Banish the Darkness

By O. Monteleone

"Death was the only fact that came with the tear, beyond that, everything else was speculation and myth."

Ana and Eli are dead kids walking. At least, that's what everyone thinks. Born to be sacrificed to t

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Dec 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637309698

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Banish the Darkness

Banish the Darkness

O. Monteleone

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 O. Monteleone

All rights reserved.

Banish the Darkness

ISBN 978-1-63730-819-6 Paperback

978-1-63730-881-3 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63730-969-8 Ebook

To Gabriel, the love of my life and my constant supporter.

To my parents, Mark and Juana, and to my brother Mark, who all enabled my passion and listened to my ramblings of things I created in my own mind.

To the readers who yearn to be an author one day—never let go of that dream. Continue reaching for it until it becomes your reality.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Acknowledgments

My rule is absolute.

I have no need for options nor secondary plans.

Their souls will be mine.

–C

Prologue

The walk to the temple was dark. Dark clouds weighed heavy in the sky, hiding much of the moon’s light behind them, and the air was still. The people of our small village brought torches with them to light the way, the bright flames hurting my eyes and painting long shadows across the ground. Trying not to yawn, I tugged at my father’s pant leg, but the eyes that met mine were scrunched with worry. The soles of my feet ached as we continued, and I longed for the comfort of my bed; it was long past the time I should have been asleep. I held my mother’s hand and walked at my father’s side, too nervous to say anything about my discomfort.

The only sound around us was the shuffling of our feet. The woods surrounding the path were silent as well, and I kept glancing into the dark tree line. I felt so small against the unsettling silence of so many people and the dark of the night.

The path to the temple was stone and hard, packed dirt that felt good under my shoes. I tried to stop and touch the ground, but Mom yanked me along. Dad patted my head and I smiled, but it seemed out of place on this walk, so I stopped. In fact, everyone looked solemn. Even my two best friends, James and Eli, were somber. Eli walked next to his father with his back perfectly straight and eyes unblinking, while James couldn’t stop looking around. Our gazes met briefly before his flew to look at something else.

I forgot why everyone was so sad. We’d been taught about this ceremony and what it meant, but I was too tired to remember anything.

The world around me seemed to grow even darker, and I looked up. We’d reached the temple. It loomed over us, made from white stone that had certainly once been shiny but now was gray from the ash and soot of countless lit torches. The columns were rough and smooth at the same time. As we filed into the temple, I noticed every part of the floor was covered in sand and dirt except for the center.

The main area was a circle and slightly raised up from the floor like a small dais. Hovering above and in front of three people on the platform was what looked like a tear in the air, as if the air were made of fabric. The Tear glowed softly with white light on the edges, but inside was pitch black. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It seemed to pulse and hum as if it were alive.

My attention was jostled from the Tear to focus on the three people behind it; two of them knelt, sobbing, while one lay still and silent in their arms. I wondered briefly why they would cry for a sleeping boy, but as we neared closer, I saw the blood coating the still boy. It seeped onto the floor.

The villagers moved ever closer around the raised circle, forming a ring around the three.

Across the room on the other side of the circle, I saw an older boy I didn’t recognize steel himself as he gazed at the Tear solemnly. He glanced at the still boy and then narrowed his eyes at the Tear. He looked over at a girl his age that stood close to his side, took her hand, kissed it, and smiled at her. She reluctantly let him go. He strode closer to the center of the room, closer to the ominous Tear. His parents tried to hang on to him, too, but he gently shrugged them off, gave them a soft smile, and walked straight into the Tear.

The crying parents gingerly moved the dead boy from the circle and into a far corner of the room to continue mourning. The new boy’s parents took their vacated spot on the other side of the Tear, and the villagers watched and waited. Pieces were coming back to me from class. The new boy had replaced the dead one, and we must wait for a time to ensure he would remain inside the Tear.

I couldn’t remember why he wouldn’t stay in, or why the other boy had come back dead. I knew better than to speak, but my eyes sought out Eli and James to see if they remembered. I began to feel fear despite my exhaustion, and when I turned my eyes to the Tear again, I knew something wrong hid behind it.

The torches had burned low, and the boy still had not come out of the Tear. The girl whose hand he had kissed smiled grimly, almost with satisfaction.

A sense of relief floated among the adults, the tension easing from their faces as they realized the boy would not come back out. As we turned to leave the temple, a woman shrieked, breaking the stillness that had pervaded the ceremony. Everyone focused on the Tear with wide eyes as the boy was suddenly returned to us, thrust through the Tear as if pushed.

He was bloody and dead, like the first boy, like so many before them.

His mother sobbed as she knelt before his broken body, the father patting her back gently as his face twisted with sorrow.

I looked to the girl again as she took a physical step backward in shock. I was one of the only ones to notice the tears running down her face as she glared at the Tear. Her sadness morphed into rage as her fists clenched and she held her head high. She looked to the dead boy and whispered something—I was too far to catch the words—and sprinted for the Tear.

Her parents cried out in shock, her father desperately throwing his arms out to stop her, but he was too late. In an instant, she was swallowed up by the Tear, and a horrified silence filled the space. Even the mourning parents stared in shock at the girl’s actions.

Silence was replaced with wails and murmurs among the villagers; she was not supposed to go into the Tear.

However, the ceremony proceeded as it should. The girl’s parents replaced the previous boy’s parents upon the platform. Silence once again descended upon the room, save for the soft crying we could still hear from the mourning parents on the far side of the temple.

We waited.

She didn’t come out.

Chapter 1

Ten Years Later

Ana

The somber gray sky did nothing to improve my sour mood.

I’d had one of the worst nights of my life, my sleep plagued by awful nightmares of the night Julie, a girl from a neighboring village, had run into the Tear. I had never truly been able to set aside the memory. Julie had upset the traditions of the ceremony—she had not been slated to enter the Tear but had gone in to avenge the dead boy she must have cared for deeply. I kept seeing both of the dead boys’ bodies sprawled on the dais, unmoving . . . 

Feeling my mood worsening and my thoughts growing more dire, I focused instead on my dad’s weird behavior from earlier this morning. He had woken me abruptly and pushed me out the door to take care of errands in the marketplace. The errands themselves were not unusual, as I often ran early morning errands for our family, but my dad’s demeanor had shaken me a bit. My normally jovial and dependable dad had seemed almost haunted and hollow, as if he had seen my dreams as well.

I tried not to linger on it, or on the nightmare that had left me tossing and turning fitfully last night. Fractions of it continued to flash through my mind like lightning: dark shadows, fires raging, screams of pain—unfamiliar screams, thankfully, but that made them no less eerie and foreboding.

A quick glance around told me my distressed thoughts had made their way onto my face and had not gone unnoticed by the townspeople out and about. One of our neighbors crossed her hands over her heart as I passed, warding away evil. Eli would have called her crazy, and the thought brought a brief smile to my face. He didn’t believe any of their gestures or curses held power.

My best friend Eli and I were no stranger to being stared at, whispered about, and looked down on with pity or contempt. People treated us as if our situation was contagious, and the whispers rarely ceased, even if we were present. The cause of all the whispers and warding gestures was our connection to the Tear. Although some treated the Tear as if it heard their every thought, most acknowledged it as the root of superstition and ancient tradition, and those were the ones that pitied us. If the girl currently inside it was to emerge from the Tear this second, I was the next to go in myself. Until my nineteenth birthday, which was a little less than two months away, the threat of being sacrificed to the Tear loomed over me.

Despite all our attempts, not much was known about the Tear besides rumor and superstition, passed down from generation to generation. In school, we had been taught that the sacrifices had started to appease an evil entity within the Tear that threatened our world. Our own King Lyons could not appease the entity in any other way, and so all the villages of our nation kept track of the two oldest children of each year. In our village, Eli and I currently were the eldest, and the responsibility of sacrifice rotated between towns. Julie and the boys who had died ten years ago had been from the village before ours in the rotation.

My dad said the Tear had to do with an old order of gods who had intended to merge universes. His theory was an unpopular one, especially since everyone who had ever gone through the Tear had returned dead. Eli believed the Tear was an empty void that spat us back out, killing us effortlessly and discarding us like trash. Our other best friend, James, had a more devout family. They were the same type of people who would cross their hands over their hearts as I passed, determined to believe the Tear was hell and our King Lyons was the only one keeping it at bay.

I wasn’t sure what I believed about the Tear, but the how and why questions surrounding the situation were a mystery I had always wanted to solve. King Lyons was worshipped because people thought he was the incarnation of a god. He didn’t age, but apart from that, he had done nothing godlike.

Lost in this spiraling train of thought, I purchased bread and the two spools of fabric my mother had requested and hurried out of the marketplace. The stall owner was certainly happy to see me go, all but shooing me away regardless of the fact that I was a paying customer. I felt eyes on my back, as always, and immediately wanted to be out of their line of sight. Two townswomen in particular were eyeing me rather noticeably, but when I turned my head, they shuffled by. They didn’t bother hiding their discussion, however, and I caught a snippet as they moved on.

Did you hear? Lurk was seen around the temple this morning! one hissed.

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Anything that happened at the temple was always connected to us, even if we had nothing to do with it.

The other gasped lightly and looked at me yet again as she replied, He gives me the creeps.

Ignoring them, I kept my feet going steadily one in front of the other, though a chill crawled up my spine at the mention of the old man. I felt claustrophobic surrounded by all the people and the stalls in the market, knowing without a doubt that everyone was eyeing me in some way or another, just like those women. Eli liked to challenge their stares; he didn’t believe in a world beyond the Tear. But I disagreed. I had a strong feeling something was there. Otherwise, why had Julie been in the Tear for so long when others before her had been spat back out so quickly?

The main road was a beaten dirt path that led all the way through our town—called the Merchant’s Walk—from beginning to end, and connected us to the royal citadel, which was a day’s journey to the north. It was also the main connection to two nearby agricultural towns we’d merged with several years ago and was lined with homes and market stalls as it wound its way through our town. My dad said there used to be more towns but had never elaborated on what happened to them. I assumed they’d died off or merged.

As I made my way past the busier parts of the road, the stalls finally falling away behind me, I reached my family’s house in the tradesmen area of town. My mother was a weaver and my dad was a carpenter, so we lived comfortably, except for the ever-present blame my mother placed on herself for giving birth to the oldest child in my year and the responsibility my father felt to train me for whatever lay beyond the Tear.

I opened the door to find my father pacing in the main hall.

Dad? Is everything okay? I didn’t move any further into our house, and he took his time replying, leaving me in a tense silence.

I had a nightmare last night. Your mother had the same one, he finally divulged.

What nightmare? My gut clenched, there was no way—

It was about that night at the temple ten years ago. When Julie went in.

I froze, panic lancing through me. I had that same nightmare. I wondered if they had also seen what I had, all the shadows and fire and pain.

Did Eli? he asked as he rubbed his head and stopped pacing.

I haven’t seen him yet. I was out running errands, remember? I raised a brow, trying to display more nonchalance than I felt. I didn’t want him to tell me more about the Tear. Since I turned seventeen, he’d been trying to tell me more about it, and I reluctantly picked up bits and pieces, but it made me sick to even think about. My heartbeat pounded against my chest. These nightmares didn’t feel random to me.

I see. Will you go ask Eli? I have a feeling his father won’t tell him if he did. He couldn’t look at me, his attention fixed on the floor.

Is everything okay? I asked, the panic now painfully twisting my insides.

Don’t worry, Ana. It’ll be fine. Dad patted my shoulder, his smile strained.

I tried not to feel strange as he brought his eyes to me now. I regretted wanting him to look at me. His eyes were hollow, like he was already seeing my ghost, the way mom always looked at me. I tore my eyes from his.

I’ll be back later, I replied, but my tone was as hollow as his gaze.

I handed him the things