Hours

We watch from the window. The sky as it becomes the colour of wine, as it darkens and deepens and purples into rich shades of red and violet; an underpinning of gold as the sun melts away into the horizon.

The moons are just under an hour away.

This is the moment. We rush out into the night. Jezorra takes my hand, she grabs her basket in the other and we thread ourselves into the clamour of the crowd. I can see the awnings erupting just above low rooftops, the colours of many rainbows. There are squeaks and squeals as the livestock are dragged into a blossoming marketplace.

We split up as we enter the square. So that we can cover more ground. The horizon looks soft now, cooled, content. But this slumber is a brief one, and the horizon on the other side is already beginning to heat up – silver filings imbedded in darkwashed aqua - a white line already beginning to trace itself over the cityscape. I rush to the stall where fruits and vegetables are being laid out. They’re stunted things compared to what they once were, dried and withered, burnt all around their edges. Some of their kin did not learn at all to survive, and lay extinct now, ruined by the fury of the moons.

“Three cabbages,” I hand over one of our dwindling coins, “and carrots, potatoes.” We can’t afford anything fancy. Can anyone?

They say that the sun and moon quarrelled, about thirty years ago, a little longer ago than I can remember. And it’s said that each grew in power, battering each other with their light and magic, not seeing that their growing might was blasting the world beneath them. It is said that the bodies of heaven at last came to a truce, but they were then so hot, so armoured, so unnaturally mighty that they could never tame themselves again. And so their light and heat breathes down on a trapped world; the radiant glare of a sun; the toxic smile of twin moons. And there is just this hour or so, at dawn, then dusk, when the air doesn’t choke us, and when the sun doesn’t burn us. Those are the times when we can go about, when we can shop, walk, harvest, breed stock, plant seeds. We charge out of our shuttered, curtained homes, a tide that surges and ebbs almost in one.

I know a child’s story when I hear one. The sun and moon have no agency. But they say another thing: this wizard drew together the energy of half a kingdom, enforced by the king’s men, the drawing together of the powers of a hundred thousand souls, all in the intention to destroy that king’s enemies. And then, when the spell turned inward on itself, and the poor, conscripted souls were burnt away: left behind was a world ripped out of its place beneath the heavens, hurled closer to the suns and moons, so that their power would burn us, ruin us. And that’s the story that takes root in my heart. The one I believe – we fleshfolk are the authors of our own downfall. This: this rings true.

Jezorra finds me. Her basket is full of the wool we can spend our days spinning and weaving. Then, in one of these hours, we can rush the streets, sell the cloth back to a darkened factory that’ll make it into dresses and shirts such as people will barely have a chance to see each other in.

There’s a young man who winks at Jezorra as she passes.

“Oh, and what do you want, Aden Tafford?”

“A kiss, obviously.”

“You cheeky scoundrel.”

“I’ll catch you at dawn market.”

“You might.”

“I may buy you a drink.”

“It won’t get you your kiss.”

But it will of course. Flirting is a hasty, harried art these days. But the wants of the flesh are stubborn against a world turned desert and death. Why would we bring a child into such an existence? Yet all over the city men and women will sink down into each other’s flesh, knowing that that’s what they might be doing.

I catch Jezorra’s arm, gesturing at the horizon. “Moonrise,” I warn her.

“Gotta go,” she says to Aden.

“I’ll walk you.”

“No, no, no; you’ll want to stay.” The tricks of men and women, those don’t change as strips of fire burn along the sky.

“You could have worse company,” he tells her.

“Or better.”

“Never.”

But as I say to her, the moons are rising. The taste of them is already in the air, and I can feel that slimy sensation as the first of traces of moonbreath touch my skin. I know that people used to walk in the sun, across fields of green grasses and bright flowers; they would sink into the long grass, staring up at a vivid blue sky, and they would dream big, big like you cannot dream these days, like you dare not dream. They travelled the world, crossed the seas. But here and now the cobbles are scarred with black sunburn, the roofs and walls are blackened, the trees are withered and even the night sky is tinged with red.

We’ve inherited this oven of a world.

“Come on,” Jezorra nudges me out of my thoughts. “Home before we’re poisoned.”

Charred streets turn to rivers of silver as moon-edges peek above the houses.

Pictured credit/discredit: author's own work