A Collection of Midnights

The warlock, Vadimas, had no love for the sun and jealously hoarded his midnights so that he might always live in darkness. Sometimes he stole midnights from the commonfolk. They would struggle to find their rest under the constant glare of the sun. Once, he gathered up all the midnights of an entire village for a year and left them all begging for the dark to return and let them sleep.

Vadimas grew tired of being chased out of every land he came to and took it upon himself to create a world where the sun would cease to go. Upon a rock between two pale stars, he raised high walls of black stone, erected towers that threw shade upon the domed roofs and labyrinth of widow walks. He built vaulted ceilings with countless nooks and crannies for shadows to gather and breed.

Gargoyles sat upon the crenulations. They glared at the rising sun every morning, their looks so intense that the bright star took to turning its face the other way whenever it had to pass over.

The colossal structure stretched the length and breadth of that solitary rock. When complete, Vadimas carved himself a cellar and then kept digging until a cavern the size of the palace above had been cut out. In this dark hall was where he worked. There were no windows, no natural light to speak of. All his waking hours were illuminated by a single orb of blue light he had conjured himself.

The days passed and with each one he filled another corner of his world with new creations. Gilded frames covered the walls and housed the finest paintings ever seen. Rich tapestries lined the corridors. A replica of the solar system hung from the ceiling, the sun painted black, and filled the entirety of one hall with giant speres. The neighbouring room was totally dark save for the perfect arrangement of tiny lights hovering in the air. It looked as though he had taken a great sword and carved out a chunk of the cosmos just to fill the space. An astronomer’s dream.

But his home was not just paintings, planets, and stars. He carved sculptures too. Marble figures stood about his palace of their own accord and bowed their heads whenever they passed the hooves of the fifty-foot-tall deer sculpted from obsidian. Vadimas’ favourite creation was the oversized sundial of wrought iron he placed in the main courtyard. He revelled in the irony of its existence. In a few short years, the courtyard would be covered. The sundial would never see the sun again and would soon forget how to tell the time.

Tragedy struck before the last room could be filled. It was the only place in the entire palace with a glass dome for a roof, and so he had been determined to build something to hang from the ceiling that would be large enough to block the light. While raising the strange marble sculpture through a combination of his own magic and an elaborate contraption involving weights and pulleys, one of the chains broke. Vadimas, old now and partially blind, found he had not enough magic left to bear the weight. Down came his final creation. It smashed upon the floor, breaking into a hundred pieces, and crushing the warlock beneath it.

The trouble was not over. Vadimas had skipped all his midnights since he first arrived on the barren rock – every day that ended, he gathered up his night, locked it away in a vault hidden beneath an unfinished sculpture, and let the next day start immediately after. His plan had been to store up enough dark hours to spend the last years of his life unbothered by the sun, but his sudden demise had left thousands of midnights unspent.

They burst from the vault in a flurry of inky shadows and several hundred moons. They spread throughout the dark halls, blotting the last of the sun’s light and swarming over the lonely rock until all it would ever know again was the deep indigo of an infinite midnight.