image [https://i.imgur.com/fbfIPnE.png]

His Holiness' tent was a massive pavilion of pink and purple silk that belched incense from every seam. Rokash led me past a row of chanting monks before holding a flap into the inner sanctum while he waited outside.

The Mane was nearly upon me as soon as I came in, his eyes wide with panic.

"Have you heard, Stranger? They're just over the hilltop in the next valley-pass. I thought we'd have more time-uhh…"

"Everything is in place, well nearly so, your Holiness. Since our conversation have you been able to think back? Have you found your point deviation from him yet?"

"Yes. No. I really don't know. I have some ideas-uhh"

I nodded. "Well just use them all when the time comes."

His Holiness chewed his lip with an ivory fang. "Perhaps it won't be necessary. If it does come down to combat, then perhaps I can overwhelm him physically."

My eyes flicked down to his protruding belly, better suited to tickling than battle tactics. A snort escaped me.

"Excuse me, Holiness, my allergies. What I mean to say is that I suspect that will not be a tenable strategy."

He shook his head, pacing away and stomping over rows of meditation pillows, kicking up a mess. "It's just humiliating. And it's not fair…"

"It is," I agreed, "but unlike him you have faced the truth, that gives you immense power. His false belief will not be able to compete."

"So you say-uhh."

"I swear to you, my Holiness. And if you fall then so too shall I, but I suspect good things are to come if we gird ourselves."

It was his turn to snort now. "I'm girded, Stranger."

"I see that Holiness. All the same this may be a time to mind your pipe. Sometimes we need a break from these worries."

He took my advice and I left him puffing away on one of his pillows, and I ordered one of his initiates to cook him up a platter of sugared bacon to occupy him.

As I walked back to my tent I felt my false confidence evaporate. I took a moment to myself on the camp's edge, beneath a towering barr'o tree to admire the valley behind us, for we rested just before the lower crest between two mountains before Lake Adego. The trees waved gently, all of them lush green. No doubt my family estate in Anticlere must have been under a foot of snow by that time of year.

But startling to me, who by training watches for such manifestations, was that Masser was not visible as it should have been full at that time. Instead only its smaller sibling waxed, Secunda floated high above us, pale in a bluing sky. A single tear fell off my cheek and onto the green grass. At that moment and by that sign, I knew everything else that was to come — not in its every wandering permutation perhaps, but in its shape completely.

I knew it all by Sucunda's face. Often called the second moon, it shone as a pale disc in the still lit sky. It is a curiosity of our culture, of all mortal-kind perhaps, that we perceive the smaller and subsequent as the lesser of any pair. This natural assumption, borne no doubt from our ancestral time as simple hunters picking the weakest quadrupeds from a herd to spear, ill serves us in matters of spirit, astrology, or even on the grander scale of our own brief lifetimes.

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Is the distant comet, smaller than a pinhead to your eye, any lesser in importance than the greates constellation? Perhaps yes, if it is headed directly for your plane of existence.

I argue that it is the role of the critical thinker to isolate ourselves from such biases. An impossible feat in any hierarchical structure which bends always under the cumulative weight of mortal averages in temperament and intelligence, but as individuals and independent academics we may do this. Consider the grasshopper's egg — an oval no larger than the lint ‘neath your pinky fingernail — glued to the underside of a blade of grass beneath your vision and notice. But by its promise to replicate the mere existence of this small thing precedes summers of sawing hopper song, foot for songbirds, and a world where a locust horde could potentially arise as a dark cloud from a far horizon.

This pattern extends beyond mere physical stature of course, as we mortals who are blind to time itself and will always be surprised by tomorrow's happenings (although we call them inevitable in hindsight). For someone such as myself, who has deeply studied the theories of fate and consequence, and who by my Stranger nature found myself inexorably bound to the lunar lattice's dilemma at that moment, I knew the meaning of Sucunda's light at once.

And that is why I wept.

I turned to see Vendrela, arms crossed in her nightmare black armor.

“Looking for something, Stranger?”

I tried to explain the moon sign to her, but made a damn mess of it by tripping over my tongue and speaking out of sequence. She raised an eyebrow. “So you’re saying we’re going to win tomorrow?”

“Yes. No. Dammit all, I’m trying to say I don’t know what will happen but I know where it will leave us. Does that make sense.”

"Not a bit, scrib-meat."

I nearly let it go at that, but something in her face stopped me. It was just a bit off, that scar in a different place. I laughed. “An impressive attempt, but I see it’s you, Benezia.”

She dropped her mask, as it were, for the while whatever makeup she had applied, but her face turned sour. Her hand had found the top of my head, and clenching a hank of hair, held me with her dagger blade a hair’s breadth from my eye.

“You call for help, Berry and they’ll find you bleeding.”

After some initial squealing I held my hands up in the cool manner of a master negotiator. “After all of this time you still think I would turn you in? What have I done but been loyal to you and the empire? Put that thing away and let’s talk like we used to. Despite the battle lines we’ve always been on the same side”

She lowered blade. I have to admit, she made a pretty good replica of Vendrela, who I assume was walking around unaware of her doppelganger.

“Were you loyal when you snuck off in the night on me? When you slept with our target in Dune? When you wasted your chance to end this bloodlessly that night with the poison you let spill on the floor?"

"Not truly bloodlessly…”

She rolled her eyes. “And you think this is better? Do you know what awaits you across the pass?"

I confessed that I did not.

"All three armies are about to reach Lake Adego, Mane of Dune from the north and the imperial legion from the east. Thats why I’m here, Berry, your brother—"

"My deviator."

"Whatever. Well, he asked me to sneak into your camp to check if you really were here, oblivion knows how he knew. More than the army, he's afraid you'll do something."

I snorted. "What would I do?"

"Did you forge another Miser's Mirror?"

"No. Never."

That seemed to relieve her. "Well he's terrified you did and he won't listen to reason. He won't let the manes speak to each other so if you’re hoping to negotiate then your plan is dead in the water. And I fear he plans to kill you despite my suggestions."

"Well on that we’re aligned. I am expecting a battle in a way. Single combat in fact." And I told ber about the lost tradition of the lunar duel as Eophicles had practiced it (without mentioning the more cunning aspects of my plan).

When I finished, she pursed her lips. "Won't that still kill one?"

"Just leave that to me."

Now she snorted in that unrefined manner of hers. "Potentially a dangerous outcome in the moment, but even if one fell it could unify them and avoid Lucca’s forces from having any legitimacy."

I nodded. “The only one I may not be able to save is Prince Findulain. I assume they're still planning to send him in as war bait for the Bosmer?"

She smiled then, the naughty secretive smirk that I had first known at Marius' estate the summer prior. "Leave the princeling to me. Are you familiar with Lax berries? Little powder blue things common around the West Weald."

"I uh… may have heard of them before."

"Well I have a sackful of them. Suffice to say his highness will be indisposed for the next two days at least."