The Dark Artifices: Lady Midnight

Prologue: Ancient Sands

Title, characters, and backgrounds belong to the amazing Ms. Cassandra Clare, the author of The Shadow Hunter Chronicles. This is fanfiction. I did research on the snippets she released about TDA and tried to string them together. Enjoy, little nephilim.

Prologue

Blood had begun to drop from the heavens, pouring down like a summer storm bright and warm, exploding on the beach sands in fireworks of red liquid, running down the sides of her face like tears. The crash of the ocean was in rythm with her own wild heartbeat. He was dying. She was dying. They were all dying and nothing was going to save them. Nothing at all.

"Oh, God. " she heard herself saying. "Oh my God, please, no, let this stop, let it be a dream, no, stop NO! " She began to sob, feeling so, so weak, pushing her filthy blonde hair out of her bloodstreaked face, choking, choking, on the words she wanted to say to him... that she had always wanted to say...

"Jules!" He was there, yards away, lying on the sand, blood, his blood, staining his black shirt and running out like rivers as he pushed him self up, saying "Emma...Emma..." Kneeling and gasping in pain, he raised his head to look at her, bloody brown hair shading those blue green eyes that were swallowed up in black, more hopeless than she had ever seen. He choked, one hand going to his ribcage, more red liquid staining his slender, pale fingers, staining the corners of his mouth, the sand, everything. "Emma... Emma..."

She tried to lunge towards him, tears dripping from her face, her hand reaching to touch his shoulder, to cradle him, to feel him, to feel Julian. He reached out to her, making those awful cries of the dying as he kept trying to say her name. "Emma... Emma..."

He was so close, so, so close, close enough that she could feel the haze of pain and death around him, smell the blood that was pouring down on them, getting in her brown eyes as she pulled herself towards him. He looked at her, curling in on himself, ragged breaths shuddering through his body as his hands dug in to the bloody sand, fingers disappearing into the red grains. "Emma... Emma..I can't Emma, I can't..."

"Shh. Its okay. I'm going to get you. Its okay." She was about to reach him, her scarred hands going to his beautiful face. They skimmed the smoothness of his forehead, reaching out, before a wave came crashing upon her, pulling her back from her best friends body, away from Julian's dying form. She screamed as he cried out for her, the wave spitting her back out onto the shoreline. She rolled, her body trembling with the effort it took, her breaths shallow. She looked up to find Jules again.

He was farther away.

With a raw cry of pain, Emma pushed herself up, willing herself to be faster, stronger, better. Julian. She was going to do this for him. He was the one person she would both live for and die for...

But she couldn't move, her legs gave in as she tried to stand, her sobs more and more ragged. She fell, lying in the sand like some poor, humiliated creature, defeated and lost without her parabatai, her best friend, her perfect match. She slammed into the air, every bit of strength pushing forward. But she couldn't. She screamed, her brown eyes falling on Jules as he shivered on the sand, the whisper of her own name snaking past her ear. "Emma...Emma..."

"No!" Cried Emma, pressing a bloody hand to her mouth. "No, Jules, please, Jules! NO!" She pushed against the barrier, forcing herself up despite the pain. I am a Carstairs. I suffer and survive, or I die on my feet. She was better than this. But as she looked up into the sky and saw black horses with flames for hooves and tigers and dogs and skelotons riding across the sky with the wind she felt a hopeless emptiness in her chest deeper than anything she had ever felt before.

Emma tried to push herself up again as she saw Julian spasm, his body going limp and his chest moving ever so slightly. With one last scream of frustration, Emma pushed herself against the invisible air and scrambled to where Jules lay, those rattling breaths coming out of his lips, his hands now trying to stem the flow of blood pouring from his torso. Emma's hands went to the parabatai rune on her shoulder. Jules looked at her with those eyes. Those soulful eyes that told her life's story. "Jules." she whispered, as he closed them. "Jules, please." She had stopped crying, her voice was soft and pleading. "Please don't go without me." The cruel curse was gone, she could touch him, and her hands went to his hair and stroked his face. "I come with you, remember? " she smiled then, and that hurt the most, it hurt to smile when Jules wasn't laughing that bright laugh of his. She just wanted to hear him laugh again. "For whither thou goest, I will go" she said, her voice breaking as she recited the parabatai ritual. "You have to let me come with you, Jules. You have to." She slipped her filthy hand in his, her thumb gently sweeping across the clairvoyant sight rune on his right hand as the blood rain spattered their intertwined fingers. Suddenly his eyes flickered open and he looked at her. "Emma. " be said, his voice pained and frail, a movement of the wind. "Take care of them. All of them. Please." Tears welled up behind her eyes. His family, his five other siblings. Mark, Ty, Livvy, Dru, Tavvy. Of course. "Jules." she said. "I-"

"Please, Emma." he said, with an urgency he rarely used. "Swear you'll do it. Swear it... swear it on my ashes... on our parabatai...you'll take care of them..." His grip tightened on hers, the light in his verdigris eyes agonizingly bright. "You'll do it, wont you? For me? "

Emma stared at him, her emotions threatening to crash free like the waves she and Jules used to swim in at Santa Monica beach, powerful and demanding and unstoppable. She and Jules. It was seemed only minutes ago they were in the training room, with Katerina instead of Diana, her parents still alive, Julian's father just downstairs instead of some unreachable place called death...

Where Jules was headed....

"Promise!" He choked, the hand that wasn't holding Emma's went to his mouth as he coughed and came away stained with more red. Even a stele wouldn't help now. "I will." Emma said, watching the bloodrain spatter his face. "I'll protect them, Jules. Don't worry." She couldn't hold the tears back, and they came pouring down her face. "I promise, Jules. I swear." His grip on her was tighter now, desperate, like it was the only thing keeping him from letting go of the world, just him and his parabatai to hold onto, like he always held on to her before. "Emma," he said, and he said it as if it were the most precious, beautiful stone the earth could ever produce. "Take care of yourself, too." He closed his eyes and gave a rattling breath as his grip went slack. "Emma..."

And he died.

Emma felt as if she died, too. Screaming as she felt her parabatai rune fade into fear and agony, she took his loose hand and pressed her face into it as the rain fell down like the tears of an angel who had been cast down from heaven, showering her in red blood. She curled up in the sand, sobbing violently, her hands in her hair scraping down the sides of her face. Something was missing inside of her that had always been there, and she had never given up before, but there was nothing to fight for. "I'll kill you all! I'll slaughter everyone last one of you! " she screamed, the rain howling down on her, the waves colliding in to her, the setting sun darkening her last ray of hope.

"Do you see this? " A woman's voice, musical and silky and yet terrifying rang in Emma's head. "Do you know what this is?"

Emma shut her eyes, the pain fresh and tormenting.

"This, Emma Carstairs, is the blood of the Angels children that spills onto the blessed earth. It is the blood of your comrades. And do you know what happens when the blood of heaven stains these ancient sands?"

Emma stared at the horizon out in the sea, forever unreachable. She watched the sun paint the sky in brilliant colors. It looked like something Jules would have loved to see.

"This means, Emma, that all things come to end."