content warnings: blood (brief mention)
There was a temple of some sort in the valley, dedicated to one god or another. The starry-robed mage who floated in, hanging by one hand from the leg of a spotted owl twice her size, didn’t care in the slightest whose temple it was. The only god who still mattered in this age wasn’t the sort to care for temples anyway, so it had no protection from her.
She waited until the owl cleared off, then lifted her polished wooden staff and planted the butt of it firmly in the earth. As she murmured quiet forbidden words, an orb of malevolent darkness coalesced on top of the weathered stone structure; then it shrieked a painful chorus in five tones, growing rapidly to eclipse the entire temple, shards of wood and stone and metal flying as it shredded everything it touched. If shapes could feel emotions, this sphere hated – and it hated indiscriminately, oily black tendrils whipping out of its depths to grasp and crush the smaller structures around the temple with contemptuous ease. Flesh and bone would have surely melted, too, if any had been within its reach.
But the mage stood well back from the furious destructive force she had unleashed, and let it rage unchecked until it was utterly spent. Without the strength to sustain itself, and her withholding her own support, the tendrils retreated into the core of the dome; and then that too dissipated like a mist in the rising sun, leaving behind a crater of partially liquefied matter where a holy place once stood. The scars she had inflicted, no matter that it was accomplished by proxy, would plague the land with a pain that would take generations to properly mend.
And still she was not yet finished.
A single spell, reflected five ways; five spiraling conduits of that awful liquid mess, rising out of the crater in arcs that splattered their steaming, corrosive contents on patches of bare earth already freshly scarred with shattered pieces of the former temple. From liquefied remnants she built five blasphemous obelisks, spaced perfectly for the occasion, each one taller than her three times over. Once the crater was drained completely of its contents, she made her way down to the center, the lowest point, and gazed up at her handiwork; still glistening with a sickening, unnatural sheen to it.
Then the mage drove the butt of her staff into the dry ground once more, and with still more forbidden words – these burning her throat raw – she began slowly, carefully twisting space and time around the obelisks. Their surfaces sweated inky black fluid; it spread out and covered them, turning their randomly constructed sides into sleek, glossy black mirrors that reflected at subtly wrong angles. She paused to spit out the blood that had collected in her mouth, and then spoke one last word that should never be uttered.
With a stomach-turning unseating of reality, the sky above turned to night. It would always be night in here, now.
It was a lot of work, and it would certainly attract attention – eventually. A Zone of Eternal Night was perfect for a great many things, very few of them appreciated for their artistry or aesthetics, and most of them feared for their destructive power and defiance of all nature. But the mage had a rather different goal in mind; and it would be accomplished before too much time could pass. So she simply took the gem-studded flask from beneath her robe and drank greedily, soothing her ruined throat as best she could; and then she waited.
She knew not how much time passed, standing within the Zone and unable to see the sun’s steady trek across the sky; but soon enough, the quiet scream of engines from the south heralded the arrival of the Dark Queen. Her winged chariot settled with a quiet crunching sound, then extended its boarding ramp; and she stepped onto it, as beautiful and terrible as ever, resplendent in scaled armor of black and silver. As she removed her mirror-faced helm, bone-white hair spilled halfway down her back, fanning out slightly in the breeze. She eyed the obelisks briefly, looked down into the crater, then stepped down the ramp and approached.
The mage watched her as she crossed the boundary and entered the Zone, and saw the way one thin eyebrow arched. Good; eliciting a reaction was a hopeful sign.
The Queen descended into the crater without breaking her regal stride, and came to a stop next to the mage. She was an imposing figure, easily a head taller; but it was more than her height that made all tremble before her, that sent the mage’s heart turning nervous little flips in her chest.
“Was there not a temple here?” she inquired, without a hint of preamble. Her voice was cool, sedate; not emotionless, but calm, restrained. A more than capable force, held in check by a will of iron – a perfect representation of the lady herself.
“There was,” the mage returned, with the slightest bit of emphasis, her own voice nowhere near as confident. “It was in the way.”
“Mm. You’ve been busy, then.”
“No more than necessary,” she returned, truthfully. The silence that followed grew a little too thick for her taste, and so she continued. “Is it to your liking?”
This too got an eyebrow-raise from the Queen. “What a curious question. Did you not have your own plans for its use?”
The mage’s heart beat a nervous rhythm, her lips slightly dry. “My plan is in e-execution as we speak.” She hadn’t meant to stammer like that; she was trying her hardest to do this properly.
“And what plan might that be?” the Queen asked, her tone slightly more edged, her eyes slightly narrowed.
“I had heard,” she began, slowly, “that the Dark Queen adores the night sky, but she is always too busy to appreciate it in the course of her duties. So I imagined she would… enjoy… a private and unspoiled view, perhaps, if I provided her such a thing.”
The Queen’s eyes went wide. “You-” She looked up at the starry expanse, then back down at the mage, whose robes seemed to mirror it. “You really-” For a moment she seemed to struggle with what to say. “You would invoke the Words, for such a thing? You did?“
“I would do that and still more, if it pleased you,” the mage returned humbly.
She raised one arm, reaching over to placed her gloved hand delicately atop the mage’s head, the thin black leather warm even through the crown of light brown hair. “You needn’t take such dangerous measures for my sake, you know,” the Queen murmured, with a little sigh. But then she smiled – just a little.
“It does please me,” she whispered, a lively sparkle in her normally cool eyes.
And the mage beamed with irrepressible delight, a smile upon her lips as she stargazed with her beloved Queen amid the ruins.
diamonds from ash 
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