A few strikes hit Clive, leaving him gasping. He couldn't keep this up. Fighting in total darkness against an enemy. He couldn’t even defend himself.

  He needed a source of light. Not the moon, that would only empower Jill. But surely there were other sources of light in the sky.

  His brush moved almost on instinct.

  [Aerial Illustration: Starry Sky]

  He painted dots of white and silver across the black canvas of the sky. One star became two. A dozen became a hundred. Each one became a pinprick of light that illuminated the night sky.

  The soft starlight scattered across the sky like diamonds. It was enough to see by.

  There.

  Reality tore thirty feet to his left. A rift gaped open like a wound in space, and Jill's arm thrust through, blade of pure void already swinging in a vicious arc toward his throat.

  But this time, Clive saw it coming.

  Clive threw himself backward. The blade whispered past his neck.

  The portal snapped shut.

  Another opened below him. A hand reached up, grasping for his ankle.

  Azura twisted hard. The hand closed on empty air as they rolled away.

  More portals bloomed around them, forming a loose sphere around them. Jill became a phantom, darting between them with inhuman speed.

  Portal above. Portal right. Portal behind.

  Thrust from the right—Clive parried with his dagger. She vanished before he could counter.

  Slash from behind—Azura tucked her wing. The blade skimmed scales.

  Overhead strike—Clive painted a shield. It cracked but held.

  Jill didn't slow down. The portals multiplied faster now, overlapping, creating a dizzying web of dark rifts. She moved through them like a dancer through doorways, each strike building on the last.

  The rhythm was relentless. Attack, vanish, attack, vanish. Constant, overwhelming pressure from every direction at once.

  "You're getting slower," Jill observed.

  She wasn't wrong. His movements felt sluggish, his reactions delayed. Each breath came harder than the last. Even back on earth, Jill had always been the fitter of them, capable of running full marathons, while Clive would give up after a mile. It was no surprise to him that her stamina would outlast him here as well.

  I can't keep up with her! Azura's mental voice was tight with strain. She's too fast—

  "Hold steady!" Clive gasped. His eyes tracked the portals, searching desperately for something—anything—he could exploit.

  Another portal opened directly in front of his face.

  Jill's void-blade thrust through, aimed straight for his eye.

  This wasn't working. He couldn't keep defending reactively. He needed to control the space. Make it dangerous for her to attack.

  His brush moved.

  [Paint: Multi-colored Volatile Sphere]

  A sphere of crimson paint formed in the air to his left, roughly the size of a melon, hovering three feet away from Azura's flank. The pigment swirled inside like pressurized liquid, unstable and ready to detonate at the slightest disturbance.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Next was a yellow-white sphere crackling with energy. He positioned it above and slightly behind him.

  A third, fourth, and fifth.

  Clive painted them rapidly, spacing them around Azura's flight path. They looked almost decorative—like festival lanterns hanging in the darkness.

  Until a portal opened.

  The rift tore through space two feet from the crimson sphere. Jill's blade emerged—

  The sphere detonated.

  The explosion was small but vicious. A concentrated burst of fire engulfed the portal opening. Jill's arm snapped back through the rift with a hiss of pain. The portal collapsed immediately.

  Yes! Azura's mental voice surged with fierce satisfaction.

  Another portal opened—this one triggering the yellow sphere. Lightning arced outward, crackling through the void rift. Clive heard Jill curse from somewhere in the darkness.

  The portal attacks stopped. There was only silence and the soft glow of starlight. The remaining proximity mines drifted in their positions, waiting.

  Jill's voice echoed from the shadows. "Clever. You always were good at turning defense into offense."

  "I'm learning," Clive called back. He was already painting more spheres, filling the gaps in his defensive net. Green ones that would release cutting wind. Blue ones packed with frost. "You taught me that sometimes the best move is to make your opponent second-guess themselves."

  A portal flickered open, but it closed without attacking. "I never taught you that."

  "Yes, you did. Chess. Our third date—"

  “Stop.”

  "You trapped my queen, and when I finally saw it coming, you told me I'd been so focused on defending that I forgot to make you afraid."

  "I said stop," Jill whispered. "Stop trying to manipulate me."

  Watch out Clive, Azura warned. She's moving.

  Clive tracked the movement at the edge of his perception, a dark shadow testing the perimeter of his mine field. She'd gotten cautious now. No more reckless portal spam.

  Good. That bought him time. But little did he know, it bought her time too.

  A portal appeared, hovering just outside the volatile spheres' blast radius. Jill stepped through it, emerging fully onto a platform of solidified shadow about forty feet away.

  Blood ran down her arm from where the first mine had caught her. They stared at each other across the minefield between them. Two people who'd loved each other once, now separated by floating spheres of volatile paint and an ocean of grief.

  When she spoke, her voice was eerily calm. “Your time is up, Clive.”

  “There’s still plenty of time. I could do this all day.”

  Jill tilted her head slightly, looking up at the eclipsed moon above. "Do you know what a lunar eclipse is, Clive?"

  He kept his brush ready, watching for any sudden movement. "It's when the moon passes into Earth's shadow."

  "Exactly. The Earth blocks the sun's light. The moon goes dark. But do you remember what comes after? When the moon passes through the deepest part of the shadow?"

  Clive knew it. They had watched it together countless times. "The blood moon."

  "The blood moon," she echoed softly. "You painted the shadow, Clive. A disc of darkness. But you forgot something… When the only light that reaches the moon has to pass through Earth’s atmosphere, it gets refracted around the planet's edge. All the sunrises and sunsets from around the world—every red wavelength that passes through Earth's atmosphere—gets focused onto the moon's surface."

  Clive's stomach dropped. He didn’t quite understand the implications of this. But he had a bad feeling. A very bad feeling.

  "The shadow doesn't make the moon disappear," Jill continued. "It bathes it in blood-red light. Every. Single. Eclipse."

  They both looked up.

  The painted black disc he'd created was still there, still blocking the moon. But the moon hadn't stopped moving. Slowly, inexorably, the lunar sphere was drifting past the edge of his eclipse, emerging from the shadow he'd cast.

  But it didn't return to silver.

  The moon's edge glowed red as it cleared the disc's boundary. It wasn’t the warm red of sunset. It was a much deeper red. The color of old blood, rust and dying stars. The red spread across the lunar surface, consuming the white-silver glow until the entire moon hung overhead like a wound in the sky.

  Scarlet light washed over the plateau. The shadow around Jill began to peel away, revealing pale translucent skin. Underneath, red light pulsed through her veins. Her eyes took on a red hue. The void-blade in her hand dissolved, reforming into a scythe of crystallized blood.

  [Phase Shift: Blood Moon]

  A new notification slammed across Clive's vision:

  [The Moon Mother]

  Power Level: 800 → 1,000

  WARNING: Berserk State Active

  WARNING: Life Drain Aura Detected

  WARNING: Regeneration Active

  The proximity mines around them began to destabilize. The volatile paint trembled, then started to dissolve, bleeding away into the crimson light that now suffused everything.

  Clive— Azura's mental voice was sharp with fear. I can feel it. That light—it's pulling at my strength. At my life force.

  Jill rose higher into the air, crimson radiance pouring off her. When she spoke, her voice was layered—as though possessed.

  "The eclipse was a good try, little Pictomancer. But you cannot stop the moon's passage. And now—"

  Jill's scythe swept in a wide arc. Where it passed, the air itself seemed to bleed.

  "—it's time to reap what you've sown."

  The clever man thinks he commands the sky. The wise man remembers: the moon answers to no one.

  —The book of the moon 10:3