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The red moon

I t is said that if Moonshadow City is the heart of the empire, then the Vertex Seal is the heart of Moonshadow City.

It’s true, though not because his palace is the location from which flow moral and legal proclamations, nor only that it’s the geographical center of the city.

It is true because the palace of the Vertex Seal marks—no, the throne itself marks—the focal point of all the Design of the empire.

Moonshadow City glimmers in a red-rock crater, a wound gashed into the center of the continent millennia ago.

To the north, red-rock mountains grow slowly from the arid forests that used to be Ilmar and Saria, the earth filled with minerals and gems ready to be mined, and beyond them rise the drastic peaks of the Cloud Ranges.

Fertile rolling fields and gentle forests spread to the west through the former Land of God, then give way to kinder mountains of Ur-Syel dividing the empire from the martial Bow queendoms with their canopy cities and volcanic magic.

Plains push east, flat and dry and perfect for cattle and sheep, toward the prairie with its troubled clans and states that once had been an empire of their own.

But our empire drove countless Pir refugees and broken Reskik peoples across those plains into Huvar, a pleasant enough oligarchy that only survives because the empire, when it expands, must expand in all directions equally thanks to the necessary balance of the four forces.

The Lapis River pours out of the northern red mountains and dives toward the city in a rush, curving east to cup the south of the crater before widening into a glorious channel slow and steady enough for barges and ships to enjoy.

Then it dives into the deserts of the south, carving canyons and caves for miles, before it becomes a snaking jungle river that spills into the sea.

That is where the Ceres Remnants maintain themselves, islands that once were a continent of their own, with a grand empire of their own, but some other young god struggled there long ago and destroyed that world.

The islands are rich, and safe from the empire because Aharté’s Design does not do well on the open sea.

The empire flourishes. Within its boundaries Design works wonders. Within it, power is in the hands of architects and therefore in the hands of the Vertex Seal.

But once there was nothing in the center of the continent except a river, broad and bright as a line of the sky, slipping south where it widened into a great coursing waterway.

Floodplains flushed green in the spring, nurturing rainbows of flora and thriving tiers of animals: insects, fish, birds, alliraptors and desert lions and pack dogs, and the soaring griffon.

And there used to be a second moon in the sky. Some suggest it orbited the Eye of Aharté, not the world. A moon for a moon. Tiny, and red as a drop of dried blood. Then it fell through our atmosphere and slammed here, cracking in four pieces. The crater is eight miles wide.

A god climbed out of the cracked moon, beautiful and oh so hungry.

He summoned people to him, and they came curiously, sensing the trembling forces.

This god gave names to those architectural forces, taught his people how to manipulate them, and there in the center of the crater, a cult was born.

A cult of young designers and holy people, worshippers of the god of the red moon.

First they carved homes deep into the flattened earth and rim of the crater, then they fashioned stucco warrens, and finally they lifted above the ground with primitive windcatchers and force-supported steeples.

The river bowed around the crater and the god taught the people to blast through the spiking walls and allow water in, to draw it with underground canals and falling force and locks.

Crops grew in the circle of devastation, then flowers and hardwood trees, and animals returned, creeping toward sustenance.

They had food, they had families, and they had a god of design. The crater city was a paradise.

Those first architects embraced every wild hope their craft promised.

They invented force-ribbons to draw vehicles, they built needle towers that swayed with the wind, they manipulated children still in the womb, making angels and monsters.

They spliced creatures together in glorious and dreadful ways, melding flesh and earth, tree and sky, anything they could imagine—some healing, some unsustainable.

Never had so much pain and misunderstanding stained the world with its effects; never had such beauty reigned.

Living rainbows, men with cat-eyes, women with four arms, friahz with skin of feathers, flying fish, small-smaller-smallest eagles, and iridescent beetles the size of a cloud.

They tested theories to make lives better: Could a child be born with unbreakable bones?

Could a woman be made never to age? They acted on whims: What if a bird’s skull was on the outside of its face?

What if instead of a tower flexible as a tree, they grew a tree as hollow as a tower?

Could flesh be blue as the sky, or sparkling as diamonds?

Where was the infinitesimal line between conscious, living being and growing crystal? Imagine! Go wild! Do not hold back.

Well, the god of the red moon gave his knowledge to humanity, and humanity made a mess.

Rival factions attacked their enemies with monsters, with force-poisoned food and tainted air.

They butchered one another with mutations, with ecstatic death and hot rising death, with the slow yearning death of hopelessness.

All while winged serpents dragged across the sunset and the river sang with the voices of changed alliraptors.

Beautiful. Terrible. The architects did not understand the patterns of life intimately enough to create it perfectly, and thus rebellious cancers appeared with no summoning, the consequences of our dreams.

Some people fought toward peace, toward the betterment of their neighbors.

Some were called to service, to drag their fellows along a path that did not allow harm.

They were good, they had hope, and they knew relationships of empathy were what made people stronger, not better bones or better swords or better poisons.

The problem was, the god of the red moon was not on their side.

Maybe he lacked empathy. Maybe nobody ever told him a good story. Maybe because he’d fallen from the sky, he was always sore. Maybe he was hangry. Maybe he missed Aharté.

Oh yes. Aharté. Watching from her own moon, that larger silver-pink moon still hanging in our sky. And she missed him, too, didn’t she?

Meanwhile, outside the crater of paradise and hell, desert kings of Bes had united under Sarenpet the Great.

Sarenpet and his kings conquered the lands around the Ilmar and into Saria.

They came to the red god’s crater, and because Sarenpet was as hungry as the red god, the god invited the king to remain.

Thus was founded the dynasty of Bes and Sarenpet, under the red moon banner.

For three hundred years the Bes and Sarenpet forced purpose onto their folk, and the crater’s influence grew. What once was a cult of architects became an empire. But it lacked balance. Was volatile.

It was too loud.

A boy was born, Maimeri Sarenpet, with a whisper of Silence in his heart.

As he grew, he abjured architecture, though he sensed the forces against his skin and within his bones.

He listened, quietly. He recognized patterns, and one day followed one such thread outside the crater.

That day a star appeared in the sky and it fell.

It fell hot and hard, and when Maimeri Sarenpet reached its much smaller crater, he found a woman sitting with an alliraptor’s smiling head in her lap.

She told Maimeri she was Syr, wife of Aharté, She Who Loves Silence, and together they would save the world.

(There is another version of the story that says the alliraptor stood up and turned into another woman, this one as red-brown as the crater, as red-brown as the god of the red moon, and said her name was Aharté.

Then Aharté turned and walked away from the city, away from her wife.

Maimeri Sarenpet begged her to remain, but she said her wife was better at magic anyway. Then Aharté vanished into the trees.)

Anyway, the Holy Syr taught Maimeri the true gospels of Aharté that they together might balance the forces of architecture and destroy the red moon god—whom she named the Moon-Eater, as if the god, in his hunger, had so devoured his own red moon it had weakened and fallen from the sky.

If he was not stopped, this whole planet would weaken as well.

Together, in perfect architectural balance, they unraveled the Moon-Eater until nothing remained but his teeth.

With epic power, under the always-watching eye of this silver-pink moon, they leveled the apostatical inventions, from towers to giant bugs, unraveling the patterns of all those creatures and structures (and people) that struggled to live.

If it could not survive without constant design intervention, it did not survive.

(Why did the skull sirens live? Why the micro-vultures?

Is it something about birds? Can you tell me?

And every once in a while a child like Bittor is born with cat-eyes, as if that recessive trait refuses to be eradicated.

There are rainbow bees bobbing in every garden, rep-cats and lattice snakes, and rumors Iriset has heard of people with feathers in their hair or scales in the dry skin at the smalls of their backs.)

In the ruins of the Moon-Eater’s city, Maimeri and the Holy Syr founded the Vertex Seal.

Before anything else, they laid the foundation stones for the palace, and the matching stones for the Moon-Eater’s Temple so that humanity would always remember his devastation.

Those structures will exist as long as the empire itself does, the palace complex in the very center of the crater and surrounded by the quartz yards.

The yards gleam under the sun, a flat expanse of quartz and shells, symmetrical half-moon pools, a quarter mile in every direction so that nothing and no one might approach the palace without being seen.

The Holy Syr said, “Here is my daughter, the daughter of Aharté. She is the Vertex Seal, Her Glory, prince of my flesh. My second daughter is the Moon-Eater’s Mistress, Her Glory, prince of my flesh.

Balance to bind, always. One must be claimed with blood, satisfied and silent, paired to the other in hunger and sacrifice. ”

So it was etched onto the throne of the Vertex Seal: one claimed with blood and paired with hunger, always binding .

The Holy Syr’s daughter was born with red-brown skin (moon-red, it might be said, mirané it would soon be called), just like the Moon-Eater’s had been. (Just like Aharté’s.)

Over time, the children and grandchildren of Maimeri and the Holy Syr learned the balance of Silence, and with Aharté’s proscriptions firmly in place, they once again harnessed the four forces to push the city out, so that it spilled toward every edge of the crater, in elegant rising levels like the ruffled petals of a mountain rose.

Design steeples spiked up, white as bone, in spiral and cross-diamond patterns, binding the Holy Design of the city.

It was that web of craft that allowed Moonshadow its arching tension bridges, stepped-marble squares and fire gardens, impossibly high gilded domes and domes glazed turquoise and blue like the sea and sky.

The web-powered force-ribbons looped, streaking throughout the city, pulling skiffs along with the slightest tug of craft.

In each of the cardinal directions a massive force-steeple was built, each with an elegant, glowing Design to lure and funnel one of the four forces: falling, rising, flow, and ecstatic.

Moonshadow was perfect, a paradise of bound design.

And the children of Aharté’s flesh, the miran, ruled.