Lesslight

Read time: 3 mins.

An excerpt from my work-in-progress novel The Song and the Tempest.

The fingernail on Nasrin’s pinky turned into a ruby spearhead. She brought the blade up to her face, then smiled at Julrane like she’d accomplished some grand feat.

Julrane waited for something else to happen.

Nasrin waited for Julrane to react.

“Oh,” said Nasrin, “I forgot you can’t see what I did.”

She pinched the center of her own forehead. A spark came out between her fingers. She widened the spark and formed a monocle with it, which she placed over one of Julrane’s eyes.

Now Julrane could see a blazing third eye in Nasrin’s head, and a jagged white rift in the water in front of her.

“I cut the fabric of reality,” Nasrin explained. “Now I can play with the stuffing.”

She pulled out a clump of viscous white substance. A little kneading turned it into a slime that looked like the bricks she’d created before. She cut a bit off and let it fall to the ground as a stone. Julrane could pick up the stone, but her hand went through the slime and she couldn’t feel it.

“Can you do this anywhere?”

“This and more,” Nasrin said. “I can even show you the moon that provided your lighthouse its light, if you’d like.”

Julrane giggled. “Is it the same moon I can float to the loathsome surface and see?”

Nasrin scratched the edges of the tear she’d made until she frayed some threats. She caught a thread and pulled it out until she’d made a hole beside the original rift. She wound the thread around her wrist, letting the hole get bigger and bigger until she’d made a window looking down on the moon.

Julrane put her head through the window. The water formed a bubble around her. Looking out, she only saw a black void filled with stars. Looking back, she saw what looked like a painting on glass of the scene she inhabited with Nasrin. The moon’s surface sprawled out beneath her. If she closed the monocled eye and only looked with her plain sight, she only saw a cold, grey dessert. If she used the monocle, she saw a canyon cutting deep into the rock, with a grand chateaux perched on the cliff face. The wing farthest from them was more rounded, featuring lots of domes, minarets, and iwans. Figures and verses were molded into the brickwork, with spiral mosaic patterns decorating the roofs. Three golden spheres adorned a spike on its highest tower. The larger portion extending towards Nasrin and Julrane featured walls of glass framed between marble columns and iron balconies. That wing was mostly covered by a sloped shingle roof dotted with chimneys and copulas.

“That’s Lesslight,” Nasrin told her. “It’s where my family live. We all have rooms there, even those of us who prefer an earth-based existence. See that balcony held up by lady gargoyles? The one on the corner near the top? That’s my suite.”

“No wonder you adjusted so well to life in the Citadel, then. Our life must seem pedestrian to you.”

Nasrin scoffed. “The beauty I see here each day only affirms Lesslight’s name.”