Free Blue Moon by Cindy Lynn Speer

removed from the memory of all living beings. You could remember the others—Puck and Titania and Oberon and Mab. You could recount their deeds, describe for the listener what they looked like, but no one remembered his mother, the Dark Queen.
    The Dark Queen. Sabin closed his eyes. He was to call her, to bring her here for the blue moon. It was his curse-task, and he knew how to complete it. But the most vital part, her name, what she looked like, had all had been wiped from his brain just like all others.
    The Black Queen. Not the Dark Queen. The Black Queen. She was whispered of in a tale to keep children in line. What they whispered—of murdered lovers and orgies where the flesh of children was consumed and disgusting sexual acts involving innocent maidens and mutated beasts occurred were just stories. His mother had done far, far worse.
    What had she done?
    Sabin knelt again, staring at the circle, shaking his head. The glow had stopped just short of the outer stones. He grabbed the memory of her Shadow voice speaking of the ley lines, an unreliable memory but more than he had otherwise, and stepped inside the circle. He took everything he knew was hers—the color of his eyes, his magic, and called with every bit of his essence.
    The glow leapt forward and engulfed the stones. The reflected light encased him in a sheaf of deep red. He threw back his head and screamed.
* * * *
    Zorovin could have told you about the burial place of the Black Queen, for he was one of the very few who remembered who she truly was.
    In the mountains far away from where Sabin cast his spell was a tomb undisturbed by man. It contained six bodies—two elves and three dwarves in armor, the majority of a party sent forth with a terrible task. They were the pallbearers of the Black Queen.
    She had been a cruel woman, so terrible that her memory was taken from almost all living beings. The kings and their wives carried the burden of her history, softened so they could sleep without nightmares. The seven brave ones they selected carried the horror in full so that they would never forget why they must take care with the corpse they carried, why they must bury it deep in foreign soil. And why they must not return, lest she possess one and return to the Twilight Lands like some nightmare plague.
    They enclosed her in crystal, they buried her beneath rock and dirt, deep inside the tall mountain. Freed from the greatest part of their task, they had a feast with special provisions they had brought. They sang and ate then spent the next day in quiet contemplation while each dug his own grave. One stayed alive long enough to shovel the dirt over them, to erase any signs that they had been there. His hatred of the Queen rose above all others; his was the sword that had pierced her heart.
    He crawled down into a small cave, and as his life bled away, he thanked God that he would no longer remember the Black Queen's name, or her deeds—and his own shame. That her one wish, to be to remembered for all time as the greatest horror that ever lived, would not be granted. That she would die as she should have lived, quietly and unremarked.
    His only hope was that his brother would have the courage to slay the Black One's child and not let misdirected mercy or familial ties stay his hand. He was relieved that he would not have to put the knife to his own son, that the task would be his brother's. He closed his eyes and prayed he would be forgiven his sins, and drifted away into everlasting sleep.
    This is the story the dragons tell, but sadly, they did not know the rest of it. They could not warn those who were to come after.
    Many, many years later, deep in a cavern, a soft reddish glow reveals a tomb of crystal beneath centuries of dust. A ghost stands there and sees the small cracks where air and water have seeped in. Her body is nothing more than sludge and filth, nothing that the Black Queen can reclaim. She feels a pull, insistent, to the east of where she