“Diurne is much larger than Earth's moon, Luna. Nocturne, a fair bit smaller than Luna. Yet like Earth, Luna, and Sol; Terre, Diurne, Nocturne, and Solaire are able to create some visually stunning total eclipses. My personal favorite is the ‘donut eclipse’ Nocturne and Diurne do once every thirty-six days.”— Understanding Our New Home, Volume One
Outside the village of Pella, the Territories of Ilsylvania. Day 02, earlier that day.
The bucket of water Alyx had been using to wash her family’s clothing had become more dirt than soap once she had moved on to Lynn’s clothing. It was really unfair that the two of them had to alternate chores when Lynn’s clothing always required the most amount of effort to clean.
As if to add insult to injury, Lynn had finished her chores hours ago and was now swimming in the nearby lake while Alyx continued to toil away.
Lynn shouted something unintelligible and Alyx did her best to ignore her. She called again and Alyx finally looked up to see what she was saying.
Lynn was pointing at the sky and Alyx followed her gaze. High above them, a shooting star flew across the sky as a fiery streak of orange and red. The meteor crumbled as it punched across the sky, shooting off fragments that sent tendrils of smoke in every direction like bolts of lightning. All the streaks faded, save one, which continued on its course, hurtling into the ground with a thundering boom that shook the valley.
Lynn swam towards Alyx. “You wanna go find it?”
“No, I want to finish washing all your dirty clothes so I can go back to the rest of my day,” Alyx huffed.
“I’ll help you when we get back,” Lynn said in the sing-song voice she used when she wasn’t going to do the thing she’d just said she’d do. “I’ll even let you keep the biggest piece we break off.”
Before Alyx could protest, Lynn had already dressed herself, fastened her sheathed sword around her waist, and was slipping under the fence. She glanced back at Alyx and nodded for her to follow, then darted off without a word.
Alyx sighed and picked up her bow and quiver of arrows. If she was going to break the rules with Lynn, she might as well be buried with something cool following her demise via parental fury.
Alyx ran to catch up to Lynn, who sat crouching behind a bush. Alyx slid beside her sister and took in the scene. The traveler from space had left several fallen trees in its wake, some still smoking. Lynn started to walk out from behind the bush when a low rumble in the ground made her freeze.
A large, humanoid figure slowly moved out from behind some trees on the far side of the clearing. It walked slowly, sending tiny tremors with each step. It was well over ten feet tall, bulky with arms disproportionately long compared to a human. Bulky with skin like the marble stone that made up Old Man Logan’s farmhouse, it continued towards the meteorite.
Long stony fingers picked at the chunk of space rock before it quickly lost interest and turned for the direction it had come from.
“Quick! Let’s grab a piece before it comes back!” Lynn ran to the meteorite, which was nearly as big as she was, and began pounding on it with the hilt of her sword with no success.
“You’ll never break through it. Let’s see if Logan has a hammer in his toolshed.”
Lynn gave the meteor one more hard thwack before giving up. “Good idea.”
Several loud booms and the sound of a bellowing roar came from the direction the stone monster had moved in. With a wide smile of excitement on her face, Lynn grabbed Alyx’s arm and pulled her in the direction of the commotion.
The stone monster was surrounded by a growing tower of flames. The monster roared in pain as the fire licked its skin. A fresh ball of fire flew through the air and exploded off the monster’s back.
Four men and a woman were standing beside each other. They appeared to be arguing with the one who had thrown the fireball.
They weren’t an adventuring party. No, they were Guardians. Powerful beings that protected the people of Navorinelle from the things that were too strong for adventurers or the city guards to deal with. They had been gone for almost a month and now they were back. And both Alyx and Lynn got to see them fight up close and personal.
Neither of them had met a Guardian in person, but they wandered throughout Castera often enough that they were hard to miss.
“We should go say hi to them!” Lynn said in hushed excitement.
“No, they’re fighting that monster!” Alyx said back.
“I at least want to hear what they’re saying,” Lynn said, moving towards a closer spot to catch their conversation.
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“You should have waited for us to suppress. There was a quest marker back there to kill the guy. It would have been easy XP and gold,” the woman said. She held a glaive and twirled it around in her hands. She was dressed in the clothing pirates of the coast of Rielle wore.
“You all got to fight those other monsters. I just wanted to see what I could do before you one shot it.” The mage said. A bolt of lighting erupted from his hands and hit the stone monster. A clap of thunder followed and the monster fell to the ground, dying if not already dead.
“You see! An epic monster and we get no loot and one experience point.” The woman huffed as she inspected the monster’s remains. “You should have fucking waited.”
One of the men wearing a white coat with two short swords strapped to his waist turned to the bickering man and woman. “Would you both shut up? We’re not here for loot. I want to piss off the damn admins and be gone already.”
“What’s it matter? Not like whoever…” The mage shrugged, his words trailing away as he moved out of earshot.
The man in the white coat said something else in a whisper and everyone went quiet. More footsteps and then a man’s voice. A voice she recognized.
“Guardians? It’s go…” Captain Tarik Kronos’ words slowed to unintelligibility.
Alyx glanced up to see what had happened and she nearly screamed. Lynn’s hand rushed over her mouth and it was all she could do to keep any sound from escaping her throat.
Kronos was standing in the middle of a shimmering bubble. His left arm was falling to the ground, fingers still outstretched in the offer of a handshake. It floated to the ground, slowly like a feather, not the mass of muscle that it really was. Blood spurted from the wound at his shoulder in tragically slow pulses. All along his chest armor, holes began weeping blood. The captain’s lips were still locked in the formation of his final words.
It was slow, but his face began to contort from his pleasant greeting to wide eyed surprise and then finally the cold, blank look of death.
His body’s fall to the ground sped up as the bubble surrounding him dissipated, but to Alyx, it still happened in slow motion, the memory forever seared into her mind. White Coat’s sword coated in Kronos’ blood drove home the terrible realization: the people sworn to protect Navorinelle had just murdered one of its people.
White Coat wiped his sword on Kronos’ cape, then turned to the man in robes beside him. “Look, our names changed to red. Clearly someone's watching.”
“Yeah, but it didn’t do anything. No messages or anything,” the robed man replied.
“That just means we need to go—”
A woman’s yell cut short their conversation and Alyx’s time to process the scene. The yell preceded the sound of metal on metal and combat erupting all around Alyx and Lynn.
Alyx looked up and nearly screamed. The woman who’d yelled had been their adoptive mother, Tyressa Pearce. She was locked in a deadly dance of swords with White Coat. She managed two hits on him before a pillar of stone burst upward from beneath her feet, launching her into the air and into a bush several feet away.
“Mom!”
The words left Alyx’s mouth before she knew it.
Everything, everyone stopped at the same moment and the forest grew eerily silent as nearly a dozen pair eyes suddenly locked onto Alyx and Lynn.
White Coat broke into a sprint towards them. He moved with such speed, Alyx saw only the blur of the figure coming towards her.
Another blur, the Guardian woman with the staff, moved even faster. She tackled White Coat to the ground before he could close even half the distance to them.
“Fuck you, Krait! I’m all for getting the admin’s attention, but I’m not letting you kill two kids in front of me!”
"What's it matter? They're just NPCs!" White Coat broke free of the woman’s grip and picked up his fallen rapiers.
The woman with the staff lunged upward, driving her weapon through Krait's shoulder. "This whole plan of yours is fucking psycho! I'm out!"
White Coat said something unintelligible before diving on the woman, taking them both back to the ground.
The woman turned to Alyx and Lynn and just before White Coat's rapier went through her head, she shouted, “You two get the fuck out of here!”
And Alyx and Lynn ran. They ran until the sounds of conflict were distant.
Lynn grabbed Alyx by the arm so hard, she almost took them both to the ground.
“We have to go back and help mom.” And I’m going whether you come with me or not was heavily implied by the look on her face.
Alyx nodded. They had already lost a father they had never met. They weren’t about to lose one of their mothers.
They turned back towards the sound of the fighting, circling wide until they found the bush their mother had landed in.
She lay on the ground unmoving. Her left eye was swollen shut and an ugly gash ran across her brow.
Neither Alyx nor Lynn had any aptitude for healing magic like their birth mother, Aliyah, but they had learned plenty about healing through other means.
They checked for a pulse. It was there.
They checked for any other injuries that would make moving her life threatening. They found none.
Lynn grabbed their mother’s right side, Alyx her left.
And they ran.
They ran past the point of exhaustion.
And still they ran.
By the time they got to the farmhouse, they were both drenched in sweat and their mother’s blood. Lynn called for Aliyah and she burst through the door almost immediately. Their mother’s face broke only for a second when she saw them before it was quickly masked behind a wall of resolve and concentration. It was a brief sight Alyx knew she never wanted to see again.
White-gold mana flowed from Aliyah’s hands and into Tyressa. As the wounds on her began to heal, their mother looked at them both expectantly.
“We saw a meteor crash and went to go break off a piece and then we saw a rock monster and the Guardians started fighting it and then we saw Mom and Captain Kronos and… and…” Alyx tried to finish answering their mother’s unasked question, her words coming in a long, panicked stream, but she couldn’t finish the sentence as she began to cry as Kronos’ gruesome death replayed itself in her mind.
Tyressa’s hand reached up and she spoke between labored breaths. “Send word to General Neemo. Kronos is dead, and I’m certain so are Caleb and Shai. The Guardians… the Guardians have betrayed us.”