Page 198 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

As I’d correctly assumed, the being wasn’t the fastest
of creatures and hadn’t moved far from his seat. My father
collided with the armored darkness, sinking deep beyond
the layers of steel into a near-ethereal body of shadow. The
being cried out, simultaneously loosing what sounded like
gunfire. I had already shifted behind the creature when the
worst of its weaponry discharged, and the vantage allowed
my sister to sever the cables from the armored helmet. No
longer fed its nourishing pitch, the Darkling collapsed.
I sought out the dead body within the armored suit, but
found nothing—merely a silken darkness weighing slightly
more than the surrounding silence. My aspirations for art
dashed, I took up a new idea. Removing the severed nubs
from the overlarge helmet, I replaced the cables and donned
the armored suit, breathing in a darkness I could never have
imagined. Then, like some deep-sea explorer, I began to
probe the primordial depths of the dead-black city.
With each inhalation of darkness, my senses turned
away from the solid world and addressed, with curiously
little hesitation, only places where its truest form lived. As
I passed into the narrow lanes of the sable city, its citizens
looked upon me with the quiet detachment of philosophers.
They nodded to me, smiles like funeral songs and soot.
There was no malice here, only friends to a different dream,
abiding with the quiet dignity of fallen kings, ruined and
beautiful.
I strolled to the edge of a fountain of smoothest onyx and
listened to the words of a sackcloth-clad poet. He extolled
the virtues of dying into the night, and wondered loudly over
“the dead eye of Luna, burned white and blind by the sun.
Man thinks it the face of the moon, and all the while, your
remaining eye, still turned to darkness, away from the world,
spies the other side of his soul. When, good mother, will you
look again upon the world?” I assumed he was referring to
the Great Darkness—I had once heard a story claiming the
dark side of the moon once faced the earth, and it was that
The Red Son | 201