“There are humans on the moon.”
Princess Liesta, mostly known as Moonblast on the Earth, actually rolled her eyes at the communication, then caught herself. She had been dealing with humans so much that she had ended up adopting some of their mannerisms without intending to. Not necessarily a bad thing, but she had to keep in mind her comportment as a princess of the moon. Even if she was currently in exile.
“That is not actionable,” Moonblast responded, powering the ancient communications device as she flew her patrol above the Mesker Kingdom on Earth. Unlike the lands to the west held by the Five City Alliance, the Kingdom was open and arable, with towns and farms that didn’t need to be staffed by supers. Of course, there were threats to deal with in all that wide open land, which was one reason why Mesker was so happy to host her.
“It is Earth’s responsibility to restrict travel, not ours,” she continued, only half listening to the voice on the other end as she dove down toward an enormous earthworm that had surfaced outside of Chesterburgville — a name that was ridiculous even by Earth standards. “So long as they’re tourists, and not there for anything more sinister!”
She invoked the series of runes describing the effect she wanted, targeting the train-sized earthworm as it rumbled along the ground, leaving a massive furrow behind it. At that size it reminded her of the tre-cheren that inhabited the crater fields on the far side of the moon, though the tre-cheren were mostly harmless. The earthworm, on the other hand, was making a surprisingly rapid beeline for inhabited land.
Slow, Float, Desiccate, Crush. They were far from her most powerful runes, but she had no desire to devastate the countryside. It was just one monster, even if it was relatively large. The worm roared in a very un-invertebrate-like fashion as her spells lifted it up off the ground; a roar that ceased in a matter of moments as it was simultaneously dehydrated into dense protein and crushed into a ball much smaller than its initial form. With a flick of a finger she sent it floating along a pre-arranged route to a processing facility, where the remains would be turned into feed and fertilizer for the farms.
“They were involved in a flare-up in Eketon, exhibiting unusual powers. One had multiple versions, and the other seemed to have excessive strength. I don’t have a consistent report beyond that, but it was clear they were there for several hours before the fighting subsided.”
“Now that, I don’t like so much.” It was obvious that whoever had managed to head over to the moon was going to be super-powered, but how they got there was a mystery. No civilian government would have dared to try without at least letting her know as a courtesy, since she was the face of the Moon on Earth. That left the reestablishment lunarians unrepresented, but she found that more an advantage than anything else
Earth supers getting involved in the endless civil war might drag in others, and there was no way that escalating the war would help anyone. It wasn’t like it was great as it stood, but any attempt to move in any direction from the current stalemate would be ruinous. If any humans were to be brought in, she’d prefer they be a stabilizing force and not unknown agents for one side or another.
Unfortunately, the general antipathy to runes and the lack of good ways to move people between Earth and the moon made such an approach difficult. She did wonder if she could puzzle out the exact transport mechanism the strays had used, however. While she could convey herself at any phase with a bit of effort, the standing stones took a lot of power at any time other than near a full moon, and repairing them was not cheap.
“Keep track of the humans if you can, and let me know if they start interfering in local issues,” she said after a moment, flying onward in her patrol. The supervillain Krakatoa was still at large, and while pest control was certainly her job, it was not her main goal. Fortunately, volcanic energy was not easy to hide.
The old-style lunar runes probably wouldn’t have even had the vocabulary for it, but the royalists had attuned their language to the Orrery and not the moon. Not that anyone had any true idea what the Orrery was at the time, only that new and exciting approaches were working. Moonblast’s own great-grandfather had been a pioneer, and she had inherited a great many of his runes. And made ones of her own.
Sense Temperature was a basic enough rune, but her version was capable of far more distance and discernment, and pinpointing the unreasonable heat source underneath an unassuming set of hills was hardly an issue. She took a moment to invoke levitation and clear out a herd of sheep, setting the bleating mass far enough away that they’d be out of the immediate blast zone, before invoking some of her more powerful runes and ripping out a chunk of earth half a mile in diameter and five hundred feet deep.
Roiling heat and dripping lava plumed outward from the bottom of the piece of earth she’d excised, a section of Krakatoa’s attempted lair. The villain launched himself out at Moonblast like a pleopoise from the maer — or really, since they were on earth, like a dolphin from the water. His elemental form hulked large, three times Moonblast’s size and thirty times her mass, his rock-like, glowing skin blazing as he conjured molten stone between his hands.
Neither he nor his lava ever reached her. Invert Temperature, Contain Energy, Force, Blindness, Deafness, Silence. In a matter of moments he was frozen in mid-air, lava cooled to obsidian and his body trapped in a subzero field. It wouldn’t kill him; she’d done it before. The question was what exactly had sparked his breakout and rampage, but she’d leave that for the shrinks back at the Palace.
He had been doing so well, too, a daily exercise of his power providing heat energy for dynamos and citywide steam, leaving him free to do what he liked for the rest of the time. Unfortunately, if he couldn’t behave, it would leave King Mesker with no choice. After all, a king had to rule, and that included serving as the ultimate judge and executioner.
It was a problem she well knew herself. Over the years she had been forced to exercise her power to keep the war under control, to prevent it from going too hot and wracking the entire moon in strife. Sometimes the reestablishment side, sometimes the royalist side; there were those who couldn’t leave the status quo where it was, who felt the need to push things beyond allowable bounds and tilt the careful balance of the stalemate toward intolerable ends. Those, she had removed, in the vein of her mother and her mother’s mother, wielding the rune of Finality to prevent small conflagrations from becoming larger ones.
She did not enjoy the work, but it was necessary, and she had taken steps to reduce how often she had to use it. Thanks to her exposure to the supers down on earth, she’d invented some new runes and set them in many cities to keep the two sides with fully engaging with each other. There was an awkwardness to people suppressed in that way, but it did work to keep tempers from flaring too hot.
So long as nothing tipped the balance too far, anyway.
***
Isaac glanced between the suddenly ticking demuto and the city gate. Once upon a time, he would simply have turned around and walked out when confronted with something as terrifying as unknown reality alteration. Not that he would have known without Mechaniacal’s gift; he hadn’t thought about it much, but the demuto didn’t measure his talent specifically. It had never registered anything other than this power before, but that just showed how few superpowers worked in a similar enough manner, altering fundamental processes of reality.
“Let’s see if we can find the source,” he said instead, turning this way and that atop the saddle to see if the demuto could help him hone in on the origin. The spikes were not exactly a perfect way to locate things, but just knowing there was an effect was an extraordinary help.
“I don’t sense anything,” Lia said worriedly, runes lighting up along her skin. That was even more suspicious, but then again, between Mechaniacal’s work and mid-level lunar magic, he’d trust the time-travelling supervillain’s expertise.
Isaac nudged Shay, following what seemed to be the largest spike that wasn’t obviously him, the other two falling in next to him as his raptor padded along the street level. Or at least the ground level, as the fine, filigreed architecture of the moonie cities put entire streets up in the air. He kept an eye out for the moonies themselves at the same time, since he didn’t want to be too blatantly and obviously out of place, but like most cities it seemed that people were more concerned with their own business than other people’s. The glamoured raptors got a few double-takes, but that was it.
The demuto led him past the outer ring of buildings, to an unremarkable section of street. Only after fiddling with it for a moment did he realize that he needed to look upward, and with a thought Shay snapped her wings into place. Flitting up to the next level, there was a decorative stele in the middle of a roundabout-style intersection, and that seemed obviously worth investigating.
Sure enough, the demuto’s dial put a spike directly aimed at the stele, and walking up closer revealed that it, like virtually everything else in moonie cities, had a number of runes etched into it. The translation spell registered most of them as the usual fare, scripts that helped with directions and maintenance, lighting and cleanliness. There were other bits, though, that the translator helped with not at all.
“Lia, am I missing something here?” Isaac muttered to her as he examined the runes. They looked to his inexperienced eye to be in the same style as everything else, but it was gibberish.
“They are royalist runes,” she replied quietly, looking at the same things he was. “But they are too advanced and obscure for me. Purposefully obfuscated, even.”
“So that’s why the translation doesn’t work,” Sarah concluded more than asked. Behind the illusion of her moonie disguise, which hid a lot more of her actions than his, he could tell that she was snapping photos with her new camera. “Glad to know it’s got some limits.”
“All things have limits,” Lia replied, a bit distractedly. “I cannot tell who might have placed these particular runes, or what they do.”
“Oh, come on,” Sarah said, before Isaac could reply. “Powerful, reality-altering moon magic that you’re not aware of? Gotta be Moonblast’s work, unless there’s lots of lunarian sorcerers on her level.”
“There are some practitioners that can match her, here on the moon,” Lia said, the translation conveying the subtext that she meant on her side. Isaac presumed that they didn’t directly contest each other for the same reason people tried to avoid sovereign-level fights on Earth.
“So, just speculating without evidence, I wonder if this is doing the same thing I’m intending,” Isaac said, looking around at the network of bridges and the various moonies going about their day, carrying on as usual. “Keeping things from flashing over into violence.”
“Or making people more likely to align with the royalists,” Lia said. “It’s very strange that my divination sigils can’t pick up the alterations, but the Princess – or rather, Moonblast – has extraordinary skill.”
“I mean, does it ultimately matter? It won’t actually stop Isaac from using his power, will it?”
“I am uncertain,” Lia admitted after a moment of thought. “Without understanding the runes myself, I could not give a full accounting of potential interactions. My experience with his power is that it is not something that can be directly affected by rune magic.”
“Then it’s more likely I’ll stop these things from functioning, whatever they do, than the other way around,” Isaac decided. The most cautious way forward would be to find who had made them, whether it was Moonblast or someone else, but that’d also probably stop them at the first hurdle. There were a lot of people invested in the status quo, or at least in one particular side winning, which Isaac certainly couldn’t guarantee and didn’t want to.
It did, however, reinforce that he would need to take a whirlwind tour of lunar cities and settlements and apply his own interference so that his guiderails took precedence. When he started letting the war change again, the various sorts of strains and reinforcements would cause a tapestry of fractures. If he was going to do things right, he’d have to make sure the breaks happened along the lines that he had laid down.
He reached out to touch the stele, taking a moment to concentrate on the idea of making the stele’s influence easier to change. Even if he didn’t know exactly what it did, that would ensure that it’d bend to him — and unlike the ever-shifting tides of the civil war, it’d stay that way. Unless the creator tampered with it further, but something set into a piece of architecture was not generally changed very much.
“Alright, let’s take a quick tour of the city before we head off to the next,” Isaac said, since he still felt he needed to know more about lunarians. “How many big cities are there?”
On one hand, the entire moon was a big place, but like with Earth he had to imagine it wasn’t all inhabited. In fact, if it was anything like the Earth then only a tiny fraction of it was; between weather, extreme events, monsters, and the remnants of ancient catastrophes, a lot of the surface just wasn’t suitable to build cities. From the Earth, the new moon was mostly dark anyway so he knew there couldn’t be an extreme sprawl.
“Maybe a dozen, mostly on the Earth side,” Lia replied as they left the stele behind, going further into the moonie city. Isaac let Shay have her head, since he didn’t have any destination in mind. “Hundreds of smaller towns, but they’re mostly held by one side or another at this point.”
“So not that many to focus on, thankfully, but we’ll have to hit them all,” Isaac said, considering. “Not all today. We’ll want to do it right the first time, so even if we want to be fast, we shouldn’t actually rush.”
“You can’t have it both ways,” Sarah said with amusement. “Fast or thorough, like Dad always says. Pick one or the other.”
“Right, right,” Isaac said, knowing he was letting his nerves get to him. He was trying not to think about the mess they had suppressed at the last city, with pulverized corpses sprawled across the ground, and once again resolved to avoid fighting. “We’ll just enjoy the tourism for a bit, then.”
He returned his regard to the actual city, even as he leaned on his talent to reinforce the peacefulness there. While at first he wouldn’t have been able to tell that there was anything aside from moonies going about their business, the translation rune proved its worth by conveying subtleties of body language and tone. The tall, grey-skinned people moved from place to place just a little too quickly in that strange, gliding step of theirs.
There was just a touch of a hush to conversations, sometimes trailing off when they had no right to. Some storefronts were abandoned, replaced by blank force walls and anonymizing runes. Here and there he spotted the kind of attitude that was common among the gangers back in star city, the swaggering, slouching lack of care. It shouldn’t have shocked him that there were moonie criminals, but for some reason he was still surprised. Though, he was most amused when one such group took one look at Lia and crossed to the other side of the street in unspoken deference.
Shay snorted contemptuously at the cowed moonies, sharing that they gave off the feeling of scavenging creatures, but she didn’t have to be told not tempt fate by going into what was clearly the bad part of town. Instead, the three of them wandered through the city center, past spindly towers wrought of pastel stone. Colored bunting, spilled from some windows and even bridges, most of it muted but some of it shockingly bright.
“I bet they see color differently,” Isaac muttered to Sarah, who had been taking pictures the entire time.
“They do!” Sarah whispered back. “I did find something about that in the library. Tinkers think it’s because maer has a different absorption spectrum than water.” Isaac nodded, though he wondered how he’d missed whatever book Sarah was referencing. They had done some homework before going to the moon, even though there wasn’t much available to help them.
Trying to actually drink maer was very strange to his sensibilities. It was a bit like drinking a smoothie, only it tasted like water. Not actually disgusting, but disquieting enough that he definitely needed juice blended into it to drink more than a little. It was, at least, safe for humans, just as water was safe for lunarians, though Isaac had to imagine there’d be some consequences to drinking it for years. Something to ask Lia, when there was time.
As if summoned by the tangent his thoughts had taken, it began to rain. In the low gravity and with maer’s thicker consistency, that took the form of two distinct but overlapping phenomena. One was a cold, wet drizzle of ultrafine mist that seemed to soak things nearly instantly, and the other was tremendous raindrops nearly the size of his fist, descending at a leisurely pace to splash and burst like water balloons when they hit the ground.
The clouds above were a similar gray-pastel color to much of the architecture, and was one reason why moon weather wasn’t easily visible from Earth. It just blended in, unlike the stark white-on-blue that Isaac had been able to spot on the sliver of visible Earth that hung motionless in the sky. He hadn’t even noticed the weather arriving, but the moment it did a glowing panoply of rune-made umbrellas popped into being around them.
In a blink, the city went from a mostly drab, gray-dominated expanse of rocky towers to a neon-washed corridor of reflected light. The fine drizzle diffused the light of active runes as well as the constructs, making them far more noticeable than otherwise would have been the case. Beside him, he could hear Sarah furiously taking pictures as he blinked at the glimpse into what was almost certainly closer to what moonies saw when they looked at the city. Vibrant color and glow, a lively scene rather than drab monochrome.
In a way, it helped him focus more on what he was doing. It was hard to fully engage and appreciate a culture that seemed to be full of drab people doing drab things, even if the translator rune did give him more insight than most would have. But seeing them with color and life suddenly made what he was doing more real, more immediate.
“It’s been a while,” Lia said quietly as her own umbrella-construct floated above her head, and Isaac realized that he wasn’t the only one who was seeing things with new eyes. He didn’t know how long Lia had been on Earth for, but he knew that it wasn’t like she could go back to the moon all the time. It was likely that this was her first extended return in years.
One of the big drops splashed against a railing right in front of him, and he hurriedly activated the weather protection on Shay’s barding. The force screen projected by the crystaltech performed the same purpose as the rune-umbrellas, though it looked far different. Beside him, Sarah grumbled good-naturedly as she tweaked the illusions to account for the semi-permeable bubble being projected from gemstone antennae rising from the barding.
“Should’ve checked the forecast before we went out today,” she said. “Do they even do those here?”
“There are weather diviners, yes,” Lia said, as they started forward once again. Shay didn’t mind the rain, the crystaltech doing something to make the moisture slide right off her scales. It was the neon lights of the city that fascinated her, not the weather, impressions coming through in a muddled fashion that made him wonder once again exactly how smart she was. It was difficult to say she was exactly like a person, but she might well be as smart as one in an entirely different way.
Something demonstrated by the fact that she found another stele of her own accord, positioned near another major road exiting the city. In hindsight, it made sense that there’d be a matching enchantment elsewhere in the city; whoever was placing them was using magic logic, not superpower logic. Isaac merely needed to be in the city to have an effect, but runes had rules.
“Good girl,” Isaac said, leaning forward to scratch Shay’s scales just where she liked it, slightly behind the crystaltech helmet. “Are there any other roads out of here? Might as well check them all,” he said, nudging Shay closer to the stele so he could alter it. In addition to reinforcing the peace of the city, he’d made it easier to change the strained atmosphere. Which, he hoped, with the addition of the other guiderails would mean that things would start tilting toward a nonviolent resolution.
In response, Lia gestured at the stele, lighting one of the runes and causing a model of the city to appear in miniature. Isaac rolled his eyes at himself for not realizing, then studied the model for a moment before orienting himself to the last of the three main roads. A flick of Shay’s wings sent him to the upper levels, the raptor darting between the domed roofs of the spindly buildings and passing by gaggles of gossiping moonies.
Having a specific target made him feel like he was more on top of the situation, being able to combine direction and intention into useful movement. His demuto ticked softly every now and then, indicating power expenditure even when he wasn’t fully intending to, though at the same time it could have been due to spells or the influence of the steles. Landing at the third spot, he reached out to manipulate the now-familiar reality-altering runes before turning to Lia and Sarah.
“Do we have anything else we need to do here? I’m pretty well set with my changes.”
“Not here,” Sarah said behind her moonie disguise. “But next place we might want to stop for food and drink. Astoria’s getting thirsty if nothing else.”
“So long as Lia doesn’t mind buying,” Isaac said. “I’m fresh out of local currency.”
“Yes, yes,” Lia said with a snort, recovering some of her good humor. “Fortunately grandfather is rather well-to-do. We would be better served stopping at a ranch for the raptors, however, as we are unlikely to find meat in the quantities they prefer inside of a city.”
“Then it’s a plan,” Isaac said, taking one last look around at the rain-soaked city. “Let’s be off.”
The lunar equivalent of smoked barbeque delayed their visit to the next city, but it was worth it both for the raptors and for just the general, unique flavors of moon meat. It put him a pleasant mood when they arrived at the next city, which had only a single reality-altering rune
It wasn’t on a stele but rather the archway over the primary road in. The city itself was built of some dark wood, with elaborate carvings covering long-legged buildings. It was a style very unlike anything he’d seen before, but the actual people inhabiting it had much of the same markers of strain as before. Nervousness, a quiet shabbiness in certain parts of the city, and people moving in groups perhaps larger than strictly necessary.
He had to wonder how long things had been like that. Moonblast had been around for a couple decades, but there was no guarantee that she was the one who had put up the runes, or that she was the first to put up the runes. He could imagine some form of stabilizing rune going up when the fracture first happened, and spreading in an attempt to stave off major conflict. Of course, ultimately all that had happened was that the conflict had been prolonged, which was only good when viewed from the short term. Over any length of time it was a nightmare.
“Yeah, I saw some stuff like this back when I went with Dad to some of Blacktime’s meetings,” Sarah said in response to his out-loud musings some time later, scribbling away in her notebook in the hotel room they’d gotten for the night, off in yet another city. “Rival gangs and such. When there’s people like Dad or Blacktime’s other lieutenants around to make them play nice, they do, but it doesn’t come naturally.”
“You see that everywhere, I feel,” Isaac said, consideringly. He scratched Shay’s belly, the raptors staying in the rooms since stables weren’t readily available on the moon. When everyone used magic runes for everything, the amenities were a little limited for people like them. They’d even needed Lia to activate the beds and the showers, which was inconvenient. “I remember at the hospital there was rivalry just between shifts. You’d think that nurses wouldn’t be so hostile to each other, but nope.”
“That can’t possibly be good for the hospital,” Sarah said.
“Well, I mean, the hospital director kept it to a low boil,” Isaac said, though he mostly only knew things by osmosis and overhearing. It wasn’t like he’d been directly involved in the actual healthcare. “In fact, he guided it into competition, I guess? Don’t think that’d work with moon factions, though.”
“Didn’t work with gangers, either,” Sarah agreed. “They just hated each other. Couple times I remember Dad passing it along that Blacktime would come down and liquidate them all if they didn’t stop squabbling.”
“Liquidate,” Isaac repeated. “Sounds far more evil than just kill, somehow.”
“Yeah, he’s always creeped me out,” Sarah said. “He never really threatened me or anything back then, but some people are just manifestly unsafe to be around.” She finished scribing a sentence and paused for a moment, chewing at the end of her pen before turning to look at him. “Still, you think that the two sides here can get along in any way? I’ve been referencing my photos and I honestly can’t tell them apart even in retrospect.”
“I might be starting to get a feel for it a little bit,” Isaac said, running over the patterns he’d noticed in his mind, more feelings than anything concrete. Lia had mentioned that learning runes was really only possible on the moon, and while he doubted he was really learning them as such, the back of his mind was getting a few hints to classify people differently. Given a few more weeks he might actually be able to consciously discern between the two, though he hoped he wouldn’t still be gallivanting around the moon in a few weeks. His goal was to resolve things long before then. He had learned that change happened slowly, then all at once, so while nothing seemed to be going on right now, when he finally started in earnest it would probably all cascade faster than he could react. Just like every other time.
“But, so far as I’ve seen they just avoid each other. It’s strange, you’d expect that the cities would have physically separated themselves, but it’s not like that. They’re all mushed together, but still not mixing. Like someone took two parallel civilizations and dropped them on top of each other,” Isaac concluded. Shay grumbled at the lack of scratches, distracted as he’d been in his own thoughts, and rolled over to flop her head onto his lap, sending the rune-chair bouncing.
“Oof,” he grunted, and Sarah giggled, glancing at where Astoria was snoozing rather than begging for attention.
“You spoil her,” she said.
“Yeah, I know,” Isaac said. “Anyway, I don’t really know how things can be resolved. It might even be the case that it’s not possible. I can only make the change easier, I can’t make it happen.”
“Not having second thoughts?” Sarah asked, though he thought it was more general prodding than an actual question.
“No. If anything, seeing what I’ve seen today just really cements that this can’t go on,” Isaac sighed. “I’m not looking forward to the bill when it’s all done, but at the same time, the longer this goes on the worse it’s going to be when it finally breaks.”
***
Magister Aucliostratus of Mare Imbrium, sometimes known as Ostra, paced the outer perimeter of his home in Muiraton, fearful and frustrated.
It was one thing to be relegated to the confines of a reestablishment city, where he was protected from the opposition but at the same time unable to bring the fight to the royalists. It was quite another to be forced to watch outsiders come to do poorly what he would do well. After all, what could humans truly know about the war? How could they appreciate the fundamental disjoint between what the royals had wrought and the true mother tongue of the moon?
In fact, they had as much as said that they were not truly on the side of the reestablishment cause. Absolute madness. It was one side or the other, so neutrality was just poorly understood opposition, not an actual position. Besides which, how could anyone be neutral? The divide was so deep and profound, every sense and thought shaped by the runes that they lived by, that it was simply unthinkable to be indifferent. Like being indifferent to breathing.
Ostra had seen his own mother and sister pulverized, crushed by those savages, and while he’d been too young to do anything about it then, that wasn’t true now. In truth he should have been elevated beyond Magister long ago, but the elders kept him and the rest of the younger generation confined. Protected, maybe, but also stifled.
He knew why, of course. People like him acted. Those who could truly use runes well, who would qualify for more advanced magics, protected what was theirs. And sooner or later, Moonblast would appear to destroy them on the pretense of keeping things from escalating too far. As if things hadn’t already gone too far! He understood the pragmatic concerns that drove those decisions, but it was still cowardice.
It was as if the elders had given up on winning. On finally breaking free of the royalists and their strange and repellant runic traditions, of bringing justice to all those who had been killed in the long, slow, grinding war. And they’d given up on a true victory by bringing in powerful people from Earth! He’d known of the long slow campaign there, of course, but had dismissed it as a useless endeavor, because what would Earth people have to do with the moon? But the newcomers were there, and dangerous.
He still didn’t know how the smoke magic worked. Or the man’s more physical abilities, for that matter. It had simply bypassed his protections, both the natural resistances of someone of his caliber and the ones granted by runes scribed along his spine so they were always empowered. He knew in a vague and abstract way that the humans used a different sort of magic than the moon did, but it wasn’t until he encountered it that he fully understood.
With allies like that, they could easily have cleared out cities. Driven the royalists back and cleared them from the moon, found justice for all the death and destruction they had wrought upon Ostra’s people. Maybe that was why there hadn’t been anyone brought in from Earth before. Should the royalists have people like that on their side, they would surely commit atrocities heretofore unseen by the moon.
“Something has to be done,” he said aloud as he wandered the rooms of his house, before finally finding he had too much energy for that and making for the courtyard where he could work off some nervous energy. He wasn’t worried about being overheard by Meister Calochon or any of the other elders. They were closeted away in their homes or the command center, being useless. He hesitated to call them actually traitors to the cause, but it was clear that the fire they should have had burned low in their old age.
The problem was the same as it always was. If he wanted to act, there were just too many obstacles. He really couldn’t do anything to match the people who had come, not even Alianora, who despite not having very many combat runes was the most well built lunarian he had ever seen. If it weren’t for the circumstances he might have spent more of his time petitioning Lia’s grandfather for a meeting rather then resenting her presence.
He shook his head, banishing the visions of muscles upon muscles with some difficulty. Perhaps Lia would come to her senses after she stayed on the moon long enough. All those years on Earth had probably made it difficult to remember her home, and spending time among her people – and especially seeing the faces of the enemy – might well remind her.
If nothing else, Ostra concluded, he needed to peel Lia away from the earthlings. Sending the earthlings back would be for the best, if they weren’t going to actually help his side, but he wasn’t sure that he could manage the force necessary to do that. Besides which, he had no artifacts with which to actually create a link to Earth. At his level of skill, creating a portal to Earth with his own power was practically impossible until it was full, as all transportation magic needed the proper phase to work.
Ostra looked up at the sun hanging in the sky and the sliver of Earth below it, then returned to pacing the inner courtyard of his home. He would do something though he didn’t know what yet. All he needed was an opportunity, and opportunities could be made.