Barnabus
Days earlier.
The last candle guttered in the holder beside me. I did not light another.
I did not need one.
The stone I had been searching for all these years had a faint glow to it, moonlit pale, because the Moon Goddess, my lady Celeste of the moon, leaves her own marks on the things she wants found. I had gone through every tablet in the archive. I had eaten little. I had slept less. My bones were a bag of complaints strung together with cloak string. I was an old man and I had been an old man for a long time, and I had one job left on this earth before I would be allowed to lay it down.
I had found it.
Three tablets. Bound with a leather thong gone black with age. Scored across the front in a language almost no one alive could still read.
The Shadow Princess.
I broke
