Apoterasis

Prologue

Light in the Dark

Close your eyes. Look closely.

See? It’s not all black, is it?

There is a veil of fuzz upon the blackness. A million, million motes more faint and more numerous than stars speckle your eyelids from the inside. Even when there’s no light at all—deep underground where dirt and rock and stone and clay have layered together in a blanket and closing your eyes is the same as opening them—look again. You’ll see it:

Light.

Your eyes love light like leaves love rain. They hold it, they remember it, and they want so badly to see it again that they will conjure it themselves in the depths of the earth. They will blow a snowstorm of spots across your vision, shifting as you turn your head. The same fuzzy veil you see now will keep you company in the deepest darkness.

But it isn’t safe to bring it down here.

Monsters love light too. They cannot stand under the sun, but they still crave its shine. They see it glowing in the seams between your eyelids, and it gives them a filling feeling in the hollowness of their hearts that swells as they draw closer…

…and they will draw closer.

There is something about them that casts a shadow upon the darkness. Where they stand, there is no gentle fuzz of imagined light; their silhouettes appear as deep and clear a shade of black as to make merely natural darkness seem gray. When they smile, their teeth cut through as sharply as a sickle moon cuts through a clear night sky.

Their names are mostly forgotten, but they persist in deep places, grumbling in the stomach of the world. If you bring light down into their domain, be prepared to lose it. The darkness will chew on you. Apoterasis will consume everything you once were, and when you finally come back out into the sunlight, you might not like how it feels.

By the gods, do not leave the light.

Chapter One

The Town on the Edge of the Abyss

As a kid, I never used to be scared of the Monster’s Maw. Sure, I never went out at night, and sure, I knew better than to light a candle by a window, but I just didn’t believe in my heart that my home could be as dangerous as everyone said it was. Our town was called ‘Sunflower Ridge’ because of the happy yellow flowers that covered the hills, and every morning I woke up to a sea of blonde heads all bobbing at me gently from across the valley. The hills that hid our homes were so full of sweetgrass that the air smelled like candy, and our beautiful goats with their long white hair did nothing but eat their bellies full all day. It was a lovely place to live…so long as you stayed up on the ridge.

My best friend, Colin, was named after the god of the sun, and the name fit. He was as blonde as the sunflowers, with freckles like seeds all over his brown cheeks. We played ball in the upper regions of the Maw, kicking a sheep’s bladder full of wool back and forth across the valley. I liked his laugh, and he liked my many blue-black braids, and I was pretty sure that we would get married one day. Curious and fearless, he was even less scared of the Maw than I was, and I often let him drag me down the hills to play. The later we played, the more the ball would roll and bring us down with it, like a tide, deeper into the valley.

The Maw had a funny kind of twist to it, where as soon as you reached wherever you thought was the lowest point, you’d look around and find another bend in the path, and another lower point further on ahead. We were told early (and repeatedly) not to go looking for a bottom that we would never find, but I’d never been very good at listening.

Sometimes our game took us all the way down to the shurtle village, where their domed huts of straw and mud blended in with the rising sides of the valley. The shurtles were a peaceful kind of monster, looking like sheep-people with bushy white fur all around their faces. They never said a word, but only used a wordless gesture-speech to communicate. They waved at us when we came by but gestured severely not to continue further down into the Maw. It was dangerous, they signed. We’d been told that many times before, but the sun on our shoulders made us feel invincible, and we never paid them much mind.

One day, Colin caught the scent of roasted nuts on the wind. We followed the smell down past the shurtles to where the valley became so deep that it made no sense to call it a valley anymore, and it became more of a canyon. The looming walls cast shadows down over us, across the path, onto a great disk of smooth stone which looked like a plate for a giant. It was covered with wonderful foods: loaves of toasted nut-bread and a whole smoked goat just sitting there getting cold. Shurtle nut-bread was a wonderful treat for us, so we took a roll each and ate crunchy bites while we kicked our ball back and forth across the slope.

The Maw’s floor was steeper here, and when the ball got away from us, it rolled, rolled, rolled out of sight. Colin kicked it last, so he ran down to fetch it while I sat on the edge of the offering plate and drizzled honey from a pot onto another nut roll. The light dimmed around me as the sun dipped down over the canyon wall. Colin didn’t come back. I licked my sticky fingers clean then hopped off the plate. I ventured down the path, calling his name, until I made another turn around another bend and saw the giant silhouette of a froate blocking the path.

The froate sat on its heels—its knees bowing out to either side of a bulbous torso—but it was twice as tall in that posture as a man at his full height. Its lanky arms had two elbows apiece, and each hand ended in eight webbed fingers. Its back, covered in long, slimy black hair, was hunched away from me at first, then it turned its long snout to the side and lifted a limp, humanoid form up to it.

I froze. I couldn’t breathe. The froate blinked one buggy, yellow-and-green eye. Its pupil was a wide rectangle, focused on me and its meal both at once. We watched each other as it sank its teeth into Colin, tore off a chunk of him, chewed, and swallowed. Then it blinked again, turned away, and the spell was broken.

I turned and ran. I fell, scrambled back up, and kept running all the way back to the sunflower fields.

It was dark by the time I reached town. I ran by moonlight, flinching as the shadows of saturnii passed overhead. I wanted to cry for my Mama, but saturnii had very good hearing, and they could come dive upon me at any time. The night was full of monsters.

I ran up past the goat barn, with its skeletal beams flaked by mushrooms, up the flagstone path to where our house hid between hills. There were more empty houses than full ones on the Ridge, and ours was one of the smallest and ugliest. A fallen, rotting tree caved in half of our roof, and the rest of it looked so overgrown with ivy that there wasn’t any clean wood left underneath. But the ivy curtain could be pushed to the side, and the door behind it was very solid.

I fell against my door, wailing, “Mama…” with the curtain of ivy draping over my head.

Ma unbolted the door in a hurry. She’d been waiting there all evening. “Shhh,” She stuffed my face into her apron to muffle my cries as she pulled me in and closed the door behind me.

“Mama,” I cried into the coarse linen.

“Shh, shh,” Ma whispered. “Hush baby.” She pet my braids as she took me deeper inside to the kitchen where she could light a candle and get a proper look at me. There, she gave me a thorough examination, hissing at the blood dripping from scrapes on my knees down my shins.

“C-Colin,” I sobbed. “Froate…” and I didn’t need to say any more.

I thought she’d be angry with me (and she was, later, after she’d had time to settle down), but first she was just grateful that I’d come home alive. That made me one of the lucky ones. For the next three nights, she made me sit vigil at the inverted temple of Avove, speaking the litany of gratitude over and over to thank the God of Descent for allowing me to return from his Maw alive. I knelt at the foot of Avove’s statue, but the silent echo of Colin’s empty coffin nearby made gratitude difficult to stomach.

Everyone on the ridge had a story like this. Pa told me it was a part of growing up. It was one thing to be told the rules of the Maw, quite another to see their consequences firsthand: to see why we brought our goats in every night to the skeletal barn with the rotten beams, why we made them sleep under a canvas coated in dead grass and manure, why we buried our roofs under sod. We lived in a dangerous place, and if the beasts of the night ever saw something worth taking, then they would take it.

It was a lesson that I took to heart, but it wasn’t all that came back with me from the Maw that night. The place planted something in me: a promise to be claimed later. It was something that my family and neighbors all recognized, though they would not speak of it. To dwell on tragedy was to invite its return, and no one wanted another dose. It was a poison to which we all either succumbed or became inured, but either way we did so alone. The only one who could harden my heart to sorrow was me.

Ma didn’t talk of the monsters with me, but she at least she sat at my bedside as I mourned, wiping my tears away whenever they fell. She taught me to weave lace, using the practice to distract me from my grief. Whenever I shed a tear, or even whenever I got that far-away look, Ma would poke me with one of her needles and point down at what I was supposed to be doing. It was nice. My people knew a lot about the art of self-distraction.

I’d always taken joy in plaiting, long-ago adopting the habit of wearing my hair in a curtain of thin braids, and I took to weaving twice as fast. I spun thin, silvery goat’s hair into cashmere threads, then wove these between pins stuck into pillows. More than a distraction, the craft gave me a sense of control. I knotted the threads like I was weaving a net to keep myself together, or to hold myself from falling back into the Maw.

It didn’t work.

One night, a few months after Colin’s death, I found myself in the Maw again. I stepped on a sharp stick with my bare foot, and the pain shocked me awake. I’d been walking in my sleep, and I was halfway down to the shurtle village already. I gasped as the wind howled up past me, fluttering my nightdress around my knees. The breeze was hot and wet like the horrid breath of a froate hungry for seconds.

This was in the dead of night, far too late for me to think I could make it home. I panicked and ran across to the closest, tiniest bit of cover I could see: a sickly willow struggling to grow atop a boulder. I wedged myself up between boulder and tree trunk, trying to make myself small and still and silent. I watched the sky through its draping branches as saturnii returned to Myriid, their city in the Maw, laden with treasures from their plundering. I begged the gods to hide me from their sight, huddling in my hollow until the sun rose.

When I came home in the morning, Ma cried and asked what was wrong with me, but I didn’t know. No one knew.

Every night after that, before I went to sleep, I tied one of my braids to my bedpost. This way, if I ever got up again to sleepwalk, it would tug my hair and the pain would wake me up just like the stick had. It also helped when the nightmares set me to tossing, though nothing would make them go away completely.

I was afraid of going outside, even though monsters were supposed to be the ones afraid of the sunlight. I stayed inside as much as I could get away with and spent most of my time weaving lace. It relaxed me. No matter what tragedies came to me, I could disappear into my lacework and the world would calm down while I put it all in order.

My first laces were simple and geometric, but soon I taught myself to weave pictures within the threads. I liked to include patterns of flowers and trees and other natural things. My parents were complementary at first, but the prettier my laces became, and the more of my time I devoted to making them, the more they began to wonder if I shouldn’t be made to stop.

“It’s just askin’ for trouble,” Ma told me, balling up a ribbon that I’d shown her. “It’s all well and good when it’s for baskets and nets, but when the point of the thing is to look pretty, something’s gonna come up from the Maw and take it.”

“If you say so,” I muttered but kept doing as I wished.

I was already convinced, deep in my gut, that a monster was going to come and take me one day, and the lace was all that made me forget it. I was sneaky and stubborn and I kept coming back to it no matter what my parents said. Ma told me I was as bad as her sister, and I took that as a complement.

My Aunt Poppy lived in Crescent Bay—a big port city to the north—and she made the long and dangerous journey out to see us once every few years to try and convince my Ma to move up there with her. She was a glamorous woman. Tall with shiny hair, she always dressed with a skill that doubled her natural beauty. With her perfumes and colorful, fluffy clothes, my aunt made herself into something you had no choice but to look at, and no monsters had stolen her yet.

“You keep doing what you want, Daisy,” Poppy said to me on her next visit. “Your lace is as pretty as any in the Bay. Keep at it.”

“We don’t live in the Bay,” Ma said tightly: a reference to the decades-long argument between them.

Poppy kept talking to me instead of her sister, showing care and attention to every tiny piece of lace I put in front of her. “The world is wide open for a woman who knows her worth, Daisy. Just pick a direction and go towards it with everything you’ve got. You could come live with me.”

My mother’s mouth thinned to a line. “There ain’t no way she’s living in your…house.”

“You could make dresses for all the girls. They’ll adore you. You could be rich.”

“Stop!” Ma said. “If you want to be welcome in my house, you’ll shut your mouth right now. No daughter of mine is going to live in a place like that, and that’s final.”

Poppy’s mouth thinned to a line even sharper than her sister’s. “You do what you want, dear,” she whispered to me and left it at that.

I kept her with me. Her support redoubled my efforts. Even when Ma would confiscate my materials for a time, I always found a way back to them. Ma called me “as stubborn as a goat and twice as dumb,” but that didn’t bother me one bit. I just shut up, nodded, and stopped asking for permission.

As I got older, I started sneaking strange and frightening images inside the pretty ones: flowers with petals that stuck out like teeth; hems that hung like spider webs; froates’ eyes; saturnii’s wings. It gave me a perverse kind of joy to put them there. They were monsters, but they were in my web, my cage, my power. It felt good to assert a little control over them. I only worried about what would happen if my parents noticed.

Before they could, a new kind of monster came to Sunflower Ridge, and his visit changed the way everyone thought of my work.

I was in my bed, working on a lace pattern of a moth, when my mother called out to me from the kitchen.

“Miss Daisy Hemmings! Don’t make me holler at you again!”

I jerked up from my work. I hadn’t heard her holler the first time. I called back, “What is it, Mama?”

“I said get on down here—are you dull?”

“I didn’t hear you, Ma. I’m working.”

“Working? Bah! That’s not work. I’ll give you some real work to do, get you learning what work is. Did I raise you kids not to know what work is? I ain’t that sort of mother. Get on down here if you don’t want me to come up there with a wallop.”