Chapter [B5] 19 — A Sky Without Stars

Chapter [B5] 19 — A Sky Without Stars

Labby stared at the sky, determined. She would do this. She had to. There was no other way.

The sky above was thin and pale, stars faint even though dusk had already taken the color from the clouds. The dimness had been growing for weeks. Every night, the same sight: fewer lights, less response from the heavens, more of that faint film that turned breath razor-dry and settled in the throat.

She kept her eyes on the highest point she could pick out. If she let herself glance at the Tree that spread over the distant castle, the small voice in the back of her mind would start again, and she didn’t want to listen to it right now. Tonight she had a task. She set her hands on her thighs and tried to slow her breathing until it matched the city’s vibration.

“Labby, are you sure—” Zhang began, but one look from her made him pause.

“We must help Master. Don’t you want to, Zhang?”

Zhang fell silent. His mouth closed, then opened again, then closed. He had the look he wore in tactical rooms when someone asked him to choose between two bad options.

“But the path to the Lunar Court, the stars have dimmed. You know how treacherous it is now. Reaching it will require you to wade through miasma.”

Labby rolled her shoulders once and let the coil of thunder at the base of her neck settle. She tipped her chin up. “Labby will do so gladly for her Master.”

“Do you think your Master would be happy if you hurt yourself for him?”

She knew the answer he wanted from her. She also knew the answer in her chest. Her hands curled until her claws touched her palms. She would attempt this, and so Zhang carried on.

He exhaled, the breath misting white. “All right,” he said, resigned rather than convinced. He stepped closer, and gravity thinned above her head and thickened under her heels, turning the lift into a slope instead of a wall. “On my count. One. Two.”

The air cupped her calves and pressed up. The platform fell away.

Second by second, they reached closer to the moon. The mountain lights shrank to coins, then to beads, then to dull glows. The wind lost its bite and turned into a steady flow across her face. She kept her body narrow to cut through it. The sky’s thinness changed to a different thinness, her mouth full of that dry, wrong taste the miasma carried. She held her breath for three counts, exhaled through her nose for three counts, and masked her throat with a veil of Chi so it didn’t reach deeper.

The miasma rose to meet them, layering and sticking, making her feel fundamentally wrong. She let her thunder gather closer around her bones. Not a showy crackle, not a waste, not like she usually instinctively did. A tight wrap along her forearms, a braided strand around her spine, a small halo around her head to keep her senses clear. The practice had taken her weeks to learn. She had broken a workbench once and scorched a wall twice before she could hold it this close without it jumping away.

All for this. All for the Lunar Court.

“Steady,” Zhang called from behind, voice pressed flat by the height. The gravity he carried nudged her out of a dark pocket and into a clearer band.

She nodded once. Her eyes watered. The dim stars became smudges behind a gray film. The moon, when she found it, looked tired. It wasn’t a feeling, it was a surface fact: the edges softened, the light dulled, the face hidden deeper than usual. The distance stretched. She could feel it in her joints, the way steps grew longer without the ground moving any closer.

Her chest tightened. The miasma thickened until every inhalation felt sticky. It clung to the Chi at her throat and tried to rip it out of shape. Her hands trembled once. She bared her teeth without sound. Pain pricked along the line of her jaw.

Then Labby unleashed her lunar Chi with her dragon thunder. Rising through the sky, miasma enveloped her, choked her, tempting her with the fleeting desire to give up and fall.

No. Labby was not going to give up.

She pulsed her Qi, counting silently in her mind, and matched them to the beat she used when she had been practicing against Leiyu all that time ago.

Her lungs burned. She shaped her Chi to follow her desired path. Her fingers spread. Sparks moved over her skin and then pulled back under it.

The first pulse cleared a palm’s breadth around her face, a tiny bubble of protected space before it collapsed a moment later. The second let her see three stars that hadn’t been there a moment before. The third hit a pocket of residue that fought back and made her teeth buzz, and she pressed harder into it until it broke apart. ℝä𐌽ȏᛒƐṤ

Lightning crackled around her, then dispersed as each pulse faded, but each time the miasma was slower to reclaim the space, thinner when it returned.

She could do this.

She spotted another dark mass heading towards her, but as she readied herself to scream through it, push through, her surroundings changed. A single blink, she stood within the Lunar Court once again.

The Court’s air met her face and didn’t scrape. It held a coolness that came from shade rather than from the absence of heat. Her ears stopped ringing. She kept her knees locked for a breath so they wouldn’t fold under her and embarrass her.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

She stood at the edge of the grand terrace. The Lunar Court spread outward in polished slabs, pale as fresh snow but with depth in the grain. Silver-white lanterns hung from thin arches. The light wasn’t bright; it was even, soothing to the eyes. The long tables were set in careful rows with low cushions.

Bowls of fruit had been arranged in ascending sizes and a sequence of shades that would have pleased Master, and the sequence repeated across the tables without a single misplacement.

In her other visit there had been music. Flutes, bells, a steady drum soft enough to touch the chest without thudding. Now the space held no sound beyond wind at the edges and the faintest ring from the lanterns’ cores.

She stared at the lunar spirits, who looked slightly different than before. They were still ethereal maidens, but now dimmer, sadder. Their robes, usually bright against the pale floor, had lost luster. The threads didn’t catch the light the way they had during festivals. The hair ornaments hung precisely, but the angles no longer looked sharp; they sagged a finger’s width lower. Their eyes watched, clear but muted.

They were not celebrating. There was still a feast laid out, but even the lunar spirits seemed disinterested in the food and elixirs. The steam that rose from the soups didn’t carry spice. The cups held liquid that thickened and didn’t scent the air. A tray of rice cakes sat untouched, the pattern on their tops crisp and useless.

“So you have finally reached here, young one,” one of the moon spirits said, looking at her with a sad smile.

The voice carried in an almost muffled manner. Labby turned fully and placed her fists together before her chest. She kept her head high out of habit and respect. “Labby has come to ask if you have any way to help Master. Labby will do anything.”

She didn’t need to think through her words. She had practiced every version of this request during the last months, next to the outer wall where the wind didn’t carry sound into rooms where people were sleeping.

Her heart beat hard enough to make her chest feel packed. She could feel each thump in her fingertips, dull and even.

The lunar spirits’ expressions dimmed further. The spirit representing the half moon let out a gentle sigh, her shoulders lowering the smallest amount. “Labby, it is a disciple’s duty to uphold their master’s reputation, to carry his legacy forward. What your master is doing in sacrificing his life for you, for his friends, for this world… It is a task entrusted to him and him alone. There is no way to replace him, no one else who can take his place. What he is, what he has become, it is unprecedented and irreplicable.”

A tightness grew under Labby’s sternum. She struggled to keep her voice steady. “There must be some way to help Master.” Labby dropped to her knees on the cold stone hard enough the impact traveled up her thighs. “Labby will do anything.”

She bowed until her forehead reached the floor, then kowtowed to the ground repeatedly, even as her head began to bleed. “Please, please help Labby.”

The drops spread warm over skin and cooled in the air. She didn’t lift her hands to check. Each bow made her vision white at the edges for a breath, then narrow, then clear. She didn’t slow. The movement itself held her together. The words kept coming because stopping them would be worse than pain.

“Foolish spirit!” One of the moon spirits thundered. The sound filled the Court and made the lanternlight tremble. “What you are doing insults your master. You refuse to carry on his legacy, you would besmirch his teachings. Do you think he would appreciate what you are doing now?”

The reprimand reached her shoulders and pressed down. Labby’s spine flinched. She squeezed her eyes shut once, then opened them and met the edge of the spirit’s robe. The pattern along the hem was stitched with stars that no longer matched the sky above.

“Labby does not care!” she screamed back. The volume ripped the inside of her throat and she barely noticed. “All Labby cares about is helping her Master. Can you or can you not?”

The nearest spirits looked at her with muted surprise, before one gestured to the food, with the slightest hint of displeasure. The gesture was elegant and complete, a sweep that invited and condoned. “Eat it, become one of us, stay here, and we will consider helping you.”

The meaning behind the offer was something even Labby understood. Sacrifice yourself, and then we’ll consider helping your master.

The food here would change her. Joining would bind her. Staying would remove her from the places where Master’s presence brushed the edge of her soul in the night and made it easier to breathe for a few heartbeats at a time.

Her legs moved on hard certainty. The pattern on the nearest bowl showed a rabbit in a field under a full moon. The rabbit’s fur had been carved to catch light that wasn’t there. The bowl felt room-warm against her fingertips.

The scent rose: sweetness with a strong under-layer that usually meant ginseng or lotus or something older, something aged in a jar and sealed in a cellar that most people would never see. The first steam touched her nose and made it burn.

None of it mattered. If this was what she must do…

Labby lifted the piece with her right hand, her mouth opened because the sooner she chose, the sooner the help would come, the sooner she would be doing rather than asking—

—when a moon spirit grasped her palm, removed the food, and pushed her.

There was no time to protest. The spirit snatched the food from her before it touched her lips and set it back on the tray with soundless precision. The push landed at the center of her chest, a flat contact through cloth and skin and muscle that sent every tendon along her spine into alignment, then took the floor from under her.

The terrace dropped away. The lantern light slipped behind a veil. The Court’s pale stone receded at a steady speed that didn’t match falling through air. There was no rush of wind. There was pressure and then absence, the change between inside and outside drawn out over a long breath.

She kept her arms tucked so she wouldn’t flail and waste the little control that remained. Her stomach rose and then settled into her throat as the miasma met her again. It went for the moisture in her eyes first, then pressed across her nose and mouth, then tried to find the gap under her collar.

She fell from the Lunar Court, through the miasma, back into the sky.

At once the layers returned, the drag and clinging of unnatural darkness. She had to make choices quickly or she would tumble without shape and slam into a miasma strip sideways.

She brought her thunder close again in a wrap and threw it out in a brief crackling nova that pushed the worst of the residue away from her face. Her ears popped, her nails digging into her palms. Her eyes watered again, then dried until the lids scraped. She smelled the bitter trace of the Court’s elixirs on her own breath, then it vanished under the wrong smell of the night.

—right into Zhang’s arms.

His pull took hold before she saw him. The gravity shifted around her and drew her into the exact space where he was waiting. He looked down at her face, searching for wounds with the practiced calm that had gotten them both through too many frantic days in the caverns, expression hopeful.

Her tears gave away the result. She hadn’t noticed them start. They were hot against the cold air and cold against her cheeks a breath later. They made clean tracks through the fine grit the miasma left behind.

She tried to close her mouth and couldn’t manage it at first. Her lower lip trembled. The ache in her chest grew too large to hold with breath discipline and the small techniques she used to keep steady when people were watching.

“Ah,” was all Zhang could say. “So they refused to help.”

Labby could only sob.