Amber candlelight preceded her every cautious step. Its gentle glow washed across bricks whose coarse, weathered features spoke ghost stories in their braille grooves. She placed every footfall with graceful care not to rouse the spirits of this realm or the next; Those old, groaning floorboards were fickle and flimsy, known to creak with every empty threat to snap at little more than the scamper of a rat. Stories told of the softest snore sometimes unsettling the countless bones thought to be buried within some yet-to-be-unearthed catacomb beneath their shoddily refurbished keep, let alone a squeaky floor. Though she wasn't normally one to lean into such unfounded rumors, the shadowy quiet and isolation of the night had a way of rooting unease in even the most logical of minds. Besides, one damnable man had given enough credence to the idea that oddities of death had laid dormant beneath Brunem, and that was a man she wished dearly not to think on at this moment, creeping onward toward the very discordant flashes and rhythmic echoes that had roused her from sensitive slumber to begin with. Someone was in the observatory, tinkering away into the late hours of the night. Someone who belonged at her bedside, curled up and waiting out the star's oversight in soporific familiarity. Thrice now she had awoken to solitude, only to go searching about the keep to find them doubled over a dirty, lived-in desk with drool cascading down its edge. A fourth time she simply would not stand, and thankfully for her the clamor they were conjuring gave her just the nudge she needed to go stalking after them, down corridors built for knights and lords yet deprived for hundreds of years without their touch. The nearer she drew the more she could recognize; The gentle hum of a moon gem's resonance, the mechanical whirr of the grand telescope's cogs cranking, a familiar voice in a frantic haze rambling to itself on and on and on. Whether or not the spirits of the old and dead had been roused by their ruckus was irrelevant, for hers was surely unsettled by their obsessions.

"Three more degrees than the previous day's two..." Their voice drifted, carried as though on the wind of passing memories.

Up a winding flight of stairs whose groans of creeping age were drowned by the melodic, pulsing hum of arcana at its finest work, she crested their peak to find just the woman she was looking for; Amber locks spilling down the head of a pale girl whose baby blue eyes were pressed tight against the mask of a mounted marvel of scientific instruments, a telescope whose small lense encompassed her eye and grand vision stretched on well into the cosmos above.

"Progression steadily increasing at a seemingly exponential rate, though to what degree I have yet to gather enough samples to accurately determine..." Again they spoke, and again they scribbled without hardly ever looking at the book beside them. The brilliant brass mass that comprised the hull of their spaceward vessel, venturing into the heavens by sight alone, was so magnificently cumbersome that it cleanly jutted free of the dome that crowned their home made both a school for aspirational academic youths and a place of study for inspirational, though oftentimes more computational scholars. They were no exception, but rather a blend of the rules. They held all of the bright-eyed listlessness of someone their age and plenty more of the rigorous need for definition that, ironically enough, defined all those that had brought them up. They were surely ambitious, but hesitant, rigorous, cautious, methodical, and truest of all to it all, terribly disorganized.

"Mayhaps it's simply a previously unobserved phenomenon only now noticed, though I doubt something so significant as the ring shifting would simply go-"

"_Ahem_..." She stood at the center of a sprawling, largely empty room, the streaking light of a brilliant, milky moon, shattered as it was, illuminating them both.

"A-Ah- unnoticed..." They flinched, slowly turned and gave a halfhearted, weak smile, their rosy cheeks painting the perfect picture of innocence as much as apology. "Terribly sorry, my dear. Did I wake you? I must've gotten a little overzealous this time, you hadn't roused the last few I snuck up here..."

"I had, only lightly, and with the vain thought that I would wake to find you back, Annette. I wasn't going to fool myself a fourth time." She crossed her arms, tapped her foot, and patiently awaited their excuses. Those excuses didn't come. Instead, she watched as they slowly crawled down from the high stool that raised them high enough to peer through the Keep of Brunem's pride and joy. When they hit the ground with a squeak they gave a little bubbly bounce on the balls of their feet before whirling with all the grace of a dancer to face them, their loose-fitting, frilly, long-sleeved blouse fluttering with their sauntering cadence as they put the distance once between them well behind them. She remained cross-armed while Annette opened hers up wide, revealing the glinting, violet gemstone around her neck, and like a snare swaddled her up in a snatching squeeze. Despite all her frustrations to the contrary, her intent to scold them back down to bed, something about the warmth in their chests so tight together she could feel their heartbeat against hers made that all feel like smoke on the breath she stole away. A heated melt came over her, and a moment later she found herself hugging them right back.

"I'm sorry... It wasn't my intent to leave you so forlorn, Merce." A knowing, tender hand met her cheek where it was, cradling it with a precious appreciation. "You feel simply frigid, you know, you should trail your way back to bed... I'll only be a moment longer- And I mean it this time."

"Annette..." Her arms around them sank a little, their embrace suddenly feeling far more fragile than it used to. "What has you so- So consumed this time? You promised after your last bout of frenzy into your research that you would temper yourself."

"I know, I know..." Even in Merce's arms she tensed, recoiled, and shriveled up into a little cocoon of herself. Seeing this, her stance softened, and Merce relented to her.

"What aches you, dear?" A quiet touch landed upon their cheek, guiding their eyes back home to hers. "The only way I can help you is if you speak..."

Without skipping a beat, Annette blurted out. "Something is- wrong with the moon..." Merce stifled down a laugh that bubbled in her chest, her cheeks lifting with a warming flush of life.

"Darling... What are you talking about?" Annette got a stern look on her face as her fingers trailed the circumference of her wrist and sinched, locking tight and yanking her into the quick pivot step they took back toward their telescope. 

"Come, I will show you exactly what I'm talking about." She guided her to the seat promptly, going so far as to lift her up by the legs with a guiding arm at their back right into the stool that raised her eyes right to the scope's lens. The disk of glass that looked out into the sea of cosmic stars was wide enough to encompass her entire face, and so she peered close with both eyes and her hands cupping the outer rim of the golden apparatus, with Annette's help at her wrist of course. "There, right there, now look right dead center of the field of view and tell me that doesn't look off?"

"Right, right I understand, you can let me go now." She shooed them away with a flick of her wrist, and a sly wink cast their way that just caught the hard cross of their arms over their chest before tucking away into the view of the scope. Up into the brilliant sky she gazed upon an inky ocean of the void, one made beautifully contrast by all the gleaming swirls of nova coloration like inkblots of blue, violet, green, and pink. They made homes for the stars, like that of true north, or the eleven whose brightness was ever-shifting. A gleaming, glinting glamour could be ascribed to each and every one of them,  yet none shone quite so brilliantly as the fractured moon above; With a great, craterous 'eye' at its core, a black-dot blemish on its circular surface, it spilled radiant pale light out into the stars above and showered the world in a quiet light. A sharp ring of a similar murky quality to the moon's visage encompassed it, a perfectly circular swirl hanging crooked off of its brilliant body. "I see... Nothing. Naught but the night's sky, that is."

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Look closer, just to your left, there's an entire sliver that's gone entirely-"

"Scarlet red..." The words were more of a whisper on her breathless tongue. "I-Is this not already a natural phenomenon?" Merce raised a brow and peeled her face away from the lense, looking back to Annette as though searching for the comforting answers she felt a need for in their expressions. She found only more doubt. "It strikes me as... eerily similar to the shade of a Blood Moon the few times I've had the nerve to look one right on..."

"This isn't a blood moon, Merce. They don't wax like this, not so sharp. They spread from the iris outward in an uncoordinated, disjointed pattern, almost like a sort of spillage, and it all happens at any single point through the night, never telegraphed like this one, two, three nights out. That wasn't even what caught my attention at first glance, that's only come to be my most recent discovery." With a twirl she whisked herself away to a nearby sprawl of charts and diagrams blotting out the rough of a table, each one looking to be some map of the stars with enough oak-shade stains from the countless emptied mugs of Derulian concoction collected alongside them to make them feel aged. Judging by the haste with which they were scrawled, however, they were certainly new, though their meanings were difficult to discern from the cursory glance she was allowed before Annette began jabbing fingers at the page in hasty explanation. "The moon's ring has always looked crooked from our perspective of it down here, but slowly I've begun noticing a spin in its position the same way a plate sometimes spins when it hits the ground, waving up and down, and yet rather than steady it seems to be growing in velocity exponentially. I'm noticing it dipping higher and lower every passing night, seemingly until it comes to wreathing the moon from our perspective, but why? Why this sudden pull and why only towards our view of the moon?"

"It could be a coincidence, my dear. Or, perhaps, simply natural. Who knows what sort of turmoil could have been caused by the comet? Mayhaps the mother moon is still a little stunned after it all...?"

"Or..." Annette set the papers down, her eyes shifting this way and that, her hand clawing out to grip her at the elbow and pull her in close, the other taking her behind the head, drawing them so close together their breaths were shared as one. Annette spared only a second to tap a small, violet gemstone dangling around her neck before resuming the close pose, and as though spoken from within Merce's own ears, she heard a voice not even the moon was privy to. "It's... him. There are moon gems in that ring, I've confirmed it, gems of power unlike any we've been able to claim. The moon itself is powerful in its own right. He swore he would stop every breath, every current, every river, wave, flame, life in all of Akabar, and swore to me that the secret to it all lay in the moon..." Merce felt the breath leave her lungs, and on its wind a chill brushed across their rosy, delicate, sunken cheeks. They shook a little where they stood, their hands trembled, and their weight was set into Merce as though they could hardly hold themselves up; That surprised her little, they must have been exhausted in all their fear, though she'd be lying if the fear wasn't beginning to creep upon her as well. She thought back to that man she once called her friend, the woman he loved that she had once called her sister, now gone. She had never seen a man more broken in her life. She had never seen a man put himself back together into something so entirely new, and entirely horrifying either. He had made her afraid of ghost stories before he fled- Fled, for she cautioned to think that they had somehow driven him out. 'No... He chose to leave. We could hardly ward him off. He understood so much more than any of us could have imagined, and paid the price for all of that knowledge.'

"You're positive?" Even as she asked aloud, beyond the safety of their heads, she knew the answer, but she needed conviction in its verity. Their stern, troubled nod gave her that conviction.

"I will say, in all of the years Brunem has stood, through every oddity the stars have shown us, nothing compares to this. This feels... Too unnatural not to be him. The last thing he said to me... 'The Moon is not nearly broken enough,' still haunts me."

"Then... What do you mean to do about it, love?"

A pause hung in the air, long and tortured. She shuddered and tucked away, pressed her face into Merce's soft, supple neck, and hid away with a sigh so exhausted she thought it possible they might sleep standing tall. "I don't know... Scrying, tracking, divining... Nothing works. And only Snowsteads very finest have ever been able to walk the land he treads now." Her mention of the ever-frigid town's elite was laced with venomous disdain. "Yet, I have come upon no better option than to resort to the use of Paladins to hunt him down. And that excludes any plans of once we find him, wherever he is, whatever he is doing- it all seems so insurmountable!" A fist beat against her chest.

"Annette..."

"And what to do if word gets out, how to explain to everyone what I've uncovered, that a blood moon is mounting unlike any seen previous, the weight of that makes me sick to my stomach..." The fist melted into a palm, slid down to her abdomen.

"Annette."

"I'm worried I won't be able to tackle whatever comes next, even for all I've done to get this far, I-I think I've hit my limit a-and-" Annettes arms curled around her waist, and in a haste to quiet them before another awful, dreadful word could tumble out, Merce spoke right from the very chest against which they laid.

"Annette, stop." The way she tightened, the unsettling stillness, all lingered for the moment that it took for the tensions felt in both to expel, leaving only the yearning for comfort they satisfied for one another. "Hush... Look at me." Merce cupped their cheek and brushed what felt like a soft, wet trail cascading down it away from the moon's view. She put no force into the gesture, just held them, preciously so. "Dear. Look at me." Reluctantly so, with a slow drift upward, Annette met their eyes. "Breathe... Deeply. You're not shallow, you shouldn't breathe as such." She felt their chest rise against hers like a roiling wave, and come slowly sinking down into a quiet, babbling brook. "We can speak of this now, or... We can sit by the fire for a time, read a few more pages together, and talk come morning."

"Story, and a fire... Sounds nice."

"Good. You must feel like the most special girl in the world, getting another chapter before bed, yes?"

"Quit talking to me like that..." She rolled her eyes, but in her warm, inviting huff was a chuckle, in her watery eyes was a sparkle, and in her pert, soft lips were the beginnings of a smile. "I'm sorry for-"

"No... Don't say that." A finger stifled the words right where they met her lips. "Who is special? Who is brilliant? Who is beautiful...?" Merce leaned into every punctuating point of perfect logic and hugged them deeper into the embrace of those very words.

"I am..."

"Come now, say it so the moon knows it too. Say it good, so the next time you spend a night looking up at the sky without me, the moon might say it back to remind you."

"I'm special." She laughed the way that only Merce could get her to. It made her smile just as brightly in kind, a smile known only to their eyes. "Now, can we go? I would love to get that fire going, I'm freezing..." Merce need not hear another word before she took a quiet step back, slipped her arm a little firmer around their back, and nudged them on to walk in her stride.

"Of course... And come morning, whatever ails you, we'll face it on... Together."