I don’t know how much time I spent with my eyes closed, wondering whether the ghosts would show up or not. I wished that at least Olesia would, because the ghosts were present when Mama wed the Moon and hence know how the ceremony should proceed in practice. That is, at that point, both Celestia and I knew how it should go in principle. But principle and practice are always two different things. Anyway, I had to remind myself several times that it mightn’t be up to them to decide whether they appear or not. They’re not in control of themselves anymore. They’re fading. Soon, they mightn’t be anything else but waning hauntings of a forgotten house.
I stirred to the sound of the curtains being drawn apart. Though the gap between the planks is narrow and the crack in the glass is small, barely the size of a copper penny, a thick, silvery beam of Moon’s light flowed into the room. My sisters and I, we drifted to bask under our father’s gaze.
This is when the ghosts finally appeared. Irina formed next to Alina, Olesia beside Celestia. In the Moon’s light, they looked more real, solid.
Scribs, I’d grown so used to seeing them but in a reflection, that to see them—not in flesh, but in the ghostly version of that word—greeting our father, his daughters just like us, my heart swelled with a bruising feeling, a sort of foreboding melancholy. But at that moment, I knew that our father would always care for us all, that he’d forgive us, no matter what path we wound up following.
Celestia stepped forth, toward the window, and turned to face us. Dressed in her negligee, holding the two soul beads on her palms, she seemed to gleam silvery luster—no, to reflect the Moon’s light. “Welcome, my sisters. Welcome, our honored aunts.”
Olesia curtsied, but Irina didn’t. She chose to remain still, taller, thinner, her outline sharper than that of her sister, with the gap between her and Elise sore like a ruined grin. She simply said, “The guards are asleep.”
I glanced at the chair with which I’d barred the door, still happy that I’d chosen to do so. Even if the ghosts had checked up on the guards, there was no guarantee that one of them mightn’t wake up.
Scribs, you’re right, I’ll be running out of ink and paper before I get to the ceremony. Hence, I’ll be skipping the greetings and some other bits. I’ll try not to leave out anything that might be of interest to you.
“Shall we begin?” Celestia asked, and not only to check if I was ready for my part, but to also verify from the ghosts that everything was in order.
I held my breath. Celestia and I had done our best to combine what I’d figured out from the scriptures and what the ghosts had told us about the ceremony. But how could we really know if we’d still got something terribly wrong?
“I see no reason for delay,” Irina replied, and she was right. The late-summer nights are short still and the gagargi will be sending for Celestia well before the next full Moon. This might be very soon indeed.
This thought in mind, we hastened to our assigned places: Celestia at the exact center of the Moon’s light, Elise to the right of her. My place should have been there, next to her, but of course tonight it wasn’t, as I had the sacred rites to perform. Merile, Alina, and the rats gathered to the left of Celestia, uncharacteristically attentive. Irina and Olesia remained where they’d appeared. They were to be the rest of our family summoned to witness the most sacred of ceremonies.
Once everyone was in the right spots, I untied the knot securing Celestia’s negligee. With my fumbling fingers, it took me two separate attempts to manage this, but once I did succeed, the garment slipped off her shoulders, off her. She stepped out of it, to reveal her unclothed body for her husband-to-be. In his light, she was slender and pale like a young birch, the shadows of her ribs the stripes. Rooted to this moment.
My sister said, “I am ready.”
Scribs, speak of a pressure! I can’t even begin to describe how nervous I felt as everyone turned to stare at me. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe, let alone move. My sisters’ fate, the very future of the Crescent Empire, rested in my clumsy hands! We had but one chance for the ceremony, only one swan soul. If I were to say the wrong words, mispronounce the glyph, if the beads were to slip from my fingers at the wrong moment…
“Sibilia.” Celestia’s voice was laced with confidence.
I drew a deep breath. She believed in me, and if she did so, it had to mean that I could really perform the ceremony. I pushed any opposing thoughts aside and strode to my place, before her.
“The sacred marriage that binds the Moon to the eldest Daughter of the Moon is the most blessed of unions,” I said, and my voice didn’t waver at all. More confident now, I opened you, Scribs, and turned over the right page. I cursed myself for having written sideways over the passages. But then…
Our father’s light lit the paper white, and the black letters grew bolder under my gaze. Each word was so easy to make out, so easy to say. And so I recited our father’s wisdom in a clear, loud voice, coaxing forth the glyphs that would bind my sister to the Moon. And they came to me, in orderly groups, though I’m no gagargi.
When the time came, Celestia extended her bare hands toward me, the soul beads resting on the cups of her palms. With each passage I read, the light inside the beads changed form. White threads surged under the glass, radiant but impatient. We’d speculated on the complications of one soul being split apart and being reunited later. The ghosts had reassured us that this should pose no risk. Or that was what the young gagargi had told them all those years ago.
And now that the final glyph emerged from amongst the words, I had to believe in the ghosts and the young gagargi I’d never met, that they’d been right, that they’d known what they were doing. Because as the master of all glyphs expanded in the Moon’s light, winding more complex with each heartbeat, I for sure had no idea whether I was going to succeed or not. Scribs, there really was but one way to find out.
“Celestia, the oldest Daughter of the Moon,” I addressed my sister, so very keen to pronounce the master glyph, but terrified as well. For the glyph was so impossibly elaborate, a hundred times more so than any I’d ever coaxed forth from the pages before. Being so for a purpose. “Will you marry His Celestial Highness, the Moon?”
“I will.” Celestia smiled at me, and it was as if her whole being, her body was radiating the answer, her eagerness in the form of lustrous white light. I could feel my sisters’, the ghosts’ expectant gazes on us.
I willed myself to remember the glyph in its whole glorious intricacy, and then, Scribs, I closed you, and having no other place to put you, I clasped you between my knees. My hands shook violently as I extended them toward Celestia’s.
She met me with the most trusting of gazes, as blue as the innocent summer days of our childhood. “Sibilia, the one our father has favored with the deeper understanding of his words, will you perform the rite?”
I forced myself to take a slow breath, and in our father’s presence, I at last found calmness. My hands ceased to tremble, and Celestia placed a bead on each of my upturned palms. “I will.”
And then, I pronounced the glyph that was the key to the Crescent Empire’s future.
Scribs, I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you of the things that unfolded next. It’s not for selfish reasons, but a matter of necessity. My father’s secrets are not for me to share. But I can tell you that the moment he took my sister as his wife was both beautiful and terrible, deafeningly loud and silent, short and long, and all the things in between.
This much I can say: the ceremony changed Celestia. Where she had been serene before, now her blue gaze is wide and deep like an ocean that knows no boundaries. Where her posture had been tall and proud, now it’s even more so. And where she’d been fair before, now she gleams our father’s blessed light even when he’s not present.