Chapter #1:"Moonchild"

Call her Moonchild, as she lay with the reflection of her namesake in her eyes. The lights of eons away took pleasure in dancing across the spouts of water above her before they fell and gracefully etched stardust into her scars. Their beauty always came close to tempting her into floating away and following their path back home, but she was pinned to Earth by the gentle hold of her lover: a girl who wore frills on her sleeves and the night sky in her heart.

Their dwelling was a lonely place as is, and on nights like this their only company was a journal bound in violet buckram, sitting opened to the latest of many pages filled with amateur reports about astrology, hand-drawn star charts, and orisons to the music of the spheres. Tonight, sticking out from the collection of celestial writings, was a dotted heart doodled on one side of the margins. Within its outline were their two names next to each other: “Tsukiko” and “Ririka”.

The Moonchild played with glinting sparks of colour which flew between her nails, feeling herself bonding with the Stars that she held in her soul. Cold wind blew snowflakes and water drops across her, and tickled her face with her fox-tail bangs. She was taken out of the sky’s trance when she noticed how extra-quiet things had been since she started losing track of time. She turned over to her love and found her gently breathing, with her eyes fallen shut. Still looking over the lake at the clouds blowing towards them, she ran a pair of fingers across the darling girl wrapped around her, until they slid across a spot on her cheek they could squish, rubbing up and down until she literally stirred her awake.

Her eyelashes rose up, shaking off a bundle of snow crystals nearly too small to see, and she grounded herself back to the waking world with a delicate yawn. “Tsukiko,” she mewled out, calling for her girlfriend out of habit as much as she was actually addressing her.

The Moonchild replied, “Wake up, my dear.” Tsukiko’s voice was a deliberate smoke on the air, even the fewest of words sounding like answers to questions she had spent hours pondering.

Ririka talked back in a faint, quiet voice asking her “What’s wrong?” as she rose from her sleepiness.

“You fell asleep outside,” Tsukiko said, the bemusement in her voice weighed down by how she had started feeling tired herself.

Her tender little lover’s words went from drowsy and cute to sputtered out and stumbling. “Oh Stars, did I really pass out out here?” She jumped awake, scurrying in place as she reeled her hand back to cover up the line of blush that filed across her face. “Darn it, darn it, I t-totally screwed up!”

“No need to fuss, sweetheart,” Tsukiko assured her. “Being asleep in the grass is really cute and charming, don’t you think?”

“But we still have to do the prayers!” Ririka pouted.

“Was it our turn to do them?”

“Yeah, it was,” Ririka replied, still in full sulk, “and now it’s late and our whole schedule is gonna get thrown off!”

“Oh yeah, we’re gonna have to really bolt over there to make it,” Tsukiko dryly replied; she assumed an exaggerated running stance, before hopping two steps in front of her and waving her arms around to frame the scenery. “Hey look! We made it!” she giggled.

Ririka’s anxious mutterings were not deterred by Tsukiko’s gag. “Tsukiko gracefully walked up to her and grabbed her hands, “Baby, look, as long as the Moon’s still hanging in the sky, we have plenty of time,” she reasoned treacly. “We can just go read them now and then swing back around to our place and get right to bed.”

“But we aren’t in uniform,” Ririka fretted.

“Well,” Tsukiko sighed half-heartedly, “I think the spacefarers will forgive us.”

Ririka relented, starting with her up a trail of moss-covered stone stamped into the ground, which led from the fountain they had huddled around towards a small but imposing building made of smooth marble.

“Even if we did actually mess ourselves up, Ririka, what’s with the ‘all my fault’? I let myself lose track of time too, silly.”

“Well, the whole reason we went out that late is because I wanted to stargaze,” Ririka said, voice cowering.

“Nonsense,” Tsukiko soothed. “It’s our favourite thing to do, after all.”

“Well,” Ririka bit on her nails, “it’s more of my favorite thing to do, you know?”

Tsukiko shook her head indignantly, her hair spinning a mesmerising spiral of its orange-white gradient. “Any time I’m next to you is time well spent,” her face broke out into an excitedly mischievous smirk as she grabbed Ririka by the shoulders and leaned her down to whisper right in her ear, “my Princess Lily.”

This made Ririka so flustered she nearly tripped, her face stained with nervous blush even after the thousandth time she had heard that nickname.

They approached the building at the end of the footpath, which was not a shop or a shelter, but a mausoleum. Tsukiko held the door to the tomb open, letting a little sliver of moonlight stalk across the room. It shone in the eyes which waited to judge them: two dozen pairs of sleek, bestial masks hung on the wall. They clouded around small yet immaculate shrines to the cosmos, and underneath each of them was a glass case on a pedestal, safely housing some seemingly random choice of object inside.

This display was a memorial: a wall of honour for their predecessor mages. Those Familiar things had been the object of their hearts’ truest trust, and those masks were painted to match the ones carved from their souls to face the dark with the guise of starlight- of hope and faith. They once belonged to some of those with the powers that formed their world, the champions of their creed, who could triumph over whole legions in sweeping wars without spilling a single drop of blood.

They once belonged to Scene Stars.

The door clicked shut, leaving the girls in the dark. Tsukiko reached into her pocket and slipped out a lighter, which she clicked a flame out of. The darkness was now kept at bay by the comforting orange glow. The small flame was worthless at actually heating a cold stone box, yet the air still seemed to shift to feeling comforting and warm.

Ririka took a kneel and rolled up her sleeve, pulling the fabric all the way up to her shoulder blade, and letting all of the skin on her arm breathe in the dim light. Tsukiko stayed standing - secretly smiling to herself over how cute it was that Ririka was as tall kneeling as she was standing - but followed in pulling her sleeve up, frigid air stinging her skin where it was tattooed with cosmic marks of belonging. Chants and fortunes each night for those who had gone to voyage across the stars; this was perhaps the most fantastical of their duties, which mostly consisted otherwise of sweeping and make-work.

During a break in the spoken prayer, Ririka suddenly spoke up, not to the spirits but to Tsukiko. “H-hey, so I was thinking…”

Tsukiko waited for her to go on, thinking her slightest breath could put out their light.

“Do you wanna start learning how to sew from me again?” Ririka asked, starting slowly with wound-up words before muttering out the relevant question. “‘C-cause I’ve really been on Heraschel’s good side lately and I think I could totally convince him to let you work for him too.” She looked at Tsukiko and smiled, as if to be encouraging. “And that’s- So much better, you know?” She bit her thumbnail, “We would get to be together all day.”

Tsukiko looked at her dolefully. “And you suppose Luci would think that’s a good idea?”

Ririka stayed quiet.

“It’s sweet of you to daydream, my dear,” Tsukiko sauntered over to a window, gazing into the lush grass and dense forests that lined their village. “Someone’s gotta take care of this old place, though; It’s my home and it’s right for me to pay some things back to it.”

Ririka didn’t say anything, merely shaking her lips silently while she moved around without doing anything.

“I just like the peace and quiet.” Tsukiko stepped back to kneel down next to her girlfriend. “Are you mad at me?” she asked.

“Not at you,” Ririka muttered back. “I just, think it’s a little unfair. All Summer you were still the only one who ever did any of the actual work! Everyone else just dallied around the shops and pretended to sweep the shrine,” she fussed. “And like, sometimes it feels like the reason they tell you to do all the stuff away from the main shrine is ‘cause they think people think you’re weird.”

“Hey, hey,” Tsukiko waved her hand downwards, conducting the concert of her girlfriend’s fretting to simmer out. “It’s alright,” she dismissed as she stood up. The window caught her eyes again. “It’s alright.”

Tsukiko gently set the lighter down - its cap still off and flame still shining - and plucked a little box off one of the levels of the shrine. Speaking delicately, lest her words slam too hard into the little whispers Ririka had resumed chanting into the air, she said “I’ll go lay them out.”

Back out into the cold, Tsukiko slipped open the palm-size box she had taken with her, and let gravity spill its contents between her fingers: three-dozen-and-some cards, each with identical backs but their own beautifully painted portraits on the front, which she shuffled and cast down one of around each corner of the building, ritualistically.

The type of devotee one was most likely to meet in the day-to-day was a housesitter like Tsukiko and Ririka; lowly girls who populated and staffed the Heavenly Markets, little villages built to serve the community and be a place of worship, operated and inhabited by priestesses and their servants; Tsukiko and Ririka’s was a particularly small and secluded one, befitting the girls’ introverted habits.

Even such a backwater place was held with reverence, though. No matter where you walked, or who you thought yourself to be, one piece of advice would always ring true: do not challenge the KIBOU Nation, for it will not end well for you.

Finishing laying out the cards, Tsukiko hummed to herself and contemplated whether to look at them. They were, of course, tools of divination: each one symbolising an aspect of life and the world. Here specifically, the idea was that drawing them whilst praying to the departed would let them momentarily speak back to the living world, giving their wisdom on events current and future. Ririka would be far more interested in what they actually had to say, while Tsukiko wasn’t in the mood to dwell on them.

Tsukiko had broken into an aimless wander around the mausoleum, right up to the tree line. The sight of snow-powdered forest spilling into their home brought her to a place of serenity. Even compared to being taken by a clear view of space on a cloudless night, Tsukiko found there was something to be gained from letting her eyes and her mind wander towards the trees.

Those lovely trees, standing in the delicate dark.

Her thoughts were drawn into the landscape; her fingers began mindlessly fidgeting with her hair.

Those sprawling trees, crowding each other inside the wide and long dark.

Something compelled her to take step after step closer to the edge, then through it, having to use her hand to fend off stray branches and falling clumps of snow from smacking her in the eyes.

Those gnarled, mocking trees, framing a landscape that grew with spiteful pride in being built from dark.

She was now just barely far enough into the treeline that you couldn’t spot her from outside it. Had she been watching someone else do the same, she’d have thought their movements odd and foolish, but something had tempted her into joining the foliage for just a brief moment. Her eyes felt almost forcibly transfixed onto the shadows of several trees overlapping.

The branches swayed from a force other than the wind; the leaves were trampled by a weight which did not belong. The spot where the tree limbs blocked out moonlight harboured a stomach-turning sensation, like a flickering curtain was inviting her to be drawn in behind it and swept out of all that she knew and all that felt real.

Something else was there with her.

No little animals, or even crawling insects; they had all been frightened off. Being in its presence was being stabbed with a sharpened, cold knife that mercilessly cut out any will to move - even stand - before it. It was ethereal; intangible; a little horde of a hundred little things, while also something unbelievably massive.

She stared at it - it; breathing static; fright manifest - for a second, maybe even two, before she bolted backwards, so desperately she nearly stumbled and snapped her own ankles from the force with which she ran.

Fleeing felt like it should have been a gruelling trial, so Tsukiko felt disoriented when she snapped back to her right mind and found she was back in front of the mausoleum only a couple seconds later still. Her eyes darted around, expecting to find something evil or foreboding behind her, or maybe catch a glimpse of such in the trees. Nothing was there. As quickly as her fright had started up, she was calming down. Shaking off what had just happened, and trying to replay it from an objective point-of-view.

“...The hell triggered that?” she glumly cursed to herself, writing off the experience as a play of neurosis which had sprouted up as a result of nothing more than being left to her own devices for too long, even if “too long” was such a small length of time.

Much to her relief, she heard Ririka - the distinct sound of her dainty little skip-steps - walking back outside.

“Hi Tsukiko!” she cheered, as if the last time they saw each other had been significantly longer ago than five minutes. “Everything alright?” she asked, initially meaning as a general question but then making it sound worrisome when she saw the look on Tsukiko’s face.

“Yeah, yeah,” Tsukiko assured. “Sorry, I just let my mind wander and freaked myself out.”

“Oh honey!” Ririka grabbed her, her embrace warming Tsukiko’s face so much that the snowdrops melted off her face. “Come on, let’s go inside.”

The couple walked back to their cabin, a small building built nearly as a cube, trimmed with pale yellow framed windows and a porch which served to beckon one towards it from the wide courtyard on which it sat. Once nothing more than a disused hut, it had come to be claimed as the girls’ own, its interior becoming distinctly them-flavoured. One little spot to house all that they had to be happy about, including each other, and shut out the world around them. It was precisely what Tsukiko needed, not that she intended on saying so.

Walking inside, Tsukiko made a concentrated effort to relax herself, not wanting to keep Ririka worrying about her.

She made for their bathroom, craving a warm shower, but Ririka stopped her with a grab to the wrist and pulled her over instead to their bed, which she promptly fell into, taking Tsukiko down with her.

“I know what’ll cheer you up,” she winked. She slid her and Tsukiko’s hands together, and reached them to brush up against a heavy quilt she had made herself, which sat folded up at the foot of the mattress.

Light suddenly flared from between their fingers. There was of course the radiant glitters which painted the air and could pop out against anything, characteristic of all such mage’s tricks; on top of that, though, was true starlight. Five radiances appeared to dot the blanket, lined together with a little zigzagged shape that was drawn out from their light.

To their whim, the mass of the quilt began to shift; all of its fibers tensed and coiled up, being shaped by invisible hands from a soft, square lump into something much more intricate.

The quilt had become a fox. Perfectly detailed, with a bushy tail and pointed ears, down to the last crease on its paws. What was poured into it was not merely the image of life, but the spirit of it too; the fibers pranced around of their own accord, then - beckoned by a little wave of Ririka’s hands - lovingly leapt on top of Tsukiko, nuzzling her with comfort. With her darling and her starlight to keep it at bay, the thought of Tsukiko’s fright in the woods was pushed to the back of her mind, even if she couldn’t seem to entirely rid herself of it. Even as that blight hung over her, or maybe over everything they touched and walked over, they revelled in the morning’s light: a blessed mixture of emerging sun and departing moon.

This was humanity’s miraculous triumph; this was the gift of the cosmos, which the KIBOU Nation studied and revered; this was magic; this was her power, birthed from the peaking souls they called Scene Stars.

Perhaps, with it, they’d be able to make the world shine forever more.

INDEX | NEXT