The moon looks bruised, Anthera thought as she gazed up through the barbed silhouettes of a hundred branches. Its face was pocked and frail, with blotches of grey tarnishing what should have been perfect beauty. Instinctively, the girl raised a hand to her own cheek, then flinched as the dull throbbing pain coursed through it again. Not yet healed.

The forest around her was quiet, and darkness peered from behind every branch. The girl shrank back every time their cover became too thick and she could no longer see the moon – the night had claws, and if she wasn’t careful it would grab her and drag her all the way into its depths. It did that to her father, sometimes – there were nights when he went out into the dark, and the thing that returned hours later wasn’t him. Its eyes were empty, and it didn’t love her.

The night – or whatever monster it was that lay within it – had come for them as the sun set that day. Anthera had sensed it when the fire burned low and the cabin turned cold, and he wasn’t there to kindle it. She’d tried to do it herself, to banish the dark away and bring him home safe, but found herself unable to carry the thick oaken logs back to the hearth. So before it could find her, she’d stolen away.

A shiver went through her as a sudden wind picked up and the boughs above began to sway, the criss-cross patterns of their shadows jerking erratically on the forest floor below. With a gasp Anthera plunged out of the moonlight entirely, into the shade of what must have been a willow tree in the year’s kinder months. Now, its tangled branches blocked the light out almost completely, and the girl grasped blindly around the trunk until her fingers found it – a groove in the wood, clumsily hewn in the shape of an arrow. She’d carved it weeks ago with a sharp twig, on a night much like this one. Knowing she’d soon have to walk this path again.

So Anthera walked, until the trees cleared around her and the moon blazed so bright it left dark circles on her eyelids. Its rays filled the sky, cascaded towards her like a great celestial waterfall then came to rest on the still water of the lake before her. Its surface gleamed a brilliant silver, enough to cast the glade around her in eerie half-light – but even this could not disguise the murky depths that lay beneath it.

She gazed into the water. The girl who looked like her gazed back, as always, eyes like glimmering sapphires amidst the surrounding void. How could this be the same darkness that had tormented her out in the forest, when it was so… gentle? When it held so close the beauty of the glade that surrounded it, the grace of the moths that danced lightly over its surface, and the wonderment in the pale young face that looked out over it all?

Maybe there were different names, in whatever language the girl in the water spoke. Maybe what Anthera called darkness was actually a thousand different things humans just didn’t understand – and if not, maybe she could be the one to name them. The gentle darkness could be niithsang. The grinning darkness could be akhlys.

So all was still, and for a time Anthera simply sat there gazing into the gray niithsang below. The moon crept across the sky in its slow arc, and as it ducked behind a particularly thick cloud the water’s surface darkened, its crystalline mirror turned blurry and distorted. Anthera’s heart jumped as she realised the other girl no longer looked like her – at some point she’d changed, morphed into nothing more than a featureless silhouette. Was she hiding those blue eyes somewhere, or had that girl vanished forever? How long until the sun rose and wiped all this away, as it had done every morning since… since forever?

Anthera couldn’t explain the feeling that came over her in those moments. She would return here, yes, maybe in days or maybe in months – but would here be the same place? She’d sat by the lake so many times, looked into that girl’s eyes again and again to find comfort – but had it ever been the same girl twice?

A tear rolled down her cheek. She would return here, yes, but she didn’t want it to be a different girl looking up at her next time. She wanted the one from tonight, with the bleached skin and tangled hair, and yes, even the ugly mark that clung like tar to her cheek. The lake tonight was more beautiful than she’d ever seen it before. It might never look this way again – and this was the last time she’d meet that girl.

When the moon went low and the sky started turning blue, Anthera scarpered home. She couldn’t stay. She couldn’t bear to watch the sun rise and annihilate the niithsang, and force the moon to come back and build it all again – ever so slightly imperfect – tomorrow. Maybe her father knew a way – her real father, not the thing that had waited for her in the akhlys all night and she prayed would be gone by the time she got home. He’d told her of magicians who lived on mountains far from here, and surely one of them would know how to freeze the light, so the world in the lake could exist even after she and the moon left it.

So Anthera wept, for the girl who she’d spent a night sitting with, and who she had now lost with the rising sun. Next time, she promised the empty woodland air, you won’t have to die.

——————————————————————————————————————

Though Anthera did not return to the lake in the years that followed, it did not leave her mind. Its image – still, bright, perfect – remained even as she left that cabin by her woods and the memory of the creature that dwelled within it, even as she journeyed weeks towards the distant outlines of mountains, scanned their peaks for those great spiralling stone towers, within which lived the wizards who would teach her.

It had been five years, nearly to the day, since Anthera had last seen that lake. The morning was bright and sunny, and she’d spent it clambering up jagged stone faces and puzzling out ancient trails. Staying away for so long, even on nights when akhlys had surrounded her and the thing that was and wasn’t her father was screaming at her to come home, was the hardest thing she’d ever done. Try as she might, she had not found the gentle caress of niithsang anywhere else in the forest, among any of its innumerable roots and rills and gullies. Then again, Anthera thought as she pulled herself up one last ridge and onto the flatter plateau beyond, her searches had all been halfhearted. She had missed the gentle darkness, a small fragment of joy growing smaller and smaller in the distance as the world’s many other darknesses closed in. But if she had found it again… What then? She would stay there, enjoy it for a time, then lose it once more to the blazing dawn. No, better to leave it be, to endure until she had an answer.

This did feel absurd, though – to still be thinking about that night so many years later, even as everything had changed around her. Even as her father had gone out into the night and never returned, and taken the creature that wore his skin with him. Even as she’d had to teach herself to hunt and forage, and eventually found the courage to leave entirely, to chase those fairy-tales her real father had occasionally sang her as she fell asleep. Even now that the end was in sight, a rough wind-hewn stone tower that rose from the earth as if it had burst out from it in a single motion. A rigid grey archway twice as tall as Anthera had been carved out of one side, filled out with a heavy door made of ebony. Taking a breath, Anthera knocked.

The wizard inside was named Ash, and it was good fortune that she – the third Anthera had found and asked in her year of travel – was in both the place and the mood to take on an apprentice, and that she was willing to accept what few coins Anthera had managed to lug here as payment. Ash was a tall and broad-shouldered woman with skin a shade darker than Anthera’s own, and in matters of teaching was a much more distant mentor than the girl had expected. Indeed, she came to expect to spend six or seven nights every week alone, studying by candlelight the intricate charts and runes of power she’d been prescribed, attempting to contort her mouth into new shapes and make sounds that didn’t exist in any language she’d heard. Ash, meanwhile, would lurk in her attic with the trap-door locked, and Anthera often wondered how she ate and drank, whether she had a secret supply of food up there or cooked on the downstairs hearth-fire while she was fast asleep.

One winter night, Anthera was in a foul mood. The night had begun to fall earlier these last few months and impenetrable akhlys seemed to surround their little tower, though Ash’s flaming hearth and braced candelabras did a good enough job keeping her safe from it. The wind outside howled and howled through the day and the night and completely spoiled the girl’s concentration, ruined her every hope of memorising the great spell she’d spent weeks weaving. Each rune, Ash had explained on one of her first nights as a teacher, was as a musical note, woven into the world at the moment of its creation. Time itself followed the beat of a song so complicated no one person could comprehend its full extents – Magick, then, was the art of tweaking the tune around you just a little, though of course doing so required great knowledge of what each note did, of which could be altered safely and which formed the central melody everything would fall apart without.

“Of course,” Ash had added after a long pause, “that’s just how I see it. Ask a thousand wizards how magic works, you’ll come back with a thousand completely different explanations. Some will tell you we live in a gigantic machine full of pipes and cogs and levers, and that magic is unscrewing something or reversing a flow. Others think it’s the world’s own language, the one it spoke to itself before we’d learned to mimic it. But I like music the most.”

If it is a language, Anthera remembered thinking at the time, then it must have every word, not just ours. It must have all the darknesses. It must have niithsang.

Presently, though, the girl was scowling. Thinking of the spell as a song was supposed to help her learn it, but how could she do that when the wind was screaming and drowning out the melody as she hummed it? She felt a sudden need to tear her eyes from the mess of parchment strewn across her desk, to turn her focus to anything else. The night outside was clear despite the gale, the surrounding landscape lit up by a large full moon. The plateau was visible in its entirety, and seemed much smaller now than when she’d first traversed it, like a sudden clearing amidst the web of cliffs and crevices surrounding them. What would her father think of this place? And of her choice to spend the last days of her childhood here?

Anthera’s eyes narrowed, spotting movement in the distance. A great eagle was soaring far above, and she though she could see only its dark silhouette against the pale moon, she knew the bird – its feathers were grey like smoke and it flew past almost every night, travelling southward towards the valleys a few miles away. She opened the window, a shiver ailing her as the storm blew into the study and extinguished half the candles in a breath. Nightgown wrapped securely around her, Anthera clambered onto the desk and leaned out into the icy air. It was time to confirm a suspicion.

So she jumped, screaming out into the wind as she fell. Her tune was slow and clumsy, and as the ground approached she feared it would fail entirely – but moments before impact it took hold and Anthera was a girl no longer. One small refrain was all she’d changed, and suddenly she rode the winds in the shape of a sparrow, taking to the skies to match the eagle’s speed.

She followed it for a time, humming the melody as they passed over ravines and spired stone obelisks. Eventually her quarry flew low, dipping into a gorge beneath a rock face that rose like billows of smoke from a fire. The moon was overhead now, illuminating a crystalline pool of water at the cliff’s base. The water was deep. There might be niithsang down there – from this distance, Anthera couldn’t tell.

The eagle landed on one of the mossy stone banks and – as expected – turned to a person. For a time Ash merely stood gazing into the water, still as the scene around her. Down here, there was no breeze to sway her dark hair. Drawing closer, Anthera spotted something small and wooden clutched in her hands – a fiddle, the same one Ash had shown her during the lesson about all the ways people make music.

A solemn wail rang out as Ash drew bow across strings, and she continued for minutes, unaware of the eyes that watched her from behind. Her tune was slow and wistful, and once again Anthera found herself thinking of the home that must now lie abandoned, rot seeping into its wooden slats. The song grew and grew in intensity, until Ash messed up a note and cursed in frustration, lowering the bow once again.

She turned at the sound of footsteps, stopping only once she’d locked eyes with Anthera – now a girl again, having lost her own melody at some point in the performance. Ash looked weary and lost, but Anthera caught no anger or disdain at being followed. She opened her mouth to speak but Ash cut her off, the ghost of a smile gracing the woman’s lips.

“What did you think?”

“It was…” Anthera’s breath caught in her throat. She’d been living with Ash for almost a year now, eating her food and studying her texts, and yet in this moment she felt they were speaking for the first time. Was this why she was always away? Why hide it for so long?

“Do you play the same song every night?” Anthera managed, and Ash laughed. “Almost,” she said, then her gaze fell earthward. “I’ve been doing it since long before you arrived. I still haven’t managed to play the whole thing.”

“What’s it called?”

“Nothing. It was written by… a friend.” Anthera waited for her to continue. She didn’t.

“What happened?”

“…her song ended. Sooner than it should’ve.”

“Can’t you start it again? Isn’t that what wizards do?” A long pause, and when Ash didn’t reply she added gingerly: “Is that what you’ve been trying to do?”

Ash shook her head. “I’m afraid not. I told you: There are some bits you can’t touch, or you’d change the piece so much all of reality would get distorted. Time is one of those bits. And death is part of time.”

Another deep breath as Anthera thought about this. “I’ve been working on a spell-”

“I know.”

Against her better judgement, Anthera leaned over the bank’s edge, gazed into the same moonlit waters as Ash. Her eyes met the girl’s. She looked so different now. A fuller face, less pale, the horrible bruise from last time she’d seen her gone. Hair long, unkempt. Eyes aglow with fear and wonder.

A lump in her throat. She shouldn’t have looked. What good could come of this, bringing the girl in the lake to life only so she could die again with the sunrise? Why?

“Their songs will end too,” she said sadly.

“As they must.”

“It’s not fair. Why do our songs last a hundred years, and they only get one night? They’re born when we look into the water, and they die when the sun comes up. Why?”

The look Ash gave her was quizzical, and not unlike the ones she’d received all the other times she’d tried to broach this topic. But on this night, under this starry sky, it seemed the wizard finally understood. That the girls in the lake were living things, that something else looked out from behind their eyes. After all, how could they not live, when their songs were made from the same notes as her own?

“You can’t stop the song, Anthera. You can’t stop time.”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do!” Anthera shouted, desperately recalling each piece of the song she’d spent the last few months writing. “I found another way! We don’t have to stop anything, just change it! Like you’ve been teaching me this whole time!”

"Anthera, stop!" Ash's voice was almost a shout, firmer and angrier than she'd ever heard from the wizard before. She put a hand on the girl's cheek, forced the girl's eyes up from the water to meet her own. "Many - most, I should say - wizards would send you away just for suggesting this. To become a magician means to understand the power you're wielding, and the responsibility that comes with it. The notes you can change, and the notes you can’t. Do you understand?"

"But-"

"Anthera, do you understand?"

She gritted her teeth. "Yes."

But deep down, as Ash once again sprouted wings and left her alone with her nascent and fading reflection, Anthera was bitterly aware that she didn't. The world must be an evil place, to treat its creatures as it did, to give some beautiful hundred-year arias and others the briefest accompaniment. To gift some niithsang, and torment others with akhlys. And if the world wouldn't play fair, why should they be afraid to force it to?

No, Anthera thought as the moon vanished behind a cloud and plunged the scene into a deeper darkness, I don't understand at all.

——————————————————————————————————————

The time to leave the lonely tower came sooner than Anthera had expected. In the summer's closing days Ash fell sick, an illness harsh enough to rob her of voice and leave her unable to sing any spells into being. The witch soon grew grouchy and irritable, and ignored Anthera's every plea to let her cast a spell, one of the many she'd learned, and keep the sickness at bay. "A song cannot last longer than it is meant to," she'd croak weakly from under the blankets. "If this is to be the end of mine, then I accept it." And though Anthera did not understand now, just as she has not understood that night by the lake, she did not wish to defy her mentor so brazenly. Ash could make this decision for herself – just not for the rest of the world.

So it was a few solemn weeks after a more solemn burial that Anthera set out across the plateau, the possessions that had taken her through these two years all wrapped tight in a knapsack on her back. The road would be long and hard, but this time at least she knew where it would end, and her song of Finding would ensure she stayed on the right track. Still, the months were unpleasant, for the insects of the summer ceased their stings and bites only when the nights turned cold and akhlys began to set in earlier and earlier. There was no escaping it this time - no staying indoors with the lanterns blazing, no scavenging for patches of niithsang in the moonlight. So Anthera endured, and walked on through it or slept in its grasp. With any luck, she wouldn't end up like her father.

Eventually, though, she did arrive back in the place she'd once called home, and found that the cabin - cold and empty as it now was - had not succumbed to time as she thought it might. She took time here - and who wouldn't? - lit the hearth and looked around and made sure the place was well-remembered. But she could not linger long. The moon was already out, and in the depths of a forest even bigger and wilder than the one in her mind, a silver lake awaited.

The lake was not unlike the one she remembered, tangled tree roots rising from its waters as moonlight gleamed from the shingle shore opposite. The girl was there too, eyes weary and face pocked with insect-inflicted cuts and welts. Anthera watched, matching each movement as closely as she could, as the girl reached into her pack and drew out a small wooden fiddle.

Together, they began to play.

Anthera gasped, the air around her seeming to crackle with energy. She'd played before, and played songs infused with magic, but none had ever felt like this - it was as if the night itself was igniting, winds rising furiously to match the instrument's wails. The world itself fought against her, cruel thunder echoing in the distance to interrupt her spell. She wouldn't let it.

Silence fell. The girl in the lake had stopped.

Then, on her own, she began again.

Anthera did not stay, did not look back to admire her work - and after all, why should she? The scene would not be any different to the one imprinted in her mind, would never be different again as the pattern of chords played out one more time in their lazy loop. You're not the one I knew that night, Anthera thought as she walked away. She died alone that morning, blasted to pieces by the sunrise, and I couldn't bring myself to stay. I hope she forgave me.

I hope this is enough.

She did not see the white-plumed bird with the injured wing, its feathers forever stained red and its form forever mangled in the eddy it had been flying over the moment the spell was cast. She did not see the expression of the girl in the water, no longer ephemeral but a permanent fixture upon a lake that would stay silver long after the moon had set. An expression that, already, had begun contorting in pain.