The world is as it is, he would think, and who am I to challenge it?
That had never been Kai Salonga’s way of thinking. A challenger through and through, so much so that he’d risked his life to dispute everything people thought of Eclipse-born and Collapsings.
Much good it had done him in the end.
Kai had Collapsed right on the heels of Romie’s death, two painful blows that left Baz utterly unmoored. He’d come back from Romie’s funeral having decided to spend the summer at Aldryn, the thought of staying home without her there too unbearable. Kai, too, was staying at Aldryn over summer break, as he always did, claiming to have no interest in following his parents around the way he’d done his entire childhood, moving from country to country, boarding school to boarding school.
Baz had looked forward to it. A full summer with almost the entire campus to themselves and a near-abandoned Cadence to explore, the quiet evenings they would spend reading in the commons, the debates they’d have as they reread Song of the Drowned Gods for the umpteenth time.
Instead, he’d come back to find Kai gone, taken to the Institute to have his magic sealed.
With a sigh, Baz reached for a cup of lemon ginger tea long since gone cold. He should go up to Kai’s room and start packing up his belongings as Professor Selandyn had requested. She wanted everything ready for when Kai’s parents arrived; apparently, they were traveling to Cadence to pay their son a visit at the Institute. But Baz couldn’t bring himself to do it because all he kept thinking of was the last conversation he’d had with Kai before Kai Collapsed and how, if he hadn’t gone home, if he’d taken Kai more seriously, Kai might not be rotting away at the Institute, the Nightmare Weaver no more.
Instead, he reached for The Tides of Fate and the Shadow of Ruin.
The heavy book began with illustrations he remembered poring over as a child, included in every piece of literature on the Tides. He would stare at the detailed renderings of the deities for hours on end, even tracing them on blank sheets of paper he would then gift to his mother. He’d always loved drawing, had devoured picture book after picture book as a child, but had eventually come to focus on the words more than the illustrations themselves. That was what he was truly interested in, the stories they told.
Baz let himself look at those images now, mesmerized once more. According to the oldest myth, the Tides had once been a single person, a girl born of the sea who had lived an entire lifespan in the space of one moon cycle. It started with the one who was now known as Bruma, depicted here as a child standing on the frozen banks of a sea amid a fierce winter storm. Above her was a dark, moonless sky dappled with stars. Black narcissus flowers bloomed behind her, impossibly sprung from the cracks in the ice.
The Tides were first birthed in darkness, the text below the image read, when the seas were still ungoverned by the moon, and from the chaos of their motions emerged a child whom both life and death called their own. She understood the seas, predicted their moods so that sailors could safely make port, and the moon marveled at the child’s cunning.
Then came a slightly older version of the girl, known now as Anima: rosy-cheeked with eyes a deep indigo like the stalks of hollyhock around her that bent toward a sparkling sea. Her hands reached for the heavens, where three moons shone among the constellations: the waxing crescent, the first quarter moon, the waxing gibbous.
As the moon grew to a sliver that ate the darkness around it, so did the child grow into a maiden burning bright, so lovely and full of laughter that the seas calmed at her feet, a triumph not even the moon could boast of.
Aestas followed, her naked body heavy with child, waves lapping gently at her ankles. Her eyes were the same shade as the pale orchids that adorned her flowing silver hair, reflecting the milky light of a full moon.
When the moon became full, the maiden, too, made new life bloom in her womb, and the sea sighed as it welcomed this blessing, content to bask in the mother’s light.
And finally, Quies, a crone as beautiful as the decaying autumn life around her. Her dark gray hair rippled down to the frothy waves that seemed intent on dragging her into the sea, death or sleep or dreams waiting to claim her at long last. She held a single poppy in her bony hands, and her violet eyes were turned toward the sky, where three dark moons reigned among a dizzying array of stars: the waning gibbous, the last quarter moon, the balsamic moon.
With the last remnants of light before the inevitable dark, the mother-turned-crone looked at the last whisper of moon and shared with it all the secrets of the seas. “Now I am ready for death to claim me.” But the moon did not wish them to part. “I will govern the seas through your capable hands, my tides,” it decreed. And as it once more went dark and its cycle started anew, the child and the maiden and the mother and the crone rose together and remained, watching over the seas that had birthed them as one.
Baz ran a reverential hand over that starlit sky above Quies.
“She’s my favorite,” Romie had declared once when they were children.
They’d been perched in the branches of the willow tree that grew behind their house. Baz couldn’t remember how old they were, only that it was before their father Collapsed. He had laughed, the sound almost foreign to him now. “You only say that because you’re Waning Moon.”
“So?” Romie had shot back, eyes sparkling as she’d glanced at the illustration of Quies again. “She’s like in my dreams. So many stars.”
His heart twisting in his chest, he flipped to the next illustration.
The Shadow was a stark contrast to the other sacred figures. The patron deity of House Eclipse was depicted as a man with cruel and imperious features, his fathomless black eyes ringed with silver and gold. The moon and sun in eclipse hung above him, and in the darkness that threatened to engulf the page were things of nightmare, bodiless creatures made of shadow and bone and blood that reached skeletal hands toward him.
“Sometimes I see those in my dreams too,” Romie had said that day. “The bad ones.”
The umbrae. Monsters that dwelled in the sleepscape—the realm of dreams and nightmares those like Romie and Kai could walk into. The umbrae feasted on dreams, warping harmless reveries into something more than nightmare, like black holes of despair. Dreamers were trained early on to recognize the signs. If they found themselves in a dream the umbrae decided to feast on, they needed to pull themselves back to the waking world before their own consciousness was devoured—before their soul could be trapped in the sleepscape forever, leaving behind bodies in a state of permanent slumber.
Kai had power over the umbrae that Dreamers did not. To wield nightmare magic was to master fear, in a sense; he could draw the darkness away from dreams, cloaking himself in it until it built and built around his heart. It risked consuming him in a different way, but Kai had come to realize that pulling nightmares into the waking world helped. As if, once they manifested in the real world, they lost any sort of power.
Baz read the two lines below the image: The Shadow was born in the imbalance between sun and moon, rendering the seas so restless that the Tides themselves knew not how to govern them. He was ruination, and with his cunning brought the Tides to their doom.
The words had always left a sour taste in his mouth. As the myth would have it, the Shadow stole the Tides’ sacred magic to give to those born on eclipses, with whom the Tides refused to share their own power. After the Tides vanished, trapping the Shadow with them in the Deep—the realm of death beneath the sea—their worshippers, once able to call upon all the Tides, found themselves limited in their use of magic. A fate the Shadow’s disciples escaped.