A Curious Moon

By Buddy Ray Deering

The crickets could barely be heard above the knight’s ragged breathing. She thought her heart rate should have slowed by now, but dying does funny things to a person.

‘I’m not dead yet,’ she reminded herself for the hundredth time in as many minutes, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘I am not dead yet.’ 

‘True, but it will not be much longer, I think.’ 

Had she been healthy, the knight would have given herself whiplash in turning her head towards the voice, but as it was all she could manage was a slow rotation of the neck.

And she beheld Death. 

They seemed to be composed of all the shadows in between the trees, and yet some parts of them were clearly composed of the shadows of things she could not see, or rather things that did not exist. They were nothing and everything; tall and small, thin and fat, transparent to the point of invisibility and so present it hurt to look at them. 

‘You fought valiantly,’ said Death, calmly stepping through a spear rammed into a pine tree as though it was not there at all. ‘Bravely. You are the last soldier left standing, on either side.’ Their voice was made of the chirping crickets and the subtle rustling of leaves in the wind, but mostly of the silent twinkles of the stars visible in the gaps between the trees. It was more felt than heard. 

‘Standing?’ said the knight, looking at where she was slumped on the ground.

‘In the poetic sense. You are the last alive.’

‘Am I, now?’ the knight chuckled briefly, before interrupting herself with a sharp hack of a cough, followed by a wince. 

‘Don’t laugh yourself to death, now,’ warned Death, not unkindly. 

‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ replied the knight, with a weak smile. She sighed. ‘The last one left … There’s something in that, I suppose.’ 

‘There is everything in it.’ Death sat down beside her. 

‘Not if no one is here to see it.’ 

‘I am here to see it.’ 

The words reverberated imperceptibly through the black forest. People tend to forget, in all the philosophical waxings about trees falling unobserved in a forest, that the universe itself is an observer. So Death observed. For a moment, they both merely sat there, in the almost-silence, looking at the three visible stars poking through the leaves. 

‘I grew up on the sea,’ said the knight quietly, at length. ‘I suppose you know that.’

‘I did not. I am only permitted to view the very end.’ If a shadow could smile, Death would have. ‘Thank you for telling me.’ 

‘And — and not just any sea, mind you. The Mirror Sea at the edge of the world.’ She sighed wistfully, and for a moment her lungs felt young again, as though they were filled with revitalising salty air. ‘On some days it’s so still that, if there aren’t any clouds, you can’t tell what’s a reflection and what’s the sky, and when the stars come out there are millions of them, in a huge sash across the sky — and then under the boat as well, trailing a loop all the way around you.’

‘The edge of the world? You’re a long way from home then.’ 

‘Heh—’ Her laughter dissolved into hacking coughs once more. Death waited politely for her to regain some semblance of composure. ‘Yes, I am rather. I travelled the world, far enough that the stars were different and wrong, and far enough again that they became the same stars I had grown up under. I saw things, beautiful things, terrible things, things that were both at once. I believe that would have been enough for anyone else, but I didn’t want to find everything, or to discover new things. I wanted to find one thing in particular.’

‘What was that?’ 

‘A home.’ 

The crickets sang. 

‘And did you?’ 

‘Did I what?’ 

‘Find a home?’ 

She grinned. Her mouth was ringed with blood, dripping slightly between her teeth.

‘Better than that. I found my home. A family. They took me in, not because I needed them to, or because they had to — but because they wanted to. I defended their farm from some troll or other. I forget what it was, now. It’s funny, isn’t it? You forget why you met someone because the memory makes itself about meeting them. And then … and then I stayed. Because they liked me. Because I liked them. Because the little ones called me Auntie, because the older ones made fun of me like they did all the others; like I had always been there. Because Little Elsewise asked me to teach her how to swordfight, and I promised I would when she was old enough.’ 

She smiled, but it was sad, and the fact that it was a smile and not a sob made it far more heartbreaking than tears could ever be. 

‘I’m never going to see her again, am I? I’ll never see any of them again.’

And then, finally, she sobbed, and it almost sounded like a relief. She sobbed for some time. Death did nothing, but stayed with her, and that was enough. 

‘Sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I shouldn’t be sad. I don’t get to be sad. I made the choice to fight, after all.’ 

‘Do you regret it?’ 

‘Not on your life. I mean, er, not for an instant. I fought to protect them, and now I have.’ 

Silence rang. All that remained were the crickets singing and the dripping of the knight’s blood. 

‘I can’t challenge you to a game of chess for my life or something, can I?’ said the knight, knowing what the answer would be before it was given. 

‘I’m afraid not,’ answered Death. ‘I was banned from doing so after it was discovered that I cannot play for toffee. An entire tournament’s worth of grandmasters inexplicably survived a fire, and people started to ask questions.’

The knight laughed. And there was another long silence, but this one had a slight tinge of contentment. The crickets began to harmonise, a musical elegy for the dying knight … but she was looking at the three stars, and seeing many more than there were. 

‘Oh, to hell with this,’ she said with great force. ‘I will not die under three measly stars when I was born under — and over — a million of them.’ 

She jerked forward, towards the edge of the forest, not ten metres away. She repeated the motion, stumbling onto her feet for an instant before falling back down. Even aside from the winces, her bones were audibly grinding on themselves in a very concerning way. ‘I wouldn’t recommend this; it’s highly unhealthy in your condition—’ 

‘Healthy? Healthy?! Who gives a damn about—’ she grasped onto a low hanging branch, severed halfway by an axe a few hours ago, two trees away from the open field ‘—healthy?! I’m dying anyway!’ She hacked up something she couldn’t be bothered to wish was not a chunk of clotted blood. One tree away. ‘They always tell you you’re supposed to run from death. It’s in all the stories. Will you run with me, Death?’ 

She didn’t wait for an answer; she burst into the long grass at a sprint, eyes shut tight. She managed ten steps, ten proper running steps. Then she collapsed, not like a house of cards, but like a stone pillar, like any weight even one milligram less would not have caused her to fall. And yet, she fell anyway. 

The crickets were all silent now. Above, the stars glowed — not in a magnificent golden band like the Mirror Sea had, but nevertheless with a brilliance all their own, piled atop each other like ripples.

‘I’ll settle for a sky full of stars,’ the knight told herself, and she believed it. ‘I’ll settle for just the sky and not the sea, nor the land.’ 

But she didn’t have to settle. She opened her eyes, and gasped, for she did not have stars below her, but nor were they merely above her, in a glorious arc just like at the edge of the world; they surrounded her, orbited her, a couple even got caught in her hair. 

‘Fireflies,’ said Death, their presence betrayed only by a gap in the insectile glittering. ‘How beautiful.’ 

The knight had no strength left to answer. She threw her arms out and sank to her knees. Tears streamed silently down her face. 

And the world held on this moment, perhaps Time betraying its own kindness, or perhaps the knight’s neurons misfiring to give her one last moment to stargaze. The moment held, and the fireflies danced and sang, and the stars … oh, the stars. They were there. Right there, so close you could reach upwards and poke them. She couldn’t tell what was a star and what was an insect; but then, she didn’t need to. She breathed. 

‘I am ready,’ she said, at last, like it was a relief. ‘If you would make it quick, I would be very grateful.’ 

Death, if a shadow could grin, grinned. 

And did not move. 

Another star joined the rest. Much less pure, neither the distant pinprick of a celestial body nor the green blur of an insect; it flickered like candlelight even though it was bright enough to make the knight squint.

‘Lamplight…’ she said to herself. And she heard the running feet, the cries of We’ve got a live one! and Blimey, that’s a lot of blood echoing from the distance. Rescuers.

… Rescuers! 

‘I’m going to live,’ she said, the words only for Death. ‘You’re letting me live.’

‘I had nothing to do with it.’ They winked. ‘Now go teach Elsewise how to fight and every other good thing, O knight of the edge of the world.’ 

The knight was too happy even to grin. 

‘Thank you. Truly, thank you. Oh, but could you tell me one more thing?’

‘Of course.’ 

‘You are an excellent chess player, aren’t you? You let all those people win on purpose.’

Death smiled, tapped the nose they didn’t have, and vanished. Or rather, suddenly had never been there at all. 

And the knight laughed herself to life. 

The End.

Buddy Ray Deering (Pisces, Virgo, Leo) is a Writer, Actor, Director and General Nuisance from London. They are currently studying at Bangor University, where they have been writing a great deal more than they have been studying — don’t tell their lecturers. They have been published in the online database scribbled.online, in two anthologies by Wingless Dreamer Publishers (Vernalis and Macabre Musings), and have written and directed a play for the Rostra Theatre Society. In their free time, they enjoy watching pretentious old films.