Chapter Twenty-Five: Answers
The mass of people under the dome turns to Isabel, and by extension to Berend, leaning on her shoulder. They’re packed in side by side, with barely enough room to rotate in place. There’s no room to sit. An old man leans on a younger relative, exhaustion and pain written in the lines of his face.
The little boy with the grubby face shoves his way out of the foyer. He stops short, pigeon-toed feet in too-large shoes skidding on the smooth marble, and stares at the sky.
“It’s all right, Jemmy,” Isabel says, but there’s no weight behind her words. It’s not all right. It’s probably never going to be all right again.
Jemmy’s eyes go wide, and he breathes in short gasps. A thin, terrified whine escapes his throat.
“Are we still safe?” someone asks from inside the foyer.
Isabel takes a breath and adjusts her shoulders, jostling Berend and sending a twinge of pain across his chest. Her grip on his arm is as strong as a vise, which might explain the tingling in his fingers. The other hand prickles as well. It’s probably the blood loss.
“You’re safe for now,” Isabel says. “How much longer, I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” It’s a gentler question than Berend would have expected, and he recognizes the voice—Herard Belisia, stretched up on his toes to see over the crowd.
I should tell him what happened to his brother, Berend says to himself, but even as the thought crosses his mind, he knows he won’t get the chance. Not before he’s too weak to speak at all. He’s going to save the words he has left for the gods—or what’s left of them.
“I mean I don’t know,” Isabel says.
“You brought us here!” a man in the crowd shouts. “You told us we’d be safe!”
Isabel’s eyes squeeze shut, as though she’s fighting a clanging headache. Her fingers tighten around Berend’s wrist.
When she speaks, it’s with a volume and clarity Berend didn’t expect from his mousy Sentinel, who talks to ghosts in soothing tones and avoids the company of the living. “The world is ending,” she says, and the statement echoes beneath the dome. “You know this. I—we have been able to maintain this space and fortify it against the end, but it won’t last forever. It might not last the night.”
A murmur of surprise buzzes through the crowd. Berend wonders what she had told them before. Nothing, most likely—she’s not exactly a charismatic leader or even a good conversationalist. While she was stacking books, they drew their own conclusions. He wishes he had been here.
“Chaos is devouring the city,” Isabel continues. “It has likely consumed much of the world and the cosmos outside of it. I don’t know if there is a safe place beyond, but there might be. Finding it might cost you your life and your soul, but so will staying here.”
“How much time do we have?” someone else asks.
Isabel turns her head, glancing over her shoulder at the writhing flesh of the sky. “Until the books rot away,” she says. “Once they start, it’ll be a few hours, at best.”
The mass of bodies under the dome sways and shifts like moving water. She’s going to start a panic, Berend realizes, and end up killing them faster.
“What will you do?” another voice from the crowd cuts through the frightened din. This is Emryn Marner, visible only by his ginger hair. He still looks like he just rolled out of bed.
“I’m going down that hallway,” Isabel says, nodding at the corridor across the dome. It’s a dark hole in the wall of the dome; too dark, as though it’s absorbing the meager lamplight and the sickly, greenish glow from the few narrow windows. They’re lucky Isabel chose this temple—as if she would choose any other. The huge stained-glass panels of the Temple of Galaser would have killed its occupants when the earthquake passed through.
“I’m not sure what I’m going to find there,” Isabel continues, “but I’m going to see if there is anything left of the gods to ask for help. I’m going to look chaos in its many eyes and try to hold it off a little longer. You can come with me, if you want. You can leave the temple and find your own way. You can stay here. It’s your choice.”
Berend watches the crowd shift, slower this time. Their attention drops from Isabel, and it’s as though the pair of them disappear, becoming nothing more than stationary obstacles as people begin to spill out onto the temple steps. A few see the sky and turn back around, but others continue, walking down to the street and taking in the destruction of the district with frightened eyes and sober faces.
“Right, clear the way,” Emryn is saying, punctuating the order with a wave of his gangling arms. Slowly, a path forms through the dome.
Isabel adjusts Berend’s weight over her shoulder and walks forward.
He thought someone would follow them, but as they cross the space between the dome, Isabel dragging him sideways through the narrow passage between worried faces, only a few ghosts drift along in their wake. If he wasn’t already committed, by virtue of his own hardheadedness as much as Isabel’s support, he’d probably be staying in the temple or wandering the street outside. Gods and monsters as big as the sky are so far beyond his limited expertise that it would probably be better if he stayed out of it. If he had a family to look after, like most of the people here do, he’d stay as far away from this nonsense as he could until there wasn’t anywhere else to go.
But he’s in it now, for better or worse. If he and everything else he’s ever known are going to be destroyed, he might as well see it through to the end.
There’s a broken ghost keeping pace with him, flickering out a step behind and reappearing a step ahead. The ghost doesn’t have much of a face, but Berend would recognize that broken nose anywhere. He’d been there when it happened, when both Mikhail and the poor bastard on the other side had lost their weapons and resorted to punching each other in the face. They’d exchanged six blows before Berend could get there with his own sword.
Mikhail. You’re still here.
Berend wants to say something, but he doesn’t have the strength. He’s spending everything he has on keeping his legs underneath him so he doesn’t squash Isabel flat. Mikhail couldn’t answer, anyway. Once more, Berend hopes Geray and Warder are miserable, wherever they are.
Just a little bit farther. Berend and Isabel cross into the darkened corridor, and the air turns cold and wet, an ill omen for the stacks of books that Herard and Emryn push into place behind them, closing off the dome once more. Berend shivers as his breath comes out in a faint cloud. He was cold to start with; this change in temperature is unbearable. Get to the office, he tells himself, and then you can lie down under your coat and not move for a while.
Maybe forever.
Fear grips his belly. He doesn’t have the strength left to fight it off. His breathing quickens, and blood seeps through his new bandages and into his already encrusted coat. He’s going to die.
Pull yourself together, Horst. I’m going to meet the gods on my feet, and then I’m going to die. Can’t do it before then.
The walk down the hall to the high priest’s office lasts somewhere between a minute and five hundred years. It’s both interminably long and far, far too short.
Isabel puts her hand on the latch and opens the door.
White light sears Berend’s eyes as a blast of cold wind almost knocks his legs out from under him. Isabel lifts his shoulders and moves him one more step, then another, and the door swings shut with a rusty screech, narrowly missing his back.
He blinks, breathing in icy air that smells of rot and ash. The first thing he sees is the sky: the same web of fleshy strands and chattering teeth that stretched over the Temple District street is here, as well, and it’s both as distant as the sky should be and close enough to touch and to see every wrinkle around its quivering eye sockets and every chip in its thousands upon thousands of teeth. A field of glowing, grasping tendrils sways underneath the sky, reaching for nothing.
There aren’t any books. Isabel had said there were books, but only a wet, black smear dotted with white mold encircles the outer edge of the room. At the center, where the smeared remains of a ritual circle converge, is a white flame as tall as a man.
From the field of tendrils, a pair of long, gray fingers emerges, bending four knuckles to feel the ground. The rest of the hand, ten fingers and two thumbs and a wrist bent sharply up as though the arm is buried underground, hurtles forward into the office.
Isabel gasps, turning her body to shield Berend. He can’t move. He knows what’s going to happen if that thing touches either of them. He pulls his arm back from Isabel’s shoulders, but his legs crumple, dragging her down with him. The heels of his palms hit the cold stone.
Light flashes, thunder cracks, and Mikhail’s ghost is gone. The roving hand leaps from the ground and hits a palisade wall, five feet high and a full arm’s span across, with eight skyward points sharp enough to kill a horse. The sky flexes and shudders, and a frustrated screech ripples through it. Huge fingernails scrape against the wood.
Mikhail Ranseberg was a Son of Galaser to the last. Berend drags one numb, half-useless arm up into a salute. He wishes he could do more.
“We have a few minutes,” Isabel says.
Berend nods. It makes the room swim, but that might just be the state of the sky. “Do what you have to,” he says.
Isabel stands up and approaches the white flame, her hands outstretched. “In the names of—” she begins, and stops. What use is a prayer written in a stable world now? “I have always been your servant,” she says, “and you’ve been called forth with fire and blood. If there is any divine will left, answer me.”
The white light flares, as though she’s fed more fuel to the flame. From its shimmering surface, a face appears, then another and another—seven faces in all, fragmented like Mikhail and Bessa were, stretching and bulging as they drift ever upward in a repeating spiral, vanishing before they touch the ceiling.
If Berend hadn’t already gone mad, he does now. An incongruous, weightless joy tugs him to his feet like wind under a sail. Tears run from his good eye. He staggers forward, dragging his feet through the soot marks on the floor.
Isabel sees him and grabs him by the arm again. He falls heavily back onto her shoulders. She’s like an anchor, keeping him on the ground. As much as he feels as though he’d like to float away, he’s grateful for her.
The moving faces open their mouths—in terror, or in a kind of silent song, Berend can’t tell. The voice that comes forth is male and female, old and young, and more than sevenfold.
“Mortal mind and mortal will,” it says. “You created us, and now you keep us here to suffer.”
Isabel shakes her head. “I didn’t create anything. You created the world. Please, tell me how to save it. Tell me how to save these people.”
Wind howls, and the pillar of light twists and bends, distorting its faces. “Chaos consumes all things,” the many voices chant. “Everything that mortal man has wrought. Temples and books, faith and knowledge.”
“Is there,” Berend gasps. It’s so hard to breathe, and his body is so heavy. He feels as though he’s trying to leave it behind on the ground while he floats up toward the terrible sky. “Is there a way to stop it?”
“Chaos is time is decay is death is erosion is collapse is chaos,” say the gods. “All things must be destroyed.”
“What happens then?” Isabel shouts over the howling wind.
“How can we know? A book only knows what the hand has written.” The voices are so loud. Surely everyone in the dome can hear them, and they’re panicking—if the temple hasn’t been devoured yet. Those poor souls, all packed in together.
“You’re not a book,” Isabel says. Her face is pale, her eyes watering. “Damn you, why won’t you help us?”
Berend can’t stand, he can barely breathe, but he doesn’t want to see her like this. Not when her face is going to be the last thing he ever sees. “She’s right, you know,” he argues, and isn’t it strange, that he’s arguing with the gods? If he lives, he’ll be tried for blasphemy, surely. He’s not terribly worried about that. “A god isn’t a book, it’s a beacon. It’s a standard on a hill. What good are you, if you can’t show us the way?”
The spiraling movement of the light slows, and the open, hollow eyes of the faces emerging from it stare down on Berend where he clings to Isabel and tries to keep his blood inside his body with one hand. Through the translucent figures, he can see black mold forming on Mikhail’s palisade.
“There is a way,” the multifold voice intones. “There is a way, but there is no safety at the end. We cannot see beyond your sight.”
“But there’s something?” Isabel asks.
“We cannot say. This world is ours, and we must end with it. Release us.”
Isabel turns to Berend. He can only nod. She puts her arm around his waist and laces her fingers into his right hand.
“Then show us the way,” she says, “and I’ll release you.”
The white flame roars, filling the room. Hand in hand and arm in arm, Berend and Isabel step into the light.
Chapter Twenty-Six: Beginning
Isabel’s vision turns white, and then dark. There’s nothing; no sound, no light, no touch of the wind. She’d been wrong, then. The apparition in Pereth’s office wasn’t what she thought it was—or the gods had lost so much that they didn’t even have the limited capabilities they had claimed. Isabel is lost in the void, a solitary soul wandering in the nothingless left behind where the devourer has passed through. Soon, she imagines, her consciousness will fade, and everything that she has ever thought or believed or remembered will be gone with it.
It’s not the worst way to go, all things considered. It won’t hurt.
How long will it take?
Something presses onto her shoulders, or where her shoulders would be if she still possessed a physical body, which she’s certain she doesn’t. The pressure spreads down her back, and toward the backs of her legs—and her feet ache as she remembers she’d been standing for something like sixteen hours straight.
White noise roars in her ears. She doesn’t have time to be afraid before the sound washes over her and cold air stabs into her lungs.
Isabel opens her eyes. A violet sky blooms before her, studded with diamond stars in a spreading band from horizon to horizon. She blinks and squints, each motion a painful reminder of her physical form, trying to pick out a familiar constellation. Anything she might recognize is drowned out in the sheer, dizzying number of brilliant points.
She draws her elbows underneath her and pushes herself up. Grass crumples under her palms, wet and fragrant, and such a deep green that it’s almost blue. She’s at the top of a hill, a gentle slope falling away from her in all directions. In the distance, the shadowy shapes of human figures rise up out of the grass. To her left, waves roll in from a sea black and shining as obsidian glass, white caps breaking against smooth gray stone.
Berend lies on the hill beside her, still wearing his bloody coat. The pressure she felt in the darkness was his arm around her shoulders.
She reaches over and shakes him awake. His eyes slide open, unfocused and bleary.
“Are we dead?” he asks. He looks so pale, and his bandages have soaked through and hardened.
Isabel shakes her head. “I don’t think so.” She takes a breath, inhaling salt spray and crushed grass and cool autumn wind. This place is strange, yes, but it isn’t the nether. “How do you feel?”
“Funny,” Berend says. “It doesn’t hurt at all.”
And thus concludes the serial version of The Book of the New Moon Door. It’s been just over three years since it started. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you enjoy the published version even more. Part Three, especially the ending, has gone through a lot of changes, and I think it’s a more satisfying conclusion than this one. At the time of writing, all the preordered books are printing! This book will be available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple Books on December 15.
As always, thank you for reading. It means the world to me.
Space Whales Press 
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