The sky was as gray as the moment you realize you can never go home again.
Anais walked on water so still it was like polished stone, like glass, like ice beneath his bare and burning feet. It stretched as far as he could see, flawless and endless.
His mother walked to his left. Beautiful and terrible. But though she’d tried to, he wouldn’t allow her to hold his hand. He was angry with her, you see. At her meddling and machinations. Though her visitation to the little imperator’s dreams had proved the spur to prick the Chosen’s skin, to have her embrace the destiny that was hers, he was keenly aware of how badly it all could have gone wrong. And of the tithe that had been paid for his rebirth.
His mother carried her scales instead, black gloves up to her elbows, dripping on the eternity at their feet, like blood from an open wrist. Niah’s gown was black also, strung with a billion tiny points of light. Her eyes were as dark as her prison had been, and her smile was vengeance, one thousand years wide.
Across the infinite gray, he waited for them.
Father.
He was clad all in white. Tall as mountains. But Aa didn’t burn so bright as Anais remembered. His three eyes, red and yellow and blue, were all closed now. His radiance dimmed. The dark about them swelled, his mother looming at his shoulders, black as the truedark skies gleaming below the gables of heaven.
The Moon’s sisters stood arrayed about their father. Tsana wreathed in flame and Trelene shrouded in waves and Nalipse wearing only the wind, Keph sleeping on the floor, clad in autumn leaves. They watched him approach with unveiled malice, but he could see they feared him. He could see why. His domain was the sky, after all. Higher than all of them.
Perhaps that was why they had hated him.
“Husband,” Niah said.
“Wife,” Aa replied.
“Sisters,” Anais nodded.
“Brother,” they bowed, each in turn.
They stood in silence as long as years. A millennium of suffering and rage and sorrow between them. And finally, the Moon turned to the Suns. Though his three eyes were closed, Anais knew Aa saw him. The Everseeing saw everything, after all.
“Father,” he said.
The reply came then, like a knife in the dawn.
“You are no son of mine.”
It hurt to hear him say it. Even after all these centuries. The wrongness of it was total—to be loathed by the one who should have loved you best. The silence grew deafening, the Moon’s mind filled with a thousand If Onlys and Why Couldn’t Yous.
They were futile and he knew it. But even gods bleed.
Anais looked downward, saw himself reflected in the mirrored stone/glass/ice at his feet. His form shivered and shifted like lightless flame. Tongues of dark fire rippled from his shoulders, the top of his crown, as if he were a candle burning. On his forehead, a circle was scribed. And like a looking glass, that circle caught the light from his father’s robes and reflected it back, the radiance pale and bright. He hesitated then, even then, wondering at all that might have been.
But standing at his back, he saw a figure cut from the darkness.
A girl.
Pale skin and long dark hair draped over her shoulders and eyes of burning black. Fierce and brave and quick and clever. He knew her then. What she’d sacrificed. What she’d lost. He knew that unlike his own sisters, she’d loved her brother with all she had to give. And most of all, he knew her name.
Mia.
She put her hands on his shoulders and leaned close. His mother frowned as the girl spoke, lips brushing featherlight against his ear. Her touch was ice on his skin, and her voice, fire in his heart.
“Never flinch,” she whispered.
And the Moon looked up then. To the Suns who should have loved him. Fingers closing into fists as he spoke.
“You gave me life, but that does not give you power. And though you left me shattered, that does not make me broken. The pieces of me you left behind are sharp as knives. Sharp as truth. So hear it now, and know.
“You struck at me when I was but a child. You lay me low when I was sleeping. But I am a child no more, Father.
“And I am awake.”
He was clad all in white, but not so bright that the Moon couldn’t see. He was tall as mountains, but not so high that the Moon couldn’t reach. And Anais stretched out his hands toward his father, cupping his face. The Suns tried to pull away. But it was truedark now, and with Night beside him, the Moon was stronger.
His sisters held their breath as he leaned close.
He kissed his father’s brow, just above the first of his eyes.
And with his thumbs, he put out the second and the third.
The Suns screamed. His sisters wailed. His mother smiled. He felt those orbs of red and blue give beneath the pressure, felt the hard, warm arc of the sockets beneath. How easy it would have been to push farther then. To feel the bone splinter, to reach up and tear out the last, plunge the world below into cold and black unending.
But again, he felt the girl’s hands on his shoulders. Slipping about him in a cool embrace. Her cheek was pressed against the back of his neck, and all the rage, all the hate, all the bitter sorrow and regret, the worthless Could Have Beens and If Onlys melted away at the sound of a single word.
“Enough,” Mia said.
He turned and met her gaze, black as truedark skies.
She kissed his lips, resting her brow against his as tears spilled from her eyes.
“It’s finished,” she sighed.
And she was gone.
His father was on his knees, bleeding from the places his eyes should have been. His sisters knelt before him, their heads bowed low. His mother spread her gowns across the heavens, the bonds of her prison forever broken.
And Anais ascended his throne.
One sun.
One night.
One moon.
Balance.
“All is as it should be,” the Night declared. “The scales weigh even at last.”
The prince of dawn and dusk looked to the infinity above them.
He shook his head.
“One tithe remains,” he said.
And with black and burning hands, he reached for a piece of forever.