Servant of the Moon #1 - unedited draft

Delilah knelt over her mother’s silver bowl. For almost a month, the Tides had been denied to her, and all the other Oracles at the Temples, and the oracles in the few packs that had them beyond the Temples. The Moon had closed Her Eye to them all, from the weakest rune reader to the most powerful, the Delphi herself. There was a strange stillness, like the calm before a terrible storm, like the silence of a sound proofed room. In a word, it felt foreboding.

Tonight was no different; all Delilah saw was gray, like fog or thick smoke, obscuring everything in every direction. No sound of the waves or scent of salted water, like she was wrapped in cotton. She inhaled slowly as tendrils of incense drifted around her; there would be no visions tonight. Even using the most powerful tools in her possession, there was nothing. Nothingness. Void. She considered going down to the Hidden Eye pool, but there was one last tool she had not yet dared try.

Rising,she went to her shelf and took a blue ombre bag down. She could feel the smooth coolness of her many great-grandmother’s Tide Stone through the heavy quilted velvet. Nine generations of Naphtal oracles had used the rare stone, which was believed to be a piece of the Tides themselves, trapped in this world by some ancient and forgotten cataclysm. The saucer-sized cabochon was dangerous, it would open the Gate to the Tides when nothing else would, but it had no boundaries. Like scrying a thunderstorm, it would draw her in but she could become forever lost.

She needed Esther to be her anchor in this world, but Essie and her new partner, Zane, were chasing down the rumors of another missing pack. Only this time, a small vampire coven that shared the territory had vanished too and the Augur Vampyr Lanea had asked the Servants’ aid. If Esther’s mate had been involved or anywhere near the place, Esther would be able to sense it. Then they would be going to meet her grandfather who was tending disturbing problem, an Alpha and his Beta son, who belonged to one of their allied packs, had gone insane and attacked several pack members, including their oracle, the Alpha’s own sister and the Beta’s Aunt. It was a disturbing precedent in a time when five Oracles of the Moon been murdered, or simply found dead. Two had disappeared with their packs.

Delilah sighed and was about to put the Tide stone back when it vibrated in her hand and she could feel the movement of the waves within it. Unknotting the bag, she poured the smooth stone into her hand. The smokey blue and green labradorite oval looked the same as it had her whole life, the iridescent waves in the darkness of the night. She could sense the pulsing with the movements of the Tides, like hearing the waves on a hidden beach. She was about to put the Tide Stone away when she smelled smoke.

Not incense, but the stench of wolfsbane and blood burning over rowan wood. Looking around, she could see sickly yellow smoke creeping into the room. She tried to get to the door but the smoke burned her when she touched it, like acid. Turning she sought another way out, that was when she saw herself, lying on the floor, next to her mother’s silver bowl, the Tide stone in her hand. This was a vision and she was trapped in it.

She looked down at the cabochon in her hand and watched the Tides moving within it. They were there, the Tides were there, but something else was keeping her from reaching them, something made from witchcraft. Delilah clutched the stone to her chest and knelt over her body. Her grandfather and Essie were both away; there was no one she could reach out to for help. Looking into her mother’s bowl she could see something faintly through the bottom, perhaps a beach from the color. As the acidic smoke moved closer to her, she drew a deep breath, she stepped into the water and fell. But instead of soft sand of a beach, she landed on something hard and rolled.

Dust...

Wind...

Heat...

Coughing, Delilah stood painfully, and turned slowly around. The sun above was many times larger than it should be and its light burned her. She should not be here. This place was not of the Moon, she could feel that fiery death and blood-hungry evil that dwelt in this desert beyond the Tides. She had seen this place before, glimpses as she tried to find the Sunwolf. As far as she could see it was a wasteland, cracked clay earth and burning smoke rising from fissures in the ground, red mud bubbling and thick. The burning wind smelled of rotting, charred flesh and burning blood. She heard a sound, not a werewolf’s howl but something else, something evil calling out a hunt on the soul that had come to this land. Terrified, she ran seeking any refuge.

Scrambling up the crumbling baked cliffs, a rockslide carried her back down the incline. She tumbled to a stop at the feet of something demonic. Clawed talons like a raptors where legs should have been. Tattoos on his shoulder of pointed teeth, the sun’s mark on his chest. An imitation of the Moon’s marks in apostasy. Glowing, burning polished gold eyes stared at her from a human face smeared with blood, under a tall feathered headdress. Strange marking on his face made his mouth look more like a beak. He grinned at her showing her that all his teeth were pointed like his tattoo. His clawed hand grasped the shoulder of her gown. It tore away as she scrambled to escape from him. Rolling onto her feet, she turned, running into the smoke, blowing dust, and volcanic vapors of this place. The cracked ground cut her bare feet as she ran and abused her flesh each time she fell.

Finding herself back where she started, tears turned to mud in this dusty place, and she cried out to the Moon Goddess to save her. A drop of water fell onto her shoulder and she looked up to see the bottom of her mother’s bowl. Another drop fell, revealing glint of blue-green buried in the dust. Digging, her hand fell on something smooth and cool in this burning place. The Tide Stone. Giant wings beat toward her and a voice like thunder echoed around her. It was a language she did not know but she understood the creature’s words.

"Your land will belong to my children once again. My son will make this so. You cannot stop us, Moon Daughter. You cannot resist me. Give my son your sister, bow to me, and I will let you live. Refuse and he will burn the hearts of those you love most before claiming her. Even now your hope perishes...”

“I will never give my sister to him and I will never bow to any but my Goddess!” Delilah shrieked at the top of her lungs. “We will never stop fighting you!”

There was a distant rumbling like an earthquake, the ground vibrated beneath her feet, and she heard a familiar voice shout to her.

“Delphi, RUN! My Goddess is helping yours.”

It was Lanea; the Augur Vampyr had come to help her. Delilah ran toward the sound of the earthquake and the voice of her sister oracle. The dust and smoke billowed around her, sand beat against her flesh in the windstorm, chapping it and cutting it with a thousand shards of tiny stone. The bitter wind tried to turn her from her course but she could smell the scent of the sea on it, so she pushed through the arid maelstrom toward the Tides.

Lanea’s voice shouted at her, “JUMP!”

A chasm appeared through the blowing dust and Delilah jumped as far as she could from the edge of the canyon. She fell for a long time, the sound of wings and a scream like a great bird of prey followed her down. Below the scent of the Tides and the sound of waves thrashing in a tempest rose toward her. She held the Tide Stone against her chest, and inhaled as deeply as she could. She hit the water with enough force that it hurt before she sank into its cold, soothing depths. Looking up, she saw a shadow sailing over the surface of the waves, above the shadow was a giant burning bird circling and screeching at being denied its prey.

Closing her eyes, Delilah let the Tides pull her down into the waters and to safety.

Spring had given way to late summer, but time passing meant nothing to Comhnyall. Moire was gone. Every night when the Moon rose, his ink tingled and felt like it was moving on his skin. Every night when the Moon rose, he felt her watching him but she never called to him the way Shamus had described Rowena calling to him from the Fields. Moire never reached out for him, and she never answered his calls to her. He felt abandoned by her. His tears mixed with the spray of the sea until he couldn’t tell them apart. Shamus never shut up, and the fishing never stopped. Comhnyall stopped going back to the house when they returned to port. Instead his wolf would lie on the ashes of their pack for the night, singing the song of his grief. He didn’t even have the strength to curse the Moon for his pain. All he wanted was to be with her, with their families and pack. He felt so alone.

Shamus was waiting on the deck when he arrived back at the boat, sliver of the Moon hung above the horizon, just like that morning. Comhnyall refused to look at it.

“Ye can nah hate Her forever, Nyall. Ye made a promise ta serve Her, it can nah be broken,” Shamus said as Nyall came into the wheelhouse after casting off the lines.

“I ‘ave nothin’ left ta give Her, Shamus. She has taken e’erythin’ frum meh,” Nyall repeated. It seemed they had this conversation every day.

“Ye heart still beats an’ She has nah called ye hume,” Shamus reminded.

Nyall just grunted and went to bait the lobster pots. A hurricane far south near Bermuda was stirring the waves and casting them north. The Seawolf bobbed and rolled under the blue sky. Fishing was going to be dangerous until the sea settled but Comhnyall didn’t care. The harder he had to work to bring in the catch, the less he thought about how much he missed her, work brought a numbness that he craved. He was setting the 5th trawl of pots, went the Seawolf heaved on a rogue wave. Not expecting the deck to shift in that direction, Comhnyall stepped right into the coil of the long line. In a heartbeat, his leg was caught in the bite and he was sinking through the water. The waves dancing further and further above his head. He didn’t fight it, just looked up at the retreating light. So this was it, claimed by Shamus’ mistress and dragged down into the depths where the Moon couldn’t see him. He hoped he would be with Moire soon.

Delilah felt the movement of the Tides change. She opened her eyes and looked around. To her horror, the young golden warrior was there near the bottom of the sea. His leg caught in a rope that led down into the depths. She could see his tattoos glowing and moving in the dark water, and also the fading light of his soul as he drowned. She pressed her lips against his and exhaled all the breath she had in her body into his. Then she pulled him free, swimming upward as hard as she could, back toward the light.

A shoal beached wave foamed overhead on the surface. She broke the water’s line near the shoal, pulling him onto it. He lay on the surface of the sand, not breathing. Delilah shook him, shouting his name. She wretched his jaw open and breathed into him as she has done with her sister a decade ago. It didn’t matter they were still on the Tides, she could not let him die here or his soul would be forever lost. If he died today, they had no chance of defeating the thing she had encountered in the desert wasteland.

“Breathe, Comhnyall, for the love of the Goddess, breathe!” she begged between breaths. He convulsed and shifted to his wolf faster than she had ever seen anyone shift, even Kaiyou. The beast thrashing as though it were swimming.

“You can make, don’t die, we need you,” She pled.

Suddenly, the shoal was erased by a wave and the depths returned below them. A boat was there. A gray-headed wolf in his skin hauled the struggling golden wolf onto the boat. The Tides swirled in a vortex around her, pulling her under without a breath, and the Tide stone vibrated in her hand, so she rubbed it. Everything around her shifted and buffeted her as the water lifted her to the surface once again. Opening her eyes, she coughed and gagged; her gown was soaked and smelled of seawater. She sobbed out her relief as she tried to catch her breath. She was back in her scrying room.

The Tide Stone lay in the bottom of her mother’s enameled silver bowl, a film of yellowed dust floated on the surface. She tipped the bowl to dump the water and stone. She rocked back and forth on her knees, trying to recover from what she had seen. She had met the enemy of her Goddess face to face and escaped. She had saved the warrior who cold be king, she prayed it was enough to bring him back to his destiny. She was done for the night and wanted only to shower and sleep, then a glow caught her dust and salt water burned eyes.

A ghostly wolf made of moonlight stared at her from the corner, it walked past her out the door. Delilah followed it out onto the highest terrace of the temple. It split into four wolves and ran in different directions across the water of the Eye of the Goddess. She watched them all stop in a different place around the edge of the lake. All pawed at the place they stopped before they disappeared, and from the place where the ghostly wolves had dug, glowing yellow vapors drifted up into the sky and drifted over the waters toward the temple, she could see the dome of witchcraft the smoke formed over the island. The witches had created a barrier to block the gifts of the Moon from reaching her chosen Servants.

Kaiyou’s voice startled her, “Delphi?”

She turned to look at him through moonlit eyes, her voice did not sound like her own, “I know how the Witches are blocking the Tides from my oracles, Servant. The Moon’s wolves have shown me. Search the outer shore of the lake's crater at the cardinal points for their altars and destroy them. Find the Witches who are tending the bane-altars and kill them.”

Kaiyou bowed, “It will be done, Delphi.”

Delilah looked up at the glowing predawn light, there was barely a sliver of Moon tonight, the Goddess had almost closed Her Eye. She drew a slow deep breath, exhaling the last of the noxious fumes from the wasteland, and fainted.

Soft lips had pressed against his. Warm breath had entered his cold body. His wolf fought to make it to the surface as a voice had begged him not to die. Comhnyall’s struggling wolf broke the surface of the ocean and Shamus pulled him aboard the Seawolf by his scruff. He shifted to his skin, choking as his body expelled the noxious salted water of the north Atlantic.

“Comhnyall! I thought mo mistress was goin’ ta keep ye fur sure, young pup,” Shamus looked relieved enough to cry, as he pounded Nyall’s back, “What happened? One moment, I seen ye setting tha pots, the Seawolf rolled an’ ye were gone.”

“When tha Seawolf rolled, I lost meh balance an’ got caught in tha bite of tha long line. I went ta tha bottom, Shamus. I was dun fur. Then a pair of warm lips pressed on mine an’ breathed inta meh. She started pullin’ meh ta tha surface an’ meh wolf decided he wanted ta live. Somethin’ or someone saved meh Shamus,” Nyall coughed out.

Shamus ruffled his wet hair, laughing in relief as he spoke,“Looks like mo mistress stole a kiss an’ gave ye back ta her sister. Ye be lucky ta be livin’. Tha Sea doesn’t like ta share what she’s claimed, nah even weth her sister, tha Moon.”