“Go!” she roared, and the breath of the plants rushed out with the word.
Green.
Green.
Green.
Skeletons burst into flower. Husk-men crumbled into puffballs and morels. Robold’s sick and alien form went stiff. His eyes widened. For an instant, they shone back at her, the gray melting into pools of emerald. He opened his mouth to cry out and a clump of ferns burst out of his lips.
Thunder shook the entire hill. Hildegard turned her face up to the sky. Lightning, ordinary white lightning, flashed across the purple tear that ran between the stars. The sky shimmered for an instant. And then it went right, black and cloudy.
The world smelled like rain.
Water poured from the sky, sluicing away the remnants of Robold’s creatures. Hildegard’s nuns stood silently. They could only stare around themselves, wondering at all they had seen this dark night.
“It was the boy,” Brother Arnold said. “He sacrificed himself for us all.”
“It was God.” Hildegard blinked back tears. “It was all of us and it was God.”
She turned her gaze to the strange tree that now grew beside her, its branches as twisted and contorted as an octopus’s tentacles. A clump of ferns grew out of its center. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen such green and lustrous ferns.
Thunder rumbled again, the comforting sound of a world returned to order.
Red Sails, Dark Moon
Andrew S. Fuller
Jinny woke to the taste of saltwater and the feel of warm sand against her body, nudged by a strange tide. Fine, dark green granules fell from her brown skin as she sat up on the unknown shore. She admired the crescent beach with its perfect cerulean waves lined by a deep gingko jungle, the ragged detail of distant slopes whose peaks were lost in crawling clouds, and the tall black towers rising just beyond the bay’s far point.
Where she’d washed up from, she could not recall, nor any previous detail outside of her name. This loss troubled her deeply, but briefly, as the extravagant view and open air brought her release. She wandered freely along the shore toward the thin angular structures.
Her eyes followed the graceful pattern of breaking surf out to the rolling sea, where she glimpsed enormous dark twisting shapes beneath the surface, and the occasional green face staring back with lucent eyes from a curling wave. Strolling away from the foamy breakers, she heard a pleasing trill among the whispering trees. The resonant song drew her toward a dazzling plumage within the swaying leaves.
Suddenly a group of cats circled her legs, their soft gray and black striped bodies weaving between her feet. A dozen swift felines pressed her away from the bewitching feathers and dripping serrated beak, steering her into a straight path between water and trees. Satisfied with her direction, they leapt away into the shadows and the sun’s dim glare.
With each passing scene of eerie coastal landscape, Jinny had a disquieting sense that she did not belong, and hoped that in the city ahead she could find passage to a place where she might.
The spires grew before her, and though her feet felt no fatigue, she looked back and saw a hundred miles had passed, and many days with them.
As beach became road, she saw cottages and mills on the outskirts, and many colored sails billowing along the horizon, until she rounded the bay’s point and the harbor city came into view, proclaimed dylath-leen in carved letters on a weathered wooden sign.
Tapered buildings of stained stone and flickering windows arched over narrow streets that wound up the hilly cove, their shade layered in that of the basalt towers and settling dusk.
Loud songs both melodious and crude drew her to the pier-front boulevard, where men of three dozen hues and statures loaded and embarked on graceful crafts; the tongues of their chants were unfamiliar to her but the mosaic of lyrics formed prodigious sagas in her head. Passengers and laborers alike moved oddly, loping or rolling about, some on fewer than two limbs, others on more.
Spiced and malted aromas from the dilapidated taverns churned her sudden hunger, and she followed the newly lit lanterns along the promenade to the raucous bustle of the tented marketplace.
Passing by the canvas stalls, her mouth watered at the hanging six-limbed meats cured and charred to a perfect saffron orange, spectral filigreed stalks whose steam rained sweet crystals, and luminous, leaf-wrapped mushroom caps. A castaway with nothing to her name, she hugged her ribs tightly and found a clutch of prismatic nautilus shells in her frayed pockets. With these and pointing gestures she managed to barter a bowl of dismal soup and a small mug of, if she interpreted correctly, moon-wine.
The beverage made her giddy, and she perused the crowded bazaar, admiring many curiosities, unafraid to handle gleaming jewelry for aberrantly shaped limbs, peculiar garments, or sinuous carved statues whose faces blurred and shifted at her touch.
At the last tent, she was drawn to shining cardinal gemstones arranged on an onyx table. A closer look displayed intricate facets and peculiar runes floating within the rubies that filled her with unease. Then an unpleasant odor made her step back. The proprietor held up one of the ruddy gems and smiled at her, his mouth beneath the shabby orange turban opened broadly like a wide wound filled with soot and spiked teeth.
She tried to hustle away, but several more men in wrapped headgear blocked the market aisle, surrounding her with their moist, rotting pungency.
She ran between tents into the nearest alley, banging on cold doors, then running harder, hurdling and sliding and dodging through alcoves, careening into moonlit walls, trying to escape the footsteps behind her that rang like hooves on the cobblestones.
The alley emerged at the pier, and she stood before a baneful dark ship. Its tattered obsidian sail and bulbous pitch-black hull tainted the nearby shadows. The pestiferous stench from the vessel made her gag and weaken. The moon-wine took hold, and her knees hit the dock as the footsteps clattered forward.
She managed to kick one of the aggressors; a leg bone snapped to the accompaniment of a warbling scream. The impact of his head on the wharf dislodged the turban, exposing two curved, bony horns.
Night embraced her fully as they dragged her aboard.
Next Jinny knew, the sea whispered coarsely against the ship’s hull beneath her head. The stench was even worse here, rank and thick, like the inside of a carcass. She breathed through her mouth and lifted herself into a corner by gripping wrought metal bars. Dull light through small round portholes showed only vague outlines of a few cellmates.
In the gloom beyond the cage, thick gray bodies hunched over oars, their globular limbs pulling and extending like draining mucus. They rocked forward into a moonbeam, divulging eyeless faces with short, flush tentacle mouthparts.
The beasts rowed harder, surging the galley forward, and she staggered to the porthole, pushing someone aside. She lost all of her meager meal through the small opening. Holding the circular window frame, she breathed the salted spray and gazed at the rolling waves and ancient sky of unfamiliar stars.
As they passed between two great hexagonal stone pillars, the ship lurched and lifted hard under her, and she fell back with her cellmates. The pull pinned her to the floorboards, but she strained to stand, returning to the window. The ocean waves diminished far below, and so shrank the distant seaport lights. It is like birds see, she thought, as even sharp-toothed mountains shriveled and flattened. Soon the thick white brume of clouds swirled and surrounded them. The milky haze gradually darkened and finally relented to an immense, limitless field of black with stars brighter and crisper than she’d ever known. The curving horizon constricted behind them as a deepening chill settled through the ship.