“Moonlight.”
Cadance watched as Tembe lifted her arms towards the grey, almost white mass in the sky. The clouds had shifted, the view clear, the stars a glittering assemblage around it.
“It’s been so long, I’d forgotten how beautiful it was.” Tembe flexed her feet in the grass. They would have felt better in water but grass, for now, would do. “Tormented by the sun I’d forgotten how the moon feels like magic.”
Tembe seemed to wash herself in the pale rays. Rubbing them into her skin with vigour. As she cleansed herself of the pitch black and the boiling sun, the glow began its return to her skin. Thin slithers of silver racing along veins and capillaries creating a patch work web on the granite grey of her complexion and resembling the work of a spider in the frosty morning dew.
Her fingers caught the rays first. Blossoming with the same luminescent glow that surrounded the moon and ignited the sky.
How long had Tembe been locked in the sunlight prison? Cadance wondered. How long had she wanted to see her darling moon again. How many hours of darkness had she spent wishing for a single star, a glimmer of moonlight. How many hours in the harsh glare of the golden sun had she spent wishing for the milky rays of Mona.
“What will you do?” Cadence asked, her own ethereal form moving like a galaxy around her, shifting in and out of human shape. Through the purples, golds, whites, blues, blacks and pinks of the universe.
“Visit father so he knows I did not abandon my post. Track down Raes to see if it was betrayal or death that separated us.” Tembe responded. The grey had reached her eyes, making them almost white hollows in her skull. Her hair had returned to it’s ashy grey but the evidence of her torture was visible for all in the black streaks that cut through it.
“And the Wolves?”
“In time they will pay for their misdeeds, for now they can run as they have. Unlocked, unleashed, untethered to Mona, but I will take back the amulet and they will bow to her once more.”
Laura Kendrick 