Yonder and beyond, you will find a lake.
Mirror sheen, still as death.
At its heart, seek thou there the unseen path, revealed only when the stars are right.
The path carved only in the elder days, where twin black suns rose and Arcana had yet to earn her name.
Upon the night the Black Moon shines its accursed light upon Arcana, shall the veil suffer your trespass.
Make haste for the gilded monolith, gold and black.
In the heart of the Isle of Mists, time immemorial.
For the way was not upon stone, nor stair, nor gate.
But the lake.
Tread lightly, the old man had said, his voice a blade drawn, for the Gilded One and his servants walked still the corridors of that monolith, timeless and eternal.
Where eons immemorial unwrought even the might of the Astrastars.
Those words weighed ceaselessly upon her mind.
A persistent presence upon her thoughts.
Her sight was set upon the placid surface of the lake.
Illara beheld the ruins of the Nameless City.
The submerged districts of the monolithic city.
Its submerged streets long forsaken by its dwellers.
Its high walls and battlements long crumbled.
The lake had long reclaimed the ruins.
Illara regarded the ruins in silence.
The ruins seemingly peered back; their stones offered no answers.
They stepped past the towering city gate of the wall-less city.
They moved through the deserted avenue and the grand plaza.
They moved towards the lake.
The land resisted them, not by pulling them down, but by making every step a trespass.
But they made good time.
They left the Nameless City behind them and made their ways closer to the ruins.
To the monolith in the reflection.
The Temple of the Eternal Night.
As they drew nearer, the shadowed ruins revealed itself.
“Wait, Matt,” Illara whispered.
A gate stood yawning before them.
Once monumental, now stood as a solitary monument.
The walls and battlements once erected around it was half collapsed or gone.
The stones cracked and blackened.
Beyond the tree-line they can see a cobblestone plaza submerged in a sheen of water, the stones visible beneath like bones beneath skin.
Tattered yellow banners hung from broken lintels, fluttering in a wind Illara could not feel.
The cloth was too intact to be truly ancient.
Yet Illara felt as though centuries, millennia.
The banners drifted lazily, stirred by a memory.
Atop the banners, worn but visible.
The sign they chanced upon in the broken settlement.
This one more refined, more defined.
Beneath it, a crude cairn and offering.
Fruits and meat, rotting in the air.
Illara’s skin prickled.
“Come, let us go.” Matthias said.
They moved through the drowned plaza, stepping between half-submerged stones and algae-slick rubble.
Their reflections wavered beneath them.
Illara could not help but glance down.
Each time she did, the reflection came back too clean.
Too pristine.
Too perfect.
On either side, obelisks rose from pools like black teeth.
Illara brushed a gauntleted hand against one and felt grooves beneath her palm.
Etched markings, faded carvings.
Not in the tongue native to the mortal children of Arcana.
The symbols were unfamiliar, and shaped in a way that resisted the eyes.
Lines that curved where they should cut.
Angles that did not agree with each other.
They slithered, they crawled.
Even looking at them a moment too long made her temples ache.
Matthias stepped close, eyes narrowing. “Do not read it.”
Illara closed her eyes and swallowed. “The words, they elude me.”
“Then perhaps,” he said, “you should not try.”
They passed deeper.
The monolith loomed larger, its gold trim rising like a crown’s edge.
Illara could have sworn she saw movement along its surface.
Not stained, not grimed.
Shadows.
Sliding where no light should cast them.
Then Matthias halted so abruptly Illara nearly collided with him.
“What is it?” she asked.
He raised a hand.
Silence.
A drop of water.
Barely audible.
Illara’s grip tightened on her crescent blade.
Illara’s hand went to her shotgun.
Matthias’s eyes flicked to her.
Matthias’s mouth tightened. “We are not alone.”
The submerged city was now roused.
The drowned plaza was silent.
The tense silence of the hunt.
No croaks of frogs, no hoots of owls and wind and insects.
A low wet churning came from somewhere deeper within the murk.
It might have been water shifting under roots.
It might have been something else.
Matthias shook his head.
Small, controlled.
Not yet. Not here.
Illara listened.
At first she heard only the swamp’s distant churning and the faint drip of water from broken stone.
Then she heard it.
A hiss.
A soft rattling.
Not wind.
Not reeds.
Bones against wood.
Illara’s eyes swept the plaza and the city edges.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Nothing moved.
She heard it then.
A croaking.
Long and persistent.
Throaty, as a frog.
“Broken.” Matthias whispered.
Illara nodded.
Broken remnants that haunt the drowned ring.
Where even the Pale Coil feared to tread.
The denizen of the submerged ruins.
Their ravenous eyes.
Hunger. Ravenous hunger.
Eyes.
A hundred pairs, perhaps a thousand, hidden in the drowned alleys and under collapsed roofs.
The Broken watched the pair with a patience older than hunger.
A ravenous horde.
“We should not venture within,” Matthias muttered, eyeing the shiny eyes.
“I agree,” Illara said. “I do not think they would dare accost us in the open.”
“But we are surrounded.” The Nightblade observed, “where should we go from here?”
She snapped her compass open.
The needle no longer pointed at the ruins.
But it swerved towards the lake.
“I do not think we will find ingress within the ruins.” she murmured.
“No.” Matthias’s gaze swept the ruins, “perhaps Astraria smiles upon us.”
They continued past the grand plaza.
A bazaar, perhaps, in the days of old.
Where the city was inhabited by the Pale Coil and the lake had yet to crept.
An inexorable tide of inevitability that forced the lizardmen out.
The eyes followed them, but they dared not approach.
The words of the two strangers within their midst travelled quickly through the tribes.
Mighty Astrastars, wielding weapons of starlight.
So they watched from afar.
Illara turned towards the lake.
Her compass pointed toward the lake.
The lake’s edge came.
The water lapped without sound, as if it refused to make waves.
The lake.
Still.
Mirror-sheen.
“They are still following.” Illara said.
“Yes, but as you said,” Matthias said, “they would not approach, come.”
He trotted towards higher ground.
The Nightblade deftly pulled himself up the roof of a submerged dwelling and gestured for Illara to join him.
The Mistwalker settled beside him.
She beheld the lake.
Placid. Calm. Inviolable.
She reached for a pebble, smoothed.
She casually tossed the pebble she held into the air.
She snatched it out of the air with a quick flick of her wrist.
She cast it towards the pool.
The pebble sailed through the air before vanishing into the still lake.
Illara regarded the pool.
Shallow pools gathered between exposed roots like black mirrors.
“Lara,” Matthias called.
She looked over just to see a wrapped pack flying at her.
Illara caught it deftly.
The glowing rune dissipated as she tore open the wrappings.
Cured ham, salted bacon and cheese between two thick wheat bread.
She bit into the sandwich.
Matthias took a seat beside her and tore open his supper too.
They ate in silence.
Both said nothing for a long time.
Matthias ate with his head slightly canted, his keen ears still listening to the sound beneath the silence of the world.
Illara reached into her pack for her waterskin.
She took a swig and handed it to Matthias.
Matthias took it and took a sip.
The brandy warmed them.
But the chill of the mist-haunted isle lingered.
She took another sip of the brandy and replaced it in her pack.
All the while, the Astrastars watched the ruins.
They watched the ravenous eyes watching them as they ate.
The mist descended.
It clung low, hugging the waterline.
It crawled around their calves as living tendrils probing for warmth.
But the lake remained mirror-still.
Illara looked down once and saw her reflection ripple.
One ripple.
Just once.
Then the lake settled again, too smooth, too perfect.
Matthias’s voice came low. “Stare not at the abyss.”
Illara forced her eyes forward. “What?”
Matthias didn’t answer immediately.
When he did, it was quiet enough that the swamp almost swallowed it.
“Lest it stares back.”
Illara smiled, “then we shall see who flinch first.”
She looked up then.
Finding reassurance in the night skies.
A narrow wound in the clouds—an absence in the mist—revealed a slice of the heavens.
Stars glittered faintly through the haze, pale pinpricks scattered across the void.
Above them the twin moons they knew so well.
Astraria. Vesperia.
The skies had never lied to her.
An Astrastar need only look up.
To the skies.
The stars will never forsake them.
The stars will always welcome them home.
The lights of the twin moons she knew so well were muted here, as though smeared behind glass.
One silver, one faintly blue-white.
Even diminished, they are a sight for sore eyes.
Illara’s throat tightened with a strange, unreasonable relief.
She reached for her compass.
Then she cast her eyes upon an impossible sight.
The reflection.
Between Astraria and Vesperia, where Arcana’s sky should be empty, hung a third moon.
Not bright.
But dark.
Black.
A black orb encircled by a pale halo, repelling the light of her sisters.
A moon cut from the night itself and stitched into the heavens with celestial pale threads.
Nautauri.
“No.” Illara whispered.
A moon without rune.
An omen.
A prophecy.
Seen only upon the oldest charts and the marble relief carved into Starspiral Cathedral’s floors. Illara had heard the name whispered softly among elder navigators.
A word spoken once, never reiterated.
Reverence and dread in the same breath.
Matthias stared.
His breath came slow and controlled, but his eyes betrayed him.
They widened, not in panic, but in recognition of a truth he did not want.
“That…,” he began.
Illara nodded, voice thin. “Yes.”
Nautauri shone unlike Astraria or Vesperia.
It eclipsed their radiance.
Its darkness bled into the air, into the mist, into the swamp below.
Into the lake.
Since they first came to the edge of the lake, its presence deepened the shade.
Nautauri was never seen.
But it could be seen now.
Upon the black mirror sheen of the lake.
Her haunting beauty.
Her black radiance.
Her terrifying, mesmerizing majesty.
Matthias’s gaze drifted across the lake.
He looked up into the skies.
He looked down then.
“Lara,” he whispered.
Illara followed his gaze.
Matthias pointed.
First at the lake.
“Look,” the Nightblade said.
“I see it,” the Mistwalker whispered, “the Black Moon.”
“No.” Matthias said, he turned to her.
“The stars.”
Illara’s furrowed her brows.
“I do not understand.”
“The reflection,” Matthias whispered.
As though raising his voice would invoke something terrifying.
Illara peered again.
Her eyes widened.
The stars upon the lake.
The constellation was strange.
Distorted.
A constellation from another eon.
A time before Arcana.
An age before the Astrastars.
The constellation of the Great Hunter.
Illara seen it in the skies.
But the Great Hunter was not reflected upon the lake.
Beneath the mirror-heaven, the ancient constellation of the Serpent Lord held dominion.
Illara had never seen the Serpent Lord in the Arcanian skies.
No one had.
For the Serpent Lord was said to have been slain long ago.
Struck down by the Great Hunter.
Yet here it hung, peering at them from beyond the lake.
Illara reached for her compass.
She snapped it open.
The compass pointed straight.
The lake held its own heavens.
Its surface reflected the sky so perfectly that the boundary between water and air seemed to vanish.
The black circle of Nautauri hung inverted upon the lake’s skin, a second moon beneath the world, as though the lake held its own heavens.
Illara felt her stomach drop.
The lake held its own heavens.
Illara lingered upon the thought.
The lake held its own heavens.
“Maybe it did,” she said softly.
“What?” Matthias said, askance.
Illara rose.
She had never seen it.
No one had ever seen it.
She had only heard the name whispered in myth.
Tales bound to ruined cities and plays best left unread.
She did not speak the name.
But she knew of the name of the Lake at the Edge of Night.
The invocation rested on the tip of her tongue.
She felt it in her bones.
Ancient, primal fear.
Matthias’s gaze held the lake as if he feared to blink.
Illara reached for her compass one more time.
She needed to be certain.
Her fingers trembled slightly as she flipped it open.
The needle did not spin.
It did not drift.
It pointed steadily toward the lake.
Not toward the living forest.
Not toward the ruins.
Toward the heart of the lake.
Illara snapped the compass shut and pocketed it.
She knew it instinctively.
She knew it in her heart.
She knew it in her blood.
She knew where she must go.
Beyond the lake.
Illara’s eyes followed the needle then.
She finally understood.
There, the edge of the reflection, a ziggurat.
A shadowy monolithic monument.
She looked up.
There was nothing on the edge of the shore.
But she peered into the forest beyond the lake.
The ruins of a city.
Decayed, abandoned, fallen.
She peered into the lake.
Beneath the glow of Astraria and Vesperia, the reflection of the city.
Pristine, living, alive.
Illara had come to accept the sight upon the island defied her perception and ken.
Its outlines broken by time and water.
The ziggurat awaited, beneath the lake.
It towered above it all, the obelisks and monoliths of dark stones.
Within the ruins, some leaning, some cracked, some standing with a stubborn, ancient dignity.
Within the reflection, they are all pristine and upright, tall and proud.
But the ziggurat.
The black monolith cannot be seen in the ruins.
Only upon the lake.
The ziggurat towered, reaching towards the night skies.
The night skies.
Beneath the lake.
Within the reflection, the Black Moon Nautauri shone upon the zenith of the ziggurat.
The reflection of Astraria and Vesperia shone black with a faint, pale white halo.
Three black moons.
In the skies of Arcana.
When Arcana was young and the Black Moon can be seen.
It waited.
The compass pointed, unwavering.
Straight at it.
Illara’s voice came out as a whisper. “How long has this been here?”
Matthias didn’t answer.
For he now realized how the Temple of Eternal Night could not be seen on approach.
They had marched through forest and swamp, fought Pale Coil and witnessed the Mother’s passage.
And yet…
“It has always been here.” Matthias concluded.
“Yes,” Illara
“Now we know why.” The Nightblade breathed out.
Illara swallowed. “It was never here.”
Matthias’s eyes narrowed. “Yes.”
Illara took one more glance at her compass.
“Well.” Illara said, “it is what we came for.”
She eased off the ledge and dropped back into the water.
Her plunge barely stirred the surface.
Illara stood then.
At the boundary.
And stared.
The lake’s surface was a perfect black mirror reflecting all.
The ruins, the obelisks, the moons.
But it did not reflect them.
The Mistwalker and the Nightblade are beyond its boundaries.
Their reflections were slightly delayed.
Distorted.
The lake rejected them, it denied them.
As though the water rippled a moment late.
As though the reflection echoed a different tone.
When Illara lifted her hand, her mirrored hand rose a fraction too slowly.
When she turned her head, the reflection followed after a breath.
Illara said it then, “the lake held its own heavens.”
Matthias looked at her then, finally realizing what she saw.
His voice was barely a whisper. “You mean...this lake, this is…”
“Yes.” Illara said with finality.
She looked upon the lake.
You wish to see it?
The old man had asked.
Unseen Nautauri.
Rising toward zenith.
Upon the island of mists that only appear when the stars are right.
Astraria and Vesperia drifted closer to alignment.
Slow. Inevitable. Inexorable.
Their dim lights approached the black circle’s edge, and Illara realized with a sudden, sinking clarity what the old man had meant.
Not twin radiant moons.
But the twin black moons.
An age where the light of Astraria and Vesperia were dimmed.
An age where Nautauri glowed bright.
Where the three black moons shone radiant beneath Lake Hali.
The moment when the radiance of Arcana’s twin moons are eclipsed.
Not by shadow, but by unbound beyond the world’s covenant.
Nautauri.
The darkness of the Black Moon deepened.
The lake darkened with it.
Illara felt it then.
Instinctively.
“We were awaited.” She whispered.
Matthias dropped down beside her.
Like hers, his plunge did not stir the water.
Illara wondered for a heartbeat if it was because he was a Nightblade or it was merely the strangeness of this place.
Matthias exhaled slowly. “it seems our timing was impeccable.”
Illara’s voice shook despite her attempt to steady it. “The stars?”
Matthias nodded once. “The stars are right.”
Illara stared at the water’s mirror.
She saw it.
Within the reflection.
A tall and angular rising from the lake’s center, where no structure stood above the surface.
A temple.
Inverted.
Impossible.
Then the reflection smoothed again, and it was only sky and ruins.
Illara’s hands clenched. “It’s there.”
Matthias’s eyes remained on the water. “Yes.”
“Beneath the lake.” Illara said.
“The lake held its own heavens.” Matthias said grimly.
Illara took a slow step closer to the lake’s edge until her boots were at the boundary, toes nearly touching the still water.
She removed one glove.
The air felt colder against her skin.
Damp.
Matthias watched her hand with a tension that did not soften.
“Are you certain?” he asked quietly.
Illara’s gaze did not leave the water. “No.”
Matthias smiled at that.
He removed his glove too, “then we are aligned.”
Illara lowered her bare hand.
Her fingertips touched the lake.
Her world inverted.
The Temple of the Eternal Night loomed before her.
