Memory: Fellnight 31, 243

They were not prepared when the calamity came.
 
How could they be? They had only heard whispers of it, of something intrinsically wrong with their world and the heavens, but they were not in the place to learn more of it. They did not know what it was, how to stop it, how to protect themselves, or what the outcome would be.
 
They heard whispers of it first. People who spoke of another, unseen moon. People who would gouge their eyes out to prove their devotion to the unseen. The tang of rotting flesh on the wind, but the source never found, and the stench blown away by the ocean breeze before they could ponder it too long. Then the world plunged into darkness and everything was brought to the forefront. Some kind of Evil, they surmised, and turned their efforts toward learning more. But even the highest mage, even the most renowned of scholars are powerless to learn anything without all of the facts.
 
İlahi didn’t care about any of this. All she knew was that, now, her peaceful, quiet world was ending.
 
“İlahi!” Keelahel screamed as the girl ran into the courtyard. “Get inside! Now!”
 
İlahi looked at her aunt for a frantic second before turning away, taking in with wide eyes the carnage, chaos, and destruction that was ripping through her home.
 
Laga Fahra was transformed from peaceful college to war grounds in an instant. A new, false moon hung low in the sky. Screams echoed off the buildings and the outer wall of the campus; the horrible smell that has occasionally wafted into her home now hung heavy in the air. As she turned around, she stayed on the stone paths of the yard: the real ground squelched with each footfall upon it: oozed blood and bile in each footprint.
 
People she had known all her life were transforming before her eyes. The flesh was sloughing off the guard she talked to when her rotation placed her near İlahi’s rooms. Bony protrusions tore out of stable boy she shared apples with, but he paid them no mind: he was too focused on biting and ripping flesh from one of his fellow’s shoulders. Her stomach lurched when her gaze fell on one of the librarians clawing out her own eyes.
 
“İlahi!” Keelahel called again. She looked behind her and watched as Keelahel cut through the courtyard after her. Her breath came quick and she tore her gaze away from her aunt to scour the yard again. She barely registered that she was moving, her feet carrying her past the guard and the stable boy and the librarian, heedless of Keelahel’s shouts, out of the courtyard to the front lawn.
 
There were more people here; everyone caught unaware by the false moon’s curse. The smell of blood and rotting flesh was thicker here, and she thought she could choke on it. Those unaffected slew their fellows, people they ate with, studied with, lived, and loved with. The tears on her face fell faster as she watched a divination student run their sword through a healer she knew they were sweet on. She sobbed when the Master of Abjuration was lit up in a fire İlahi felt across the lawn, set by her fellow councilmember, who watched with steely eyes and a stony expression. She swore she saw tears run down his cheeks.
 
Her eyes flicked from one gruesome vision to another, and when she spotted familiar blue robes, she didn’t release her breath until she saw dark red ones nearby. Her fathers fought together with an ease that came with knowing and loving each other for decades. Ayaran’s pale hair flashed in the ever-dark brought by the false moon as his swords sang; Ruan was a whirlwind of red next to him, never pausing in drawing arrays and spells in the air.
 
“İlahi!” Keelahel was closer now. “İlahi, get back inside; it’s n—” A cough and a gurgle cut Keelahel off, and İlahi turned her back to her fathers. Keelahel was a few mere yards from her, just past the archway leading to the courtyard from the lawn. Her daily robes swayed around her: the soft red and golds befitting of the Heartwarder of Sune. But İlahi watched in horror as Keelahel stared blankly at her, eyes unfocused, then slowly reached up to her face and dug her fingers into her eyes.
 
Only when Keelahel dropped her gory hands to her sides and turn her bloody, sightless gaze to İlahi did she realize she was screaming. She snapped her jaw shut, stepping backwards as panic rose in her throat and her heart threatened to race out of her chest.
 
“Keelahel,” İlahi said, and could barely hear herself whisper over the din of the carnage around her and the blood rushing in her ears. Her aunt blinked and blood poured from her eye sockets. She moved closer to İlahi, who reacted with another step back. “Hala,” she pleaded.
 
Keelahel lunged for her. İlahi’s breath left her in a swift exhale, and she took another step back. She stumbled, arms floundering as she tried to balance herself to no avail. İlahi fell with a thud and her aunt’s hands grasped fruitlessly at the empty air where İlahi had been. Her palms stung from where they scraped stone as she fell, and her tailbone throbbed. She felt something fall onto her head, hot and putrid, and fought the urge to gag as blood stained her white-blonde hair red.
 
With a snarl, Keelahel reared back. İlahi’s awareness tunneled until all she saw was her aunt’s face twist, bloody rivers dyeing the gold of her underrobes too dark a red. She watched as Keelahel reached for her once more, and squeezed her eyes shut before Keelahel’s bloody hands grabbed her.
 
İlahi felt wetness on her face, and the ripping, the tearing of flesh she was expecting never came. Slowly, she opened her eyes, and stared at the weapon now protruding from Keelahel’s chest. More of the putrid blood poured from the wound, but İlahi hardly noticed where it fell onto her.
 
Keelahel’s body slid off the sword, slumped to the ground in front of her, and İlahi watched it fall before looking up and locking eyes with her father.
 
Ayaran Nevdiin stood tall and grim. Blood dripped from both of his swords as he let the left one fall back to his side. His hairpiece was gone, and his silver hair – barely held back without the hairpiece – was stained, just like hers. His gaze roved over her, and the relaxation of his shoulders was minute, but İlahi knew her father, and saw the relief evident in his posture.
 
“İlahi,” the Grand Scholar of Laga Fahra said, and her father’s low voice was such a welcome sound she couldn’t help the wave of fresh tears that ran down her face. “Get inside.”
 
She nodded, swallowing, and stood, carefully avoiding touching the corpse at their feet. When she looked up, she found her baba standing behind Ayaran’s left shoulder. He met her gaze with a face full of sorrow, and his eyes left hers for the barest of moments to look at what remained of his sister. Ruan Myh was as bloodied as his husband, but İlahi was relieved to note that most of it was the sickening bile-like blood, and not their own.
 
Neither of her fathers said anything for another moment, ignoring the devastation around them to focus on her and on each other. Then Ruan placed a shaking hand on the back of her head and pulled her close, leaning down to place his lips on her forehead. “Go inside, canım. I could not live if anything happened to you.”
 
İlahi nodded, feeling her baba’s tears mix with the rest of the grime on her: with her own sweat, with Keelahel’s blood splattered across her face from when Ayaran drove his sword into her. “I’m sorry,” she croaked. “I’m sorry.”
 
Ruan pulled away and looked at her sadly. “Go inside,” he said again, and his expression hardened. He glanced once more at where Keelahel lay, then turned away from his family, roaring as he unleashed his magic and arrays of light sparked around him.
 
Ayaran watched his husband, then turned to his daughter. “We will take care of this,” he told her. “Please be waiting for us when it’s over.” İlahi had never heard her father plead, and she wondered if this was what it would sound like.
 
“I’m sorry,” she said again. Ayaran shook his head, then looked toward the entrance hall.
 
“Go,” he said, and İlahi took off at a run, not looking back even when she heard the swords’ song join the cacophony again.
 
She tore through the entrance hall, nearly blinded by her tears, but she knew these halls; she knew all of Laga Fahra. This was her home. She could run it blind. She raced through to her father’s study. There were wards here, she knew. She was unsure of what exactly they would do, but maybe, maybe, they would offer a bit of meager protection against the nightmare outside.
 
She shut the heavy wood doors behind her and promptly threw up. She dry-heaved as she crawled away from the doors, until the taste of bile in her mouth had been replaced with the taste of salt from her tears. With her back against Ayaran’s desk, she dug her hands into her bloodstained hair and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.