Interlude I: The Game

One day old and ancient, the waxing crescent—barely more than a sliver, really—rises mere minutes before the night is to lift and the day is to break.

Weak as she is, the moon still sees it, not the act itself, but the aftermath, the spreading cinders tearing through the world, dissolving all that it touches, unravelling the tapestry that time and fate has woven of this world.

‘You’re cheating,’ the moon tries to say to the night, but then the sun has risen by now, chasing the night away from this half of the globe.

‘Why has wrath descended upon the world?’ asks the sun.

And the day, breaking merrily upon a world in ashes, says simply, ‘I am sure that all will be well again upon the morrow.’

Barely visible in the morning sky, the moon remains silent, for she alone knows that the night will not allow the morrow to arrive, not for cycles upon cycles again.

﹒

When time finally stabilises, when the world reforms again, when suddenly the moon finds herself nearly full and shining bright, with night falling like a veil all around her, she gazes upon the world reconstituted and repeats—no, not repeat. She says, for the first time, ‘You’re cheating.’

‘No I’m not,’ says the night, gentle and unyielding in the way that only an abyss can be. ‘The game hasn’t even started yet. My chosen has yet to arrive.’

The moon can’t really argue with that. ‘Just you wait,’ she says instead, ‘for I can cheat as well as you.’

Even as she says it, she knows it won’t be enough. The most she will have is a stalemate, now.

﹒

But then again, maybe a stalemate won’t be so bad.