Chapter Fifteen — Spiraling

Aucliostratus couldn’t help but flinch as a bright light bloomed in the far distance.

Even knowing what Princess Liesta could do and preparing for her, assembling his people and following the strategic scry to her location, seeing that power in action was terrifying.  That said, there was probably no other time they’d have the chance to deal with her.  Even she had to be cut off from escaping to Earth or bringing in more humans, the runes projected onto the inside of the crystal sphere holding for the moment.  They could only keep it up a few more days, but until then, they were all confined to the lunar surface.

“Everyone ready?” He suppressed his uncertainty as he turned to look at the assembled lunarians.  All of them were from the younger generation, the best of the best.  None of them could match Liesta as an individual, but the younger generation had never been truly allowed to grow that way, so they were all experts at collaborative casting instead. 

All the speeches had already been said, all the plans already made.  Ostra had called everyone together the moment he’d heard Liesta was around, all their half-made plans immediately crystallizing into action.  They’d practiced, surreptitiously and in their own time, and they’d already set up chains of command and had been ready for this day.

He just never thought it would come.

“Ready,” his lieutenants reported, one after another.  While he was technically in charge of everyone, Aucliostratus wasn’t their best tactician.  Or fighter.  Fortunately he knew that, and had assigned capable people to do the jobs that he couldn’t.

“Let’s move out,” he said, energizing certain runes and lifting several dozen people into the air.  The group casters had better things to do with their time and attention than maneuver themselves around.  Their inscribed gestalt spheres glowed, the etchings rippling as Ostra’s people prepared targeting, shielding, and preloaded teleportation.  They weren’t just relying on individually powerful persons, but entire toolsets, put together with cooperation in mind.

Their entire group, a small army of nearly a hundred experts, sped toward Liesta’s location from the temporary staging area only miles away.  He’d been able to scry where she was easily enough; her runic use was absolutely unique.  The problem was actually pinning her down, but given that it seemed like she was already engaged in combat, they had a chance.

A chance to remove the bogeyman.  The legend that had suppressed their entire generation, beyond anything even her predecessors had managed.  The lynchpin upon which the entire royalist structure rested. 

It was a dangerous thing, one that almost nobody actually wanted to do.  Princess Liesta was powerful, and one of the most accomplished sorcerers of all time.  Even though she was a royalist, the thought of losing that prowess, an expertise that should have belonged to all lunarians, was a painful one. 

She was also incredibly dangerous, and everyone knew there was a good chance some of them would die.  None of them believed that Moonblast would submit to them or, once attacked, bother to attempt anything nonlethal.  Crossing this point was final, irrevocable.  Something that could not be taken back.  He could feel the weight of the decision pushing back against him, a wall that he nevertheless was determined to pass.

The mood was tense, made only worse by the glowing pillar stretching upward into the sky.  The initial flash was bad enough, but that was just a one-time thing.  Holding that much energy in place was even more impressive.  But what they had would be enough.  It had to be enough, because otherwise what could they do?  It was fight now, or die forever.

They grew closer and the pillar started to fade, revealing what clearly had been some kind of battlefield, as outside the crater made by Liesta’s power there were scorched lines revealing bedrock beneath the regolith, and several areas were smoldering.  A hill still settled from whatever had destroyed it, stones and trees sliding down the shallow slope that remained of the wrecked summit to pile into a burning heap.

His scry runes warned about something strange in the air above, but there didn’t seem to be anything there.  Clearly whatever she had been fighting had been utterly destroyed, as was typical for Liesta.  She was even floating in the center of the smoking crater, radiating power, looking exactly like in the propaganda, watching them arrive.

“Princess Liesta!” He used his runes to amplify his voice and resonance, bouncing off the blasted landscape and plucking against the senses of everyone nearby.  “The time has come to end this farce, this slow death of our people.”  As much as he’d thought about what he’d say, as much as he projected confidence, he actually felt unbalanced, stress reaching up behind his eyes in a strain almost like vertigo, the feeling of looking down from a great height.  “And it’s time for you to answer for your crimes.”

“Is it, then?” Liesta, the royalist runes pulsing with scorn and sending her voice slithering to each and every one of them.  “You mean you’ve succumbed to foreign interests and decided to betray the moon by moving into open rebellion.  There’s a reason all this has happened just in the past few weeks.”

“This has been a long time coming,” Ostra said, ignoring her bizarre accusations as he signaled his people.  His lieutenants went to work, instructing the collaborative casting circles while the most experienced of his people scattered outward.  A teleportation lock was the first thing, a smaller, more narrowly scoped version of what was broadcast onto the crystal sphere, to keep Liesta in place and without communications or reinforcements.

The group-coordinated attack looked nearly like one of Moonblast’s own.  It wasn’t a brilliant light intrinsically, but when the spiraling, translucent vortex hit Moonblast’s defenses, the conflict of energy flared so brightly most of the surrounding foliage burst into flames.  If it weren’t for the layers upon layers of protection, he would have been blinded.

Her return spell crackled through the air, testing the defenses.  Even if he wasn’t directly involved in creating the shields, he could feel not only the power, but the subtle prodding and striking that skated over the surface as Moonblast tested their runic construction for weak points.  The independent strikers were far enough away that the shock waves merely tumbled the closest, their own protections ringing and sparking. 

Ostra’s personal contribution to the group casting was in the targeting array for their heavy hitters, trying to probe for weak points in Moonblast’s defenses — and just finding her in general, since even with teleportation frozen, she was incredibly fast.  Runic static sizzled over the battlefield, probing feints being blocked by deception and deflection, preventing a lock even if there was an obvious line of sight.

Which there wasn’t.  The smoke already billowing into the air mixed with dust and dirt from missed or rebuffed attacks as a wind kicked up from the energies being blown around.  Heat and cold from runes imprinting their meaning upon the world kicked up vortices and blew wind sideways, turning the area into a storm in a matter of seconds.  It was a natural consequence of the forces at play, and the very reason why they had included so many people with runes of all kinds of discernment.

Scrying arrays pierced through the murk, where Moonblast was apparently effortlessly holding off a dozen different attacks by different specialists.  Elemental energies, totemic conjurations, disorienting illusions, and counter-runes to deconstruct her casts were all shrugged off with equal facility.  She truly was a monster, and he wasn’t even certain she was yet exerting herself.  Arriving as they had after a use of her signature destructive spell, they should have an advantage.

One of his lieutenants barked orders, and Ostra’s group forced their targeting to resolve at the expense of several focus orbs, the tools cracking and crumbling as their sacrifice snapped the chaos of the battlefield into full focus.  The offensive group rode along the scry data, finding the floating form of Moonblast and channeling multifarious attack of negation and inversion, seeking to undermine each of the aspects of her defensive runes.  Reestablishment and royalist languages met and slipped past each other, blocked and blocking at odd angles that were hard to predict.

Yet, even with the mismatch, nothing completely made it through in either direction.  His people were conversant enough with the royalist rune language, at least in the abstract, to address the most obvious holes in their defenses, and the same seemed to be true for Moonblast.  The brief exchange was a knife fight in the dark, a rapid back-and-forth that left everyone bleeding.  Bodies were intact, but rune constructs were severed or mangled, backlash leaking from personal runes and tainting the air.

One of the defensive bubbles shuddered, a protection put up by one of the few members they had from the elder generation, sending the woman reeling backward, dazed from the feedback.  Ostra was there in a moment, helping to steady her and extending the resonance of his healing runes to help her out.  Such runes couldn’t be bent too much, but even a little bit was better than nothing.

Energies flashed and rumbled, soot pouring into the air overhead and mixing with the thunderclouds already billowing into existence.  The rune resonance of the landscape hummed and shuddered, alternately overcharged and enervated by the spells being flung about.  Another bright flash heralded one of Moonblast’s larger spells, and with a groan the already-cracked earth heaved and shuddered, regolith falling away into a deep abyss. 

A hurricane of air roared in as a crater at least a mile wide collapsed, sucking down the combatants and forcing the brewing thunderhead into sudden and shocking life.  Lightning and rain battered against their defenses, the sun vanishing behind the cloud as Ostra joined his fellows in frantically maneuvering their force platforms to keep from smashing into the cascading debris of the crater walls. 

His scry structures caught the echoes of the massive tunnels that ran beneath the lunar bedrock, uncounted miles of ancient lava flows saturated with primordial rune resonance.  The sudden influx of magical atmosphere cleared out some of the interference from the sheer morass of runic saturation and gave them a new slate to draw upon. But even the royalist perversion of the original tongue could touch that potential, and the battle began anew.

Ostra knew that the longer this went on, the less likely they were to win.  On the face of it, a single person should tire faster than an entire group, but the moment Moonblast picked off even a single one of them, their chances dropped by that much.  All she needed to do was weather their spells while targeting them one by one, and they’d be finished.

“We need to hit her harder,” he shouted, letting the man in charge of tactics actually figure out the timing.  While they couldn’t quite mimic what Moonblast could do, as a group they could get close to it.  It didn’t seem like they were getting anywhere trying to overwhelm her with quantity, nor were they able to slip past her defenses, so they would have to resort to a hammer-blow.  That might be enough for the others to take advantage and actually lock her down.

The character of the gestalt offensive group changed as some of the independents returned to help, the fifteen most powerful and action-oriented of them working together to build the most charged and pointed runic argument they could muster.  Some of the words were ones passed down through families, unique to a few people nearly wiped out by Moonblast’s purges.  Others were simply powerful scaffold runes that everyone knew but were hard to wield to their full potential.

“Now!”

Dirt and regolith for at least five miles in diameter shuddered and liquefied, transmuted by the gestalt working into seething energy and collapsing in toward the point of power that was Moonblast.  A massive implosion, which deliberately excluded all those who used reestablishment runes, rushing past them to crunch against royalist shields.  The crushing detonation sent them all reeling, shockwaves nearly overloading the combined protections.  The rest of the solo operators sent out for harassment and distraction fire ducked back inside the layered fields of force screens.

The air was choked with dust and smoke, lightning lashing out in every direction.  Rain and hail flowed along chaotic currents, hammering them from below and above, this side and that.  It was just a drop compared to the forces at play, but every bit harder was harder. 

In all the chaos, Ostra couldn’t find Moonblast’s signature at all, and for a moment he had a hope that the absolute savagery of the combination attack had succeeded.  Then the entire storm stretched, snapped, and was focused back on their group as Moonblast’s magic seized it.  Commands rang out and Ostra hastily chanted under his breath, too focused on keeping everyone alive for silent casting as he lent his efforts to reinforcing their multilayered defensive line.

The blast hurled them up into the sky, out of the enormous crater and into the eye of a forming hurricane.  Someone screamed as rune resonance thrummed and snapped, backlash straining at the words engraved on his body.  Moonblast followed, a grim specter able to hold off an army.  Ostra felt that he knew what the humans meant by the term sovereign, with one person able to handle such titanic energies. 

Part of him suspected he’d made a mistake.  That maybe Princess Liesta was just too powerful for anyone to take down, even if it was a hundred of the best sorcerers the reestablishment had to offer.  But there never had been a real choice.

He just had to follow through.

***

Professor Mechaniacal paused the recording of Isle of Leaves Got Talent! as alarms blared.  Alarms plural, of the particular tone and tenor that indicated a significant shift in probability-space.  With some degree of annoyance he rose from his very comfortable armchair, the tapping of his cane measuring the distance between his living room and the great sensor tank in the subbasement.

Rotating the wheel-lock, he stepped forward to regard the zvinth-dimensional display that tracked the meanderings of unrealized reality, the point at which future became present and probable became actual.  The great mining-machine of time’s passage frantically chewed away at the coal face of potential, moving in directions not describable by conventional language.  Not that any unconventional language was needed to describe what Mechanical was seeing; trouble would do.  Disaster was probably not too soft a word, either.

It wasn’t just the shadow reality of the shattered moon, the inevitable outcome of the unresolved civil war.  If they were merely on that path it would have been an annoyance, something that would require effort and exertion but no true risk or deep thought.  True, it would require his attention for a time, but even if Mechaniacal didn’t manage to handle it correctly Earth would be safe.  Not that he would intentionally do a poor job, but he was well aware he was the last person who should be leading or ruling.

The true problem was that two other shadow realities were drawing close; that of The Director, where the realm of dreams overtook reality, and of The Tyrant, the young Hartson’s own scar upon creation.  Despite what Hartson had done to reinforce the Orrery against truly calamitous outcomes, something becoming more difficult did not mean it was impossible — and with Hartson’s own talent driving events, there was no telling whether the power would ignore itself or not.

Mechanical left the sensor tank, cane gripped tight as he stepped into the war room right next to it.  He spun dials and pressed buttons, the reassuring click and rattle of machinery springing to life echoing through the room as his drones and sensor nets awoke, ten million eyes lighting up to paint a tactical picture of the moon.  A massive armillary sphere stood at the center of the war room, the lunar landscape rendered in miniature that began to shift and change, flash and flicker as the sensor data poured in.

It didn’t take too long to find where the trouble had to be.  The moon was an immense area, that was true, but large expenditures of power were detectible from a very long distance, and the enormous, unseasonal, out-of-place swirling storm south of Montes Huygens was glaringly obvious.  He tasked some of his nearest drones to close in on the area; unlike the spheres most people knew, these were camouflaged, many-angled things of non-Euclidean geometries, hypercompact networks of gears and flywheels elucidating capabilities that many tinkers would dream of adding only to their masterwork mecha.

They still couldn’t do rune magic, sadly, which meant that one of them was nearly instantly disabled when it strayed too close to the ongoing battle.  Its feed vanished from his sensor net and its physical form hopefully disappeared as well, its mechanically-latched self-destruct hauling it out of phase with reality to prevent any mischief from occurring.

Another one stayed further away from the ongoing battle, feeding back spectral signatures and analyzing sonic overtones.  Moonblast’s power was characteristic, and he wasn’t particularly surprised to find her at the center of it all.  The spectral signatures of her opponent were harder to read.  Or rather, opponents, since it became clear very quickly there were many different individuals in play.

His first temptation was simply to remove everyone involved.  One did not build world-threatening doomsday devices without learning how to build slightly smaller doomsday devices.  The problem was, he was going to have to live with the consequences of that decision.  When the bulk of the moon’s most skilled and influential individuals were engaged in a scrimmage, to remove them would only worsen the ultimate collapse.

The more force he used now, the more he would have to continue to use.  Or rather, the wrong force, because he certainly could engage in delaying actions at a grand scale.  Something that would provoke less response than simply rotating the atomic resonance of everything within twenty miles perpendicular to reality.  Especially since the sole battle wasn’t the only flashpoint.

It wasn’t clear whether the strain had simply accumulated to critical levels, or if Moonblast’s influence had unbalanced the mechanisms Hartson’s power had set in place, but the royalist armies were on the move.  As were reestablishment forces, though there were fewer of those, given how many were bound up in the fight with Moonblast.  If it were merely people, that would not be so much of a worry, but of course the moon was ruled by runic sorcery, and so the growing assemblage of power being wielded and employed by everyone all at the same time was having outsized effects.

His sensors showed material destabilization radiating out from the primary flashpoint, channeled by the ancient lava tubes and bouncing off other invocations in cities across the moon.  Dimensional calipers shuddered and jumped, far out of the range of what the sorcery alone should have been able to manage, as if it were ripping into a pre-existing weak point.

Hartson, The Director, and the Miller girl were easy enough to find by the sole fact that they were human.  Mechaniacal might not understand magic, but finding and differentiating between different life forms was very firmly in his area of expertise.  Besides, crystaltech gave out a unique signature and of course the delightfully kitsch deep kingdom raptors were along for the ride.

Since they were holed up away from any flashpoints, he dismissed them and moved to action, seating himself at his control panel and stretching his fingers.  Perhaps this was not the extremity he wished to be driven to, but there was an undeniable pleasure in being able to ply his craft.  Mechaniacal pressed buttons, flipped levers, pulled stops, and twisted dials, his feet depressing pedals as he played his drone army like a gigantic organ.

One set of specialized drones left the extensive underground complex, sliding along the dimensional skein to take a shortcut to where the battle raged rather than having to travel in something so pedestrian as a straight line.  Others, more conventional, followed similar non-paths toward the various flashpoints and the assembled lunarians of the royalist armies.  Outside his manor, on the outskirts of the local town, dimensional anchors hummed into life, resonance dampers locking down as much esoteric alteration as possible without actual insight into runic magic, and a vast clear dome five miles across slid up to physically protect his neighbors.  Even if the moon were shaken to pieces, they’d be just fine.

Unfortunately, he knew that once he took a hand, it would stir other forces.  It happened every time, if for no other reason than nobody felt comfortable with someone who had cut between dimensions actively guiding events.  Plus, of course, he was a villain, and who trusted villains?

The specialty drones he’d sent to deal with the battle arranged themselves at precise points of leverage, the circular, parasol-like contraptions extending from the hulls beginning to spin.  The relentless tick of the clock slowed as Mechaniacal brought time, the ruler of everything, to heel. 

His work with Hartson’s talent meant that reducing the time per time was more of a ratchet than a spring, each click of the gear straining against the ontological pins set in place.  He couldn’t duplicate the power entirely, of course, but he could replicate enough of it that such an enormous slowing of time didn’t risk tearing itself from reality and spinning off its own isolated pocket dimension. It wasn’t a stop, for such a thing was harder than it sounded and could wreak all kinds of havoc, especially in a miles-wide bubble.  But slow time was far more forgiving, though the runic magic would no doubt strain it too much to sustain long term.

That was fine.  It only had to hold long enough.

Other drones phased back into existence in cities all over the moon, though calling them merely drones did them a disservice.  They were each the size of a battle tank, seamless ovoids of gleaming steel riding on the lunar skyhooks that he had finally managed to arrange.  There was essentially not a cubic inch of open space within them, solid machinery all the way through save for where there needed to be lubricant and coolant.

“People of the moon!” Mechaniacal said, speaking into the dictaphone that recorded his voice and sent it out to all the hundreds of battle-drones stationed over cities and villages.  “You have failed to resolve your differences yourself, and now you court disaster with a meaningless war that will only end in mutual annihilation.  Even as I speak the crust shifts and cracks, the weather turns, and the very empyrean crystal of your great sphere hums a warning.”

He might have been exaggerating, but not by much.  The entire point of stepping in now was to make sure he didn’t have to do even more later.  Besides, it had been a while since he had a good, world-threatening monologue.  He was allowed to take some liberties.

“Yet, rejoice!  I, Professor Mechaniacal, live here as well, so I have no intention of allowing this foolishness to continue.  No matter that I have done my best to avoid interfering in this ongoing family feud, it has come to me.  And so I have decided to end it — in my favor.  Perhaps the conflict between royalist and reestablishment is a deep and profound division, two sides set against each other by fate and forever enemies in some tragic adversarial taijitu.  Or maybe it’s simply the squabbling of children who have never learned to share.

“Either way, there will be no more of it.  If you cannot suffer living side by side with your fellows, you will have to suffer living under me.  I will end this rivalry by ensuring you have no power to pursue it.”  He flicked a switch and the battle drones began to emanate the power-suppression field.  Its efficacy against magic was only mild, but the vast majority of lunarians were not powerhouses.  Many of those that were – at least of the reestablishment bent – had already been taken care of, trapped in five percent time.   But there were always hidden powers, lurking among their unknowing fellows.

“If you think I am being unreasonable, feel free to make an argument,” he added, as the situation began to set in on cities across the moon.  There was panic, certainly, and chaos, here and there, but a lot less than there would have been.  The suppression effect cut off the low-level, knee-jerk conjurations, runic responses simply failing to manifest. 

The only true resistance of note was the assembled royalist army.  They could simply brush aside the broad-spectrum suppression as an inconvenience, and did so, assaulting the battle-drone that he had assigned to their mustering grounds.  Amusingly, however, virtually all runes were formulated for use on people or, at the outside, rock and coral.  Metal was foreign to the lunar experience and absolutely not coincidentally broadly unaffected by many preferred attack vectors.

Mechaniacal smiled broadly as he took control of that particular battle-drone, making sure to dial the intensity of the built-in weapons down fairly significantly.  It wouldn’t do to damage a force he would soon be taking possession of too much.  That would be like keying a car he intended to steal; a pointless waste of spite.

Of course, all this did nothing to address the second issue, that of what exactly had so pressed Ichabod and Hartson that they were spiraling toward catastrophic ends.  Their position was close enough to the battle to imply some involvement, but far enough that they weren’t in actual combat.  It was also concerning that the drone he had sent their way – a more conventional one, in an attempt to keep from any potential escalation – had simply ceased to exist before it could fully manifest. 

For the moment, he would let them try to resolve the issue themselves, but when it came to the possibility of The Director — well.  Mechaniacal would keep a doomsday device or two warmed and ready.

***

Queen Selirayne stared at the window at the enormous metal thing withstanding the might of her combined armies.  It had spoken in the human tongue, but she had still understood it.  She didn’t quite understand the origin of that comprehension, but she had felt it brush against her even as it had imparted the madman’s words — dark, cold, rigid, unfeeling.  An alien menace, because of course the moon couldn’t be left to itself.

Some part of her had always objected to allowing the supervillain on the moon.  At the time of his original incarceration, Selirayne’s father had judged it worth the risk, and the particulars of the deal had never been a secret.  Teraton was a god made flesh, and his favor was itself valuable, not to mention all the knowledge and trade with Earth that came along with the deal.  When she had taken the throne, his mansion and upkeep was already a fixture, a quiet thing in an obscure corner of the moon, but every report of nothing happening came with a little whisper of fear. 

Of course, now they knew that the prison had not held him half so well as it seemed, and for half as long as they would have liked.  Mechaniacal had paid the requested price for his plot of land without a blink, a massive influx of resources that had been sorely needed to equip her forces after the long bleeding of the civil war.  The very forces that were now doing essentially nothing to the sleek, silvery ovoid hovering outside her palace and radiating palpable menace.

A spear of shaped regolith rising from the ground shoved the hovering drone back from its position, but didn’t mark the shining exterior.  Metal was rare enough on the moon to begin with, and whatever indelible material Mechaniacal had used in the construction of his dread machines was leagues beyond what had been brought in from Earth.  Royalists had an advantage in dealing with the stuff, but it still wasn’t enough to overcome Mechaniacal’s artifice.

Nor was Princess Liesta answering.  The stalwart of the royal family, a powerhouse beyond powerhouses, had been reliable even in exile, the political fiction mostly in place to prevent her presence from escalating the détente.  Gone with the humans, and now incommunicado, Selirayne could only guess at what occupied her at this very moment of crisis, which forced her to turn to alternative methods.

Regarding the lack of progress against the supervillain for a long moment, she slowly turned from the window and beckoned to her guards.  Down she went, below the Day Palace and into the catacombs beneath, where ancient runes lay heavy and deeply engraved into compressed and polished regolith.  There, the ancient relics of the royal family lay behind barriers of energy and obscurity, artifacts from the ages before known history.

They were rarely used; some took a very long time to recharge, others were simply poorly understood and had uncontrollable effects.  Some few empowered the user, but at a great cost, having never been meant to be wielded by lunarians.  Exactly what civilization had produced these artifacts was a matter of great debate, given the dearth of intact archeological sites, but the effects were undeniable.

The private, royal runes let her through the defenses, leaving her guards at the entrance of a small cubbyhole in the catacomb, descending six steps into a much larger room where the worked stone gave way to walls and shelves of pure force, alcoves and cloches holding the relics.  None were labeled; another level of security to prevent misuse of the artifacts. 

Selirayne stopped at one particular alcove and withdrew a thin rod, looking like an opalized branch of some tree, the bark still rough and corrugated.  It seemed the best option for the moment, though she did cast a longing glance at a small pyramid.  The rumors of the time-travel artifact were roughly true, but it needed at least thirty more years of recharging to actually activate.

After a moment of thought, she also withdrew a flat disk of glass, the interior prismed into thousands of different sections and colors, miniscule rune-etchings barely visible in each luminant cell.  Attack and defense, though only a few charges apiece.  It would have to do.

Queen Selirayne went forth in defense of her moon.