Chapter Thirteen — Unconvincing

Queen Selirayne eyed the single reestablishment citizen in front of her — and the humans she was hiding behind.  It was difficult to read humans at the best of times.  With no rune resonance, they were like gesticulating dolls, jerky and over-energetic, full of strange mannerisms that bore no resemblance to anything she was familiar with.

She had to concentrate hard to parse the human’s words, as the translation worked only so well.  She could tell the young man had been gifted a rune to help with the process – and an Empowerment Stone, stars only knew where that had come from – but it was quite limited.  It overlapped mostly with the artifact she’d had created to translate human tongue for herself, but either interpretation made it difficult to take the boy seriously.

Which was a problem, because he was dangerous.  She didn’t need rune resonance to feel the power there.  Or rather, the solidity, something intractable and stubborn, that let the world wash past it rather than being caught by the flow.  Perhaps even large enough to divert the currents of the world entirely.

It was an intuition that she paid attention to.  While Selirayne was not Liesta, a pinnacle sorcerer, she was not without her own prowess.  One that cautioned her against taking any of the humans too lightly, even if was difficult to understand, for example, what the point of the pipe-smoking was.

“If you are here to advance the reestablishment cause, you are very bold,” she told him.  Even if it was not obvious, the protections within the palace were myriad and potent, enough that she didn’t fear any Earth-based powers.  Not that she was helpless on her own.

“I didn’t say to win the war,” the man said, his words feeling somehow like they were weighted down with stone and maer.  “I said end it.  Without destroying one side or the other.”

“Win or end is a distinction without a difference,” she said, already weary of the entire topic.  It was one that had been dissected and dismembered end over end for the past several days.  The ever-present, slow-burning dissatisfaction had suddenly crystallized into true resolve, and she was a queen of her people.  Perhaps she had inherited the mess, but it didn’t mean she had to maintain it.

“In fact, it seems the height of hubris for a human to come here and attempt to instruct me about the fate of my people,” she said, eyeing Administrator Ichabod.  She had dealings with that one on occasion, and he had passed the proper codes for a superpowered emergency, which was why she had agreed to the meeting.  But this seemed a blatant abuse of the term.

“Less instruct, more offer,” The Custodian said.  “I can make some things far easier than they should be.  Or harder.  You may not believe this, but I have reached out to the civil war and reinforced it against any change toward violence.  I wouldn’t call it the reason you haven’t whelmed your armies and started fighting, but a slight difference in what is more or less difficult accumulates along a thousand choices.  Enough to make people more likely to try something else.”

Selirayne blinked, once.  With iron control, she kept her shock from influencing her rune resonance, because the childish, naïve translation rune the boy was using conveyed his absolute sincerity.  It might not be the truth, but he certainly believed what he was saying.  And Selirayne knew well that the machinations of what the humans called sovereign-level powers could make the impossible happen.  It seemed that the codes regarding superpowered emergencies had been accurately invoked after all.

“By what right have you interfered with Our world?” Selirayne demanded, using the special, unique and unduplicatable runes of the royal family to speak, the entire palace waking and casting a disapproving eye upon the human petitioners.

“I was asked,” the boy said, and the fact that he didn’t even flinch before the imperious strength, human or no, was grim confirmation that he was far more than he appeared.  “And it was a mess that needed cleaning up.” 

Selirayne regarded him for a moment, a faint connection tickling at her brain as he spoke to her own sentiment regarding the war.  The Custodian, one who guards — but also a euphemism for a janitor.  One who cleans.  Not a moniker taken in whimsy, then, but one of deep meaning. 

“Asked by the reestablishment forces?”  There was an obvious partiality to the boy’s actions, showing up as he had with one of the enemy.  One that was not in any way superlative when it came to runes, though Selirayne had never seen that sort of musculature on a lunarian before.  It was nearly grotesque.

“Yes,” the boy acknowledged.  “But I don’t actually understand the difference between royalist and reestablishment.  I know it’s about runes, but I don’t understand those runes, which makes me entirely neutral in this.  You can’t possibly be satisfied with the long slow grind, of people dying and dying and nothing ever being resolved.”

Selirayne took a moment to calm herself.  She was not used to being questioned in such a direct manner, even by people such as Princess Liesta, but at the same time she was a queen, and that demanded poise and equanimity.  Instead of replying immediately, she plied her runes, seeing if she could verify the claims.  Large scale and subtle effects were one of the most difficult things to detect, altering as they did the very mechanisms used to scry.  An eye cannot see itself, as it were.

As she had somewhat expected, her runes gave her nothing obvious to work from, but now that she knew to look for it there were faint differences.  Harmonics and undertones that weren’t quite right.  A miniscule impression, barely noticeable, of something different at the edges of the world’s functions. 

“I am indeed not satisfied,” she said at last.  “But that does not mean I prefer manipulation and mind control, or whatever methods you have used to affect my world.”

“As opposed to the manipulation that was already there?”  The boy seemed utterly assured.  “There were runes in virtually every city I went to that were altering reality, written in a script that was impossible to decipher but was royalist nonetheless.”

“Princess Liesta did put certain protections in place to prevent instability and collapse,” Selirayne said, not even certain why she was explaining herself.  “Her family have always been proponents of a stalemate, of preventing active war.”

“And that was likely the best option at the time.  But I can provide other options.”  The boy flexed one hand into a fist and released it again, in some apparently unconscious gesture.  “I’ve been told that coexistence really isn’t possible.  That the two sides are just far too different, that there is too much bad blood between you.  That you would need two moons to sort it out.”

“Blunt, but accurate,” Selirayne conceded.  “Do you intend to use your power to somehow smooth over the past century of history?  To reconcile one tongue with another?”  The very idea was repulsive, and she let her rune resonance show it. 

“No,” the boy said, the translator rune reassuringly conveying that he was just as repulsed by the idea.  “But I can make some things easier.  Such as dividing the moon in two, and going from there.  There are places that need work to be habitable.  I can help that change.  There is a lot of lacking infrastructure.  I can help that change.”

“Dividing the moon in two,” Selirayne repeated, agog at the sheer effrontery of the suggestion.  “Upending thousands of years of history and culture is not what I would call a useful solution.”

“No solution can be had without effort,” he said, in something that was not quite disagreement.  “But right now you have people , on both sides, that are full of energy, full of a desire to do something about the situation, but violence doesn’t come easily.”  The boy’s earnest sentiment shone through the clumsy translation rune, which would have been endearing if he weren’t talking about shaking the entire world.  “That’s a lot of stress and strain and desire that could be put to use on an actual solution, one that doesn’t involve killing off half the population of the moon.”

On one hand, it was utterly ridiculous.  Proposing grand, sweeping solutions to problems never truly worked, and asking people to do something so ridiculous as go out and create more civilization, to abandon their properties and creations to scrabble something out of the ground was entirely unappealing.  Any solution predicated on hoping people would get together and just do something was doomed to failure.

On the other hand, she had gotten a glimpse of the vast and subtle power in effect, and now in hindsight the rash of changes on the moon made much more sense.  She was, of course, conversant with the abilities of the various sovereigns of Earth, as any self-respecting monarch should know about possible threats or allies.  The boy in front of her had nowhere been listed, but frustratingly, new power emerged all the time.  There wasn’t some proper path of instructions like raising someone from Magister to Meister, just a scattershot scramble to classify what could be seen.

“And you, Administrator Ichabod?”  Selirayne said, choosing to focus on the man that was at least nominally an ally.  Though some of the ties that had brought them together had lapsed, now that Mechaniacal was no longer an actual prisoner.  “Are you supporting this?”

“Absolutely not,” Ichabod said, her own artifact letting her pick out the exasperated tone.  “But things have already begun moving, Earth is cut off, and I would rather not see the moon descend into a genocidal war.  Something must be done, and The Custodian’s plan, and his ability to act on it, are as good as anything else.  It may not be perfect, but imperfect now is better than perfect after the fact.”

“I would not call it particularly good,” Selirayne said, considering the vast amount of political capital, let alone actual physical work, that would be required to sell anyone on the idea.  At the same time, the true cost of every city undergoing strife simultaneously – never mind the disruption in food and industry – was already bad and would only get worse.

“It is a fair point that, should everyone align themselves to the notion, it would improve the current circumstances,” she said after some further contemplation.  At the very least it would prevent the sort of infighting that had brought nearly everything to a crawl and forced mobilization.  “But that is just an impossible task.  If nothing else, Princess Liesta – Moonblast -  is committed to the status quo, and without her full-throated support the political situation would be, shall we say, complex.”

Even if Liesta had committed herself, Selirayne still doubted the boy’s damn fool idealistic pitch would capture too many people.  Which was the problem; The Custodian clearly expected that Selirayne could wave her hand and command absolute obedience, rather than understanding that the consent of the governed was absolutely vital.  Her armies could force compliance on one city, maybe, if she was willing to turn thousands of her subjects from their own homes.

“I would be willing to try and convince Moonblast,” the boy said, clearly not knowing what sort of task he had set for himself.  “My goal is to resolve this, after all.  I have no stake in anyone’s claim on anything, just on getting this mess cleaned up.  At least to the point where it’s not threatening to spill over into a moon-wide conflagration.”

“If you have no stake, then why do you have a reestablishment lunarian with you?” Selirayne turned her attention to the human’s over-muscled companion, who didn’t seem particularly happy with her lot, but had still entered the palace.

“I am here to represent my people’s perspective in the negotiations,” she said promptly.  “Blind change won’t help much, so just knowing what people are doing, where the lines are being drawn and what The Custodian is helping with, means that we can encourage people to move in the right direction.  If nobody knows that Perepelkin Desert is ripe for change, it will never happen.”

“Adequate,” Selirayne judged.  “Though you must know how unlikely it is that anything will come of it.”

“I have seen The Custodian’s powers in action, Your Highness,” the lunarian, her rune resonance uncomfortable but honest.  “Things change, and he makes that change easier.  Or possible.”

“And what does the reestablishment side intend to get out of this?”  Selirayne asked.  In a way it was a pointless question, but it was also necessary.  Not for what the answer actually was, but for how it was answered.

“My parents are royalist,” the lunarian admitted after a moment, which was unusual, but only just.  As many as ten to fifteen in a hundred lunarians switched sides at some point.  “I don’t understand them, but I don’t want to see anything happen to them, either.  If The Custodian can resolve things without needing to purge one side or another, that’d be best for everyone.”

Selirayne suppressed the skeptical resonance in her runes, since she had asked, after all.  It was as foolish and idealistic as the boy’s proposal — but of course it was, it was all part of the same force working to destabilize her moon.  But at least the reestablishment lunarian’s motives were understandable, and not some ideological diatribe nor unreasoning hatred of the other side.  It was rather sad that was the best that she could expect from one of the reestablishment lot, but reality cared little for hopes and feelings.

“I will not reject you outright,” she said eventually.  “But I will require more than words and empty assurances to even think of asking my people to leave homes and careers behind, to venture out and do the coarse and difficult work of establishing new cities and new places.”

“There isn’t much time to make the decision,” The Custodian said.  “The civil war is changing, and it will continue to change, ever more quickly.  I’ve been preventing too much violence so far, but without a relief valve, the pressure will overcome any walls I can put up.”

“That is an extremity that I have always been planning for,” Selirayne said.  As Queen, the ultimate and inevitable collapse of the carefully balanced suppression keeping the war from exploding into orgiastic violence over every city was a constant worry.  Even now she was mustering her armies to contain, control — or purge, as necessary.  There were plans, protocols, hidden and not-so-hidden weapons and escape routes, evacuation plans — every contingency that could be conceived of. 

Unfortunately, Princess Liesta featured in a fair few of those, and with the assumption that the flashpoint would be natural and inevitable, visible long before its arrival.  Not something that unbalanced Liesta’s hard work in putting off that inevitability.  But it would be worth calling her in regardless, as acting in opposition to or even not in alignment with the most powerful lunarian sorcerer of the generation would be foolish.

“I will make no commitments now.  It would be the height of folly to embark on a radically new direction just on the word of Earthlings,” she said, even though part of her wanted to.  Unfortunately, knowing that there was some subtle influence even made that desire suspect.  “But there is enough at play that I am not dismissing you outright.  For the moment I will have you assigned a place in the palace.”  She eyed the living mounts they had with them with disfavor. 

“Somewhere in the outer palace.”

***

Princess Liesta – also known as Moonblast – flew in broad curves over the lunar landscape, surveying the state of farms, towns, and cities, crossing back along her flight path after her talk with Mechaniacal.  Part of her was still annoyed that he had been so little help.  The tinker had even known what was going on, and done nothing to stop or intervene, or even inform.  Useless.

She wasn’t sure if she was looking for Hartson, or just looking to fix what he’d broken.  Certainly she would welcome the chance to address the super’s actions personally, but if Mechaniacal was right, even if she did find Hartson he couldn’t make things rebound back to normalcy.  Fixing it all would take work, and she only had two more days to do heavy lifting before needing to return to the Mesker Kingdom.  There was some forgiveness there, especially if the block was still up, but she did have responsibilities.

Unfortunately this did not seem to be a simple task.  She had yet to inscribe a rune that would let her detect humans specifically, and really didn’t want to considering that would be useless down on Earth.  A permanent solution to a temporary problem was something that she’d carry for the rest of her life, a maddening itch, a scar across the carefully constructed and densely packed runic branding covering her skin. 

No, there were other options, once she returned to the palace and coordinated with Selirayne on the defense of her domain.  Moonblast doubted that her cousin properly understood the sheer scale and weirdness of what was going on, closeted away in meetings and planning as she was, aiming for the enormous push it’d take to crush the reestablishment side once and for all.

Liesta followed the divinations, looking for areas where there was the most change and disruption. The city that drew her in first was one that, after a moment, she realized she had already checked on.  The one where she had found people arguing with unnatural vigor.  Yet for it to appear on her divinations once again meant that something had changed, which she looked for as she flew low over the buildings. 

None of the inhabitants took any notice of her, too absorbed in their discussions to care about the outside world.  A series of scries showed that it wasn’t complete madness — the necessities of life still went on.  People made food, sewed clothing, carved stone; all of it, however, was punctuated by arguing, yelling, cajoling, and complaining.  For a moment, it seemed all was as it had been.

A moment later, she noticed stranger and more insidious behavior, which became obvious with such suddenness it was as if a great veil had been drawn from her eyes.  The arguments weren’t simply the reestablishment and royalist hardliners putting forth their opinions and staking their ground.  The arguments were working.  Sort of.

People were switching back and forth.

It wasn’t unheard for someone to change from one side to another.  Usually when they were young, but something about the royalist or reestablishment position might seduce someone even after they’d formed their runes.  But to change more than once was a severe problem, the result of a sick mind.

That wasn’t even Liesta’s own prejudices.  The swap from one perspective to another, from one language to another, required a significant mental leap, a remaking in miniature of one’s assumptions and preferences.  To see people jumping back and forth multiple times in a frenetic, almost desperate spasm, was looking at widespread brain damage and incipient insanity.

Expansive, Silence, Rune Suppression.  She pulled on her runes to cast the entire city into a soundless bubble that stilled even rune resonance, not willing to see such nonsense continue and turn into who knew what kind of mess.  A hush descended upon the lunarians, quenching the roiling energy that had infected them.  Liesta hovered above, watching and scrying, to see what the effects were.  It wasn’t like people would just forget what they were doing and go back to normal, barring some bizarre superpower-style madness infection of the sort that arose occasionally on Earth. 

Whatever fever had gripped their minds hadn’t quite robbed them of good sense, as a mass silence spell was obvious by both its effects and its energies, pulling people’s attention as they came out to look up at her and gesture in her direction.  There was still a restlessness involved, but the silence seemed to have broken some of the frenetic desperation. 

“Return to your homes,” she broadcast, able to circumvent her own silence, of course.  “Shelter in place.”  She glanced around and then forcibly lit the appropriate public beacon, turning on the city’s defenses since the people in charge clearly hadn’t been able to do so.  “You’re being influenced by a hostile external force, so stay home and stay quiet.”

Slowly and begrudgingly, the streets began to empty. The city still didn’t look right to Liesta, a certain level of confusion and hesitation in where to go, even aside from the strangeness of the silence.  Some people were no longer on the same side as they had been that morning; others might not even know which side they preferred, or maybe they were just too befuddled to think even that far. 

So to home they went, maybe not their own, negotiating with pantomime and body language alone under her sharp eyes.  She didn’t want to see the arguments continue, though without the normal meaning carried by runes it was difficult to do more than half-baked charades.  Here and there she put up temporary walls of opaque force to keep groups of different factions from running into each other or even just to separate mixed crowds.  And to encourage them to break up and head back.

“I will leave the communication suppression in place for now,” she broadcast, adding Permanence to the rune effect.  It would run out eventually, of course, without something physical to anchor it, but it would take time, hopefully more than enough to get to the bottom of this disruption. 

After one last, dubious look at the city in question she darted off to the next, more annoyed than ever.  It was clear that this Hartson had no idea what he was doing, the harm that was occurring to complete innocents when it came to a supposedly less violent way of solving the war.  It was a naive, outsider’s perspective that the two sides could ever be truly resolved, or that breaking the stalemate was going to lead to anything but genocidal violence. 

Something that was borne out by a series of farmsteads out in the middle of the countryside, burning away.  Somehow, things always caught on fire, and it seemed the injunction against violence wasn’t perfect or at least didn’t extend to all the hundreds and thousands of little plots of land dotting the long stretches between cities. 

She could almost trace the path of what had happened by the burnt, bent, and blasted crops.  A skirmish at the border between two plots of land, a sally forth, and then the rebuttal.  The calling of allies, that turned into a rolling conflict sweeping along the river valley.  Nobody involved had combat runes as such, but tools for harvesting crops, chopping wood, pulling stumps, breaking rocks, and churning the earth could all be repurposed.

Liesta swooped past a brand new muddy lake, scanning it and pulling out a drowned corpse, but there was nothing else she could do there so she darted ahead towards where her divinations implied there was still active fighting.  A plume of dirt fountained into the air, and she glanced over the two knots of farmer-ranchers plying their extant powers against each other rather than the land.

Rune Suppression went out again, silencing their runes solely due to the overwhelming power she wielded.  Energies sputtered and faltered, cut off halfway, and she conjured an opaque wall between the two groups.  It was not as if they were feuding pets who merely needed to be blocked from each other’s sight, but it would help them focus on her rather than each other.

“Return to your houses,” she told them, repeating the performance that she’d given at the city.  The same words, though with a bit more force behind them, given that these people were actually fighting.  And some of them recognized her, which was all to the good.  Her reputation was helpful when making people clean up after themselves and behave properly. 

A brief set of quick, more localized scrying showed a few injuries on both sides, and she issued a few self-contained Heal runes.  They couldn’t do the job of a dedicated healing super, mostly just speeding up native regeneration, but they were better than nothing.  She made an effort not to look too closely at which side was which, simply dispensing benefits equally before ungently directing them back to their houses and farms. 

After watching for a minute or so, it seemed the river itself was more or less the dividing line, so she used a Permanency, Barrier rune set and erected a wall some twenty miles long and a hundred feet high, splitting the river in two.  As before, it would last only so long, and in truth it was not even particularly strong, but its very presence would be enough to dissuade any brewing conflict.

She moved on.  There was an awful lot of moon to cover, though she cared less for the individual trouble spots as finding something that might lead her to who or what was creating the barrier between the Earth and the moon.  Or for some lead on Hartson.  A human should stick out among the sea of changes and the froth of lunarian life, but there was no evidence of him, nor was there any clear indication of a locus of power for the changes.

Even plotting what she considered the severity of the changes versus their locations, there didn’t seem to be an obvious epicenter.  Liesta stopped at another city, watching a straggle of refugees leave – including some of the ever-less-common children – and breathed in the cold, sweet air of the lunar lowlands.  Every place she went, it seemed there was something.

For her whole life she’d worked on maintaining the peace.  The balance.  The careful suppression of the impossibly deep chasm between lunarian peoples.  All of which seemed to have been tossed aside in only a few days, the world tilting off its axis because one person thought he knew better than those who had safeguarded the peace for decades. 

If she permitted herself the term, she was furious.  Not that she ever allowed her runes to show anything like that emotion. People as powerful as her didn’t get that freedom.  But it simmered as she moved onward, seeing everything that one careless super from Earth had wrought.

The next city was up against the mountains, and already had the shelter in place rune lit.  That was a good sign, and she had intended to only give it a once-over as she approached.  If her suppression runes were holding, that was fantastic; if they weren’t, at least these people hadn’t succumbed to madness.  Yet as she got closer, someone actually waved her down, flaring a very specific Greeting to get her attention.  One of her cousin’s men.

“Report,” she said, dropping down to the balcony, keeping her scrying active even as she spoke.  This particular city didn’t seem to have ejected the minority population, nor turned into some seething mass of chaos as they tried to resolve differences, which was itself was an oddity. 

“Ah?  You’re not here about the humans?” The words were almost casual, but they instantly got her attention.  The royalist almost flinched back from her sudden regard.

“Tell me,” she demanded, and the man straightened.

“Five days ago, two humans with some form of reptile mount interrupted an unexpected flare-up,” he said, more professional than before.  “They both exhibited a willingness to engage in physical force, separating combatants without regard to alignment.  Neither of them had been in the city when the issues started.  Both exhibited…”  The man trailed off, seeming to struggle with how to articulate it.

“Yes, superpowers,” Liesta filled in.  Most lunarians had only the vaguest tales about the weirdness that saturated their sister world, and confronted with the reality they would likely be absolutely staggered by the apparent power and lack of control.  Like children fighting with bombs.  The lack of control was actually an illusion in many cases; it was simply that control didn’t look the same to supers as it did to lunarians.  “Describe them further.”

“One male and one female, accompanied by a reestablishment lunarian who did not herself interfere in the conflict points,” the agent continued.  “The female demonstrated some form of smoke control, along with an ability to shield or misdirect with it.  I observed both some form of teleportation and duplication power, though it’s not clear to me if it was true duplication or some more advanced form of misdirection.”

“Yes, without specialized techniques the nuances of superpowers can be quite opaque,” Liesta agreed.  The power set didn’t seem familiar, and without access to Earth she couldn’t simply ask about it.  That said, such a broad scope of abilities was concerning.  Most supers had a fairly narrow set, something targeted in outcome even if, from the perspective of any runic practitioner, the actual mechanisms were a muddled morass. 

If each of the abilities had been accompanied by a different manifestation, that would be one thing, but the agent’s rune resonance had made it clear that everything the female did was associated with smoke.  Different manifestations meant magical tools or technology, but the same one meant a power stretched beyond its most immediate application — the hallmark of the most powerful supers. 

Liesta doubted that the female was actually a sovereign. There were relatively few of those on Earth, most people stalling out before they reached that realm of mastery, but at the same time there were probably more than anyone actually knew.  Not everyone was an obvious hero or villain, and there were always people appearing from the froth of population and rising like bubbles.

“The male?” she prompted.

“Only exhibited physical power, but seemed to be in charge,” came the reply.  “Considering the alteration in behavior once they finished suppressing the conflict and the prowess of the female, it does seem likely there were non-obvious effects.”  Liesta nodded in approval; she at least knew some of what Hartson’s power was thanks to the incident with Mechaniacal and non-obvious was absolutely correct. 

She could put together at least a basic sketch of what was going on.  The reestablishment lunarian was the local contact, either as instigator or just as transportation.  There weren’t many who could do that, but unfortunately the royalists didn’t have a monopoly on travel to Earth.  The smoke user, the almost-sovereign, was the prime mover, since even on Earth power mattered.  And then Hartson was the fulcrum, a unique power being used for a unique purpose.

If he’d been here, then maybe he could be tracked.  Liesta had some runes for that, but normally she relied on others for that purpose.  Her cousin would have people.

“Good work,” she told the agent.  “I’ll have someone here soon.”  She could simply have called directly to the palace and have someone sent, but after a moment she decided to go herself and so impress the importance of the task on whoever was available.  Liesta ascended into the air, invoking the teleportation rune and returning to the palace.  The moment she popped into existence above the building, she could see below her the unmistakable form of Ichabod’s chair, crossing to the outer palace.  With him were two humans and one lunarian, all leading reptiles.

Fate had seen fit to deliver her to her targets.