Phoebe's Tale: Into the Light, page 1
Nightlord:
Phoebe’s Tale
Into the Light
By
Garon Whited
This one is for Tori, Lia, and Emmy
Other Books by Garon Whited:
Dragonhunters
LUNA
The Nightlord Series:
Nightlord, Book One: Sunset
Nightlord, Book Two: Shadows
Nightlord, Book Three: Orb
Nightlord, Book Four: Knightfall
Nightlord, Book Five: VOID
Nightlord, Book Six: Mobius
Nightlord, Book Seven: Fugue
Nightlord, Book Eight: Penumbra
Phoebe’s Tale:
From His Shadow
Short Stories:
An Arabian Night: Nazin’s Dream
Clockwork
Dragonhunt
Ship’s Log: Vacuum Cleaver
The Power
The Ways of Cats
Copyright © 2025 by Garon Whited.
Cover Art: “Awakening” by Rachel C. Beaconsfield (rbeaconsfield@hotmail.com)
ISBN: 979-8-9923563-1-1
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is probably coincidental.
Journal Entry #60
The fire crawled up the mountainside and cleared the view.
Below, what had once been Denver was laid out like a diorama. There was no crater, but the blast had leveled a large piece of city and left a circular pattern of destruction. From there, fire spread unchecked. Smoke still rose in places and, farther northeast, pockets of flame still flickered. Here, in the mountains to the west, a few coals smoldered under ashes and the remains fallen trees. There was little left to burn.
Rusty checked his wrist. He wore a sophisticated radiation detector because I don’t like it when he’s anxious. It barely clicked.
“The prevailing winds must have been away from here,” he said.
“Yes. See how the fire climbed uphill and petered out at the top? Looks as though the wind kept pushing it to the east.”
“Looks like,” he agreed. “This not-quite-a-crater is fresher than I thought it would be. I didn’t expect more nukes. Didn’t everyone shoot their shot already?”
“Every nuclear war plan I’ve studied has more to it than the first strike. You can’t expect them to open up with one salvo and call it quits, can you?”
“How many nuclear war plans have you studied?”
“Didn’t you play Global Thermonuclear War around the dining room table as a kid?”
“No. I’ve never heard of it. We tended more toward card games.”
“Fair enough. The bombers would also be in the air, along with the cruise drones. They would have default orders and would carry out their missions after the first missile strikes. Did they put nukes on satellites? In your world, I mean.”
“No. There was a treaty about nuclear armaments in space.”
“So, they didn’t admit to putting nukes on satellites?” I pressed.
“Right,” Rusty sighed. “I guess they could drop those payloads anywhere, if they had pre-programmed orders. Or if there was an intact bunker with a transmitter.”
“Even if they all followed the treaties, there are submarines,” I added.
“Good point. Those have definite orders. When they surface, if nobody tells them otherwise, they carry out their fire missions, right? There might be two or three or four rounds of nuclear exchanges before it all settled down. Assuming it has,” he added.
“Which may be why parts of Denver are still slightly on fire after all this time.”
“How long do you think it’s been?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Weeks, at least. I don’t know where I’d find a working clock or current calendar. I guess we could work it out from the positions of the planets, if you think we need to know the exact date.”
“An approximation is fine. I’m wondering if there are more cycles to come for the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic mutually assured destruction.”
“I’m sure we’ll find out.”
Rusty shrugged, mostly as a way to agree without speaking.
I lifted my binoculars again to look at the ruins. Rusty kept an eye on our surroundings. For close-up work, nobody beats The Nose.
There was no sign of life. The wind occasionally stirred the twisting smoke from not-quite-out fires. It was the only movement. I saw no survivors nor signs of survivors. No dogs, no deer, not even a raccoon.
Considering how many vampires might be slumbering in the ruins, I wasn’t prepared to give odds on rats, either. Feral vampires are not at all fussy. And they are very, very fast.
“Seen enough?” Rusty asked.
“Yeah. There’s nobody down there.”
“Want to come back after dark to see if anything crawls out at night?”
“Not on your life! We’ll spy on the place remotely.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Where to next?”
I looked at the devastation under a cold, cloudy sky, thinking about Rusty’s question. The view needed a contrast, a counterpoint. Maybe a single ray of sunlight. Nope. All I got was grey. I didn’t like it.
I could have viewed the devastation through a scrying spell. I looked at a lot of other places before this, doing tallies of detonations, how big, where, how recent, and whether or not they were airbursts.
For the record, the majority of North America, South America, and Australia got mostly airbursts and therefore less of a fallout hazard. Europe and Asia got a lot more ground detonations. Population centers in India and Africa got a mix of both, although a few detonations seemed placed specifically to inflict fallout over large areas rather than to destroy cities. Destroying agricultural infrastructure, maybe? Or were they targeting secret military sites? I couldn’t tell from the craters. Put a nuke inside a penetrator and it blows a really big hole. Double-tap a location and the hole is impressive.
I didn’t like looking at Denver with my bare eyeballs, but I felt I ought to. It’s not the same as watching a magic mirror while the viewpoint drifts through the rubble. This, I could feel. I could taste ashes and fear. The preliminary EMP destroyed electrical and electronic infrastructure days, maybe weeks before the nuke blasted a chunk out of the city and set a lot of the rest on fire. Outside the blasted zone, the pre-seeded vampire plague spread faster than rumors.
How many vampires does it take to start a plague? One. If you’re in a hurry, you can show up three nights earlier and get a head start. This means you can have hundreds, maybe thousands of them in less than a week. It’s not a sustainable way to survive as a vampire. If your objective is to kill as many people as possible, it’s hard to beat. Once they eat or convert everything in the city, they leave, spreading out into the countryside.
Nukes and biowarfare. Undead biowarfare. Necrowarfare! Nukes and necrowarfare are a nasty combination.
“I’ve seen enough up close. Do you have anywhere you want to go? Any place in particular you want to look at?”
“I’ve seen the one place in Harlem that matters. There’s nothing else I care to see. I’m only here because you are.”
I reached out and squeezed his hand. He smiled slightly and squeezed mine.
“I’m sorry about that.”
“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.” He shrugged again. “Back to the Moon?”
“Suits me.”
I let go his hand so I could run one finger around the inside of my new bracelet. He stood very close as I did so. I can’t pull off large shift-spaces the way Pop does.
Initially, when the bombs dropped, we took refuge with my Uncle Dusty. There were a lot of things to deal with and most of our issues stemmed from the way the world went to hell in a handbasket. Hanging around with the atomic demigod was the second-safest place I could think of. We spent quite a while in the administration building of Uncle Dusty’s power plant. It was surprisingly comfortable. Pop had prepared a couple of the top-floor offices as an apartment for me.
Technically, it was for me and Pop. Mostly for me. The top-floor restrooms were converted into one large bathroom, complete with sauna, whirlpool tub, and a multi-jet hot shower. One office was repurposed and furnished as a bedroom. He knocked out a wall and turned two offices into the main portion of the apartment—kitchenette, table, a couple of dining chairs and a couple of comfy relaxation chairs.
It was originally intended as a bug-out base while I was little. If anything went seriously wrong at our house, I would dive into the shift-closet and wind up here. If anything got past Pop and managed to follow me, it would then have to deal with a literal deus ex machina, the God of Nuclear Fission, or whatever it is Uncle Dusty is the local deity of.
I wonder if he has a pet lizard that breathes a radiation jet? Probably not. Should I suggest it to him? Probably not.
Despite all Pop’s remodeling, he never took me to visit. All I knew at the time was we had a place to bug out to. When I finally had reason to be here, it was surprisingly nice. It had his characteristically stark, neo-industrial utilitarianism,
I did a little furnishing and rearranging. Pop’s sense of style isn’t so much “style” as “sense.” Once it’s functional, he has to be reminded there are other metrics. Aesthetics, to him, is the same thing as efficiency. They say form follows function. To him, function defines form.
I added area rugs to break up the kitchen/living area, sort of divide it into virtual rooms. A Berber rug put a perimeter around the tempered-glass table, making it the dining area, separate from the tiled kitchen area. A big, Persian rug—what Pop would call “an eight-seater” in flying carpet terms—paired well with the leather couch and a recliner to form the living area. The bedroom and bathroom were the only spaces with real walls and doors, but I wasn’t immediately concerned with places where I was going to soak or sleep. The kitchen/dining area/living room was where I would pay attention to my surroundings.
Rusty appreciated the homey touches as much as I did. We had a space the size of a luxury apartment, which was an upgrade for Rusty. I considered converting a neighboring office to another bedroom, but, after the first few nights, discarded the idea as unnecessary.
The apartment upgrades were nice, but they were hardly our first concern. They happened here and there, one by one, rather than as an interior design crusade. Most of our mental effort was spent on other things. Among them, figuring out what was happening on and to Rusty’s Earthline.
Sitting in a nuclear power plant and casting spells across universal barriers was one way to find out more, but it was tiring. Uncle Dusty’s reactors put out magical force as a necessary component to his divinity dynamos, so he had such an enormous budget he didn’t mind me using it. It’s like having a rich uncle who can afford to buy me a new car whenever the current one runs out of gas.
The trouble is, I have to do the work. I have more power than I can use, which is a good thing. Doing the actual spying-and-scrying work—with the attendant mini-gates and mirrors and everything—can be exhausting. All the power had to go through me in casting the spells!
Once I cast the proper spells, though, we could use them pretty much indefinitely. As long as they stayed in Uncle Dusty’s powerplant, that is. I wouldn’t want to use them in an Earthline for long; they would run out of energy and consume themselves. On the other hand, it would be quicker and easier to use them actually in Rusty’s Earthline, which meant either finding a power source or schlepping power crystals back and forth to a reactor world for charging…
I really need to enchant equipment for a proper workshop again. Having my previous one blown up by vampire terrorists was disheartening. I suppose I could hunt through Manhattan for anything that survived, but I don’t really want to look at it again. Finding the pizza shop and the remains of Rusty’s parents was enough. It was too much, really. We both lost too much in Manhattan to want to even think about it.
But we didn’t feel we were done with the world as a whole. Manhattan, yes; the world, no. There were vampires to investigate and survivors to help.
We set up a base of operations in Rusty’s Earthline to cut down on power costs and mental effort. There are universes where IKEA produces flat-pack lunar housing modules. A few earth-moving robots—okay, regolith-shoveling robots—borrowed from Uncle Dusty’s workforce made things go a lot faster. I had to vacuum-proof them to avoid routine failures, but they worked pretty well as construction equipment. They could use a shovel and had a cargo bed they could load to haul away the spoil. An afternoon of work got us the equivalent of an underground cabin on the Moon.
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to put it on Earth?”
Yes, but Earth is presently infested with feral and not-so-feral vampires. True, I could park the habitat in the Gobi desert or Antarctica on the theory that where there are no humans, there are no vampires. On the other hand, there remained a non-zero possibility someone might lob a missile at me.
I’ve survived a near miss by a nuclear weapon. I don’t want to push my luck. Besides, with a shift-space, the Moon was, for all practical purposes, one step away from anywhere on the planet and much harder to attack.
It was also nice to see Rusty enjoying himself. A werewolf, in a spacesuit, on the Moon? He thought it was hilarious! “One small howl for a werewolf, one giant Awoo! for lycan-kind.”
Seeing him smile did me a world of good. We haven’t had much to smile about since the initial strikes. For a long time, we were running under the whip, too busy to go to pieces. Once we were settled in one of Uncle Dusty’s reactor worlds, we had ample opportunity to relax and fall apart and talk through what happened to us.
I was glad I didn’t have to go through it alone. I had Rusty to talk to, and vice versa. I can’t imagine what it would be like to try and explain it to someone who wasn’t there.
Maybe I’ll go into all that later. Not now.
We talked about it a lot and decided it wasn’t going to be a quick process. We needed a lot more talk therapy and maybe a little occupational or action therapy. Once we were a little less post-traumatic stressed, we decided we needed to know what happened to Rusty’s version of Earth. That’s when we built our lunar cabin and moved in there. It was a three-room affair and we had extra modules ready to go if we needed to expand. We had life support, two power nodes, and an airlock stairway to the surface.
Since Rusty enjoyed being on the surface during the dark phase, I sent him up with a wand I made. With it, he drew rectangles in the lunar dust. This defined an area and the wand filled it with a solar conversion panel. He kept busy at it while I handled the other creature comforts in the place.
He goes out to work in the fields, farming a crop of solar panels. I’m the homemaker. I kind of enjoy it. I’m not sure what I want to do with my life in the big picture sense of things, but it could involve a similar arrangement. We’ll see.
With our living and power arrangements sorted out, we settled in to look at the Earth. I wanted to reconstruct what happened, or at least get an idea of how it all went down. It might not be necessary, but it was a good first step in the coping process.
See, we lost a planet to vampire plots. Technology really isn’t something vampires—excuse me, secret vampire societies—cope with at all well. These bloodsuckers came up with the idea of using human technology against itself. The idea was to bust everyone back to the Dark Ages and, using the Natural Superiority of the Undead, take over the world and subjugate whatever was left of mankind.
This would not ordinarily bother me. I grew up knowing there were universes where bad things happened. In this case, it did bother me because I knew I was at least partially to blame. And, if I’m honest, because the vampires pissed me off.
To this day, I still miss my teddy bear.
It also bothered me because it bothered Rusty. This Earth was his Earth. It had all his friends and family on it. I’m going to feel bad about that for quite a while, thank you.
So we’re coping, or trying to cope, with serious guilt and loss. We’re looking at Earth and trying to understand what happened in as much detail as we can. If we can grok it, great. Grokked or not, we’re still going to have to cope with it. Somewhere along the way, there’s going to have to be a bit of acceptance. Eventually. Rusty and I haven’t found it. Not yet.
Which brings us back to the Moon. My bracelet is set to generate a cylindrical shift-space and target a similar space in the underhut. I built these spells myself, along with all the other magical equipment. Pop is off doing his own thing, so I have to do everything by hand, by myself. I’m okay with that. I’m a big girl and can handle it.
I’m sure I can. Positive. Pretty positive. Nearly certain. Confident, anyway. Not insecure about it at all.
I always knew my Pop was an absolute powerhouse as far as the design, casting, and crafting of all things magical are concerned. Having to make every single thing I wanted, myself, by hand, without any help or input, and in a hurry? Now I know it know it, not just think I know. It’s exhausting, no matter how much of a power supply I have.
At least the lunar module was easy. The instructions were very well-written and we watched the demonstration videos. Hand-crafting a bunch of spells took much longer.
