Superstition decreed that Dark Night was to be observed every time Zelura passed full over the skies, which was once every seventeen days. All transit arrival points in particular were to be covered securely, lest vengeful spirits appear to murder and pillage.
At least, that was the official ruling. Eventually, observation grew lax as more and more slips resulted in no murderous ghosts. But the stigma remained, leaving Zelura as the one moon without an established trading post or regular visits.
Or, rather, officially without regular visits.
Ghostmoon smugglers were those willing to brave the wrath of the Moon King's ghosts - to say nothing of local monsters, vampires, and other lunar perils no longer held in check - to make deliveries and collections from places and at times ordinary merchants would not. The quantity of mercenaries, criminals, and deserters who also called the ghost moon home helped to maintain its sinister reputation.
A determined sweep with an invading army could reclaim the scattered outposts, but there was never sufficient motive to do so.
Besides, it had been tried more than once. Three of the outposts were broken, their transit platforms cut off from the network, domes shattered, and the invaders overrun by monsters and vampires.
Zelura’s few inhabitants didn’t take kindly to invaders. Association leaders were sure to keep their contact network strong, healthy, and well-bribed.
Naturally, having an independent trade organization capable of moving goods at unofficial times served everyone’s best interests far more than wasting time and resources on a war.
Jair's journey to reach the ghost moon was relatively straightforward and uneventful.
He didn't have any problem sneaking into Sejrilo manor grounds, nor in traversing familiar hidden ways into its underground passage.
The guards there weren't expecting him and gave him some trouble, but between a sizable bribe and namedropping their bosses, they let him through without more than a cursory search to ensure he wasn't some kind of plant.
Lunar passage was both similar to and completely different from standard transits. It took the same type of power, but took considerably longer to activate.
Instead of immediately transitioning from one spot to another, you could feel yourself being pulled through space. It seemed to stretch for moments that lasted an eternity, a strange weightlessness while also being a pull that compressed.
The passage also messed with the other senses, leaving you unable to see or hear. It could be mildly uncomfortable or nauseating at first, but Jair had used enough lunar passages over the years that he didn’t even notice.
He arrived without difficulty.
The surface of Zelura itself was as he remembered. The arrival outpost was small, barely twice the size of Astralla Institute, and contained far more commercial buildings and very few homes.
Ghost moon passages were often more limited than the official ones, due to the expense in maintaining an active arrival platform, as well as the moon’s spin leaving only a few-hours window in which to utilize the circles on its end. The remnants of the Moon King’s realm only covered a small patch of Zelura’s surface, leaving most of it uninhabitable.
In the centuries since his fall, smugglers and pirates had eventually converted most of the surviving settlements into a network of small domed outposts with their own internal transit network, connecting the three major passage sites and forming a buffer between themselves and the lunar locals.
Terluna spun slower and its passages were more plentiful, albeit less frequently available, while Nuprima’s were the slowest and least frequent of all. But Terluna was the closest thing to habitable you were likely to get off the planet itself, and Nuprima's deadly frost caverns were the most abundant source of mana to be found anywhere, making either more desirable.
Zelura had considerably less going for it. The climate of the moon was... hostile at best, barren and inhospitable. The domes were kept heated and charged by a constant exchange of charged crystal, but unlike the pervasive mana-rich environment on the planet below it was a difficult feat to maintain a full manabody here. Outside the domes, a manabody would be unable to breathe, stagnating and beginning to crumble without active effort to upkeep its integrity.
That also made fighting the local wild vampires and other monsters a dangerous proposition for pure mages, as once they expended their available power there was no way to readily replace it. No possibility for emergency overdraw if there's nothing to draw upon.
As he walked, Jair idly considered the merits of having a custom sheath built for Maelstrom so times like these he could carry a weapon visibly. He was attracting more than a few glances. One disadvantage of storing his weapon in his soul. Academy student without any imprints, prime target for anyone looking.
If he started asking too many of the wrong questions to the wrong people, or flashing too much wealth, he could end up forced to revert. But today’s trip wasn’t going to require more than the bare minimum of interactions. Just a simple matter of passage, no excessive drawing attention to himself.
The arrival outpost wasn’t the same place from which he’d have to depart to reach Reskas - and therefore Orard.
To get between domes in the network, he had to buy a new set of transit tokens, since they weren't something he could carry from timeline to timeline. Here, again, having the significant sum of money from Ran made everything easy. Ghost moon traders were not known for their aversion to being given extra money for doing what you wanted.
The Reskas passage, however, posed significantly more trouble.
“No passage tonight,” insisted a nasal-voiced attendant who Jair recognized but didn’t consider worth recalling. “Reskas platform hasn’t sent confirmation yet.”
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“That’s fine. I don’t need confirmation. Just send me down. I’ll cover the full charge cost.” Jair pulled out the money, as though the thing were decided.
“No, can’t do that.” The attendant shook his head insistently. “No passage without confirmation. That’s the rules.”
“Then I’ll pay double to compensate.”
The attendant appeared torn, but shook his head again, albeit more slowly. “They’d know if we activated prematurely. It’s not worth my job, even if…”
“Triple, then. Final offer.”
Everyone had their price. The attendant nodded reluctantly, but the glint of greed in his eyes showed Jair that if he’d haggled he probably could have gotten it cheaper - but it wasn’t worth the wasted time.
Jair stood in the center of the transit platform as the power built and built and built.
He drifted, pulled and compressed, tugged downward–
Jair landed with a splash, plunged deep underwater with the momentum of his arrival.
Not good.
His heartbeat instantly shifted into overdrive as he desperately swam for the surface, breathless from the impact.
Water was bad. Sure, there were wells and springs, baths and pools, but landing in water?
BAD.
He swam for the surface, lungs already screaming at him to inhale, but he'd drowned enough times to resist that instinct.
He broke the surface and scanned the area for the nearest shore. If he was lucky, he'd just ended up in a small pond formed by runoff from a spring, something that wouldn't connect--
A rumble shook the water, vibrating through his body with the kind of implacable power that he recognized instantly. He'd tried swimming across rivers in the past, and this was bigger than that.
The shore was distant, too distant to reach. Minutes.
How had the Reskas platform been flooded? Why hadn't he heard about this in the past? Well, the why was obvious, he had more money and thus more freedom of movement than he ever had. By the time he reached the ghost moon most loops, it had been at least four or five months, if not longer.
The deep purple glow of something from the darkest deeps began to grow beneath him. Light reflected off the stone of the transit platform, lighting up his own arms and legs as he frantically tried to outrun the too-rapid approach of death, body instinctively fleeing while his mind still reeled from the abrupt unexpected impact.
With a roar and hiss, a whirlpool formed beneath his feet to suck him down. He was pulled effortlessly under the surface despite his best efforts to swim free, gulping water before he had time to react. Purple light enveloped him completely in a blinding glow.
Jair caught sight of the sea monster’s massive maw, teeth longer than his arms but needle-thin, thousands of them forming a spiral of death in a mouth that moved in ways no living creature should. The light burned from its throat, growing in intensity–
The world stuttered in place, before he could feel the impact of its teeth, its breath disintegrating him into tiny pieces for easy consumption, killing him instantly.
He’d lasted nearly eight seconds, far more than usual. It must have been as surprised as he was.
Jair dove desperately into his soulspell. Even in the prolonged instant of death the thing's light writhed out toward him, a myriad of lashing tendrils reaching eagerly for his soul now it had been cracked out of its mortal shell.
Nope. Nope nope nooope.
He fell through time, the purple glow blessedly fading behind him. As soon as he was sure he was well clear of the deadly flooded city, he yanked himself out of the temporal reversion.
He landed back in the courtyard just as Ran stepped toward the house, gasping involuntarily for air.
Ran stopped and turned, immediately tense. "What happened?"
"Reskas arrival platform is flooded," Jair reported, still panting for air, his mind reacting even though his body had no reason to. "Oriad is out for this cycle."
Ran's eyes narrowed. "Terluna? Or..."
"Yes, yes, I shouldn't have run off to the ghost moon alone, you were right." Jair flapped his hand in a shooing motion. "Go talk to your father, buy the things, I'll be fine."
"Alone?" Ran echoed, his voice going colder. "You said we wouldn't go tonight."
"And we didn't." Jair took a deep breath, and when he let it out he'd regained control over his instinctive response to drowning and being eaten. "No point, anyway. Only reason I went was to get in touch with Aethron, and if Reskas is flooded and the rest of the Orard ports aren't available this passage, then it's fine. I'll stay here, like you wanted."
"You'd better." If he'd been any closer, Ran would have smacked him, but as it was he only glared, then turned to go inside again.
Jair sat down, checking on Maelstrom's condition in case it had advanced further, but it still hovered at 13%. Seemed each one took a couple days to fill in.
So, no way to solve this properly before terluna. Fine. It was only a temporary shift of focus anyway. Current focus, get the medical scans and such.
Which... he could also do on the ghost moon, or at least obtain some names of people and places to visit outside it.
Except he'd promised Ran not to go running off alone.
The temptation to do so anyway was strong, but he pulled himself back.
Next time.
No rush.
Learn what they could through available official channels, it would be fine.
Jair scanned his soulspell to ensure he'd not been damaged by his brush with death, but thankfully the water monster hadn't been a soul-damaging type. Jair had only been dead for a few seconds before reverting. No harm done.
He checked over the status of his manabody, finding it in roughly the same condition as before, though the poison blood was starting to gain ground again. He took out his vial of antivenom and swallowed his three drops for the evening, observing in his mental sight as the infusion bolstered his body's resistances back to their proper strength.
He wasn't enough of an analyst to assess more than that. He had neither the right spells nor the proper soulspell to deep scan like a healer would. His personal assessment ability was rudimentary at best. Very advanced for the average citizen, but meager compared to what those who focused on it exclusively could do.
Once satisfied with his checks, he wandered back to the library to continue his cross-referencing and charting out the different dragon types and their attributes. The graph would be helpful to have memorized, but he wanted the information laid out neatly before committing it to memory.
He was still working on that when Ran returned, looking harried. "We need to get you outside," he said, grabbing Jair's arm.
"What, why--"
Ran tugged more urgently, and Jair allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. They ran out to the back door, then Ran motioned for Jair to hush while he opened the door a crack. He closed it just as quickly, cursing.
"What is it?" Jair asked.
"Hyperion. There's a pair at the front demanding to search the house. And, turns out, another lurking out back."
Jair hissed softly, annoyed. He'd once again forgotten they were being pursued. "I should do something about that next time."
"Yeah?"
He sighed in resignation. "I'll go see what they want. The more information the better. If they try to arrest me, I'll revert. If they just want to ask questions, no reason to keep the chase going any longer than necessary."
"I'm coming with you. If they try to arrest you, they'll have me to deal with."
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