sakon76

Mark of Snow 7
by K. Stonham
first released 8th February 2019

Jack didn't know how long Pitch had spent planning this. He didn't know where the wanker (to borrow the mildest of Bunny's expletives) had gotten the sheer power for it. And he definitely did not know how he and the other Guardians were going to beat the Boogeyman this time.

He just knew they had to try.

But as the dome of ink crept across the sky, moving from east to west, swallowing the sun, it was impossible to get ahold of Pitch. He was moving from shadow to shadow, uncatchable, his voice taunting them into burning up their energy.

Sandy's corrupted sand had at least been solid. How did you fight a shadow?

"You should have taken my offer, Jack," Pitch's voice whispered silkily in his ear. Jack whirled, but there was no one there.

"Oh, poor North. No wonder you never stood a chance," he the swordsman taunted from elsewhere. North yelled and slashed, to no effect.

"The darkness'll kill them all," Bunny warned, boomerang at the ready in each hand as he turned in a slow circle, searching for a target. "Then who'll be left to be afraid of ya, ya bloody--"

Dark laughter cut him off.

"Oh, you think a little darkness will kill them all off? I think not. They're rather like cockroaches, you know. Humans, so resourceful. So creative. And so apt to turn on one another when the lights go out."

"Pitch--" warned Tooth, her army of a thousand surrounding her, just waiting for their chance.

"My dear Tooth Fairy, so quick to violence. But a knocked-out tooth... why, that's nothing compared to what's to come."

"What's to come is us beating you again," said Jack, wishing for half the confidence he was projecting. Only a slim sliver of sky was left now.

"Oh, you think this is about you?" Pitch asked, manifesting briefly, just long enough for them to see him in the gloam, before vanishing again. "I hate to break it to you, Frost, but you're not the center of the universe. Not anymore."

For some reason, that took Jack aback. "Not about us...?" he murmured, holding still, holding to his staff, eyes tracing the last line of light. "If it's not about us, it's about...."

Light.

The last of the light.

The Last Light.

"Jamie," he breathed in sudden dawning realization.

Jamie, who was light. Who glowed like a nightlight, he'd said. Jamie, who could maybe light the endless night.

If Pitch didn't snuff him out first.

It felt like a punch to the gut.

"North!" Jack demanded. The bigger man turned. "Snowglobe!"

North didn't hesitate, throwing one to Jack the instant it was requested.

Jack shook the snowglobe, activating its magic. "To Jamie!" he said, and smashed it at his feet even at the darkness reached the horizon and night was complete.

The glowing portal activated and he darted through, followed by Pitch's echoing laughter. If only he wasn't too late....

Jamie remembered a story where a computer was used to calculate out all the names of God. Once the computer's task was completed, the world had simply ended, all the stars winking out one by one.

He couldn't help but recall that story now, as he watched the night sky be swallowed up by absolute darkness.

This was so much worse.

Vantablack, the artist in him thought. Or Black 2.0. But in the cold clench of his gut, he knew that the absolute black was nothing so simple as paint.

It moved in a silent slow wave, east to west, eating up the night. Stars disappeared, and the world below them sounded with whispers and shouts and screams.

It was almost summer, but Jamie could feel the chill creeping up the back of his neck as the light vanished.

"Jamie, what's happening?" Tracy asked. He ignored her.

Do something, he thought, looking at the moon.

"Do something," he whispered, pleading.

"Do something!" he yelled, waiting for a response.

But no answer came from the man in the moon even as the darkness began to move across the moon's face.

"You can't win, Jamie," a voice whispered in his ear. Jamie stiffened. "But there are... alternatives."

Jamie swallowed. He knew that voice. A voice no one else would hear. He remembered old fear, the shadows, a lightbulb breaking. "Been watching Star Wars?" he asked with false bravado.

Soft laughter, derisive, from the shadows. There were shadows everywhere. "Waiting for Frost to save you? He's not here this time."

Jack wasn't. Jamie didn't know where Jack was. Had Pitch done something to him? What had Pitch done to him?!

Jamie felt anger spark to life in his chest. "If you've done something to him--" he threatened, rounding.

Pitch's laughter was louder this time. "I haven't laid a finger on him," he said. "I had no need to, little light. How can he fight this?" A wave of a pale gray hand in the shadows, indicating the sky, was all Jamie's eyes caught.

"Jamie?" Tom asked. His voice was shaking. "Who are you talking to?"

"The Boogeyman," he told his friends. He looked around, couldn't see Pitch any longer. But he knew the Boogeyman was still there, and could hear him. "It's a Dyson sphere, isn't it?" he asked, taking in the way the smooth line of darkness moved across the sky. There was a mere sliver of the moon visible now. "You're closing the world inside a globe of darkness."

"Clever," the Boogeyman complimented him. Jamie felt a cool finger brush his cheek momentarily, but Pitch was already elsewhere. The moon vanished.

"Why are you here?" he wondered.

"Oh, my dear boy, in this darkness, I can be everywhere!" the Boogeyman answered, glee in his voice. "And who better to celebrate this moment with than you?"

"Why are you doing this?" Jamie asked.

"Because I can."

"No," said Jamie, shaking his head. "No, you can't--"

Pitch's laughter cut him off.

"Jamie," whispered Beth, "make him stop."

Jamie drew a deep breath. He was afraid, yes, but he was also angry. He remembered stepping forward to defend weakened Guardians when he was ten. To defend classmates from bullies when he was twelve. Thirteen. Fifteen. Seventeen.

Now.

"I won't let you do this," Jamie said, and knew it was true. I have magic. As I believe, so shall it be. He took another breath and forced a smile. "Greetings and defiance, fairest and fallen," he whispered, as ready as he ever would be.

I am a wizard. A guardian. And the darkness shall never have me.

And as simply as that, he knew it was true. He knew what he was. And he suddenly recognized all the little doubts that had been growing, all the fears of being different, of being ostracized, of being locked up and experimented on, for what they were: Pitch's handiwork.

"Oh," he said, almost offhandedly. "That was you, wasn't it?" He felt it viscerally as the darkness finally closed on the horizon, plunging the world into darkness. But in a way it didn't matter.

Because Jamie was the Last Light. And now he glowed, casting the darkness away. All the troubles and thoughts and doubts and fears that had weighed him down were suddenly shed like the detritus they were. He felt so much... lighter. "Tell me," Jamie invited the shadow of Pitch, "why are you so afraid of 'one little boy who won't stop believing'?"

"I am not afraid!" Pitch snarled, and whoo boy, Jamie knew a lie like that when he heard one. He grinned, having the upper hand.

"Jack seeded my magic, you know," Jamie said conversationally. He spun around, shedding colored light like glitter. "You can thank him for it sometime."

A snarl. "Frost--"

"Jamie?" Ron asked, his eyes big. He saw Jamie's light now, glowing through and out of him. They all did. It spilled like weightless paint, a wave and a particle, active and solid both, lighting a wide circle around him. His friends crowded into its safety like they had the igloo they'd all built once to survive a snowy night on a mountain. Others hovered farther away, at the fringes of the circle, less certain, but scared of the dark and all that it meant.

Suddenly a portal appeared to Jamie's right, colored light forming a ring that five figures hurried through.

Unscathed.

Jamie suddenly felt lighter. Pitch had been lying, of course he'd been lying, but seeing Jack and the others loosened something in Jamie's chest.

Which was when the laughter returned, louder now, and cruel. "So be it!" Pitch's voice boomed, and it was no longer just Jamie and the Guardians who could hear him, because everyone Jamie could see flinched at it. "One little light will not save you."

"He's completed the bloody sphere," the Easter Bunny snarled. "He's got the whole ruddy world in darkness now."

But that was wrong. There was still light. Sandy glimmered. Jack glowed. And Jamie... Jamie shone.

"Darkness only wins," Jamie said, "when there's no light left. But we're still here, aren't we?" It was filling him up, spilling out, brightening the night. He looked at Jack. "I found it, Jack. My center." He felt breathless with it, with the realization that it had been there all along and he'd only needed to know how to look for it.

"Oh?"

Jamie smiled and reached out his hand to his best friend. Jack's hand, cool and solid, closed on his. An unbreakable bond.

"Illumination," Jamie said.

The white smile matched his own. "You've got this, haven't you?"

Jamie shook his head. "No. We've got this," he replied, looking around. Guardians. Humans. Friends. Strangers. They were all stronger together, braided together, interwoven. What darkness could compare to that?

Jack's face showed his realization of what Jamie meant, and a single movement holstered his staff in a sling on his back. He, too, reached out a hand. Bunny, less certain than Jack, took it. Tooth took Bunny's other hand, then North, then Sandy, then an awe-faced boy Jamie didn't know....

Jamie reached out his other hand to his human friends. Ron hesitated, then took it, equally solid. Beth latched onto Ron's hand, then Tom and Tracy onto hers and each other's, and others beyond them holding on too, forming a chain....

And Jamie's light was still spilling out of him. But it was spilling into them and he saw, heard, felt the intakes of breath as the others felt what he did. Euphoria, and hope, and dreams, memories, fun, wonder....

It felt like they could light up the planet.

Pitch's shriek of rage seemed so distant and far away somehow.

Jack laughed.

But Jamie was looking up to the sky now.

"Jamie," said Ron, sounding shocked. "You're flying. We're flying."

Somehow he had known that, known that the ground was far away beneath the feet of all of them who had chained together in the light, but it was unimportant now.

The darkness wasn't so far away. It was as close as his own skin. It always had been. But so was the light. And when Jamie took his hand from Jack's, from Ron's, no one fell.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a worn pencil.

But it wasn't just a pencil, was it? It was a pen and a brush and so many things more. It was a tool of creation.

He was an artist, and life was light was color.

The pencil flickered in his hand, shifting into a halberd of pure light that almost hurt even his eyes.

The darkness was a bubble, a balloon, a globe of black glass. And like all those things, like all ephemeral illusions, it was so incredibly fragile.

It was amazing, Jamie realized, how little power Pitch really had, when it came down to it.

With a gentle smile, he swung at the darkness, and watched it shatter.

The Earth rang like a bell.

Blinking, Jack realized they weren't in the air anymore. Had they ever been? It was still night, here, but the stars shone a brilliant white swath across the sky, and the moon....

He breathed in the bright moonlight, relieved.

"No!" Pitch snarled, manifesting fully before them now. He had a scythe in his hand, and Jamie was clearly his target, but--

Jamie, still glowing like a lightning bug, looked up at the Nightmare King. The weapon in his hand changed again, back into a pencil. He cocked his head to one side, expression earnest. "Pitch," he said, "can I draw you?"

"What?" Pitch was caught aback, faltering midswing.

Jamie smiled, turning the pencil over and over in his hand. "Light has all sorts of colors in it, you know," he said. "Even black." He let that hang in the air for a minute, then added, "We don't have to be enemies. There are other options. Alternatives to fighting."

Bunny gaped at that for a second. "If you think for a minute that we're working with that--"

"We're all made of stardust," Jamie said. "Some more directly than others," he added, with a nod to Sandy. "But it's kind of hard to see the moon and stars if the sky isn't dark at night," Jamie reasonably pointed out.

Jack could see Tooth and North exchanging incredulous glances, while a flurry of excited sand symbols fluttered over Sandy's head.

He could also see Pitch's scornful gaze rake over them all before returning to Jamie.

With a sniff and a huff, the Nightmare King turned and disappeared back into the shadows.

"Well, it wasn't a no," Jamie said.

Jack stepped up beside his best friend. "You really think that's going to work?"

Jamie shrugged. "Those books of North's say a wizard redefines the world by the words he uses, the acts he does, and by what he believes. So, who knows? Maybe. It's worth a shot."

"It is not--!" Bunny started, but Jack tuned him out in favor of studying Jamie.

"So," he said, poking at Jamie to see if the sparkles were transferable, which, hmm, hey, they kind of were, "'Luminous beings we are, not this crude matter'?"

Jamie laughed, which had been Jack's goal.

"Uh, excuse me," a bespectacled man in his forties asked, staring at Jack and the others as if he could see them. "Are you...?"

"Santa!" A wave of a dozen children nearly bowled North over. Chortling, North managed to juggle half of them and let the others climb him like monkey bars.

Tooth's eyes were wide as she stared at the adults staring at them. "They can see us...?"

"Crikey," agreed Bunny.

"Aaaand... I think that's my fault," Jamie said.

Sandman raised an eyebrow.

"You said Jack put a seed of magic in me," Jamie told the Sandman. "And, um, I think I've just put a seed of magic in all of them," he said with a nod at the quite literally hundreds of people who were milling around under the streetlights, getting glimpses of legends and fairy tales and trying to figure out what had just happened. Tooth's fairies were flittering all around the crowd, enjoying the adult adulation, and giving quick dental checkups on opened mouths.

"Oops?" Jamie offered, with a shrug.

Jack gaped for a moment, adding up all the changes his magic had made in Jamie's life to the size of the crowd, plus the possibility of Pitch changing also....

"Bit of a game-changer, isn't it?" Bunny murmured, his train of thought for once in complete accord with Jack's.

"Wow," Tooth breathed, then let herself drift closer to the man who had asked the question. "Um, I'm Toothiana. You might know me as the Tooth Fairy. And you're... oh, you're a dentist, aren't you!"

Author's Note: This chapter was written under the influence of listening to Pink Floyd's "Learning to Fly" on loop. Jamie and Jack, being geeks of a feather, both reference Star Wars (A New Hope and Return of the Jedi, respectively). Jamie's line about "Greetings and defiance, fairest and fallen," is taken from Diane Duane's Young Wizards books (a series which I have been reading since, um, 1985.) The theory of how a wizard redefines the universe is a mix from the Young Wizards books and the Guardians of Childhood novels. The Young Wizards books, particularly the first, So You Want To Be A Wizard, also inspired giving Pitch the option to change. Jamie's statement "And the darkness shall never have me" echoes the last page I remember reading from the Amethyst, Princess of the Gemworld comic books several decades ago. And the story mentioned at the beginning, where at the end the stars start going out one by one, is something I read years ago in an anthology. Unfortunately, I can't remember which one, or the title, or the author, or anything else! So if anyone recognizes it, please let me know so I can credit it properly. Thanks!