Eclipse

 The wood was dry, snapping with a sound like small bones breaking beneath a heavy boot, and soon a yellow tongue of flame was licking up through the pyramid of birch twigs. Arthur held his hands out, the calluses on his palms catching the amber glow, and let out a long, shuddering breath that plumed white in the thin air.

Around him, the forest of the northern ridge did not rustle. It remained locked in a dead, salt-flat silence that had persisted since sunset. No owls called from the high hemlocks; no foxes barked down in the brush-choked gullies. There was only the dry crackle of the kindling and the faint, rhythmic hiss of his own blood in his ears.

He tilted his head back, resting the base of his skull against the rough bark of a fallen spruce behind him, and looked up into the plutonium night sky.

The sky was not the familiar black velvet of his youth, nor the bruised indigo of the valley towns. It was the color of a freshly polished reactor rod—a sickly, luminous gray-green that seemed to radiate from nowhere and everywhere at once, casting hard, sharp-edged shadows across the snow. Against that poisonous ceiling, the moon hung like an unblinking, jaundiced eye.

And as Arthur watched, his throat tightening with an instinctive, nameless dread, he saw the edge of the sky begin to move.

It was not a cloud. Clouds had texture, edges, the ragged gray fluff of moisture caught in a high wind. This was a smooth, absolute void, drinking the light as it advanced from the eastern horizon. A secondary disk, heavy and completely opaque, was sliding slowly, deliberately, across the face of the moon.

Arthur blinked, his eyes stinging from the dry wood-smoke. He reached up, rubbing his knuckles against his eyelids, hoping to clear a film of fatigue or the onset of some mountain-madness. When he looked again, the shadow had consumed a third of the pale orb.

The light shifted. The warm, amber glow of his small fire was suddenly beaten down, overwhelmed by a sickly, cerulean wash that bled from the encroaching darkness. The snow around his boots turned the color of old lard. The birch logs, a moment ago burning with cheerful orange tongues, now flickered with a corpse-blue flame that produced no heat, only a faint, metallic taste on the back of his tongue—the taste of old pennies and damp copper.

"No," Arthur muttered. The sound of his own voice felt thin, swallowed instantly by the dead air of the ridge.

He leaned forward, bracing his palms on his knees, his eyes fixed on the sky. The advancing shadow had no stars behind it. It was not passing in front of the heavens; the heavens themselves seemed to be folding inward, closing like the iris of a dying eye. As the moon narrowed to a bright, crooked crescent, the surrounding forest seemed to recoil. The towering pines, their needles frosted with rime, appeared to lean away from the light, their black silhouettes shifting subtly in the periphery of his vision, though there was no wind to move them.

Arthur’s heart began to hammer against his ribs, a frantic, caged thing. He told himself to stand, to pack his kit, to scramble back down the goat trail toward the safety of the lowlands where men lived in houses with wooden doors and iron locks. But his legs were leaden, rooted to the frozen earth by a fascination so profound it bordered on catatonia.

The last sliver of the moon vanished.

Totality did not bring darkness. Instead, the plutonium sky flared, a sudden, blinding flash of lime-green luminescence that bleached the landscape of all shadow. Every tree, every rock, every blade of frozen grass stood out with terrifying, hyper-real clarity, stripped of depth.

And then, the sound began.

It was not a roar, nor a whistle. It was a low, sub-audible vibration that started in the soles of Arthur’s feet and worked its way up through his shins, rattling his teeth in his jaw. It sounded like the grinding of tectonic plates, or the groan of ancient icebergs splitting in the dark polar seas. With it came an odor—not of burning wood, nor of pine sap, but of something ancient and sterile, like the air released when a tomb is unsealed after a thousand years of vacuum.

Arthur pressed his hands to his ears, but the sound bypassed his eardrums entirely, vibrating directly inside his skull. His vision blurred at the edges, the green light fracturing into jagged prisms of violet and yellow.

High above, in the center of the unblinking, lightless sky, something was changing.

The black disk that had swallowed the moon was not smooth anymore. It was fracturing. Fine lines of burning white light, thin as spider silk, spread outward from its center, splitting the dark crust into jagged geometric shapes. The smell of copper grew heavier, so thick and metallic that Arthur gagged, tasting bile in the back of his throat. He fell to his hands and knees in the snow, the frozen crust biting into his palms, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps.

The sky was opening.

Through the widening fissures in the dark vault, something was looking down. It was not an eye, not in any biological sense, but an immense, shifting geometry of angles and planes that defied the architecture of the natural world. It possessed no color, yet it cast a profound, staggering weight upon the ridge—a psychic gravity that made Arthur’s spine bow toward the earth.

He tried to scream, but his lungs refused to draw the poisoned air. His mind reeled, tumbling backward through layers of memory, identity, and reason, stripping away everything that made him human until he was nothing more than a trembling animal cowering beneath the gaze of something that had existed before the stars were struck.

The fire before him was completely blue now, a still, cold flame that gave off no smoke. The logs remained unconsumed, preserved in their unnatural state.

In the vast silence between the tectonic groans of the sky, Arthur pressed his forehead into the freezing snow, his fingers clawing uselessly at the crust, and waited for the light to touch him.