Excerpt: The Moon and its Keeper

The first thing Yunri became aware of was the pitch-black behind her eyes. She blinked several times, but it did not recede. Had the torches been extinguished in the panic? Her head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, her thoughts muzzy and disjointed- she struggled to make sense of what had happened. There had been a rumbling, and then the stone split- and then... she shook her head. Faintly she registered a buzzing sound, as if coming from far away.

"...al? General?"

She turned towards the point of the voice. "Sir?" she said slowly. There had been lightning, she knew that. Coming right towards them, arcing straight down towards them from a cloudless sky. And then-

Sayir had saved her. It had been coming straight towards them, like a beacon- and then his hand came up, and it was arcing around them, as if a clear glass dome had been erected, around which the lightning danced and writhed.

"You're alive. That's good," he said tonelessly. Fuzzily, the darkness began to recede into gray patches. Just barely, through eyes dotted with black spots, she could make out the shape of the Imperial Mage. He was... holding something? His arm. Clutching it towards himself like a precious thing- or a dead weight.

Yunri glanced around. In a perfect circle around the both of them the stone had been scorched to blackness, shattered into complete rubble. The whole square was a mess, littered with broken stone and moaning bodies, all grabbing at ruined limbs as they whimpered and sobbed. The ground was still shifting, but the violence subsided to an angry tremble. “What happened?” she breathed. Sayir glanced towards her, and on his usually emotionless face was an expression she had never seen before. She shuddered, seeing such utter hopelessness echoed on his features. With his good hand he pointed towards the sky.

The sky was still covered with a bank of dark clouds, but just above the pedestal it had broken. Her vision was cleared enough that she could just barely make out that behind the clouds, something was there- something big. It was dark, just a shadow against shadows. What could that be? Yunri peered closer.

She gasped.

And suddenly Yunri was feeling a lot smaller, because she wasn’t looking at a bird or a kite, but hanging there, floating in the sky behind the cloudbanks, was a massive citadel, its dark spires jutting against the night sky. A deep, ominous red aura emanated out from it, pulsating against the dark clouds. It must have been a hundred times the size of their own Imperial Castle, surrounded by a black wall and perched on top of a craggy piece of rock as if it had been gouged out of the earth and flung into the atmosphere. Looking up into the sky, Yunri’s heart quailed.

“Sayir,” she choked out, “what in the nine hells is that?”

He glanced at her with his face so full of hopelessness and slowly, he shook his head.

“It’s happening,” he replied, his voice heavy with pain. “The Demon King is rising.”