The bloodline ran through these hands, the Sanguine Aristocracy, the apex design of a world that had mostly destroyed itself, and underneath that bloodline, in the deepest structure of it, was the original intention Ke Jun had placed there when he seeded this world.
The blueprint for something that had been built to be first.
I had already pulled the ancestor out once.
It had worked well enough to make a Leviathan tremble and surrender without fighting.
I reached for it again, past the surface of Snik's body, past the centuries of performance layered over everything, down into the foundation. The Golden Sun energy came with me, that warm, clarifying light that showed things as they truly were and what they had been and what they could still be.
The avatar rose behind me and kept rising, that enormous figure built along the lines of Snik's body but reaching upward until it stood above the tallest surviving bone-trees, above the level where the Blood Moon's light was most direct, into the sky of a world that was coming apart at its edges. The golden lines across its skin were burning brighter than they had the first time. The ruby eyes in the avatar's face were lit from within.
I looked up at the Blood Moon.
Then I bent my knees slightly, and I flew.
The ground dropped away. The settlement shrank. The dark channels of the central bog became lines of faint light below me, and the bone-trees became a texture across the landscape, and then the Blood Moon was close, really close, and the scale of it from here was different from any other vantage point I had used.
I had seen it from Snik's courtyard and from the air above the bog and through the portal from my own inner world. Up close, at the level where the three tree systems had their branches extended toward its surface, it was bigger than any of my suns, it was the size of a small city.
The roots and branches had found purchase. I could feel the connection through the Golden Sun energy I had pressed into the trees. Three separate grips on a surface that was conceptual as much as physical, the crystallized foundation of thousands of years of blood cultivation built into the spatial structure of an entire inner world.
I raised Snik's arms.
The avatar raised its arms behind me, enormous hands reaching upward toward the dead grey disc hanging in the purple sky, and for a moment nothing happened. There was just the silence of a world that had used up most of its remaining time, and the sound of the channels running wrong and the distant bone-trees losing their grip on what direction meant.
Then the avatar's hands found the Blood Moon.
The impact of it went through me in a wave that started in my hands and ended somewhere behind my sternum.
But I wasn’t asking it to move willingly.
I pushed and pushed until the Blood Moon began to move again.
The spatial fabric around it protested, those stressed sounds that inner worlds make when their foundations are being rearranged, a deep sustained groan that I felt more in the chest than heard with the ears.
Below me, the world was falling apart in earnest now. The channels had stopped making sense entirely. The settlement buildings at the edges of the courtyard were beginning to fold into themselves in slow motion. The bone-trees at the outer edges had gone entirely.
I pushed even harder.
The portal was visible ahead. The tear in the sky that connected Ke Jun's inner world to mine, and through it I could see the three suns in their orbits, red and blue and gold, and the landscape of my own inner world below them.
The Blood Moon moved faster.
Something in the resistance had shifted. The three trees below were groaning audibly now, deep structural sounds that carried through the root systems and up through the avatar's connection, but they were holding. They were holding because they were ancient and they were stubborn and the Golden Sun energy had reminded them of what they had been at their peak, and at their peak they had held up worlds.
The portal expanded slightly as the Blood Moon approached it. I had not known it would do that. It made sense, in retrospect, since the portal was the point of contact between two inner worlds and it would adapt to what was passing through it, but I had not been certain it would happen, and the moment when the Blood Moon's edge aligned with the portal's edge and I felt the spatial fabric of my inner world reach through and begin pulling from the other side was the first moment in several minutes when something went better than I had expected.
The trees let go.
They had to. The Blood Moon was past the point where their root systems could maintain the angle of pull, and the portal's own pull had taken over.
The avatars above them dissolved.
I didn’t stop. I pushed the Blood Moon through the portal.
The resistance on the other side was different. My inner world was alive, and alive worlds have opinions about what arrives in them. The Genesis Seed was still bound, its golden calligraphy sealed tight across its surface, but the inner world itself had its own foundational character, and that character recognized the Blood Moon as something large and foreign and of considerable cultivational weight.
The entry was not smooth, but it worked.
The Blood Moon settled into the sky of my inner world, and I finally let go of it.
As the golden avatar around Snik’s body dissipated, I looked around my inner world to see if the Leech-kin had made it through safely.
It didn’t take me long to find them.
The Leviathan was hard to miss.
It had positioned itself in the northeast quadrant, above the lake, and the lake had made reasonable accommodations for the fact that something the size of a small landmass was hovering over it.
The Leech-kin were still on the Leviathan's back inside the protective bubble it had generated. Several of them were looking at the Blood Moon with expressions I recognized from the courtyard, a combination of recognition and displacement, the feeling of seeing something familiar in an entirely wrong context.
A child's voice rose from the Leviathan's back.
"It followed us."
A second child voice immediately joined. "I told you it would follow us."
"You did not say that."
"I said it was very big and hard to leave behind."
"That is not the same thing."
"It didn’t follow us,” an older child cut into their conversation. “The lord brought it.”
"Why would the lord bring the Blood Moon?" said the first child.
"Because it's ours, it came with us because it's ours."
As for the older Leech-kin around them, they had gone quiet.
They were clearly struggling to wrap their minds around what had just happened.
"The moon looks different here," one of the mothers said to no one in particular.
"The color is the same," said the woman beside her.
"Yeah, the color is similar," she agreed. "But it looks different."
I understood what she meant. In Ke Jun's world the Blood Moon had been the only light source, the ceiling of everything, the thing that defined what the sky was. Here it was one object among several, and it was a large object, but it was no longer the totality of the sky. It was just a moon. Floating alongside suns that outshone it. Sitting in a sky that was not asking it to be the center of everything.
I turned away from the Leviathan and looked around at my inner world properly for the first time since this had all started.
The bees were doing what bees did, one of them had found the Blood Moon's light interesting and was orbiting a lower portion of the sky near it in a slow investigative spiral. The Lithari in the northwest quadrant had apparently noticed the new celestial body and several of them were standing at the edge of their mine shafts looking up and having what appeared to be a significant philosophical debate about it.
The Ancient Oak's canopy had shifted slightly in the direction of the Blood Moon, probably evaluating the new light source for photosynthetic potential or something, but then the canopy quickly pulled back.
It probably realised that the quality of the light was not quite right.
But what made me release a sigh of relief was that my inner world was adapting.
And then I saw myself.
The other me. The half of my spiritual manifestation that had stayed behind to watch Ke Jun's statue and keep an eye on the portal. Standing at the edge of the central area near the Genesis Seed, watching me arrive through the portal with a Blood Moon, with a surprised expression.
My original self expected me to save the inhabitants of Ke Jun’s world, so the mass migration wouldn’t surprise him, but even he probably didn’t expect for me to come through the portal carrying a massive Blood Moon.
We looked at each other for a moment.
I didn't feel the need to explain, and he didn't feel the need to ask because at the end of the day, we were the same person.
Whatever I had decided in Ke Jun's world, he would have decided too, because the decision had come from the same place that every other decision I had ever made had come from, and when we merged, it wouldn't matter anyway. He'd have the memories. I'd have his. We'd be one person again who had done one thing and remembered all of it.
He just nodded, once, and I nodded back.
Then I turned around and went back through the portal.
My work wasn’t over yet; there was still one last thing I needed to do.