Submission (#3843) Approved

Wordcount: 1830, look I'm below 2k, aren't you proud of me mods. :p
Elnin: ELN1432 Lunarity
Region: Silveil
Feature: I don't think I've dropped any lore here, but sure if you wanna.

Anyhow, I dunno if y'all are as invested in his story as I am, but after forever Lunarity's finally got his pomu! Woooo! It was either pomu or a glimpse of Lilu, since canonically he /is/ in Silveil atm and is gonna stay there until I have him and can start his story. We shall see. :D

He stepped off the ship that took him from Kyendi to Silveil and onto the docks, mouth ajar in slack-jawed, stunned surprise. Yes, he’d spent the majority of his time on that ship hiding below deck, refusing to come out for food, citing seasickness and trying not to let it be too obvious how much he hated knowing the only thing between him and a long, long descent to the bottom of the ocean was a few planks and threaded sails.

But it was worth it, he thought, to stand on the docks and stare up at the vast, unknowable sky. There were more stars than he’d ever seen before, even in backwater Kyendi where very little light could ever reach the heavens, stars in great sweeps of colours like clouds and the occasional shooting star, Dusk low on the southern horizon and largely out of sight. There wasn’t even clouds tonight, and everything was stars, and he’d never felt so small, and so very much part of everything around him.

He'd been lost for so long, and it was stars enough to scatter across the sky that anchored him to the ground. The other passengers from the ship moved around him, ignoring him as he stared up at the sky, moving along their night like this was usual and unremarkable.

Nothing in the world could be less unremarkable than those stars, and he wasn’t home, he might never be home again, but for once in the months since he had woken with no memory but his name, he felt like he had something to set his eternal compass by.

Lunarity wondered, briefly, if he had been named for the moon in some way, the corrupted Dusk that blocked out the stars. He wouldn’t know. There was no way to know. But he tore his eyes away from the sky, trusting it to set his paws on the right path even as he wasn’t looking at it, and headed into town.

 

Quest complete: map and supplies for several days’ bought, pocketwatch set by a local jeweler, directions given from an Adventurer from the Pathfinder’s guild in exchange for some string for their pomu that Lunarity had discovered on his back fence one morning a month prior. He stood briefly on the edge of Silveil City, quite far from the lake that housed the eldertree, beholding the woods. In the midst of summer, there was little-to-no miasma at all in the entire region of Silveil, and he wouldn’t be the only one running around in the woods seeking stars on his pelt and an adventure or two.

Although he wasn’t really seeking stars in his fur like the four other people the Adventurer had seen. More adventure, and more in the faint hope he’d remember slightly more about his past if he managed to prompt it. For all he knew, the deep woods of Silveil had the key. It wasn’t like he’d been here before, and the jeweled caverns of Zevija had offered him a glimpse of a dangerous, salt-soaked castle. Maybe it was the dancing, iridescent lights.

He broke into a run, towards the woods, pocketwatch affixed to his cloak and supplies in his saddlebags, his hood drawn up over his ears. The Adventurer had said that if he took the path off Leafbright Avenue and walked for three hours, he’d find a sight well-worth beholding that few ever visited. Apparently, string from Kyendi feyfolk was that valuable. Had he known that, he would have brought the entire ball of yarn, bartered it slice by slice away for foreign goods to bring back to his neighbours and barter away again.

The soil under his paws was loamy and moist, enough to give him a nice grip but not so muddy that he was getting stuck. He didn’t mind, and the night air was warm, cool only with the breeze and sweet when he paused to admire his surroundings. They looked good as a blur, anyhow. But it was warm and the shadows were not as long as he expected, not with pops of colour in every direction. They were beautiful, Silveil’s forests at a running blur, and the hood of his cloak fell back around his mane, and he was running with the loose fur in the breeze, and he was laughing.

He'd been travelling with others for so long, and much as he appreciated the company and all the people he had met on the way, it was good to be alone, and adventuring, and knowing just enough about his surroundings that he wasn’t afraid for his life.

Lunarity ran, and Silveil blurred into sweet, shadow-silhouetted rainbows, and all was right with the world for a few hours.

 

He ran until he couldn’t run anymore, and then he slowed down to a canter, and then to a trot, and then to a relaxing walk. He stopped only once to sip some water from a nearby stream, jumping when each touch of the water lit it up like there were stars within it. Then he paused, studying the flecks of light for a moment. Hadn’t he seen something similar, on the other side of Sulapei, in a stream that everyone swore up and down was twice as magical as he’d felt it might be? Yes, he’d seen stars in a stream before, and a scientist he'd found who had been studying some local flora had confirmed it was just bioluminescent algae.

Fascinating, that, and he uncorked his thermos to refill it with water from the stream. He could drink water that didn’t taste like it came out of a Kyendi ditch, at least until he moved on to another region and found something else to drink instead.

But he kept going, following the Adventurer’s map, checking his compass by the stars whenever he wasn’t sure. And after a few hours of time he didn’t bother to check, the path he’d been on faded bit by bit, until his shoulders were brushing glowing mushrooms and ferns taller than he was to squeeze his way through the undergrowth.

And there it was. He stopped, finding that the ground very abruptly ended a few feet in front of him, and beheld nothing but sky and a long, long way to the horizon on what seemed the other side of Eyre. He’d barely noticed that he’d been hiking upwards for the past few hours, never at a steep incline but an incline nonetheless, and he was sure he was at the highest point of Silveil, staring out to the rest of the region below him and to Faerindell faint as far out as he could see, barely more than a whisker’s-width slice of dawn on the horizon.

How no one came here, he didn’t know. How he had ascended high up enough to see this and not notice how high he was climbing, he didn’t know. But it chased all thoughts from his mind, leaving him breathless and staring out at the wider world. The view from an airship was never as good as this was right here, inland and away from the water, close to the sky, and surrounded by shadows and gleaming, shimmering rainbows.

He stood upon his hind legs, for a moment, reaching back to detach his saddlebags from his hips before settling down into a seated position. Not taking his eyes off the vista before him, he reached into one and pulled out a sandwich he’d bought from a baker before giving up and laying down on his stomach, front paws just over the edge of the cliff and hind legs stretched out behind him, one elbow resting on the edge as he began to munch away.

Focused as he was on memorizing the view and eating his sandwich, Lunarity didn’t notice the small, feathered creature climb out from his shadow. But a feeling of peace swept over him, and between one lazy blink of contentment and the next, the vista of forest and endless, star-wrapped sky vanished.

– The world is vast and the world is sleeping, and it doesn’t matter, because we’re sinking deeper and deeper into this despair. It wasn’t safe in the ruins we’d made our home, in the labyrinth of trees. The court was falling apart, and our queen was lost, and our princess was dead, and no one to hold the wilds back from consuming us all.

I did something. By the keeper of the forests and glades, I did something to save us. There was light, when the trees broke away from our small domain. There was light, in the hearts and eyes of our citizens. There was light in mine, before I plunged us into the only sanctuary I could reach, and the light in my eyes shattered with the pieces of my heart.

You were there. You saw what I had to do. You gave me the jewels and the scepter anyway and you kissed my forehead and told me you believed in me.

I saw the blood dripping from your hands, and I said only, “thank you,” and we were damned from the start of the mess the siblings of the wind and cruelty left us in.

We were never safe on land, and you and I both knew that, and we were damned from the start. –

He blinked, sandwich gone, and abruptly stood up, shaking his head, clearing the blurriness from his eyes, mouth ajar. “We were damned from the start,” he said, out loud and to no one in particular, feeling out the words, and they were in the wrong language, and his mind was translating the sentiment, and whatever memory he’d stirred up, it was the wrong syllables for the right sentiment and something vital had been lost. Something vital, in the translation from a language he remembered only in his bones to a language he knew how to speak aloud, had been lost.

Something chittered beside him. He whipped around, and a small white face smiled up beside him, and raised a black, feathered arm to wave at him. It was small and fat, so round he was sure he could bowl it if he tried. Its face was decorated with a light blue, matching his eyes, stars and small comets across its forehead and nose, artistic scales patterning its cheeks.

Lunarity looked at the pomu. The pomu looked back at him. “If you know anything about my past, this is where you tell me everything you know, and I promise I won’t fall off the cliff and owe Gwynceirw twenty coins at the revelations.”

The pomu only smiled, and chittered something apologetic and pleased. If he had to guess, he would have said it was sorry that it was so late, rather than sorry that it didn’t know anything.

He sighed, and reached into his bag, and handed it a coralberry muffin. The pomu took it, and he watched the muffin disappear in almost record time.