The Blighted Eye

It is a well-known fact that, when the night pins atop the day, lunacy rises.

Youth play pranks under the veil of darkness (inevitable: preying on the shard of bone that sits in the Grand Hall, dipping it in glitter before returning the rib to its pedestal; possible: going for the city’s jugular, taking the scrolls of the Lost Years and writing DICK in the margins). Beggars and thieves will steal across the iced-over canals, clamber into the shallow boats caught in the white-blue freeze, and reap their drawers of prizes. Cloaked creatures slip away from their daytime work and steal across town by the cover of night, revelling in anonymity. Men answer baser instincts. Women learn to kill.

She will not be found when they do.

On the morning of the blighted eye, Ana crouches low in the snowdrift. Tendrils of ice and frost brush her grey cloak, and a heady frost laces her lashes.

At midnight, the first song rose from the city, and the music has not stopped since. Heraldic wisdom floats above the ice and shingles. It is a weapon wielded by boys so young they cannot yet hit low notes.

The harmonies are pretty up close, but haunted by the time they reach Ana, where they travel on biting winds. She can’t see any of it across the icefield, but she has been around long enough to know what takes place within the city’s stone walls on days like today. 

From the steps of the cathedral, the soloists appeal to the sky. For the duration of their hymn, they stare down the sun’s rays, begging peace against the dark. When their number has ended, they stumble down the steps, lashes wet with tears. The less devout boys, who dare shut their eyes against the brightness, can usually fumble for the handrails. But the ones who believe the most, who commit to their task, see the world in a white haze. 

When they should be playing, these young boys are held still while the weight of the world is set upon their narrow shoulders. Rather than learning to count or write, they’re urged to make sacrifices they cannot understand—and while they are still too small to stop it. 

“Gramma,” the boy’s voice is a reedy whine. “If I’m not back, they’ll find someone else to sing my part.” 

She knows this. It is exactly what she has hoped for. She steels herself against his tears.

Dressed for the occasion, the wide sleeves of his cassock swallow his little arms. He shivers, and the gold embroidery at his wrists catches light from the sky. “If I don’t sing it, I won’t be able to save us.”

She resents whoever taught him this fairytale, though that flings a wide net. 

Often, she wishes her daughter had not been born so long after the Shamanic Wars. There was so much more world to learn before the valleys gave way and the mountains were raised. Grand ideas were crushed under rocks and reduced to pebbles. Entire schools of thought reduced so that, unless you knew them before, you would not think twice about them now.

Within their enclave, entire generations were raised on superstition. Now, they have built their governments, their faith, their schools, and their culture on a framework of moronic folklore. Dark-blaming nonsense. 

As if an unbroken afternoon could have kept the world whole. As if the sparks were not already on the wind, as if the kindling had not been long-dried.

They are so quick to shrug off her generation’s memories. It isn’t hard; there aren’t so many of them left to weave their yarn now. 

The governing generation would rather speak of how the darkness sieged them before the fall, then curse it, as if the sun and moon had not been lovers before. They spiral as the shadows set into stories of how the dead were raised. How the earth reshaped: cut the land with canyons, pierced the sky with new peaks.

Ana feels as though she alone remembers eating sticky candy by lamplight in the mid-afternoon. Back when they treated days like this as a holiday. All the schoolchildren would meet in the snow-covered parklands to play blind man’s bluff, and their parents would drink mullwine, bundled in hand-knit scarves. When the sun ducked behind the moon, they would pause and reflect, holding in their hearts and minds all they held dear.

No one else fondly remembers that strange and beautiful hour when the heavens were robin’s-egg blue and the earth below sparkled with candlelight. Anyone who does knows better than to say so. She might as well be the sole survivor.

She turns to face her grandson head-on, her shoulder against the city. When she moves, a bone cracks in her knees.

“Nothing is going to happen.” She has an accent from another time, from a state that slid down the new mountainside, from a city that no longer exists.

Bogdan stamps his foot, though the snow absorbs the sound, “It’s the blighted eye, Gramma. If we don’t sing, the blood roses will come and the dead will follow and the earth will break again.”

Sharp disapproval flashes across Ana’s face. His recitations sound like a Church pamphlet, but she can’t blame the priests more than she blames her own daughter.

How did I raise a fool? Ana would ask her when they fought. Her daughter would shake her head at her dolt of a mother. 

Reality is happening under your nose, and you’re stuck in the past. People like you, Mom …

His eyes well, and it’s only a moment before his full cheeks grow slippery with tears. “I have to go! I’m soon!”

He is trying to tug her now, to drag her back down the path to the city’s gate. She may not be the force she was once, but she is more than a match for a child of his size. It is how she got him here. It is why he will stay. Her body is deadweight, resistant to his pulling.

“Gramma, please!”

She hates to see him cry, hates that his face is growing puffy and red under the dying light. But there is nothing he can say that will persuade her to loosen her grip on his cassock. He is too young to decide for himself if it is better to be here or among the criminals and the burning boys. She will decide for him.

“Bogdan, no,” she says firmly. “We are staying right here. The blighted eye is just the sun that warms you and the moon that sings you to sleep, meeting.”

When she used to say these things to her daughter, her daughter would roll her eyes into her head. She would scowl, disdainful of her mother’s old-world views, her old-country voice. Your generation broke the world, she’d say, having reached a bittersweet age when she was proud and outspoken and no longer listened to her mother. You left us to clean up your messes.

So Ana would be left in their boarded-up house while her daughter went to watch the young boys sing against the blighted eye. She would have no choice but to say, Take the bat, and her daughter would say, Obviously. I’m not an idiot. 

Then Ana alone would hold a plank of wood stabbed with nails, guarding their meager possessions against the scavengers who rose with the dark. She swore at passersby and did not open the door for anyone, not even when she heard screaming, not even when blood pooled and spread from the street into her home.

“Bogdan, nothing will happen. You are safer here than there, do you understand?”

His tears keep coming. By the time they reach his round jawline, they are slow and cold. “I need to save them. They’re going to die.”

As if on cue, a shriek rings from the city. Ana flinches. 

Bogdan would not believe her if she told him of the peppermints they sucked under the daytime moon, would not understand that they gathered and reflected, full of love for the world. He has grown up like her daughter did. The Church carriages picked him up at midnight, and he left behind a house with boarded windows, his father waiting with a gun for the day to unfold.

Her daughter will be furious that she stole Bogdan from his duties, that Ana sneaked him through the narrow alleys, over bridges, and under the gallows outside of the city. Ana has long accepted that her daughter is lost to her. Bogdan is still young, still has a hope of growing up smarter.

The moon is within kissing distance of the sun now, and Bogdan looks to her in a final, desperate appeal. She holds him firmly by the wrists and shakes her head.

Across the icefield, a song fades to its end. 

Bogdan gathers a deep breath, tilts his wet face to the sky, and sings in a wavering, pained voice.

O, Dark, O, Dark, Unto the Snow!

She slaps a hand over his eyes, forcing a barrier between his stare at the sun. He fights against her fingers, and she wrestles him under her arm. He loses all musicality, singing into her overcoat. He doesn’t sing to tune but to be heard. 

Yonder blood roses, be Staid!

“Bogdan, stop,” Ana commands over his singing, but he doesn’t, of course. He is his mother’s son. It isn’t the songs she hates—though they are vapid hymns for the new age—but she does fear attention, that someone will be drawn to his call and drag them both to the heart of the dark.

She struggles against his wiggling. Her hands are sticky with his tears.

That the Light the Dark must know

Evil away have we Prayed!

The mountainside rumbles.

It is a sound with no equal: the dull shift of a monument, the earth resettling. 

“Bogdan—” she has only enough time to hunch her shoulders over his small, singing body before, over, above, and around them, snow.