The rocks parted behind me with a muffled crunch and, like a lash-less eyelid, the crevice sealed shut, erasing the way back. Night received me whole: no buzz of the Electric Wall, no sifted pulse of the Pyramid—only a wind without memory that smelled of fossil dust and rancid water. Underfoot, the ground held the temperature of a dead animal; each step on the gravel scraped like bone against bone.
I thought that if I looked back I would see my shadow glued to the stone—a loyal, obedient silhouette—but when I turned there was nothing. No shadow, no fissure. I almost laughed from sheer fear. *There is no body when darkness chooses to forget you,* I told myself, and moved on.
Grassless hills rose and sank like petrified wave-corpses. The air, though motionless, breathed on its own: it swelled the plain's chest and deflated it again, throwing my heartbeat out of time. Each inhale felt like swallowing a broken clock. High above flickered a ashen glow; I thought it a distant reflection from the Giants' Furnaces, but when I looked up I found the Moon.
If *moon* is the right name for that marble face. It was no perfect circle but a tilted oval, as though someone had nudged it and left it askew. I saw no craters, only a gray haze thickening at the rim. When I stared, the flesh around my eyes tightened. I half-remembered old tales of sailors who avoided looking at the Moon lest they lose their wits. Ancient superstition, I thought—yet I looked away too quickly and felt a prick at my nape, the itch of an unseen gaze boring in.
The terrain sloped toward a hollow where a parasitic light oozed up: not fire, not any known biolight, but a thin lazy green clarity seeping from the soil like a phosphorescent worm. I descended slowly. My head hummed with layered memories: the climb through the breach, the secret syllables of *Naani—Mirdath*, the tremor of the jade still hanging at my neck. I touched it: it beat. No metaphor—it beat like a miniature animal, an irregular pulse that would drive a metronome mad. I forced myself to think of no rhythm but my own heart.
Halfway down, the hills parted into a gorge. The wind's scent changed: to the stale reek was added something sweet, almost floral—yet flowers sick, withered before birth. Terror spiked when I grasped it wasn't vegetal; the perfume seeped from the rock itself, sweated from the stone's marrow. An absurd idea pierced me: *the earth dreams of gardens and exudes the memory.* I shut my eyes a moment to banish the image, but the retina kept the skewed Moon, the green footprints on gravel, the jade's throbbing.
When I looked again, the sky had changed. Clouds tore the firmament, and in every rent a piece of that oblique Moon grinned. It didn't shine; it glowed with the valley's borrowed light. Then I saw the impossible: dark stains on its surface, wavering shapes with no fixed edge, swelling into immense faces that spied on the earth. At first I thought them shadows cast by some peak, until I noticed they moved the wrong way: when clouds slid past, the blotches drifted *within* the Moon, like bubbles in liquid glass.
"Don't stare too long," I muttered, unsure whether the warning was for me or some presence circling me. "The night is full of broken mirrors, each hunting an eye to cut."
I kept walking, but my shadow still refused to appear—perhaps my body itself had turned to shadow, a hollow more than a weight. Even so, the ground complained under my boots. I skirted a mound and the green light deepened, staining the dust a sickly hue. There I found the stones: cyclopean blocks piled into an incomplete apse. Each slab bore erosions that might be runes—or simply claw-marks of centuries. Circling the half-ring, I found at its center a cone of rock polished to a shine. Upon it rested a corrupted skull, impossible to tell what beast it had belonged to; its edges were burnished as if licked by glass tongues. The beak—if it was a beak—pointed at the Moon like a clock hand stuck on an eternal hour.
An irrational urge seized me: touch the bone. Then the Voice bloomed, soft as an eyelash brush.
*Jareth?*
Breath clogged in my throat. The word didn't strike my eardrums; it traveled straight to the bleeding place where memory and hope share a root.
"Mirdath… Naani…" I whispered, each name hurting like metal piercing cold-guarded flesh.
*There you are,* she answered. *I feel you close. Don't keep your eyes on the Moon too long. Its reflection… isn't yours.*
I had already blinked: the Moon now filled half the sky. How it grew so fast I couldn't tell. Slender dark threads writhed beneath its surface, like rivers of ink sketching a living continent. I squeezed my eyelids shut; the jade's pulse quickened, hammering my sternum. I could feel the stone skull awaiting my caress, my hand trembling a palm away.
"Where are you?" I asked—or dreamed I asked.
*Among broken columns. I hear your steps. Every beat of the jade is a blow against my temples.*
I said nothing. The jade throbbed faster and faster; my slow heart felt on the verge of failure. I thought that if I grasped it, I'd shatter the synchrony and drop dead. I also thought the jade was beating to another heart; bringing it to my chest forced a duel of metronomes.
A high wet whistle brushed my ear. Left—nothing. Right—nothing. Yet the air bent like fabric before tearing; I saw the outline of something that would exist only when I blinked. I denied it the chance. Eyes on my boots, I stepped forward. The ground turned smooth, almost glassy. Looking down, I saw the Moon reflected—but its face was inverted: mouth where eyes should be, eyes where I imagined its seas. I blinked and the image unraveled.
I forced myself to speak, to anchor consciousness:
"Inventory: hill—stone—skull. Metallic taste, dead-flower smell. No shadow. Living jade. Temperature steady…" My voice cracked. Not fear, exactly—more the sense of merging with a choir of whispers not my own. *The man who turns into an echo ends up uninhabited,* I thought.
I raised my gaze: the Moon now swallowed nearly the whole sky. One detail emptied my bones: the curvature I saw obeyed no sphere's law. It was rather the inner face of a nearby dome, a monstrous lamp hanging only kilometers above. Beneath its light my skin took an ashen tint. My gums throbbed; I doubted my teeth were still bone and not translucent crystal. I refused to check.
Her voice returned—a candle's last flicker: *Go to the chasm. Follow the fireflies. If I fail… remember your name and seek mine.*
"Chasm? How will I—"
Silence. Current cut. Only the Moon, the jade, the bone hill breathing whenever I looked away. Reeling, I followed tiny green motes dancing over the gravel. They were so faint I feared my over-saturated retina invented them, yet whenever I closed my eyes I saw them clearer, a cinder-map on the back of my lids. I traced that luminous thread through a valley smelling of rust and moldy mistletoe.
The slope became a funnel, ending in a natural pit. A cold vapor seeped from its mouth. A vertical crack spanned rim to rim, and my nostrils filled with an acid reek so sharp I wished never to breathe again. The Moon overhead looked once more like an injected eye. It was no longer tilted; it had rotated silently, centering itself above the pit like the iris of some colossal, cross-eyed creature that had finally found the angle to focus on me.
If any lucidity remained, it died there. One irrational thought took command: *If I jump, the gaze will close.*
"I see you," I whispered.
The Moon blinked—truly: a shadowed eyelid swept across its face, and the black scar blooming on its surface split in two, sketching lips. Something gleamed along them—perhaps only vapor's distortion—and then I heard the impossible: a deep heartbeat, alien to my veins, alien to the jade. The throb of a gigantic inhuman engine buried in the Moon—or beneath my boots. Each beat jarred my ribs.
I don't recall when I began laughing. Perhaps I didn't laugh; perhaps the whimpers were laughs the Night interpreted at will. Enough of me remained to step back, yet some older part, more faithful to the Voice, moved forward. I leaned over the rim. Vapor surged, leaving my tongue gritty. A phosphorescent mist pulsed below—its center lighting and darkening like the same jade I wore, multiplied and burning.
My mind split across two planes. In one rang warnings, memories, the tender image of Iden bent over maps to teach me the route. In the other, a choir repeating my name and hers, ever more entwined, until I couldn't tell whether the true sound was *JarethMirdath* or *NaaniJareth*.
I knelt. The edge crumbled, as though the rock were brown sugar. Grit scraped my lips. I almost kissed the earth, sealing a pact with the impossible. The jade answered, surprisingly slow, as if pitying my heart; beneath the skin, my pulse folded into its rhythm—contract, release, contract… two hearts converging on one note, two strings tuned by shared tension.
"Mirdath?" The name came out hoarse; vapor stole it before air could turn it echo.
The Moon blinked again. A sparkle at its rim—like a pupil finding in my insignificance something worth attention. Then the pit's mist spat up a reflection: my own face—though not exactly. My features, yes, but the eyes filled with liquid night, the cheeks sunken, the skin veined with green root-like threads. The grimace bent and stretched as if kneaded by an unseen hand. I understood the spying moon reflects more than the world: it handed back the shape I might take once Night finished colonizing me.
I tried to retreat, and the rock yielded under my knees. I fell on my back. The heartbeat rattled my teeth. I clenched my jaw till it hurt, refusing to scream; had I barked a sound, perhaps the Moon would have smiled with its newborn mouth.
Flat on the ground, I watched the stars. They didn't move. None twinkled; the Moon's glow drowned them. They looked like carvings on a painted vault, and a shiver burrowed my gut: maybe there were no stars—only burn marks, scars on living skin scorched by forgotten fires. I thought of the Pyramid, of millions sleeping nameless for such things. *Who watches those who dream,* I wondered, *and who dreams for me while I lose the frontier of flesh?*
The wind shifted. It brought a whisper not hers—dusty, ancient, like parchment scratched by nails. I caught no words, if words they were. My skin drenched in gooseflesh; my true voice—the one with a throat—refused to rise. I lurched upright. One simple idea: retreat. And I retreated. Every step weighed more than a confession. Climbing the slope, the green light unraveled behind me and the acid perfume faded, yet the Moon remained immense; I no longer knew whether it followed me or the pit clung to my heels like a newborn shadow.
Reaching the bone hill, I glanced back. No pit, no valley. Everything had folded away like a night-flower wilting in cold. Green light gone. Only the Moon remained, and upon it black lines now forming something like chains… or branches… or fingers.
Then the jade moaned—a brief note, low as a distant horn. And I knew the Voice wished to impose silence. I did not speak her name; the air had turned blade, any syllable would cut off a piece of tongue. I merely *thought*, as clearly as I could: *Don't abandon me.*
No answer. I was alone under an enormous lamp breathing too slowly to be a star. Sometime later—the memory warps here—I spotted a pinpoint of light unlike the lunar gray, flickering on the horizon. It looked like a beacon guiding bodies that wander without sky. And I was certain: even if it took a lifetime, I had to reach it.
I set out. On my chest the jade slowed to one beat a minute, as though it too must ration strength. My heart, obedient, mimicked the rhythm: a beat, a step; a beat, a step. With each stride copper flooded my throat—perhaps blood, perhaps only Night's metal seeping into my veins.
*I'll walk until dawn,* I thought, and in the same instant knew there is no dawn in this world. Perhaps the fleshy light of the beacon would be the nearest thing—relief or a final coup de grâce.
*Jareth,* something whispered in the distance. I couldn't tell if it was the Voice or the Moon extending a tentacle of sound. One beat, one step. The horizon collapsed toward me, and the whole earth creaked as though waking to swallow the dreams of a man no longer sure he deserves them.