Hey everyone! With OIM coming to a close (I'm almost finished the epilogue) it's time to start thinking about what comes next.
Leviathan is still the planned next story, but due to moving and some rough patches with OIM I'm badly behind on my buffer. The plan right now is to, instead of launch directly into Leviathan, fill in with five chapters of a sci-fantasy bounty hunter story that I wrote on in a fit of inspiration a few months back - and might get put ahead of Casual Blasphemy to go after Leviathan.
If after that I'm still behind, I might take an actual break afterward. If I need to do a month pause I'll let you know then, and do that payment suspend thing. Hopefully though that'll give me enough time to unbury myself from my hole.
OIM wraps with Chapter 21 .
Chapter Eighteen — The Moon Rises
Isaac felt every part of him strain as he assisted Ike with getting ready to perform a great and amazing feat of superpowered might. Frankly, he preferred being the support over being the principal, having had his fill with the short stint on the Tyrant’s Throne. He sure didn’t need to be at the center of everything for the sake of his own ego, and The Custodian was meant to be more behind the scenes anyway. Not that he’d managed that on the moon so much, but the spirit was there.
“Now I need you to make it harder for me to — no, that’s not how it works,” Ike corrected himself. Isaac sympathized. It was far too easy to confuse making change easier or harder with making labor easier or harder; he’d done it himself a few times and absolutely failed to accomplish anything he was trying to do. Even if Isaac had been able to stretch his talent far beyond physical resistance to change, it was still dependent on change.
“Let’s try this. Make it progressively easier for me to change the – let us call it the color of the tricuspid gate – over ten seconds, and then reverse the process to make it harder over the same time frame, and then make it as difficult as possible.” Ike instructed. It made very little sense to Isaac, but his talent was certainly getting a workout. In a way he didn’t need to know what he was doing, he just had to be able to target the structures as Ike told him, but there was a definite difficulty with working blindly.
“On it,” he said, breathing in the thin, cold air of the mountain top outside of Shay’s barding and feeling a trifle lightheaded. He wasn’t sure how high up they were, but it was enough that he was feeling it, and nothing about his powers did anything to help him get more oxygen out of the air. Something that sure didn’t help with the mental and supernatural work he was trying to do.
Concepts were slippery things, as he’d been finding out with everything he was trying to do with the war. They shifted and changed, throwing off his alterations as their very nature transmuted and rendered whatever he had addressed irrelevant. And that was with things that were straightforward like violence or speed. When it came to things like the colors of concepts that were only relevant for Ike’s talent, it took an intense concentration to hold onto something so esoteric with any clarity.
If anything it showed him that he was still very much lacking in experience. He could tell that he could make up some of the loss in precision with brute force, but he didn’t have much of that either. It just drove home how much of his former success was due to simply operating from an angle nobody else had thought of. Someone would probably figure out a way to make a shield against his talent eventually, and there wouldn’t be much he could do to break it.
As it was, he felt like he was bashing his face against a wall repeatedly as he made the changes Ike demanded. Or really, more like first day at the gym, or maybe that one time in school when he’d studied the wrong material and had been forced to learn how the heck to solve a multivariate equation on the day of the test. He felt weak, unprepared; scrambling to catch up to where everyone else was.
His fancy watch ticked down the ten seconds while the demuto crackled inconsistently, his talent sometimes catching and sometimes not. Isaac kept a close eye on Ike, whose brow was furrowed, wrinkling his bald, scarred head, and tried to pin down the color of the tricuspid gate — whatever that was. Then time was up, and he started pushing and pulling in the other direction.
Their surroundings were, for the moment, peaceful. The pastel mists that covered the mountaintop didn’t cover the ring of standing stones, each one of the obelisks standing at least twenty feet tall and five feet wide, slab-sided and tapering at angles that spoke of purpose and precision. The proportions tickled memories from back in school, something about golden ratios that he couldn’t remember.
At the very least the place felt like it was up to the task of some heroic effort. He didn’t have the senses for magic or fate or any of that, but he didn’t need to in order to appreciate the import of the location. From their position in the center, Earth seemed to float directly atop one of the standing stones, which even had a bowl-like top to cup the blue marble. The sun balanced over another one of them, with a precision that didn’t really feel like coincidence despite the fact that, so far as he knew, the day wasn’t a special one.
On the other hand, now that he was a super and fate was an active participant, coincidences like that were to be expected.
Lia stood nearby, towering over them with the thin and gangly moonie build, her eyes half-closed and an entirely different set of runes than he’d seen before lighting her skin. Some sort of meditation, it seemed, and he didn’t envy her the task. Trying to corral Ike’s power with his own was bad enough, but he actually had an idea of how to get it done. Figuring out a proper dream for the moon’s future was an entirely different ball of wax.
Like with his own power, Ike’s power had broad application but still was very specific in what it required. Everything to do with Ichabod had to deal with dreams, though whether that was an actual realm with its own rules or just a very robust manifestation of an incredibly potent talent Isaac couldn’t tell. Ike was vague on that particular detail, but what the old super had access to was not arbitrary, not something he could pull from his own mind, even. The dreams of people and places encompassed many things, but not all things, and often not things that currently existed.
Isaac would bet that each one of the greeblies that Ike’s power had summoned before was simply a nightmare, Ichabod’s own or just something that featured in the minds of survivors, but it was neither the time nor the place to ask for details. That could come later, when they weren’t in the middle of a crisis.
“Good, good,” Ike said, after Isaac had been straining to make the tricuspid gate – or at least its color – more resistant to change for what seemed to be forever but according to his watch was about thirty seconds. “Next, the brightness in the macular span. Ten count harder, ten count easier, ten count harder.”
Isaac gamely focused on the completely meaningless concepts. At least, meaningless to him; by the way the demuto still registered his power use it was clear that Ike wasn’t at least putting him on. The two of them were at least mostly left alone to figure themselves out, though some of the minor manifestations started to appear again as Ike refocused his power, abandoning the control that had created the massive polar aurora.
Sarah was on top of it, her clones vanishing and reappearing in bursts of smoke to hit crawling eyes and malevolent cubes with concentrated plasma or laser light at point-blank range. One of the smoke army even carried a vibro-blade as long as Isaac’s forearm, the characteristic ultrasonic whine making his teeth hurt whenever that particular clone got too close. But the real pressure on their time didn’t come from those dregs, but rather the distant fights where Mechaniacal’s forces met the moon’s.
Even if he wasn’t studying them, not even looking in their direction, the waxing and waning of different colored lights from cities showed something dramatic was going on. As far away as they were, the thunder of distant detonations reached them at random intervals, entirely disconnected from anything they could see. The ground trembled underfoot, wobbling unpleasantly from shock waves originating hundreds of miles away.
One particular shock, vibrating in a tremulous whine, led into a cracking, roaring sound from below. A massive slab of stone loomed out from the surrounding mists as it was hurled from wherever it had been resting for the past umpteen million years. Even under one-sixth gravity that was a lot of rock, and he darted over to try and turn down its inertia so they had a chance to shove it away before it squished someone.
His fingers touched it and he yanked out the falling inertia, for a moment feeling ludicrously strong as he held up the entire slab. Then gravity made its polite insistence known, as even at lower moon gravity it was just too much for him to hold. It started to slip, and he shifted from trying to hold onto it to adjusting its resistance to being turned to smoke.
“Sarah!” He called, and without any apparent manifestation from her clones, the slowly-slipping monolith dissipated into vapor. It reappeared off to the side, dropping in slow motion to vanish into the mists and slide down the slopes.
“Ready to resume, Mister Hartson?” Ike didn’t seem even slightly worried by the rock that had come close to squishing them, or at least threatening to sweep them off the clearing and shatter the standing stones.
“Coming,” he called, trying not to be irked by Ichabod’s phlegmatic reaction. The administrator probably had seen a lot worse, given how long he’d been working a Star Central. But the lack of reaction still felt wrong.
Ike’s mostly-nonsensical but meaningful-to-him instructions resumed, time ticking away in increments of the ten-second count Ichabod preferred. The cold air of the mountaintop began to blow, making him shiver despite the thick cloth armor. Neither Ike nor Lia seemed bothered, and Sarah was mostly incorporeal so probably didn’t even feel it, but he did notice her fighting against the wind. Puffs of her smoke streamed continuously from her clones, the apparitions eroding and being remade in a constant cycle.
The ground trembled again, hard enough to set the standing stones to rattling. The enormous frozen storm where Moonblast was, the towering mushroom cloud rising from its center, suddenly vanished like wind-blown haze, devoured by a light that looked to be made of inverted colors. In the distance, the unmistakable silver dots of Mechaniacal’s drones swarmed closer from beyond the horizon, whether heading for them or just blanketing the moon it was impossible to say.
“This will have to do,” Ike said, following Isaac’s gaze. “Now, I need you to make the moon itself more susceptible to my power.”
“I need to know exactly what is going to change,” Isaac reminded him.
“Let us make this as simple as possible,” Ike said after a moment. “You must make it easier for the moon’s dreams to change. Not just the people on it, but the moon’s own dreams, the longing of a place. It’s possible it could work without, but every advantage counts.”
“That, I can do,” Isaac said, crouching down to put both his hands on the stone underfoot. The moon was by far the largest thing he’d ever tried to influence, and he could tell from the tiny bit of feedback that he could garner from his talent that it was far too large to nudge much at one go. Fortunately, that was a problem that he’d already figured out the solution to.
Reducing the resistance to reducing the resistance to change, through several layers of abstractions. He had to go up and down his mental framework, a stack of references of ever-more-tangential and higher-order resistance to change, only able to grapple with the one above it after touching the one below. Trying to skip ahead any further ran the risk of losing contact with it, and that was a limitation he still couldn’t get around.
The demuto ticked slowly at first, then more rapidly as changes percolated through. He wasn’t sure how permanent such alterations would be, whether it was something that would be resolved upon completion or would linger, but for the moment the moon felt mutable, receptive. It was no less real than it had been before, but now there was a potential energy just under the surface, something invisible just waiting for a push.
For a moment he had a clear vision of what he had wrought, where the moon had once been sitting at the bottom of a valley surrounded by mountains. What he had done was carved a path out and through to a lower plain. All it needed was a push and it would roll of its own accord. A push he couldn’t supply himself, but he’d helped set up the one person who could.
“Alianora,” Ike said, beckoning the lunarian closer. “I hope you have thought very deeply about this, because there is only so much I can guide it.”
“I have,” Lia said, and it was only at that moment that Isaac realized how much of the plan rested upon her. It wasn’t Isaac’s dream, or even that of all lunarians. Most of them just wanted to see the other side gone, and certainly nobody had considered the possibility of Ike’s power. As far as dreams went, it was a new and idle daydream, not some long-held yearning that could almost manifest of its own accord.
Ike spread both hands wide, and if Isaac thought there was going to be any subtlety at all to what was about to happen, he was very quickly disabused of that notion. A visible ripple raced outward from the man, changing the color and tenor of the air, the sky, the ground all at once. It was a faint fuzzing, like television static, but at the same time it was felt just as seen, a tremor down deep in his bones. The raptors squawked uncomfortably, and Sarah suddenly precipitated out of the atmosphere, condensed back into her own skin.
He could even see the fuzz covering his own body, and his eyes found it difficult to find the point where his hands touched the rock of the ground. A sense of unreality pervaded everything, because of course it did. Dreams were full of impossible and incoherent things, logic that dissolved like candyfloss upon waking. Such as the way the ground tilted and didn’t tilt at the same time, a contradictory and simultaneous impression as Isaac watched the moon rotate around the standing stone that bracketed Earth.
A tremendous wall slid upward from the ground, the fuzz separating into two half-real swaths of stone, the one below and the section rising up, up, and up with impossible speed. After a blink Isaac recognized the exact same mountain perch and standing stones, the rising wall suddenly cohering in his mind as the moon itself, with the particular standing stone that bracketed earth as the pivot point for the two diverging bodies. Earth itself became fully encircled by the pair of stones, one above and one below.
“Mister Hartson, I could use your help to sustain this,” Ike said. A glance showed that the man was under strain despite his calm words. His eyes popped cartoonishly and veins throbbed visibly in his forehead. The life support chair beeped and muttered unhappily, audible hisses and whirs coming from within as pumps spun up and whatever other technological magic happened to support the laboring super.
“I’m on it,” he said, jumping up to the top of the stone in low gravity, where the two bodies were almost touching and still moving out of each other. He grabbed onto each standing stone, holding onto both versions of the moon at once, and pushed his power into two things. First, his connection to the moons, because he was sure the celestial bodies weren’t going to remain in such close contact, and whatever came he was going to need to be able to remain in metaphorical contact while Ike’s power worked. Then he focused on the ontological inertia, the realness of it, its resistance to change by outside forces. Maximizing the moon-ness of them both, and so more reality and less dream.
Beneath his hands, the stone had actual energy, not merely imagined as he had before. Something Ike’s power had created, the moon divided in two. Not half and half, but it seemed to Isaac from the hazy feedback he got that Ichabod had somehow made it so that both moons were the original, and both the dream-copy, attributes from both already firm and at the same time hazy, like Sarah’s smoke clones.
Making the smoke more real was something he had experience with, something he knew how to do. Something he had practiced, no longer fumbling around in the dark as he tried to grapple with the complexities of his talent. It was that path to realness that he focused on, dangling between the two moons with one hand on either, Earth in the distance as he helped bring dreams to life.
***
Princess Liesta, more usually known as Moonblast, broke free of her restraints.
The human tinker was not quite as clever as he thought he was, using time to chain her down. Time was difficult and slippery, but the royal family had an artifact capable of true time travel, so they had studied it for generations to create their own runes. She knew when time was being meddled with.
It rarely came up, as few beings or forces were capable of manipulating time, but when it did come into play it defined the battlefield. Whether that battlefield was in the royal court or between sorcerers, anyone altering the inevitable march of time raised immediate alarms. The fact that it had come at the exact time that she was engaging a foolish attempt by reestablishment forces to either distract her or even, ridiculously, try to best her was of course not coincidental.
Her runes flared as she exercised her power, snapping out of the bondage of slowed time and bursting forth above. The clouds crackled around her, full of leashed power and the exudations of clashing runes, a foul breath exhaled above the battlefield. She pulled on her own talents to clear it, a finely tuned set of phrases to disperse the disharmony in a flash of light.
The reestablishment army remained stuck in time, and she dismissed them. They were irrelevant, but the feel of a greater conflict very much was not. She had been stopped for only a few moments, from her perspective, but the world had changed. The moon groaned and cracked under the discharge of one of the royal artifacts, the sky etched with malevolent scrawl.
It had clearly been used only a short time ago, but against what, Liesta couldn’t fathom at first. The reestablishment army was clearly engaged with her, not with Selirayne’s forces. Not that the queen should need the help to deal with the dregs that had attacked her. Leaving the site of the battle behind, Liesta invoked the teleportation rune and appeared over the Day Palace.
Immediately, all her divinatory runes screamed at her about the slagged chunk of metal sticking out of the palace grounds, something that didn’t belong on the moon and even in its destruction radiated threat. It listed at an improbable angle in impossible geometries, half-in and half-out of some higher dimensional state as residual magic crackled around it, exposing internals of twisting and interlocking mechanisms horribly unnatural to behold.
Like the chair she had seen months ago on the space station, there was something about the arrangement of the components that, even without comprehending a single thing, disturbed her on a deep level. Her natural antipathy for metallic technology had been mostly muted by her long associated with humans and their civilization, but the sight of it made her instincts roar back to life.
The worst part was it was still moving. Even mostly destroyed and still afflicted by one of the most powerful artifacts in the royal vault, the gears still moved, unnamable parts still ticked with dread purpose, and the shining steel still shrugged off the efforts of the army Selirayne had mustered outside the palace grounds. The story wrote itself with a glance. Mechaniacal had taken advantage of the fight to ambush her and attempt a takeover of the moon. As supervillains did.
What she didn’t quite understand yet was the undertone of reestablishment sorcery adding to the mess. Powerful reestablishment sorcery, not the crude stuff those kids had been tossing her way. It resonated through the already abused lunar atmosphere, causing almost palpable cracks in the firmament. In fact, she could see sunken lines radiating out from the royal city where lava tubes had collapsed, further choking the natural lunar magic as the moon’s own original runes were damaged.
Liesta took care of the remnants of Mechaniacal’s device with Heat, Entropy, as powerful as she could make them. Which might have been overkill, as the steel exploded into superheated vapor and she was forced to hastily shield some of the closer soldiers from something that would have overwhelmed their normal defenses.
She started to turn her attention toward the reestablishment forces that had somehow infiltrated the city, but before she could find them and remove them, some of her divination runes warned her of something sliding along the skein of reality toward her. It seemed Mechaniacal had more tricks up his sleeve, so she cycled through her arsenal to take them both on at once. Despite her concern about the fragility of the local fabric, there was no choice.
Just as the device began to manifest itself, just as the reestablishment sorcerer began casting something powerful enough she would have to respond in kind, the world changed.
Her runes blared with all kinds of nonsensical warnings, completely uncertain what to make of the visible wave of energy that rippled past and the ensuing blurriness of reality. Liesta had all kinds of protections in many layers, preventing everything from hostile sorcery to toys like that overpowered gun the Hartson boy had used from actually reaching her. Nothing should have been able to affect her, and yet she could feel the reality blur encompass her as if her defenses weren’t even there.
Fear wasn’t an unfamiliar sensation for Moonblast, as anyone who engaged in both super activities and politics at a high level participated in conflicts with real risk and real stakes. But there was a peculiar kind of fear that was very rare for anyone in her position; the gut-level response to the unknown. The personal, animal fear that was mostly left by the wayside on the road to being powerful.
She rifled through her library of sorcery to try and understand what she was seeing, what effect could be so pervasive and yet not respond to the normal inquiries of divination, not to mention bypass every protection that the royal family had ever been able to create. All she could figure out was that it was not sorcery, not magic. Which left Mechaniacal’s technological horrors — or a superpower.
It didn’t take more than a second or two to conclude it was the latter, and that the source of the power had to be Ichabod. She knew that his talent was a profound one, given the amount of effort that went into keeping it suppressed, and she’d seen what kind of reality-threatening horrors it could summon just by running wild. There was quite a step between the thing she’d eliminated and something that could affect everything she could see from horizon to horizon, but even at the highest levels people didn’t stretch their powers to the utmost most of the time. There were consequences to being so profligate and uncaring about who and what you affected — as she intended to ensure Hartson learned.
Mechanical’s drone popped out of nowhere, an enormous thing the size of an ore truck and wielding weapons to match. The reestablishment sorcerer below revealed himself with the release of a grandmeister rune, toppling the fragile balance of the resonance around the royal city. And the world split in two.
The moon turned into a mirage, an illusion, and separated slowly, one version rising upward and sliding through the other. It wasn’t just the landscape, the city was mirrored as well, and at first Liesta thought even the people. Then she realized it wasn’t quite everyone. It wasn’t even most people in the city. Just a select few, each just as hazy as the phantom moon. The only one she recognized – and that word was not even fully accurate, since she was only familiar with the resonance of the sorcery – was the reestablishment grandmeister.
The phantom moved faster than she expected for such a huge thing, whether it was real or not, rising up and flowing past her in a scant few seconds. The rock of the moon slid around and through her in translucent solidity, eaten through with ancient lava tubes and even more ancient remnants of civilizations past. She wasn’t one for claustrophobia, but the momentary sensation of being surrounded by uncountable tons of regolith and stone made her hearts thump painfully in her chest.
Then she noticed the rune resonance itself was changing. It wasn’t being fixed; the damage was still done. But the notes from reestablishment casting far and wide were pulling away with the illusory moon, as if borne aloft by it. She held her own sorcery in abeyance, unwilling to intervene in something that she did not understand while the moon itself quaked from the powerful forces at play.
Even Mechaniacal’s drone seemed to pause, half-in and half-out of phase with reality. The ovoid hovered uncertainly, its smooth surface deformed in the hyperboloid impossibilities of higher-dimensional space, as the doppelganger moon swept, up, up, and out. It was only after the curve of the far side became visible that Liesta realized that it wasn’t merely shifting, it was rotating, pivoting around a fixed point far in the distance, out of sight over the horizon.
With something specific to look for, and only simple math to do, her divination runes ran through the options before delivering a verdict. A place that she was familiar with, having performed her pilgrimage there long ago, before she was Moonblast. Montes Huygens.
Moonblast gave the drone another look, weighing whether it was worth her time to engage with it, then decided against it and shot off in the direction of the point upon which the two moons were balanced. It was not somewhere she had a ready-made teleport anchor, and she cursed her lack of airspeed even if she rarely found it an issue. Normally being able to fly at hundreds of miles an hour and teleport was more than enough, but at a time when seconds might count, being minutes away was completely useless.
The landscape blurred below her as the twin of the moon kept rising, the lunar face ridiculously close, looming over them like a suspended sentence. The uncertain, illusory nature of it began to congeal into something more real, or at least more present. There was not yet any gravity from it, something that would result in the immediate and catastrophic destruction of both celestial bodies, but it felt like a quickly looming threat.
Despite her singular focus, she couldn’t help but notice that almost half the population over the farms and towns she passed were gone. That left some places almost completely empty, and others untouched; it was not some even distribution, not a perfect, halfway split. There was intention behind who had stayed and who had left, and she could well guess it was the two factions.
The further she went, the more the influence of reestablishment sorcery waned. It still echoed – bouncing through the primordial runes formed by ancient lava tubes and saturating the atmosphere, even resonating from the distant crystal sphere – but the runic pollution and the strain that cracked at the seams of the vast network of power that ran in, over, under, and through the moon eased ever so slightly. Liesta didn’t view it with relief, because such deep, substantial, and wide-sweeping changes never came without consequences. And none of it would matter while the dispensation of the second moon was as yet uncertain.
Short-ranged teleports, only a few dozen miles apiece, skipped her across the surface even as she rose higher, high enough that the pale sky began to darken and the air grew thinner, whipping feebly against her shields in protest of her passage. Ahead she saw the peak of the mountain, shrouded in mist as usual, the point where the two bodies seemed to touch. A fragile connection, hidden by the veil that covered both mountains.
Closer still, and her divinations directed her to the exact point she had suspected, yet as she zipped up to the standing stones, she found that the humans – and that one reestablishment lunarian – were on the other, unreal moon. The sole exception was Hartson, who was in the improbable position of being between the two, with one hand on each of the standing stones, dangling backlit by the Earth as if he were keeping the pair of celestial bodies together with muscle strength alone.
She slewed to a halt, only feet away and not quite willing to touch anyone — and not sure if she could. All of them seemed hazy, half-dreamlike, rather than solid like the ground underfoot. Hartson was the sole exception, appearing to her a half-step beyond real, firmer than either moon and pressing on her divinations in a way that the rest weren’t. Her arrival elicited belated reactions, the three raptors fixating on her with predatory stillness while the Miller girl summoned several clones in a defensive stance.
“What.” Liesta said, gesturing to everything around. Any more specificity seemed to be unnecessary. “What?”
“I said I was going to clean up this mess,” Hartson said, responding to her from his ridiculous position and having the temerity to sound like he was stating the obvious. “Both sides said they couldn’t share the moon, so two moons it is.”
Liesta floated there, speechless, forced to reassess her own priorities and review her own hubris. The smoke user had been, on balance, an insubstantial threat, no matter how easily she had shrugged off Liesta’s sorcery. The real power was the simple and immovable solidity of the man hung between two moons.