Disappearing into the Night

On the night the moon falls from the sky, Neve is leaning out of her window, watching it.

Of course she is. Neve has a knack for those sorts of things; she can predict exactly when the sky will lighten, whether or not there will be rain, and how soon the mist will clear. Her subjects speculate that it’s because she’s the daughter of the sun.

Neve is born from heat and fire, and it shows. If you look at her for a few minutes, you can see those sparks in her eyes, banking a little each time she blinks. She never gets cold, not even when the snow starts to fall, not even when the cattle huddle into one another and refuse to move. She is untouchable.

Not that anyone minds. Being a little bit out of the ordinary is fine when your father is a god. People like Neve. She prevents the ponds from freezing over in the winter and can always keep a fire going overnight. Which is why, when Neve walks out of the palace that night, the guards don’t try to stop her or ask her where she’s going. They let her pass by with a glance and a deferential nod.

Neve moves out of sight fairly quickly. Her legs aren’t long, but they eat up the distance in great gulps. She moves faster, faster, faster, passing trees and crossing plains in an instant, because now that nobody is watching her, Neve can run. She can let her legs fly in that way they do and let that fire in her eyes come to life, blazing her a path to the fallen moon. By morning, that trail of fire will be gone—quenched, as if nothing has ever been there. But for now it’s there, and so is Neve, and that’s all there is in the whole world because that fiery trail is everything and the heat and light are consuming her and filling her and telling her, you are home and she is home, for that moment she is home, and she forgets what she’s doing and just runs. Just runs.

Until the trail cuts off.

Neve stumbles out into the cold darkness of the night. Her vision expands. The world clicks back into place.

She ignores the aching, dark place inside her that was filled with flames a moment ago.

“Selene?” Neve croaks out, voice ravaged by throat burns that will disappear by dawn. “Where are you?”

She turns in a wide circle, looking for that familiar silver aura. Looking for a reflection on the autumn leaves, each shriveled and contorted like a crone’s hand. Neve takes a few steps forward and blinks hard, trying to coax her night vision into sharpening. Still nothing. She starts moving again and tries to summon her broken voice.

“Sel—” Neve is cut off as she trips over a log, hands knees elbows tumbling and scraping on the ground. She stands back up and brushes herself off, aiming an “Ow” and a kick at the log, which groans.

Neve continues on. Stupid log—

She freezes.

Neve had known the moon goddess once, before she had been sent down to earth as a gift—a tame wife for a favored king.

She closes her eyes and turns slowly.

Selene had radiated cold light and dreams back then. People had been able to tell she was approaching before they had even seen her.

She kneels down.

Neve had been the only person who had never known when Selene was coming. She had always been caught off guard. No matter how hard she tried, she had never been able to sense Selene the way everyone else seemed to be able to.

She opens her eyes.

It’s her.

***

Neve was in the middle of sneaking out of the palace on the night she saw Selene. It wasn’t that she had any plans, it was just that she couldn’t sleep. How could anyone sleep? The most interesting things happened when the stars came out. It was like once you saw the stars, you had permission to make mischief. And Neve loved mischief.

She could already hear music, playing very faintly. Strange. Neve hadn’t known there was going to be a revel, or that they were allowed this close to the sun’s palace. Helios didn’t like to be disturbed during his nightly rest. But Neve could hear laughter and singing, and who would notice one more among the crowd? She slipped down the palace hill cautiously and straightened up to survey the scene.

Lights. That was her first impression. Lights so blinding and numerous that they made the area into a patch of day. Lights draped over every possible hanging surface and the ground, too. People with strings of lights tangled around their necks and ankles and wrists. Light pooling in every corner and crevice. Neve thought she might go blind. She loved it.

Her immediate second thought was: music. The sounds she’d heard earlier, but multiplied a hundred fold, and it was so, so different up close. It was grand and loud and impossibly fast and it made Neve’s heart want to gallop right out of her chest. It caught her up close and made her want to spin forever and ever and ever and ever. When she listened closely, the music danced around her, teasing her, showing her every impossible thing she’d ever dreamed of in the dead of night and making it more fantastimagical. It encircled her and held on tight, whispering directly into her ear as if it was made for her, just her, only her until she was left dizzy, reeling, wanting more. Wanting it all, but knowing that she couldn’t have it, knowing that if she kept listening, she wouldn’t be able to resist and would dance until her feet bled, her heart burst, or the music stopped. She wanted it to stop. She hoped it would never stop. She wanted it to promise her everything and nothing and keep going and keep going and keep going—

I would die here, Neve realized, taking an involuntary step forward. I would happily die like this.

The song had no clear source. Even though Neve was used to looking at bright lights, these ones were so disorienting that she kept on turning in circles, unable to find her way to the center of the revel and no matter how far she walked she always ended up somewhere near the outside and all the while the music kept playingplayingplaying and Neve’s heart kept beatingbeatingbeatingbeating and she didn’t realize that golden ichor was trickling out of her nose or that her skin was glowing a feverishly bright color until in the middle of a step, she collapsed.

When Neve woke up, she was lying out in the dark. Apparently, someone had dragged her unconscious body out of the party. They probably hadn’t even checked if she was still alive. The party must go on, Neve thought dryly. Corpses can wait till morning.

Neve double checked that she wasn’t dead—though she felt like it—and hauled her aching body up, propelled by the memory of the music. She had to find it, had to hear it again. Each step hurt. It was slow going at first, but the pain melted off as she got closer to the revel and the music got louder. Neve didn’t get lost this time. Or maybe she did and didn’t notice. In the end, she arrived, and that was all that mattered.

Neve finally got close enough to see where the song was coming from (heart beating like water falling from a glass). She expected to see a place. A box, maybe. But the ground was clear except for the millions of lights strewn across it. Neve looked around—and there—in the middle of the party—at the heart of the music—draped in thousands of lights—

Stood a goddess soaked in song. Neve had never seen her before, in her father’s court during the day or at a revel during the night. She spun and laughed, flinging music off her like drops of water, and where she went, people followed like moths to a flame. Because that was what she was. A cold, hot, beautiful flame. A flame to match the sun. A flame that far outstripped anything Neve had ever seen.

Neve locked eyes with her for a second before she turned away.

She was incandescent.

Down in Greece, mortals believed that the gods had originally created them with four arms, four legs, two faces. But upon seeing them, Zeus had cut them in half, fearing their united power. Condemning them to eternal loneliness. Leaving them forever searching for their other halves. Here, standing in front of this eternal flame, Neve could believe that that was real.

***

Neve’s father, Helios, only took interest in things that shone as brightly as he did, which was why he had never paid attention to Neve. She was too dull. Too much like her mother, her aunts clucked as they fussed with her hair—the mother she hadn’t seen since age five. Most likely Helios had married her off to a minor god or mortal king once he’d gotten bored with her. Neve was okay with being invisible, though. She didn’t want to disappear. Women disappeared all the time, especially now that her prettiest cousins and sisters were beginning to approach marriageable age.

Right now, the newest ‘thing’ in Helios’s court was some musician. Neve hadn’t actually seen her or listened to her music, only heard from her cousins about how Helios couldn’t stop talking about her. This new, upcoming talent that he had found and cultivated, he bragged, throwing a possessive arm around her shoulders and taking a half-step in front of her. 

Neve’s sisters also told her about the way Helios wrapped his arms around the musician’s waist. About how she trailed behind him quietly, flinching every time he turned to her. About how sometimes, the musician would appear with bruises on her graceful throat from thick male fingers.

Neve’s father, Helios, only took interest in things that shone as brightly as he did because he loved to watch them fade.

Her cousins reminded Neve of why she was grateful that she escaped Helios’s attentions, why she was grateful that most people in Helios’s court had forgotten she existed, and if they saw her from time to time, they mistook her for just another nymph, just another daughter whose name they couldn’t quite recall but who they were sure they’d seen before. They warned her not to show her face and to keep her head down or you’ll end up like us, and you don’t want that, as they walked stiffly and wore long sleeves to cover the handprints on their arms and cried at night when they thought she couldn’t hear.

Staying away during the day also gave Neve time to catch up on the rest she’d been missing. She could no longer sleep at night; when she went to bed, she swore she could hear strains of music following her and pulling her outside.

The night after that night, as she had taken to thinking of it, she had gone back out to try to find the revel again. It was gone. She had been out every night since, pinching herself until dawn, and not once had she heard music or seen lights.

Hope can only last so long. By the second month, Neve was bored, desperately bored with waiting for it to come back for her. She needed to distract herself. She needed to find something interesting. Nothing was interesting after that night.

Despite her sisters’ warnings, Neve decided she would go to Helios’s palace during the day. Who would notice one more among the crowd? She wanted to see the musician who had captured Helios’s interest for more than a month. She wanted to erase the music that kept playing in her head and replace it with something else, something different. She wanted to stop thinking about her.

***

It was the desire to get her face out of Neve’s head that finally drove Neve out of the fields and into the palace, regretting and hoping with every step, on the day of the musician’s biweekly performance. Neve wished she knew the musician’s name; she would ask one of her sisters to find out later. She stood inconspicuously behind the seats of her father’s performance hall and waited impatiently, because every moment that went by was another moment that her face floated through Neve’s mind, and her music played Neve’s body. For the thousandth time, Neve closed her eyes and tried to banish her face from her eyelids. She could hear the musician come in, the collective breath the audience released as they settled in for the performance, the blinding light as Helios entered and made his way to his seat in the front row, and still she could see her face, moonlight beneath the stars, and it wouldn’t go away, and Neve didn’t want it to go away. If she stayed and listened and her face disappeared forever—

She couldn’t listen to this, couldn’t let the music drive her away. Neve had to leave. She turned and ran towards the exit. All eyes turned towards her, gold and white and red and orange and blue, the colors of the sun. The music started.

Neve stopped.

Because no, it couldn’t be, but yes, it could, and all of a sudden her heart started beating again even though she hadn’t realized it had been still.

Moonlight made music. Moonlight-made music.

Neve turned around and locked eyes with her.

***

Her name was Selene, Neve found out from her sister that night. The goddess of the moon, descended from the stars, come out of nowhere. Probably as old as the Titans, but not as powerful.

Neve attended every single one of her performances.

Because of the attention she’d attracted at the first performance she’d been to, people watched her constantly. They were probably trying to figure out where she’d come from and who she was and if she was someone of note.

Her sisters told her to stay away. Attention wasn’t good. Sooner or later, their father would see her, and that would be the end of the freedom she’d enjoyed for the first part of her immortal life. When she kept going, they stopped warning her and started avoiding her.

She didn’t tell them that she couldn’t stop coming. Even if she wanted to, the music in her memory pulled her towards the palace twice a week, and the more she went, the more she couldn’t stay away. And maybe it wasn't just the music anymore. Maybe there was something else pulling Neve towards the palace, something with hair like stardust and eyes like the space in between the earth and the stars.

At the end of each performance, Selene would look into the crowd and find Neve. They had never spoken before and probably never would. But they could share a look

in that moment

that spoke enough for a lifetime

before Neve had to slip out of the palace and Selene was dragged off by Helios.

It had only been a matter of weeks before Helios had called Neve to his court and asked who she was.

It had only been a matter of days before she had disappeared.

On the night the moon fell from the sky, Neve knew why. In Helios’s court, girls and goddesses went missing like stars in the dawn’s rosy light.

***

Neve lies down beside Selene. In the morning, Neve will have to explain to her husband why she’s been missing all night and Selene will have to explain which mortal king she’s intended for. But for now, the daughter of the sun and the goddess of the moon lie curled together, legs intertwined, arms finding one another even in sleep.