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Updated: May 2, 2025
"No, no," persisted Nycteris; "we must go now. And you must learn to be strong in the dark as well as in the day, else you will always be only half brave. I have begun already not to fight your sun, but to try to get at peace with him, and understand what he really is, and what he means with me whether to hurt me or to make the best of me. You must do the same with my darkness."
When the morning began to come, he began to grow better, but was dreadfully tired with walking instead of sleeping, especially after being so long ill. Nycteris too, what with supporting him, what with growing fear of the light which was beginning to ooze out of the east, was very tired. At length, both equally exhausted, neither was able to help the other. As if by consent they stopped.
At the Very moment when Photogen caught up Nycteris, the telescope of Watho was angrily sweeping the table-land. She swung it from her in rage, and running to her room, shut herself up.
She was melting away from the roof like a bit of sugar in water. Nycteris was fast growing afraid, and sought refuge with the face upon her lap. How beautiful the creature was! what to call it she could not think, for it had been angry when she called it what Watho called her.
"Then that is not the sun?" said Nycteris, thoughtfully, pointing up to the moon. "That!" cried Photogen, with utter scorn; "I know nothing about that, except that it is ugly and horrible. At best it can be only the ghost of a dead sun. Yes, that is it! That is what makes it look so frightful." "No," said Nycteris, after a long, thoughtful pause; "you must be wrong there.
It is all so frightful!" "What is so frightful?" asked Nycteris, with a smile like that of a mother to her child waked from a bad dream. "All, all," he answered; "all this darkness and the roaring." "My dear," said Nycteris, "there is no roaring. How sensitive you must be! What you hear is only the walking of the water, and the running about of the sweetest of all the creatures.
And just as she was born for the first time, Vesper was born for the second, and passed into a world as unknown to her as this was to her child who would have to be born yet again before she could see her mother. Watho called her Nycteris, and she grew as like Vesper as possible in all but one particular.
And whether it was that her failure with Photogen foiled also her plans in regard to Nycteris, or that her illness made her yet more of a devil's wife, certainly Watho now got sick of the girl too, and hated to know her about the castle. She was not too ill, however, to go to poor Photogen's room and torment him.
"We must not wait for the morning," said Nycteris, "for then I shall not be able to move, and what would you do the next night? Besides, Watho sees best in the daytime. Indeed, you must come now, Photogen. You must." "I can not; I dare not," said Photogen. "I cannot move. If I but lift my head from your lap, the very sickness of terror seizes me." "I shall be with you," said Nycteris soothingly.
The foolish witch had made herself invulnerable, as she supposed, but had forgotten that, to torment Photogen therewith, she had handled one of his arrows. He ran back to Nycteris and told her. She shuddered and wept, and would not look. There was now no occasion to fly a step farther. Neither of them feared any one but Watho. They left her there, and went back.
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