalgamation of light fragments that formed the sun, the light fragments that covered the world from the ground to the realm of the dragons remained fixed, their positions undisturbed unless shifted by wizards or other ethereal forces. Yet now, as before, they reacted to Midnight’s presence. Again they gravitated towards her, forming a growing spiral that compressed and intensified with each passing moment. The light grew brighter and stronger, creating an almost palpable aura around her. It was an anomaly that marked her, exposed her in a manner that was both disturbing and alien to her new existence; a light so vivid that even those who could not typically perceive the phantom presences of light during the absence of the sun would now see it.