Chapter Eight — Shifts and Rumblings

Aucliostratus moved.

It was time.  He could feel it.  The earthlings had been gone for days, elsewhere on the moon.  He knew that they could return in theory, but for the moment they were far away, and thus not able to interfere. 

It was a simple matter to invoke a message to the rest of his cohort, all the younger members of various families that had been sent to the sidelines in Muiraton.  Every one of them had lost someone or something, and very few had been given the chance to strike back.  He hadn’t thought that he’d be starting with his own side, but things needed to change and all change began at home.

Not that Ostra intended to kill the elderly lunarians.  They were still pillars of the reestablishment cause, unparalleled in their knowledge and history.  However, they were clearly too old.  Too set in their ways, too afraid to try anything new.  The future belonged to the young, not to those who had been in charge for years and decades with nothing changing. 

His friends assembled themselves in the spire that he had cleared out to use as their temporary meeting-place, surrounded with obfuscation and buffer runes.  While he might not be at the level of the grandmeister, he still had his own prowess and was more than capable of securing a site.  It wouldn’t do for someone to forewarn the elders what was coming.

“We have waited long enough,” he told the men and women sitting or standing in the room, all of them accomplished enough to rise at least one rank if not two, were they given the chance.  “This waiting around, doing nothing and hoping that something will happen to break the stalemate must end.”  He surveyed the room, seeing bright eyes and feeling the strength of their conviction.

“Let us begin with you,” Ostra said, nodding to his most dedicated lieutenant.  “What is the status on our people in the royalist capital?”  He went through his compatriots one by one, each of whom had links to other cities.  They were all brothers and sisters in exile, as it were, but it didn’t mean they didn’t maintain ties to their families, friends, or former coworkers. 

There were people in vulnerable positions.  Scattered individuals still stubbornly or bravely located in royalist strongholds.  There were people who had been deliberately assigned to important areas, refusing to cede control of major industries or transportation companies to the enemy.  Not to mention broken and defiant families, survivors, and scattered firebrands.  All of these people had to be accounted for, one way or another.  All of them had to be given orders, reasons, excuses, and justifications.

They were used to the way the oldheads ran things, and just replacing two people wouldn’t cause millions to fall in line.  In fact, they would be replacing far more; just as they, the youth, had connections and networks, so too did the elders, which they used to keep the younger lunarians from becoming too brash and too noticeable.  So the entire old organization had to be overturned at once, replaced with something fresh and new.

Even then, simply replacing them did nothing but put Ostra and his fellows in charge of an arthritic structure that operated more by fear than anything.  Fear of conflict, fear of failure.  Fear of Moonblast, who could end up wiping another town full of men, women, and children off the map solely for the crime of existing too loudly.

Ever since the earthlings had arrived, Ostra had been considering the problem, and he thought he had something of a solution.  The main threat was actually from Earth; Moonblast spent most of her time there, ostensibly to prevent any sort of political escalation on the moon, and Alianora’s two earthlings showed that any other imports from their sister world would be equally dangerous.  There were few ways back and forth from Earth to the moon, which meant it was a viable avenue to attack.  If he could restrict such movement, they could operate more freely.

Ostra suspected that the royalists couldn’t cut it off.  Their perversion of the mother tongue came with certain weaknesses, ones that the true children of the moon lacked.  It wasn’t easy or simple, but consulting with some of his followers and they with their followers, they’d figured out a way to augment the massive scry-array with obfuscation sigils.  Subtle ones, as the moon’s surface simply going dark would be obvious to anyone on Earth.

Rather, thanks to his friends and allies, he had a glyph-set he could append to the massive array that would deflect and falsify both communication and travel, projecting subtle characters onto the crystal sphere to keep people and words from breaching lunar space.  It wouldn’t last forever, of course, as it’d have to be rewritten constantly to deal with time and movement, not to mention the actual resources it’d take to keep it active.  But it might well last long enough to give them a chance.

“We are ready, then,” he said, and led the way out of the spire.  They marched down the street to the command center, all of them holding active runes that would keep any prying eyes away from them — and hopefully stifle any communication if the elders decided to call their pet earthlings.  He still remembered the feeling of being turned into smoke, however briefly, and it was not something he wanted to repeat.

The door of the command center had no restrictions set upon it; why would it, when all in Muiraton were of the reestablishment persuasion?  The Grandmeister was standing at the scry-focus, the projection just the smallest tip of a runic array that covered virtually the entire building.  Meister Calochon was not in evidence; for the best, really.  The Grandmeister was far easier to deal with, even if he was technically more powerful, by virtue of most of his mastery being put into informational runes rather than combat or defense.  Not that it should come to combat, but the implicit threat would be enough.

“Magister Aucliostratus?”  The Grandmeister blinked at him as he approached, only looking up from the scry-projection at the last moment.  The older lunarian’s eyes flicked to take in the others with Ostra, and his rune resonance cooled.  “So you really have come to make a play for my position?”

“No,” Ostra said, having rejected the entire concept after serious consideration of the possibilities.  “I don’t want your position.  Your position isn’t necessary at all.  That’s the problem.  Your generation set up a system where we will never win, and those who would try are never allowed stand on our own two feet or improve our lot.”  He raised his hand to begin to point at the Grandmeister, then dropped it again in disgust.

“Isn’t it the duty of the elders to care for the young?  To nurture them and allow them to grow?  But you have failed that charge.  You have purposely made it impossible for us to master the mother tongue as is our birthright.  And why, because you think you know better, that your way is the right way to handle things?”

“If you’d been smart enough, you would have already won the war!” That comment came from Ostra’s lieutenant Yon, his magic carrying the snarl better than any sound ever could.  The young Magister in question was a bit of a hothead, but it was hard to blame him when he was the only survivor of his entire family.  “It’s only because of you that it got this bad!”

Yon’s runes glittered with aggression as he pulled together a strike, but Ostra quickly energized a counter-rune to pick apart the language of Yon’s attack.  It was one thing to seize control of the reestablishment faction for themselves, but it was quite another to act like the royalists and actually attack people like the Grandmeister. 

“There is no need for this to become unpleasant,” he said, giving Yon a quelling look.  “We are all on the same side, here.  We are all loyal sons and daughters of the moon and the ancestral tongue.  But it is also time for you to step aside.  The time for change has come, that has become abundantly clear.  You know this can’t keep going; isn’t that why you decided to bring those earthlings here?”

“It is,” Grandmeister said, going so far as to actually frown.  Unfortunately he also was invoking runes and Ostra was not skilled enough to pick apart those castings.  Fortunately, he didn’t need to be.  He waved for Yon to head the enforcement effort, the man stepping forward with two others and simply locking down the Grandmeister physically, with a couple of others ready and waiting with rune disruptors just in case.  Nothing violent, of course, but enough restraint to keep him from activating defenses or calling in other people with more martially-oriented rune sets.

“Then you understand why it is time to do this, Grandmeister,” Ostra said.

“But you can’t even operate the strategic array!  How are we going to maintain our vigilance against the movements of the royalists?”

“By myself, I cannot,” Ostra agreed, quelling the desire to point out it was the Grandmeister’s own fault that nobody else could manage the runework by themselves.  “But I am not by myself.  Between all of us, we are confident we can manage it.  And make improvements.”  There would have to be people at the other anchor points in other cities, but all of the hard work had already been done.  The rune networks existed, the artifacts had been created.

“You will regret doing this.”  The Grandmeister drew himself up, dignified despite the restraints.  “You have not the experience or the perspective necessary to understand what we have been doing to keep up the cause.  While I certainly cannot stop you, I can tell you that this will not end well.  For you or for anyone.”

“As if things have been going so well thus far?”  Ostra scoffed.  “Everyone here has lost family and loved ones.  For the past decades and maybe even since it started, there has been no real change or chance at winning this war.  All we’ve had is this slow grinding destruction, a truce that nobody really even follows.  An insidious and unstoppable death by inches, hollowing out our way of life!” 

He stopped himself before he truly went on a rant, though some of his fellows were nodding along.  There was really no point in trying to explain himself to the Grandmeister, as everyone had brought up these issues over the years, only to be dismissed.  They were told they were too young, too naïve, too unlettered to properly grasp the situation.  No longer.

“Keep him confined to his quarters,” Ostra said.  “We’ll find Meister Calochon and do the same.  I’m sure once they see our successes, they will have no choice but to concede our approach is the better one.”  Even as he said that, he took a quick accounting of the mood of the various people with him, and assigned the more coolheaded ones to guard the Grandmeister.  If he put Yon in charge of it, things would probably go poorly.  If there was anything Ostra didn’t want, it was to lose the knowledge and wisdom of the elders — however misguided they might be at the moment.

“Now, let us get the obfuscation array into place,” he said, as the Grandmeister was gently escorted off to his own quarters.  Ostra beckoned the three people forward, two women and one man, who had the needed expertise the additions would require.  At the same time, another pair came over simply to keep the strategic scry going; there was some built in buffer and inertia, since the Grandmeister couldn’t attend it every hour of every day, but it was better to take control.

They broke out the chisels, little wands of lovely and intricate rune-etchings, and ducked under the projector pedestal.  Since the obfuscation had to go everywhere the endpoint of the massive strategic scry was the best place to put it.  The process would cycle into the scry and back out over the entire moon, projecting up to the crystal sphere.  In truth he didn’t fully understand the modifications himself, as his runic focus was actually in crafting and processing — the chisels were, in fact, his work. 

The modifications had been extensively planned and in the end took only a few minutes.  The scry-display rippled once, a few extra glyphs appearing on its periphery.  That actually wasn’t so much their doing as the excellent work of the scrying artifact itself.  The Grandmeister was Grandmeister for a reason, the display taking in new information without a bobble and writing it into place without any prompting from Ostra. 

Contrary to their planning, the obfuscation didn’t go up all at once.  He studied the readouts, finding that it seemed to be a consequence of the actual way the strategic scry worked.  It wasn’t everywhere all at once all the time; rather, it updated in bits and pieces, sending waves over the lunar globe.  The protective changes went with it, slowly fuzzing the communications and travel with Earth.  He would have preferred to do it all at once, but really, it wasn’t that likely that anyone would notice.

***

Moonblast paused in her writings as the communication artifact that connected her to the moon began to act oddly.  It was a silent conduit in her consciousness most of the time, a thin link that waxed and waned with the phases but always kept her connected to home.  Yet, it was waning in real time as if someone or something was conspiring to turn the moon toward new.

She placed her pen on top of the peculiar white paper they used on Earth and stepped out onto the broad balcony of her dwelling in the palace.  The moon itself was barely visible on the horizon as the Earth’s turnings brought it into view, exactly the phase it was meant to be, with no obvious power coming between the two.  Her connection should have been clear enough, so outside interference it was.

There weren’t many lunarians with the power to contest her, which wasn’t to say there were none.  Especially if they worked in concert, setting up large rune-arrays and collaborating on the instructions and grammar.  Something she had put in a lot of work to try and discourage, to prevent the need to escalate to a destructive confrontation, even if it still happened sometimes.

“Report,” she demanded into her device.  There was a rotating cast of people who were meant to be there to answer her, but she knew each and every one of them.  They were as familiar to her ear as the Mesker Kingdom’s dispatch agents, and the voice that assured her all was well was not one of them.

She lifted her hand to the little communications pin that the King had purchased from the Five Cities alliance, a useful bit of tinker-work that let her communicate with dispatch far more easily than she had before.  She had actually gotten a few for herself, but Administrator Ichabod wasn’t yet willing to sell the versions that, in theory, could communicate all the way out to the moon.  Not that she needed it, but it might make things easier for her fellow Lunarians who were on Earth.

“Casper?  The family is having a bit of trouble,” she said, giving dispatch the code-phrase for when she was needed on the moon.  While technically she could travel there at will, pragmatically it was such an expenditure of will and energy that she only went there for emergencies.  Especially since she’d have to come back soon enough, and unfortunately a round trip was always difficult.  The reciprocal phases meant that low-energy transit required a two-week wait.

“Understood,” the crisp reply came.  The super known as Caspar could almost be lunarian with how little emotion he packed into his words.  Except that she’d met him in person, with runes active, and he was just a cold fish.  But that was common for information supers, who saw so many patterns and connections that people didn’t stand out from the world’s complexity in any special way.  “You are cleared for three days of time off, barring emergencies.”

“Three days it is,” she said, though she was not technically bound by King Mesker.  Sovereigns really only acknowledged authority when it was convenient, but she’d found the Mesker Kingdom quite convenient and had no desire to flout the responsibilities that came with what they offered.  Of course, emergencies arose and King Mesker was quite understanding, but three days seemed like it would be sufficient time to find out what was going on.

It wasn’t quite an emergency, so she at least took the time to straighten up her room and finish the paragraph she had been working on before taking her go-bag – an amusing human term for an idea that was oddly useful – and returning to the balcony.  While she needed the standing stones to transport other people, and especially Ichabod with his hefty travel chair, when it was just herself she needed only her own magic.

The teleportation runes were a wonder of royalist script, a tightly-packed series of glyphs in a band encircling her left arm, just above the elbow.  There were all kinds of reasons she was more powerful than most other lunarians, but one of the larger ones was simply that she was able to create runes with such precision that they took up very little space.  For most people, creating something of that complexity would require a canvas like their entire back, rather than a discreet decoration on one arm.

She energized the runes, the complex glyphs reaching out to the lunar surface in a very specific way — only to be rebuffed.  Frowning, she cycled the endpoints until she found a path without any obstruction, concerned that there was an interruption to begin with.  The very presence of that kind of interference further limited the possibilities, since being able to affect the transference was a far broader effect than merely the communication.

With a flex of will she appeared at the peak of a mountain, instantly casting a smaller, more local teleport to move to just above her cousin’s palace, already invoking her scrying runes to surveil the area.  No current attack, no local unrest.  At least, to the superficial eye.  A moment later, she realized the meeting rooms where important things were discussed were filled.  More than one of them.

On the moon she was Princess Liesta, so as she dove down toward the palace she shifted the appearance of her garments slightly, from the rune-reactive superhero outfit meant for earth sensibilities – one advantage of having sorcerers and tinkers working together – to a more appropriate dress showing off the sheer expanse of her rune mastery.  Descending past the outer defenses, she flitted through the palace halls to some consternation from the servants and stopped at the door to the room containing her cousin’s energy signature.

“Princess Liesta, arriving!”  The flustered servant called, activating the specialized announcement runes at the side of the entryway.  Such meeting rooms entirely locked themselves off when important deliberations were afoot, and while Liesta could easily force her way through the opaque and soundproof screen, it didn’t seem to have that degree of urgency.

The isolation wards flicked off and Liesta floated in.  Behind her, the wards went back up, but she mostly was focused on her cousin who seemed oddly embarrassed.  No, more like uncomfortable, behind the royal demeanor.  A bit like a child that had been caught by an adult, no matter that Queen Selirayne was slightly older than her.

“Queen Selirayne,” Liesta said with a bow of the proper angle.  “I came to report on and investigate an ongoing interference between the moon and Earth.  It seems you have anticipated me.”

“I’m afraid not,” Selirayne said after a moment, glancing around at her advisors.  Those within the room accounted for most of the people who should have responded to her call; the rest, Liesta presumed, were in the other meeting rooms.  “If anything, it seems that the other side has already found out about our deliberations, as we certainly haven’t tried putting anything like that in place.”

“Ah?”  Liesta had a sudden sinking feeling.  If what seemed to be a war council wasn’t gathered in response to aggression from the other side, then it was gathered to wage that very same aggression.  The sort of thing that she had been campaigning against for years,

“You know it can’t continue this way, cousin,” Selirayne said, almost pleading, but not quite.  She was a queen, after all.  “Our people have endured the stalemate long enough.  I can’t simply let things go as they have.”

“What made you suddenly change your mind?” Liesta asked, more than a little suspicious.

“There was nothing sudden about it,” Selirayne denied.  “This has been a very long time coming, and you know it.  We have had various ideas submitted and for once, I believe they are worth consideration.  Please do not fight me on this, Liesta.  I rule for our people, and this is what they want.”

“I see,” Liesta said, stifling a number of responses.  The state of the civil war had always been a point of contention, but she’d thought that Selirayne had understood the risks and difficulties associated with any push to end it.  Let alone the death toll that would inevitably result.  But unless she wanted to publicly berate the queen, which would force Selirayne to break with Liesta, there was little she could say or do at the moment.  She certainly wasn’t going to attack her cousin.

“You will do what you think best, but I would advise restraint, at least until have discerned the nature of the communications restriction,” Liesta said stiffly.  She would have to talk to Selirayne privately, later on.  For the moment she did want to investigate things, but not necessarily whatever jamming was going up.  There were precautions in place to prevent a preference cascade like Selirayne seemed to believe had happened, and Liesta was curious to see if they had failed, or if public sentiment really had risen so far.  “I will speak with you later, Queen Selirayne.”

Selirayne inclined her head, the movement a touch brittle, and Liesta turned to leave, opening the sealing rune from the inside so she didn’t break anything while doing so.  The moment she was outside the meeting room she zipped out of the palace, flying into the air and making straight for the nearest city where she had placed a balance runeset.  The Palace had obviously not needed one, since everyone there was part of the same faction. 

Liesta didn’t bother disguising or hiding herself as she dropped down toward Olikayn City.  Those who knew who she was could know, and for the rest, it wasn’t relevant either way.  She hovered next to the directional stele there, inspecting the runes she’d added.  Given their power and influence, she’d been very careful when inscribing them, the hypercompressed style she used preventing people from being able to make alterations.  If there was anything different with them, she would have expected outright destruction.

What she found was far stranger.  Everything was intact, every rune just as she had scribed it. And yet, there was something off about it, something that she found hard to understand.  It was as if the very meaning of words had been altered around it, a twisting of something deeper than the language. 

Her first reflex was to simply destroy it, but she had long grown out of acting on reflex.  Instead, she made a brief and temporary matching runeset next to it, to test how far the effect went.  The new rune was unaffected, which at least meant she wasn’t dealing with a worst-case scenario.  If someone had been twisting reality to the point that runes themselves changed their meanings, that would have been absolutely apocalyptic.  Targeting specific runes was merely suspect, though she didn’t know from what side.

The sad thing was, there were people on both sides who wanted to push through to supremacy, no matter how catastrophic that might be for all involved.  Liesta couldn’t see any way that it would work without utter destruction, which was why she’d worked so hard to keep the war from reaching that point.  If she let things spiral out of control it would make all the hard, brutal choices she’d committed to in the past pointless. 

Liesta began trying to analyze the reality alteration.  Even if scrying was not her specialty, she was still one of the foremost experts on any rune magic, anywhere, especially that which fundamentally altered the local framework.  And yet, oddly, she couldn’t seem to find any other rune that the effect might be anchored to. 

She stared at the stele for a while before realizing the answer was probably an obvious one.  The single, unconfirmed report of humans on the moon meant that some form of super had been around.  Since superheroes and villains both found themselves in improbable situations, she hadn’t thought much about someone ending up on the moon, on purpose or by accident, since there hadn’t been any further trouble. 

Human superpowers.  Humans using their superpowers on the moon, to interfere with the civil war.  She had no idea who it might be; none of the supervillains she was aware of had any stake in it, and none of the superheroes would go rogue and defy the standing agreements between earth governments and lunar ones to send someone to interfere.  Besides which, who would stand to benefit from such a thing? 

The only thing she could figure was that someone had hired mercenaries to cause the change — but who?  Both sides had people who wanted to win the war rather than keep a lid on it, and people who would be more than willing to profit from the chaos.  It didn’t even have to be someone whose main goal was winning the war for their side, it could be just someone who thought they’d be on top when the dust settled.

As much as she hated to admit it, there were villains among the lunarians, too.

Princess Liesta ascended back into the air, darting off toward the next city as she considered her options.  The last thing she wanted to do was actually fight with her cousin, which was one reason that she had spent so much time enforcing neutrality on the lunar cities.  She knew that Selirayne was more a creature of her people than anything else, and would not have dared to move forward with any plans for the civil war without a mandate.  If all the unrest or even Selirayne’s decision had been created by an outside factor, that would make resolving their differences far easier.

The next city had altered runes as well, manipulated in exactly the same way.  Given that she’d spent a non-trivial amount of space on runes designed to analyze and identify superpowers, the fact that she couldn’t dissect the exact mechanism was a little bit irksome.  Of course, it wasn’t actually possible to address the whole spectrum of human powers so she had focused on the sort of esoteric energies that would be a threat to a sovereign.

The changes she was finding were, for the most part, small, but operated by allowing the fundamental meaning of the runes to adjust without changing the structure.  Which was probably why the effect had worked at all; certainly, very few lunarians would have been able to figure out a way to affect one of Liesta’s creations.  For a moment she wished she had someone she could consult about these things, then she realized she was being stupid.  There were at least two people she could ask on the moon, though she wasn’t sure how either would go.

Mechaniacal was technically a villain, if one in retirement, and even if he knew something there was no guarantee he’d share it.  In fact, from what she knew of the man, he’d refrain from telling her anything just for the sake of making her life harder.  On the other hand, his history showed he was not reticent about reaching out when he thought somebody should know something, so there was a good chance he’d find her first if he became involved.

Administrator Ichabod was a better bet — except that communications with Earth were down, and Liesta genuinely didn’t know how much he’d be able to help without that.  She was sure he’d try, given that they had fairly positive relations, but at the same time he was here on vacation.  And without the standing stones she wouldn’t be able to teleport him back, especially with the interference.

But unless she wanted to run all over the moon looking for the source of this mysterious interference, that was probably the best stop to make.  She gave the perversion of her runework a sour look before rising into the air and jetting off to Aristarchus Island.  The place was Queen Selirayne’s Dark Palace, for the weeks of night, but for the moment it was so lightly populated that it had seemed a reasonable spot to host Ichabod, and so improve the royalist relationship with the Five Cities Alliance.

She circled around a vortex storm, a small, lazy version of the hurricanes on Earth, and headed down toward the beach where Ichabod had been scheduled to stay.  It hadn’t taken her long to get there, but it had occurred to her that a sudden change in public opinion might mean that the human’s presence was no longer entirely welcome.  The very last thing she needed was for someone to make an enemy of the Five Cities Alliance because the war broke the bonds she had put in place to restrain it.

Liesta found Ichabod inside the villa, rather than out on the beach, a big hat over his face and the chair within the saucer reclined.  She almost felt bad about interrupting his nap, but she didn’t have time to even say anything before the chair woke him, beeping softly as subtle weaponry oriented on her.  If she weren’t already familiar with the travel saucer she probably wouldn’t have even realized she was being targeted.

“Moonblast,” Ike said, before even taking the hat off his face to regard her with a sort of weary resignation.  “What brings you to interrupt my vacation?”

“I believe that some human supers are interfering with our war,” she said, since Ichabod had already discarded the preliminaries.  “The two sides are preparing for something major, including cutting off communications with Earth.”

“Of course,” Ichabod sighed, reaching out to depress several buttons, listening to the multiple tones that came from his chair.  “Vilmonica, respond.”  When nothing was forthcoming, Ichabod flicked several more buttons and the chair returned him to a proper upright position.

“So, information,” he said.  “Do you know which humans, do you have descriptions?  What are their superpowers like?”

“There was only one report of them, several days ago,” she said, which they both knew meant nothing.  “I have only found evidence of the powers changing some of the artifice I put into place.  The reality there was altered in a very odd and specific way.”  Liesta paused, considering how to articulate what she had found of her runes.  “It was as if the runes were being allowed to change what they did.  Not a rewriting of them, not a rephrasing of them.  Somehow allowing them to alter their nature without changing their script.”

“No,” said Ichabod, and it took Liesta a moment to realize he wasn’t actually objecting to what she said.  “I don’t believe it.  But who else could it be?”  He sighed, running his hand across his face before looking her in the eyes.  “Hartson.”