Where Sun and Moon Intersect

The colliery town was permanently choked in soot and that raw, heavy river fog.

Seventeen-year-old Carl shoved his iron cart over the tracks, his thin cotton shirt black with sweat and coal dust. Out here on the Marches, under the heavy boot of the Roland bloodline, humans weren’t citizens; they were livestock to be bled on the first of the month. Carl had been a sickly kid—he’d have ended up in a pit hole years ago if the older miners hadn’t shared their rations.

Then came his seventeenth birthday, and the illusion tore wide open.

The Overseer showed up at the barracks with two dozen men at his back. The Viscount’s hundredth anniversary feast was coming up, and they needed twenty young bodies for the tables.

"I’m not going! My little brother needs me!" One boy fought back, only for an officer to drop him with a silver-braided crop. The spray of red caught Carl square across the face.

The second that copper smell hit his nose, Carl’s heart hit his ribs like a sledgehammer. A strange, oily heat boiled out from the marrow of his spine. The room turned blinding crimson, and behind his ears came the sound of a hundred wolves baying in an open field.

"What are you looking at, cattle?" A guard stepped up, raising his spiky crop to lay Carl’s face open.

The leather never came down. A heavy paw covered in coarse black hair caught the strap mid-air.

Carl’s joints popped, the bone stretching until his jacket tore down the seams. He grew six inches in three seconds, his eyes turning the bright, hard yellow of fresh brass. Before the guards could clear their sabers, Carl swept his arm across—the steel-plated armor ripped open like wet paper, dropping two men into the dirt.

"A wolf?! Where’d a wolf come from?!" The Overseer shrieked, tumbling backward over a bench as he ran.

Carl stood there panting, staring down at his bloody claws and the ruined bodies on the floorboards. Panic swallowed him whole. He didn't touch the other miners; he just turned and bolted out into the dark timber-land.

"I’m a monster... God help me, I’m a monster..."

He ran until he hit the ruins of an old keep tucked deep in the gulch. When the full moon cleared the ridge, Carl found a length of heavy anchor chain and bound his own arms and legs to a stone pillar, letting the wild beast tear at his guts from the inside out until his lips were bitten through.

"You can’t chain a wild spirit with iron, boy."

The voice was quiet, dry. An old man in a threadbare wool coat stepped out from the shadows by the hearth. He walked up without hesitation, pressing a cold palm against Carl’s forehead. A calm, icy wave washed through Carl’s chest, forcing the fever down.

His name was Anthony. He’d been a high scholar in the city before the council exiled him for writing that the packs and the houses could live on the same land.

"You aren't a monster," Anthony said, watching the boy catch his breath. "You’re a First-Blood. They only come around once a millennium. You carry the spark that breaks the wheel."

Over the next few months, Anthony showed Carl how to keep his head when the fever took him, and how to hold his shape when his bones wanted to stretch. And he told him the old story: buried deep in the ruins of the Aurora Rift, right on the border between the two territories, lay the Sun Core—an ancient remnant said to cure the madness in the wolf-blood and take the poison out of the sun for the vampires.

So Carl packed his bag and headed up the mountain.

Inside the crumbling stone temples of the Rift, while working through a set of heavy gear-locks, Carl ran straight into his worst nightmare—Elise, the Viscount’s daughter.

She wore silver-plated riding armor and carried twin dueling rapiers. She moved like smoke, elegant and dead-certain. The second they locked eyes, they went at it. Carl used his weight and quick feet to dodge the narrow steel, while Elise cut him three times before he could get his fingers around her guard.

Then the ceiling gave out.

A massive rockfall slammed down between the pillars, pinning them both in a narrow sub-chamber. Out from the dark gaps in the rubble came the old stone guardians, woken by the crash, their iron joints grinding together.

They had to quit fighting or die in the dark. Carl threw his back against a ten-ton slab to keep it from crushing them, while Elise darted under his arms to run her rapiers through the core-gear of the lead automaton.

"You... you aren't like the ones in the woods," Elise whispered, wiping black oil off her cheek as Carl held the stone clear so she could crawl out.

"And your people aren't all cold-hearted butchers," Carl spat out a mouthful of grit, his mouth twitching into a wide, awkward grin.

They worked their way through the lower maze together, notch by notch, until they reached the center of the sun-pyramid. But the moment they stepped onto the dais, the ancient warding curse snapped. The wolf-fever and the blood-thirst hit them both at once, and Carl dropped to his knees, his veins turning black under his skin.

"Carl!" Elise didn't back away. She bit her lip, unbuckled her high collar, and shoved her wrist right against his mouth. "Drink it! My blood will kill the rot!"

The second his teeth broke her skin, the light changed. The pure vampire blood neutralized the old curse in his marrow. Carl stood up, reached into the stone altar, and pulled out the Sun Core—a heavy gold orb that glowed warm as an August afternoon.

When they climbed back out into the light, the world had arrived at the gate.

The Viscount’s heavy cavalry was pulled up in a broad line across the valley floor, facing three hundred wolf-pack warriors armed with heavy axes. The iron was out on both sides, the horses trampling the brush, waiting for the first yell.

"Hand over the artifact, stray!" the Viscount bellowed from his stallion.

"It belongs to the mountain!" the wolf-chief roared back.

Carl walked straight out between the two lines. Before either side could charge, he took the gold orb and drove it straight into his own chest.

BOOM.

A column of golden light shot five hundred feet into the noon sky.

Carl hovered off the dirt, the rough black hide melting off his shoulders, replaced by fine gold lines running along his skin like wire. He didn't turn into a giant hound, and he didn't turn pale like a corpse. He stood there in the sun, broad-shouldered and clear-eyed—the first Daywalker.

The weight of the power knocked the cavalry horses to their knees; swords dropped into the gravel all down the line.

Carl came down softly on his boots between the two armies. He looked at the old Viscount, then at the wolf-chief, his voice quiet, clear, and carrying across the whole valley:

"This war hasn't kept either of you alive. It just kept us all down in the mud. From here on out, the Rift is open to anybody who wants to walk in the light."

Elise walked out from the rocks behind him and took his hand.

The sun cleared the high granite peak, throwing warm light all the way down to the valley floor, and after five hundred years of dark, the two sides stood together in the sun and didn't draw their steel.