When the Moon Hatched （Moonfall, #1）
Sarah A. Parker
For those who feel small and quiet.
Spread those wings and roar.
The world began with five.
First was Caelis, God of Aether, invisible to the naked eye. The empty space nobody thought about. Where matter formed, he was simply shoved aside.
His baritone song was so full of substance, yet lacked it entirely. A lonely echo that haunted the empty space between near and distant suns—inaudible in its depth, no matter how loud he sang.
Desperate to be noticed, it was he who offered an empty canvas for the others to fill.
Bulder, God of Ground, sculpted the sphere with one belted bellow, building a sturdy globe that did not spin. A world half bathed in sunlight, sprinkled with a rich ripple of rust-colored sand, the other half eternally dunked in shadow so thick it seeped into the stone and cast it black.
With more blunt and droning words, Bulder sculpted the terrain, creating dips, dollops, and cracks in the world. Forging a wall that cut through The Fade—where sunlight and shadow refused to meet—the sky a forever splash of pink, purple, and gold.
The Goddess of Water came next.
Rayne fell upon the ground in a billion yearning teardrops of unrequited love, puddling in Bulder’s dips, filling his gorges with her gushing affections. Upon the shaded side, she descended in a patter of heavy flakes, dusting the sharp mountain ranges in a frosty hug.
Her love was a screaming torrent. The deep, gut-wrenching wail of an avalanche. The near-silent cry of sprinkling rain.
Her mournful song was so unlike that of her sister Clode—Goddess of Air—who hinged on the precipice of immeasurable madness. Her voice was a ribbon of silk, soft to touch, unless it turned to the side and slit you with its edge.
Her whispered words swept past branches laden with leaves, tilling them into a flirty dance. Her violent shrieks ripped around sharp corners at a voracious speed simply because she liked the sound. Unable to stand Rayne’s somber still, Clode’s gusty howls often churned the Loff into a heaving mass that dumped upon the shore like a drum.
Ignos was a glutton for Clode. The God of Fire feasted on her. Consumed her.
Loved her so much he could not breathe without her.
His searing song was one of ferocious hunger and impassioned greed, but Clode could not be tamed by his rabid affections, even as he blazed jungles and gave her smoke to dance within. Even as he melted bits of Bulder’s stone until they were molten rivers of red, desperate to woo Clode with volcanic blasts that shook the sky.
Bound to his mournful solitude, Caelis watched this all, jealous of the other Creators for their ability to be seen, touched, or heard, but thankful to be part of something.
Anything.
And he watched in quiet wonder as, upon this lush and fertile canvas he’d gifted his emptiness, life bloomed. A various cacophony of folk who littered the land and snow and sand—some with hearing sharper than the tips of their ears, making them privy to the four other elemental songs. A number of whom learned their languages. Spoke them.
Found power in them.
Others fell upon a silver book some say Caelis wrote in his desperation to be heard. Who found a different form of power in those runes nobody could read or pronounce, discovering that the strange markings could be wielded. Could mend bones, charm blood, glamor objects …
Many beings filled all corners of the world, but none the Creators were more proud of than the great winged beasts that lorded over the sky.
The dragons.
Upon the seemingly uninhabitable crown of The Burn, where the sun’s harsh rays bubbled skin into fleshy welts, the Sabersythes thrived—big, bulky beasts with black and bronze and ruddy scales. With ferocious aptitudes that could not be matched.
They made Gondragh their spawning ground.
Some folk were brave enough to venture close. To raid a nest and snatch an egg.
Brave … or stupid.
Less volatile than their distant kin, the Moltenmaws found their home in The Fade. In Bhoggith—a foggy scrap of marshland that gobbled almost everything in muddy, sulfuric burps.
Their honed beaks were sharp enough to slash, their claws just as severe. Veiled with feathers as colorful as the ever-vibrant sky in their part of the world, no two Moltenmaws bore the same glorious palette.
To steal a Moltenmaw’s egg, one also needed to be brave or stupid … but perhaps a little less.
Netheryn, however, was almost impossible to raid—the chosen spawning ground of the ethereal and cunning Moonplumes.
Being farthest from the sun, Netheryn was the darkest crown of The Shade, bearing a cold so deep it could turn the blood of most common folk slow and sludgy. But not the Moonplumes, with their luminous, leathery skin so chill to the touch. With their long silky tails and eyes a crush of glitter and ink.