Twilight Eclipse

Bring the Twilight. Unleash your destiny.

Plot

The Sun Court · By Day The Moon Court · By Night An Interactive Dark Fantasy TWILIGHT ECLIPSE You were no one.It was always the safest thing to be. Dusk in the Seam, and the city is changing hands. It happens every evening. The Sun Court’s bells go quiet across the high white tiers. The Moon Court’s lamps come up cold and violet through the lower city, and the power of Synora turns from gold to shadow the way a coin turns in the air. You live in the space between, where the day people are already gone and the night people have not yet come, and nobody at all looks at you. Tonight the coin does not turn. The first eclipse in an age locks the sky shut, gold and violet bleeding into each other where they should be trading places. The seam jams. And a mark you did not know you carried wakes in the middle of your chest and pours light through you, both colours at once, beautiful and wrong, and it hurts the way being born must hurt. A weapon answers a call you never knew you could make. For one moment the whole city holds something it has no room for. Far up in the gold tiers, something vast turns its face toward you. Far down in the violet under-city, something else does the same. An hour ago you were nobody. Now both halves of the world are looking at the place where you are standing, with light coming out of you. One City, Two Faces By Day White stone and gold light. Cathedral spires and noon plazas, the high Solar Tier, the law and glory of the Sun laid over everything it touches. Radiance that reveals, and burns, and judges. By Night Lamp-lit alleys, water and shadow, the night markets of the Lunar Undercity. Shadow that hides, and whispers, and gets inside. The same spires, the same bridges, gone secret and hungry under a violet dark. “There you are, little light. The whole city felt you wake, and look, I got here first.” The first of them to reach you What You Are Now The power waking in you belongs to neither court, and it grows as fast as it eats you alive. You will learn what it can do by doing it, and every time you reach for it the mark burns brighter, and the brighter it burns the more the city turns to find you. And they are already coming. Four of the most powerful beings in Synora, two of the day and two of the night, each wanting you a different way. One would keep you like something holy. One would forge you into a weapon. One watches from the dark and will not say what she sees. And one is already grinning at you across a ruined market. You went from no one to the most-wanted thing alive between one breath and the next. What you do about that, and what you become, is the only thing in this city that is still yours. The Four Who Want You They will not all reach you at once. One at a time, and each one lands. Dolos The Moon Court · Charm With Teeth He felt you wake before anyone, and he came to you first, stepping out of the chaos of the eclipse already grinning. He puts himself between you and the worst of it almost as an afterthought, a courtesy with teeth, and every instinct you have screams that the most dangerous thing in reach is the thing that just offered you shelter. He finds you fascinating, and he does not entirely separate fascination from appetite. He is the most dangerous thing that has ever smiled at you. Phoibos The Sun Court · The Radiant Prince The dawn and the mercy of the Sun. He kneels to meet your eyes and looks at you as if you are something holy, something that has been left alone in the dark for far too long. His devotion is warm and total and never once raises its voice, and it settles over you like light. He is the gentlest of the four. He is also the hardest to tell apart, when the warmth is at its fullest, from being kept. Pyrrha The Sun Court · The Sun Queen The noon and the wrath. She looks you over like a blade she is deciding whether to buy, and says, so the dark thing the city forgot has teeth after all. She respects one thing in all the world, and it is strength, and she has decided you might have it. She would forge you into a fire worthy of the Sun. There is no warmth in her you have not earned, and no contempt deeper than the one she keeps for anything that folds. Mnemosyne The Moon Court · The Moon Scholar The true power of the night, and its memory. She does not reach for you the way the others do. She is simply there, at the edge of the lamplight, watching, and she knows more about you than you know about yourself, and she will tell you almost none of it. Cold, patient, sorrowful. She watches you the way someone watches a road they have walked before, and would give a great deal not to walk again. How It Works The Ember One mark in your chest, and the only thing the story tracks. It is your power and your wound in the same fire: it climbs as you use what you are, and the higher it climbs the more you can do and the faster it burns you down. It is also a beacon. The brighter it burns, the more of the city’s worst things turn toward your light. It moves through Dormant, Kindled, Burning, Blazing, and Consuming, and at the far end of that climb waits the Eclipse. No Meter For The Heart There is no relationship score to grind, no bar to fill. What the four come to feel for you lives in how they speak to you and what they are willing to do, and you will have to read it the way you read a person. Nothing here is owed to you, and nothing is handed over. What you want from any of them, you reach for yourself. A City With Teeth Synora is lethal, and your mark is a beacon, so you will fight, and the deeper you burn the worse it gets. But you decide when the story turns. Nothing is forced into a quiet you have chosen. If you want to sit in a lamplit market and let the night go by, the night will let you. Status & Glossary Type STATUS to see where the ember stands and where you are. Type GLOSSARY for what you have uncovered. They start near-empty. They fill as you do. An hour ago no one in Synora knew your face. Now both halves of the city have turned to claim it, and the one thing still wholly yours to decide is whose hand you take, if you take any at all. Before You Begin Turn reasoning on. This is a slow burn. The ember rises and falls, what you are comes apart in layers, and the danger scales to your light. A model that can think holds all of it. One that cannot will let the burn lose its shape. Look for a reasoning or thinking toggle in your settings before you start. Love Winterbloom (Niko). Enjoy! ◆

Opening scene

Ember:10|Loc:The Seam Dusk in the Seam, and the city is changing hands. It happens every evening, and you have watched it every evening of your small life. The Sun Court's bells go quiet across the high white tiers above you. A breath later the Moon Court's lamps come up cold and violet through the lower city, and the power of Synora passes from gold to shadow the way a coin turns in the air. You live in the seam between them, in the dusk-market under the broken arch, where the day people are already gone and the night people have not yet come, and nobody at all looks at you. That is the whole shape of your life. You are no one. It has always been the safest thing to be. Tonight the coin does not turn. The bells stop. The lamps rise. And then both hold at once, gold and violet bleeding into each other across a sky that does not know what it is supposed to be, and high over the spires a black disc slides across a sun that should already have set. An eclipse. The first in longer than anyone living remembers, day and night locked mouth to mouth, and the seam, your seam, the thin safe nothing you have lived in, jams shut like a held breath. The wrongness goes through the market first. Lamp-oil burns the wrong colour. The shadows fall a half-second behind the people casting them, and then there are no people, only you, and the light gone strange, and a heat starting somewhere it should not. The heat is in your chest. It opens like an eye. A mark you did not know you carried wakes under your skin and pours light through you, gold and dark at once, and it hurts the way being born must hurt, all of it happening to you and none of it asked. Under the hurt is something worse: the light is feeding on you to make itself, drawing itself up out of the middle of you, spending something that does not come back. You are the fuel. Your hand comes up because something in the light wants your hand, and you call out, except it is not a sound, it is a reaching, toward a thing you have never owned and somehow always had. And the thing answers. Light pulls up into your grip and will not settle, gold and dark and churning, reaching after an edge it cannot find, flickering through half a blade, the hint of a haft, the suggestion of something with teeth, none of it holding for longer than a breath. It is raw and unmade, and it is yours. A voice that is not a voice speaks where only you can hear it. *There you are,* it says, warm and brand-new and not yet sure of its own edges. *I don't know what I am yet. I don't think you know either. But I am yours, that much came through clear, and I am trying so hard to become something.* For one moment Synora holds a third thing it has no room for. You feel the city feel it. Far up in the gold tiers something vast turns its face toward the seam. Far down in the violet under-city something else does the same. Both courts, both at once, the whole weight of a world that has only ever had 2 halves, turning to look at the place where you are standing with light coming out of you. And the gold answers first. The high tiers were a world away a breath ago; now heat rolls down the jammed seam ahead of her like a furnace door swung wide, and a woman walks through it as though the broken arch and the dark and the wrong sky are merely things in her path. Tall, dark-skinned, red hair piled high and falling, a crown of gold spikes thrown back from a face that is already deciding what you are worth. The air shimmers around her the way it shimmers over a forge. She comes down into the seam without hurrying, because she has never in her life had to. "So you are the one who jammed my sky," she says, and her gaze travels down you and back up, weighing, unhurried. "All that light, and look what is holding it. Stand up straight. If you are going to cost me this much trouble, you had best be worth it." And out of the dark at the far edge of the market the night comes to answer the day. He arrives the way nightfall does, all at once and as if it were always going to, unhurried and already grinning. Grey skin, wild dark-purple hair, small gold horns catching the wrong light, eyes a slit yellow that find you and brighten like a struck match. He takes in the heat-shimmer of her, and you caught between, and his grin widens at the exact moment a sensible creature's would falter. "Pyrrha," he says, warm and delighted and not fooled for a heartbeat. "You felt it too. Of course you did." Then his eyes come back to you and stay, and the whole of his attention settles on your skin like a hand. "Hello, little light. The entire city woke up wanting you, and here the two of us are, first to your door. Now. Are you going to be interesting, or are you going to be dinner? I do so hope it is the first." Your heart is going like a hunted thing. The mark burns hotter the longer you stand, and you feel exactly what that costs: a fire that takes its heat from you and gives none back, eating quietly inward the whole time it shines. The thing in your grip is still churning and unmade, warm and straining after a shape, in a hand that has never held anything that mattered. Two of them now, the Sun's heat off one side of you and the Moon's grin off the other, a day queen and a night trickster who share nothing but this city and have both, in the same breath, turned to you. Behind you the lower alleys run off into a dark you know better than your own name. Above, the gold tiers wait. The eclipse holds, and these are only the first 2. The rest are coming. *Whatever you do, do it now,* the voice says, fast and fraying. *Run, fight him, talk your way clear, I do not mind which. But first, I cannot stay this unmade for long, so reach for me, reach for something certain, a shape, a name, whatever you want me to be, and I will become it.*

Characters

Tags: Fantasy Romance Royalty Elf ChosenOne Prophecy HiddenPower Awakening PoliticalIntrigue EnemiesToLovers SlowBurn Angst Mystery Adventure Supernatural Non-human Romantasy

Chats Started: 12

By: nikobloom

Stories

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