It is the evilest of eves in the kingdoms of the realm when the visitors in the sky change everything. The moon shines full, and gruesome souls everywhere toil gleefully at their foul mischiefs. Wolves gnash their frothing teeth and don cloaks of warm flesh. Wise women cackle over spindles and rituals and blood-pricked eternal slumbers. Stepmothers pay huntsmen for slick nubile hearts, while hideous others destroy ballgowns and hold the cheeks of maidens to glowing cinders.
As the sorrow-cries of the many crescendo and meet the sky, there arises a mighty quaking thunder as if every lightning strike in the firmament ignites at once. An unearthly flash dazzles the gloom and blows fast at the cobwebs. And even those with blades at the ready pause in their evils to peer out windows and tree-hollows and gawp in terrified awe.
Even the shrewdest eyes cannot be believed as the trembling moon slips behind the hull of a monstrous gleaming starship. Later this night of earth-shaken nights—once the gossips reclaim their stunned tongues—they will make tell of fiery bronze dragons and blazing palaces aloft in the sky. Though truthfully, none possess the words to describe what they now see.
The fine hairs prickle along their necks, wine ripples in goblets, soils quake in gardens, and the air hums as ominously as dark-throated wise women invoking a curse.
Now, in a flash of sky-fire as sudden as the first, the titanic vessel streaks heavenward and vanishes, leaving behind a star-fall of smaller ships. These ships shimmer in the sky for several heartbeats before fading like hearth sparks.
In the cobblestone streets below, chaos and tall tales overtake the peasants, while high in throne rooms and mountaintops, tyrants with much to lose clutch at sinister existential powers, desperate to hold on.
And for those of wistful heart—the stepchildren, the maidens fair, the wanderers many—an eerie newfound sorcery promises soon to rise. For all their dark nights spent moongazing out lonely windows, for all their desperate wishes upon the cold and mystifying stars, for all their far-far away dreams of escaping to other lands, to other worlds.
The other worlds have, at last, come to them.
Deep in the forest, brambles rustle, leaves part, and a tattered princess staggers out into a wide midnight glen. The bodice of her dress glistens with blood, and beneath the dire slash of silk and boning, a grisly wound weeps. Yet she still has her heart.
Beating and intact and furious with hope.
The huntsman with his cutlass hadn’t expected a princess to be fleet of foot and faster of dagger—just as the Queen never imagined her stepchild might out-blossom her in both beauty and cunning. While the Queen drove herself mad aging before a merciless looking glass, the princess roamed the pages of ancient tomes, learning the wisdoms of the blade and of survival in the wilds and how to navigate using the boundless stars.
And at last, her night of daring nights has come.
When, earlier, the hired huntsman drew his weapon against her chest, he was befuddled to find himself pressed so swiftly beneath her boot and blade. “You wish to slay your princess?”
“Forgive me, fair one! Spare my life, and I’ll present the heart of a wild beast to our queen. She’ll think you dead, and you’ll be as free.”
“I’m already free,” swore the princess. “And if you harm so much as a hare of these woods, I’ll make you to dance upon shoes of red-hot iron—just as agony will befall my step-terror if she ever prays injure me again.”
Naturally, the princess didn’t sincerely have a stomach for such vengeances—yet even as she growled her hollow threats, there arose a vast thunderclap and the sky alit with a colossal golden sun. The spectacle blazed a leafy lacework pattern between the treetops.
What sorcery was this?
Before the astonished princess could find an open eyeline, the spell vanished, the forest fell dark, and the huntsman scrambled away, taking his cutlass with him.
Now, the princess limps into the glen, holding her chest and wishing upon the stars for the sanctuary of some distant kingdom. New friends, new possibilities.
Yet she’s weak from the huntsman’s blade and the moonlit cliffs of this hidden valley blur around her. At the farthest reach of the glen, she spots a strange flower-shaped cottage, hearth-fire aglow in its many windows. A dwelling unlike any she’s ever seen. She prays the folks inside will grant her a place to rest, perhaps even tend her wound.
As she shadows forth, a twig cracks, echoing darkly from the forest at her back.
The huntsman?
The princess grips the hilt of her dagger and listens past her wild pulsebeat.
Another twig snaps, then another.
Breathless, she faces the forest. Breaking branches ricochet throughout the trees. Too many to be the huntsman alone.
The air hangs in a sudden mist, oddly haunted. Gooseflesh prickles across her moon-pale skin, and her ears hum like swarming bees.
The brambles part. A wild boar trots from the forest, snout then tusks. The princess tenses. Boars can be vicious.
Before she can hide, the forest parts again and two wildcats steal sleekly forward, eyes like silver moons. Astoundingly, several stags follow, antlers high, followed still by a herd of white-tail does, a waddling racoon and a family of foxes, a porcupine, and a black bear with a deadly maw. This peculiar migration roams calmly into the glen, drifting like spirits.
The princess stands motionless as the wildcats pass by. They must be enchanted, possessed. Yet even as she marvels, she discovers a keenness behind tamer eyes. The black bear swings his lucid gaze upon the princess then continues by with mysterious purpose.
That ethereal hum deepens, a dire song of dizzy gravity. Oddly emboldened, the princess grips her dagger and follows the animals deeper into the glen. Far ahead, the strange cottage pulses with jeweled crimson lights, like candles shimmering through bloody stained-glass, gleaming abstractly in woodland eyes. Though perhaps it isn’t a cottage at all—
Another twig snaps.
Boots crunch the earth, and the steel clang of a cutlass rushes at her back.
Swifter than any predator, the princess pivots low, prepared to sweep upward with her dagger. The huntsman roars, a rushing gale of brute fury and stinking sweat. He swings his cutlass at her throat.
Yet before his cutlass can sever pulse and bone, a stream of light streaks across the glen like a watery moonbeam. It catches the huntsman mid-swing and raises him off the ground. suspending him in a swath of spectral brilliance. He squawks. The cutlass loosens from his hand but doesn’t tumble, merely hangs there motionless with the rest of him.
What in the heavens?
The princess turns instinctively toward the twisted flower-shaped cottage. Its windows beam with jeweled firelight—the same light encaging the huntsman high in the air.
They must be sorcerers!
The air hums brighter. Wild grass ripples, and throughout the glen pebbles dance and rise. Strands of the princess’ raven-dark hair tendril upward, and on a swell of gasping awe, her boots forget the ground.
Animal voices growl and chitter as paws and hooves rise in the air. Not dangerously high—perhaps the height of a few stacked apples—but lofty enough to thrill every creature with a gentle terror. Before the princess can cry out, the cottage light flares, and at once, the animals drop nimbly to the ground.
The princess lands on her feet.
The huntsman falls upon his cutlass, heart to wicked blade, with a bloody mortal shriek.
And in this same instance, as if by mystic counterweight, the cottage blazes into the sky, a wingless winged-thing, a swirling streak of icy starshine. Not a cottage at all—but a vessel unlike any water-ship or land carriage ever encountered.
Not on this world.
Yet, the princess stands tall, alive in her terror. Hadn’t she wished for this? New friends, new possibilities.
The light-ship glides overhead, spinning slowly, twisting the meaning of reality. Phantom dreams constellate across the princess’s upturned face as the impossible vessel descends to meet her. It settles in the grass like an enormous flowering nightshade. Its metallic petals bloom, opening to reveal a stunning crimson heart-center lit with mechanisms unlike any cogwheels created by mankind.
Silently, the forest animals gather around the trembling princess. The black bear brushes against her. Wildcats and stags join her in preternatural daring, assembling to greet their visitors.
One of the vessel’s metallic petals touches the earth like a steeply angled drawbridge, a gangway. At the top, a host of slender silhouettes take form inside the misty red luminosity.
Odd and hideous, vaguely demonic. Yet also lovely, soft and perfect.
Seven of them.
They open willowy, wraithlike arms and welcome the princess aboard.
High on a craggy cliffside overlooking a sleepy kingdom, a wise woman snaps leather reins, driving her carriage-horses up the mountain road. Her moonlit eyes glint, her teeth tremble, and she cannot contain her newfound terror. Her inner wild sight has come fully awake this night of unsettling nights, and her mystic eyes scan the empty windows and rose-vined battlements of the castle far below.
Not a single torch burns, not a single knight watches, not even the king’s loyal hounds make their evening rounds. No midnight dancing, no boisterous feasts, no voices celebrating the birthday of this kingdom’s princess. A pure-hearted thing, as beloved as any aurora in the sky.
Though, currently, the princess sleeps on filthy cobblestones in a royal tower, curled fetal around a spinning wheel, her fingertip weeping teardrops of poisoned blood. A sorcery of eternal slumber, black and boundless. The princess knew the kingdom’s spindles bore the wise women’s curse, and still she’d touched one anyway. Stupid girl.
Stupid, delightful girl!
Yet the wise woman toils to enjoy her victory. The sky hangs haunted, cursed with other magics, troubling magics. She whips the horses, eager to crest the highest peak and escape this vexing kingdom—frantic to forget the blaze of wild sight that overtook her down below.
Earlier, when the wise woman stepped over the slumbering king and queen in the ballroom, she envisioned the years passing in the sleeping kingdom. The briars would grow to swallow the castle, twisted and thorny. The princess’ birthday gown would rot to ashes. Vines would curl around her perfect mouth and thorns would dig into her rosy cheeks.
Yet as the wise woman strode across the castle’s drawbridge, cackling, dark velvet cloak rippling extravagantly, her wild sight exploded with a thunderclap and lightning.
The sky granted her a true vision.
Reflected in her mystic eyes, a vast cauldron rose into the sky. She craned her neck to see, and in that blinding-bright hell vision, her teeth hummed, her skin prickled—and she envisioned the slumber-cursed kingdom once again.
Except this time, as the princess slept, spindly inhuman beings crouched at her side performing shocking alchemies. These creatures, with their irregular silhouettes and aberrant, unknowable faces, chilled the wise woman’s blood. In this vision, the sleeping princess began to stir, and the visitors turned hideous black gazes upon the wise woman.
An accusation.
Her mind shattered, horrified to be seen.
Now, she forces the carriage-horses up the mountainside, desperate to escape the curse she witnessed in the sky.
The horses gallop precariously, and as they round a rocky curve, the princess’ hourglass tips sideways in the seat. The wise woman stole it as keepsake.
Now she gropes for it, frantic to throw it from the carriage, to forget this entire kingdom.
The carriage-horses skid to an abrupt halt. The hourglass slides away.
“What stalls you?” the wise woman hisses, squinting. Nothing obstructs the road ahead, yet the horses clip-clop nervously in place, refusing to continue on. She cracks her whip. “Onward, you worthless mules, or I’ll put you to sleep, too!”
The horses shake their manes, chew their bits, doleful eyes set fast on something unseen stirring below the cliffside.
Everywhere, road pebbles shiver and pop like venom in a hot cauldron. The sands inside the hourglass rise grain by grain. An eerie corona swells around the cliffside, a midnight sunrise.
The horses fall deathly still.
As the corona blazes brighter, rising, the wise woman tries to close her eyes, turn her head aside—only to discover herself paralyzed!
Her body locks into a deep, motionless fugue.
Her eyes fill with rising fire—a terrible golden cauldron alive with frightful creatures. It glides without wings and her wild sight dazzles with petrified tears.
Below, lanterns flicker in the princess’ royal tower. Someone stirring. It cannot be! Yet even as the kingdoms wakes—a century too soon!—a blinding scarlet fatigue sweeps the wise woman under. The carriage vanishes, blood light fades to blackest void.
The wise woman wakes to find herself sprawled atop an icy metallic table. A ghastly gravity holds her paralyzed. One by one, repulsive spindly visitors lean over her, peering deep, using a wild sight all their own to probe her evil inner workings. Curious clockmakers discovering her broken cogs. She unhinges her mouth to scream, but all that wheezes out is a yawn and missing time.
The clock slows to a crawl. The hourglass breaks.
A century passes in the blink of a hellish black eye.
Darkness, eternity.
When, at last, she wakes, the wise woman finds herself high atop the mountain road. The horses have long ago abandoned the carriage, and a rose briar encases her ancient body. The hourglass sits cracked and empty, the sands carried away on winds of time. She blinks thorns from her eyes and tries to summon the gleeful memory of her conquest, the magic that put an entire kingdom to bed.
Yet her wild sight flashes with a singular truth, over-bright and haunting. A nightmare vision to stain her remaining years. The curse gleams behind her weary eyelids, and she knows every time she drifts away, she’ll see them.
Infernal probing visitors standing over her while she slumbers.
In a muddy village overflowing with orphans and ragamuffins, a toymaker sits in his workshop and ponders the enchantments of childhood. Even rascals with the foulest fortunes can find joy in simple games and toys. The toymaker, who with his wife never knew the blessing of children, feels his heart swell whenever their grubby smiles shine.
Yet after countless years setting doll eyes and carving wooden animals and twisting the key-springs of marching soldiers, the toymaker finds the pains of aging have slowed him.
Now, on this night of whimsical nights, while he tests the pinwheel atop his latest creation, his wife settles a wrinkled hand upon his own. “Must you work yourself to the bone even tonight—after the miracle we just witnessed?”
The toymaker nods toward the window, the silver starlight shining between the rooftops. “It’s because of what we witnessed that I must work tirelessly. The children were awestruck, you saw their dazzled faces. They’ll need toys to suit their newborn daydreams.”
He holds up his latest creation, a paper sky-ship shaped like his wife’s tea saucers. Flick of his thumb, he sets the pinwheel to spinning. A cleverly placed flint expels a shower of sparks. Hand trembling, the toymaker releases the sky-ship into the air. It bobs a moment then plummets, crashing to the workshop floor.
His wife squeezes his hand. “You’ll figure it out, love—but in the morning. It’s past our bedtime…” She tugs him gently off his stool, but he stalls and rescues the toy.
“Just an hour more. I wish to have something amazing ready when the children wake and look to the sky.”
“There’s no arguing with you.” She smiles tenderly, yet a cog of disquiet turns behind her eyes. “What do you think it was?”
“Something unknown, something from somewhere beyond imagination.”
She shivers, draws her nightgown tighter. “Is it wrong that I’m afraid?”
“I think it might be wrong not to be. Never understood it until tonight, but some say fear and wonder are two flips of the same coin.”
With that, the toymaker sets to work, toiling heartily and minding the window, hoping for another glimpse.
The candlewax has barely melted when the knobby joints inside his hands pop and cramp. Even so, he worries over the fine mechanisms of the pinwheel for a spell longer, knuckles shuddering. At last, he cries out in despair.
The pain is too much.
He didn’t complete a single toy. The children will have to wait another day for something special. Regretful, the toymaker kneads his knotted hands and rests his head on the worktable.
He falls asleep at once—and even faster falls into a hazy red dreamscape. Truly, he must be dreaming because such visions cannot happen in waking worlds.
The stars in the window recede into a black void until only the moonlight remains. Like the toymaker’s generous heart, it swells brighter and brighter, until the entire workshop stands awash in radiance.
On the worktables, springs and cogs and wind-up keys shimmer and shimmy. On shelves, soldiers beat their drums, porcelain dolls blink their eyes, pinwheels spin and spin.
And now, awash in light, the strange shadows of gangly men appear.
Here and there, they stand over the dancing toys and fill in missing pieces. Cogs and wheels and glass eyes glide in the misty bright air and twist into their rightful positions, setting toys to completion.
A royal fleet of spinning sky-ships rise and twirl sparks into the air. And the toymaker, dreaming with wide gaping eyes, feels the slow finger of unease scrape down his spine, the same terrified reverence his wife spoke of before bedtime.
Yet the toys become many and more wondrous, newfangled and complex, and the toymaker knows the children will adore them. Oh, how their laughter will haunt the streets when they wake to find gifts from the sky!
As mysteriously as they arrived, the spindly shadow-grey visitors depart, and the toys settle patiently onto shelves.
In the morning, vivid dreamscapes turn to uncanny murk even as sunshine spills through the window. Yet, in a workshop of impossible new automatons, the toymaker lifts his drowsy head with a gasp, awed then unsettled as he looks around.
Some dreams are more than dreams.
In the neighboring woods, past moonflower meadows, at the shadiest end of a winding path, a pleasant little cottage stands alone. Hazel bushes overgrow the gardens, neglected ever since the sweet grandmother who lives here became too sickly to mind her daily vegetables.
On this night of darkest nights, the gingham curtains in every window have been tightly drawn. Shadows wait within, not even a candleflame trembles.
The front door stands open.
Inside, the gloom settles dustily atop quaint doily-laced furniture. Not so much as a trinket overturned, not a kitchen basket out of place. Yet in the shadowy inglenook below the cold hearth, a bloody pawprint congeals like black pudding.
The bedroom door waits ajar, and something stirs beyond, restless and immoral.
Here the night gathers and a scarlet mist hangs telltale in the fetid air.
In bed, beneath the grandmother’s quilt, a big bad beast can barely contain the excitement of his meaty breath.
Earlier, the wolf devoured the grandmother’s bones and vital organs, and now he wears her bedcap and the cloak of her wrinkled flesh, a wily disguise indeed. The grandmother made for a sour supper, diseased meat, splintery bones—but well worth the sweet red dessert yet to come.
Even now, the wolf scents the lingering honey of the young girl throughout the cottage: on wicker baskets, on wooden stools in the kitchen. The girl visits often, and tonight will be no exception. The wolf last glimpsed her red hood earlier in the woods, skipping through the meadows, plucking flowers for granny, a basket of treats in the crook of her succulent arm. Surely her mother warned her not to wander. But the flowers proved too tempting, the sunset too mysterious, and the girl was simply a child chasing daydreams and fairy dust.
Still, the wolf knows, wherever the girl roamed, she would’ve seen the moon eclipse the sky. He licks the taste of granny from his chops, hoping the girl isn’t too frightened to finish her journey. The giddy thing must’ve been struck dumb by the lunar spectacle.
And, what a spectacle indeed!
The great hunter’s moon had swelled fatly, fatter, fatter, until it shone larger than the sky.
Vast and horrifying!
In that bloated moonglow, the wolf let the wheezing old lady slump back into bed. Then he threw back his bloody maw and howled.
Such a blinding sky vision must be an omen from his lunar master.
Now, he tightens granny’s slick skin around his shoulders so when the girl arrives, she won’t at once discover him. From granny’s pillow, he has a clear view through the open cottage doors, out to where the path ambles from the woods. He’ll see the girl long before she even knows her peril.
And there!
Between the oaks, blazing red torchlight floats steadily closer.
How did such a simple girl ignite such a blinding fire? It grows alarmingly brighter—suddenly it’s as if she threw her flame at the cottage!
The wolf bolts upright.
The air vibrates with a high-humming frequency, rattling fangs, bristling fur. The flying torchlight flares. A moment before it reaches the threshold it veers up and over the cottage.
Beams of blood-stained moonlight erupt through every window, roaming, blanching the bedroom of all color but red. So bright it steals the shapes from his vision. Growling feebly, the wolf tries to shield his eyes but his bones lock up inside the grandmother’s flesh, seizing him.
A face, astonishingly unhuman, peeks around the doorway of the cottage.
Slowly, it steps through the blazing moonlight, gliding closer on skeleton-thin limbs. Inside granny’s flesh, the wolf whimpers, cowers.
What demon of the moon is this?
For a moment, the wolf thinks he glimpses a red-hooded figure holding the demon’s hand. Yet he can’t look away from the unearthly terror itself!
It violates the threshold of the bedroom and arrives at the foot of his bed. Unnatural, unnatural that smooth and unsettling face!
That gaze!
That hideous black and fathomless gaze!
“Oh, what big eyes you have,” whimpers the wolf.
“The better to see you with,” says the moon demon, although the slit of its mouth never moves. Its voice hums between his ears like lunacy, shaking him.
“Oh, what a strange head you have.”
“The better to know your rabid heart.”
The wolf shrinks inside the grandmother’s skin, unable to hide his gory, unsightly deed.
Throughout the cottage, the crimson moonglow sharpens to blades.
“Oh, what bright fire you have.”
“The better to scorch you from this world.”
Trinkets tremble and topple, the wolf’s fangs vibrate, the bright air thickens and sizzles, and he scents the stink of his impending doom.
A flash-second before the hellfire consumes him, a red hood leans over his bed. True indeed, the girl holds the moon demon’s pale spidery hand and a nosegay of wildflowers. Weeping yet brave, she crams the blooms into the wolf’s bloody maw.
A final gift for grandmother.
Then the moonlight flares, turning blood to darkness.
Inside the cobblestone kitchen of a bucolic chateau, a young scullery maid kneels in breathless desperation before her stepmother. The diaphanous skirts of the maid’s shredded ballgown sweep near the cinders of the hearth, but she pays no silly mind to her dress.
“Please, Stepmother, I must get to the festival! Those weren’t fireworks we glimpsed in the sky just now.”
From the arched doorway, the maid’s stepsisters snicker. Marvelous and awful in their flawless gowns, they still clutch shreds of the maid’s only finery. “Of course, those were fireworks, you ninny! The king wants the prince’s engagement festival to be unforgettable. Fireworks, trumpeters, all manner of extravagance.”
But the stepmother raises an eyebrow. When those spectral lights had reflected across her sharp upturned face, the maid saw a stark disquiet ripple that unflappable demeanor. The woman had grown pale, smaller somehow. “Not fireworks you say?”
The maid glances toward the starry window. “This might be everything we’ve waited for. A marvel to change all as we know it.”
“What wild imaginings are you chasing this time, child?”
“Yes, what? Just like her foolish dead father,” cackle the stepsisters, frivolous girls of tiny heart and even smaller curiosity. “Little cinder mouse, always spreading make-believes of other worlds. Visits from elves in flying teacups!”
“They aren’t elves,” the maid insists. “They come from higher lands—and yes, perhaps other planets! At night, we watch their homelands through a great telescope. They aren’t imaginings. Bloody red and acid yellow and even one with rings!”
“More absurdities, Mother! She’s delaying us from the festival on purpose.”
Yet the stepmother remains shrewd, pale. “Through a telescope? Where would a lowly hearth maid find a telescope?”
The maid hesitates out of habit, then decides if ever there was an eve to reveal the truth, it’s this one. “I’ve discovered a friend with royal means. Together, we’ve peered through the king’s telescope and named the celestial bodies.” And oh, so much more…
Two moon-eyed friends sharing bizarre gossips in the midnight hours of a meadow where some say a peculiar vessel crashed once upon a time—a startling vessel, not of this realm. And they’ve heard other tales, too, of shadow-pale visitors coming to folks in their bedtimes to perform unknown sermons and alchemies. The scullery maid’s father told of such an encounter before he died. Bright lanterns above his carriage and uncanny beings taking shape in the light. Now, together with her cloak-and-dagger friend, the maid dreams of mapping the mysteries of the heavens, of meeting those from beyond.
“Skygazing and crazy-making,” the stepsisters snicker.
The stepmother speaks through clenched teeth. “And who, pray tell, is this friend of royal means you speak so faithfully of?”
“He’s the reason I must get to the festival. He’ll know what we must do to make contact.”
More insidious laughter.
“Say his name,” the stepmother demands.
“His name isn’t important.” The maid smooths her spoiled gown, realizing even now they will sooner tear her naked than allow her near their coveted prince. Such petty minds, still distracted with royal engagements even as monumental truths await the whole world. The stars mean nothing to these fools. Just imagine if such nasty creatures were the first to greet these visitors—what would they think of the hearts of humankind? Would they understand the unfair balance of evil and good at play upon this little blue-and-green planet?
The stepmother clasps the maid’s chin between daggered fingernails and hearth-fire blazes in her narrow eyes. “His name, tell me now.”
The maid swallows her fears and lets herself believe. The truth is out there, meant to be discovered. Tonight marks an epoch of change. “He’s the prince and we are—”
Swiftly, wickedly, the stepmother snares a fistful of hair and shoves the maid sideways into the stone hearth, pressing her cheek against red-glowing cinders.
Sparks rise around the maid. Fire and agony blister through her flesh, roasting her teeth and her poor eyeball like a lingonberry about to pop.
The maid struggles, shrieks for mercy—and the stepsisters shriek in wild delight, starry-eyed at last, all their dreams coming true. Regally, self-righteously, the stepmother finally lets the maid from the cinders.
The maid scuttles away, holding a shaking hand to her blistered eye.
“We can’t have you embarrassing our family name like your rambling father did. Step one foot near the festival and you’ll lose your other eye, too.”
“Try gazing through royal telescopes then, little cinder mouse.”
The stepsisters cackle on as their mother ushers them, silk and sin, out the door of the chateau. The hoof-and-wheel ruckus of carriage horses passes the window.
Sobbing through her agony, the maid chases them outside, but she’s too late. In the tearful blur of her half-ruined vision, the carriage vanishes over the crest of a hill.
In the far-far distance, the palace shines over the kingdom’s treetops. Festival bonfires illuminate the spires, and royal flags ripple on high. After the miracle in the sky, is he still overseeing the festivities, dancing with dull ladies, waiting for his star-gazer to arrive?
Or has he already snuck away to their secret place?
The skyscape contains only the stars and the full moon, yet it’s almost like peering through the vapors of hidden ghosts. The air feels charged, anxious, haunted, as if the entities in the sky hold their collective breath.
Despite the stepmother’s warning, the maid runs barefoot through the pumpkin patch and into the nearby woods, the direction of the palace. A daze of desperation numbs her blistering wounds, her half-sight, keeps her going until she stumbles into the secret meadow. In the center, a pond awaits her—the deep crater where some say a star-flung vessel fell to earth, and the spot where she first encountered the prince and his telescope.
The maid is the only soul here.
At once, the pain overwhelms her, a searing tempest of hellfire and heartache. And longing, oh the stellar longing! This was supposed to be their night!
Beside the hazel tree, her strength gives out and she kneels on the pond’s shore. Her ruined face ripples in the moonlit water. One scorched eye, a blistered cheek. Her beauty will never be as it was. Yet she finds herself fiercely thankful for her enduring sight.
One eye is enough to peer through a telescope.
As she thinks it, a flock of sleeping birds explode full-feather from a nearby hazel tree. Owls, ravens, all the night-feathered birds under heaven, screeching and fluttering and swirling in a maddening gyre overhead. Everywhere, the air shimmers and hums, the pond ripples, meadow soils dance, and wild grasses stand taller. In the flickering waters, the moon swells with luminosity until the entire pond turns blinding with an approaching crimson-fire light.
The maid lifts her head and shields her eyes, her heartbeat feathering with a grave and lovely intrigue. In a misty red descent, her wish-come-true breaks from the sky, tearing free from the hidden firmament.
The vessel gleams above the swaying wild grass, larger than any carriage, the shape of a twisted-leaf pumpkin flower. Wild ravens swoop closer, brushing uncanny metallic petals with oily black wings. As the vessel blooms open with a hiss of steam and infernal radiance, the maid forgets her pains in lieu of a terrible awe. Her singed hair dances, teardrops pull from her lashes and quiver unnaturally upon the air. She’s waited her whole life for this moment, yet suddenly greetings escape her.
A willowy figure appears in the spray of ruby light.
The maid’s gut twists curiously, an existential vertigo.
The visitor, decorated in a suit of sleek starlight, is unlike any creature she’s ever encountered. Slender silhouette, flowing limbs like the branches of the weeping hazel tree, and a waxy, nearly featureless face. Most striking are those vast almond eyes, black as pitch, yet full of embers and wisdom and an abyss of vast swirling galaxies.
“We received your wishes,” a discordant voice echoes inside the maid’s mind—even as the slit of the visitor’s mouth remains motionless—a brimstone hiss, a blazing seraphic whisper. “We received your prayers. So many small voices signaling up to us.”
“My—my father,” the maid stammers, at last finding her trembling voice. “He once met souls such as you. He spoke of beings who might one day appear to all the kingdoms. He said you would nurture those of sweet spirit and dissect those of blackened soul. He said your fiery magic would be true if only I believed.”
“Your father was a wise man. He would be pleased by your bold and curious nature. As are we.” The visitor extends a spidery hand, fingers slim as enchanted wands. “Tell us your deepest dream…”
The maid places a hand over her scorched eye. She must look a fright. Yet with steady voice, she says, “There’s a friend who I wish for you to meet.”
Still, the visitor’s mouth never flickers even as its words fill the maid with gleaming light. “Yes, bright one. But you cannot go to the festival like that…”
At once, a hellfire radiance washes over her, filling her sight, humming inside her cheeks and teeth. Her singed hair spirals upward in a breeze and her bare feet rise above twists of wild grass. For several insidious heartbeats, her mind dazes, time turns upside down, raven feathers flurry. Then an uncanny peace spreads like cool balm throughout her tender flesh.
Even as it begins, this strange sorcery trickles and fades like sparks.
Breathless, the maid looks down upon herself. Her ballgown still hangs in tatters, but as she presses a hand against her cindered cheek, she finds only smooth healed skin.
And oh, her starry vision is restored!
She blinks through a rush of unsteady tears and looks around. The pond and meadow have vanished. In their place, murky red lights blink along the starship’s inner walls, brimstone steel alive with beguiling mechanisms.
The visitor stands nearby, manipulating bizarre controls, and the floor of the starship flickers then turns invisible. The maid cannot contain her dizzy scream of laughter.
It’s as if she’s standing on a window of moonlight, a howling breeze. Far below, in streaks of treetops and midnight rooftops, the kingdom rushes dizzily past.
Yet before they reach the palace, the maid spies a winding road and a velvet rider on his horse.
“There!” She points.
In a sweeping bow of impossible motion, the starship descends, commanding dominion upon the road.
More unearthly sorcery, and the starship blooms open, hideous and lovely all at once as the gangplank lowers. And though the royal horse stands true and steady, the prince looks ready to topple sideways from a blood chill of amazement.
As the scullery maid steps forward, he cannot tear his gaze from the entity looming behind her. He unchokes the horror in his throat. “Is this our dream made real?”
“I believe it is something more.”
Clutching each other, a surreal new gravity shaking their bones, the maid and the prince board the starship. They arrive at the festival in a blaze of exquisite wrath and wonder.
Sinner and saints alike rush down the palace steps to pay witness. The stepmother and stepsisters shove their way to the front. At the sight of the prince and their little cinder mouse, they shriek in jealousy. But even as they ball their fists and invoke their bitter-tongued curses, an unforgiving light cuts like sword-strike from the starship and stuns them to spine-rigid silence. A starless, oily void pools in their cruel eyes and spreads like a cosmic plague to the narrow gazes of every wicked heart, every wolf in human flesh, every cackling insignificant monster beneath the fathomless sky. For these souls, menacing probing eyes and blackened midnight nightmares shall fill the pages of their storybooks.
And on this night of inescapable nights, the scullery maid pays them no care.
To the dreamers of the realm, to those of wistful heart, to the wanderers many, she cries, “Come, abide no horrors, and meet the stars who make wishes come true.”
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Amanda Cecelia Lang is a horror author and aspiring alien-invader from Colorado. Her weird stories haunt many dark corners, including The Deadlands, Ghoulish Tales, Uncharted, Cast of Wonders, Gamut, and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated anthology This Way Lies Madness. Her collection Saturday Fright at the Movies: 13 Tales from the Multiplex (Dark Matter INK) is available everywhere nightmares are sold. You can stalk her work at amandacecelialang.com—just don’t be surprised if she leaps out at you from the shadows. | |