the palace of the moon.

-ascendance-

At the heart of a Caern, the barrier between worlds is no more substantial than the interface of air and water. Charlotte would know how that feels: how it is to dive into still waters, or perhaps into that great churning salt sea that she and Erich spent such happy days beside. If you're not careful you can still smack that transition hard enough to sting, but if you are careful, if you know how to go about it,

you just slip right through.

On the other side, the sky is a limitless blue-black bowl overhead. The moon is enormous, as huge as it was when it was first carved from the earth's ribs, and it is impossibly luminous. Bright as day, but cooler, more distant than the blazing sun. The moon loves Charlotte, and so does the earth: great and dark and breathing, breathing beneath her feet here in the center of this caern dedicated to its remembering and its forgetting.

And see there: there, at the epicenter of that blasted radius, a faint dusting of moon-silver. If Charlotte strains hard, she can just about see -- imagine? -- the trail that extends up into the unbound sky.

Black Sheep

Charlotte sometimes feels as if her skin were made of moonlight and her hair threaded with starlight. The moon loves her and she loves the moon, lifts her face up up up to it natural as anything, and howls a strange sort of greeting with her too-human throat. This is rite and ritual, this greeting, and as she offers it she does so in a way that is wholly conscious of the moment in which she finds herself.

Then she closes her eyes, and breathes out, a little bit ragged, a little bit nervous, a little bit proud. Thinks about the first time she met Erich and how walking at his side reminded her of Lauren, reminded her of what it must be like to be the prow of a great sea-going ship, cutting through the ocean.

Then: then, she turns herself to the scene. Takes in both the blast and the faint silvery trail climbing up into the sky in a way she cannot hope to follow.

Not naturally, not natively. Not in this form.

No matter.

She breathes out, unpuffs her boyish chest and unslings her messenger bag and gets to work. Charlotte unearths a small bowl of beaten copper and sets it down in the center of that blast radius and finds as well a small stoppered bottle of cold, clear water from the highest elevations. Pours the water (which sings, supple, with its own small power) and sets free the spirit bound within until the bowl is half-full and the moon has a mirror in which to admire herself.

And so begins the summoning ritual.

Black Sheep

(Gnosis to activate clear water talen)

Dice: 6 d10 TN4 (2, 5, 7, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 5 )

Black Sheep

wits + rituals!

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 2, 3, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Black Sheep

gnosis! going for a jaggling, spending 2 hours to invoke it. so difficulty 5, -2.

Dice: 6 d10 TN3 (1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )

-ascendance-

This takes time. It takes time to prepare the materials, and it takes time to perform the rite. To do it properly and respectfully and carefully; to gather power from inside herself, to channel it just so, to work that bright, subtle magic of hers. It takes so long that when the rite is at last complete, the speed with which it takes effect is almost shocking.

One moment Charlotte sits crosslegged before the bowl. The next, the bowl, the girl, the entirety of the caern's heart is suddenly and soundlessly lit with a blazing pale light, so bright that motes of dust in the air candesce, so bright that stones on the ground seem to levitate from their shadows carved black beneath them.

The source of that light hovers over the bowl. Other, more literal-minded Garou see Lunes as personifications: some see moon-maidens, lovely and svelte; some see crescented Men in the Moon; some few even see green cheese. Charlotte, however, is a Theurge, and her mind does not shy from the pure and the true. She sees the Lune as it is, as pure cold light, massless and heatless.

A faint, faint, faint music shimmers at the edges of her mind. The Lune awaits.

Black Sheep

Charlotte is smiling and lifting her face (pale eyes closed, pale lashes kissing her porcelain cheek) as soon as she senses the shimmering presence by the changing light visible through her eyelids. Lifts her face as if she were soaking up the warmth of the sun's rays, rather than the cool, perfectly reflective brilliance of the lune.

That music against her mind gives her such a fine, shivering little thrill and she opens her eyes then, and is somehow both beaming and swallowing her smile, not unlike the moon herself, holding it close and allowing the expression to be touched and framed by shadow as much as light.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

she sings right back at the spirit, in a language that admits no human words and few human thoughts and the rarest of human tongues.

Then:

Your sisterbrother was scared by the elicpse and soared up into the sky. Will you open a moonbridge that I might follow to find himher again?

-ascendance-

There is a sense of -- mirth, silvery ringing mirth, as well as perhaps just a touch of superiority. This is a Jaggling of the Moon: older, wiser, stronger than whatever poor daft sisterbrother it was that was frightened away. By shadows! Ha, ha, how silly.

A sudden tugging, somewhere between those narrow bird-bone shoulders, within that boyish ribcage. A bit of Charlotte's spirit-magic siphoned away, a price and a raw material both. The Lune spins, it coalesces, it flares impossibly bright and then -- !

A band of light, ten feet wide and as long as the eye can see, stretches into the sky. It approximates, vaguely, the celestial dust-trail left by the fleeing lune.

This Lune, this larger, stronger Lune, settles into a mellow glow. It is very pleased with itself, its strength, its beauty, its not-silliness.

Black Sheep

This time Charlotte's gratitude is more quiet. She beams at right back at the mellow-glowing spirit, whose self-satisfaction she can also taste humming in the air the air around it, read in the changing glow that suffuses it.

Charlotte waves, why not? a little threefingered wave as she gathers up her messenger back and folds herself from human girl to running-wolf, sleek and shimmering and pale-as-moonlight, and pads onto the moonbridge, and starts to run.

-ascendance-

She waves. The Lune glows brightly back.

Her forepaws touch the moonbridge, and -- speed, speed like you can hardly conceive of. Nothing goes faster in the universe than light, after all, and Charlotte is allowed to share some of that dizzying velocity. She runs, but she hardly needs to: the world around her streaks by whether or not she runs, pushed past her vision by the incredible speed of the moonbridge. The earth dropping away beneath her, the moon growing larger and larger and larger and larger, the atmosphere thinning and then she is amongst the stars, whose names she knows, whose faces she may one day see.

From this height she can see so far. The curvature of the breathing earth beneath; that aspect, that piece of the universe closest to Gaia herself. Its surface joined by a thousand silver arcs, some steady and strong, some winking on and off even as Charlotte watches. Other moonbridges, other travelers, other quests for glory or honor or salvation.

She must turn her eyes from them. She's looking for a single, lost lune, and it is so small, and it would be so easy to miss at this speed, this height. Perhaps she doesn't even dare blink.

[roll a percep+alert to see the lune! if successful, roll wits + athletics to get off the moonbridge!]

Black Sheep

Perception + Alertness!

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Black Sheep

Wits + Athletics!

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

-ascendance-

The earth, the stars, the distant sun, the enormous moon. Somewhere in this grand tapestry, huger and more brilliant than she could have imagined -- a tiny, tiny, tiny pinpoint of light that is neither star nor sun nor moon nor earth. Is it her quarry? Can she be sure? She can't be -- but there's no time to wonder. She leaps from the moonbridge,

which unlike all the others below does not arc from point to terrestrial point, but extends straight toward Luna's divine face,

and finds herself weightless; drifting gently on gravity's currents. She is closer to Luna now than she is to solid ground. The Aetherial Realm, they call this, but that's just a fancy word for space. If she were to cross over now, she would suffocate. Die a terrible, frozen death. Here, in Luna's shadow, in Her embrace, Charlotte is safe, surrounded by limitless distance and endless silence.

Not so far away now, that glimmer, that gleam. It is, indeed, a lune: smaller than her Lune, and still running. Fleeing toward mother moon, in whose gravity Charlotte herself is caught.

Black Sheep

So she runs. Moonlight dappled in her fur, moonlight stretched out light taffy beneath her paws, this rising wonder all around. The winking stars and the steady moon and the arcs lifting strangers through the vast demi-darkness that frames the fragile fastness of their world.

And she hardly needs to run, but she runs because she was made to run, because of the way it makes her heart pound and her tongue loll and her flanks heave, because of the way it makes her feel whole and entire and (not mad) alive.

There is so little time to everything in and around and above and below her in: because within all of this she must search and search and search, and how to connect this moondust trail, this passing spark with that which was below - ?

There is no time for that, either. The wolf leaps and tumbles in the fleeing spirit's wake.

And then: the wolf, too, begins to glow.

Tumbles nearly weightless, following in the little lune's wake, and calls out, in the spirit's tongue:

Wait, little brothersister, why do you run? The earth has given the moon back to us, there's no need to flee.

[-1 WP. Lambent flame so you know, she'll be awesome like a lune and less scary and not-illuminated.]

-ascendance-

Ahead of her, that little light, that small fleeing bright-thing -- it halts, it hesitates, it quivers in place

and then it keeps running. Homeward.

[Charlotte can attempt to overtake it with a resisted wits + athletics roll!]

Black Sheep

Wits + Athletics!

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )

-ascendance-

[resist! run!!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 6, 6) ( success x 2 )

-ascendance-

It flees! It zips ahead, skipping and winking and blinking, fast as it can. Charlotte gives chase, and in truth it is all a little silly, all very slow-motion in the immensity of space, where even if they were moving fast it would be impossible to tell simply for lack of a relative still-point. Relative to each other, though, Charlotte is gaining, little by little by little, until she is close enough to reach out and grab the little lune --

Black Sheep

Charisma (3) + Subterfuge (er....0). (Persuasion)

Dice: 3 d10 TN7 (3, 5, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Black Sheep

-- which is not precisely what she does. She does not grab the fleeing, fear-filled little spirit who has been running (and running or perhaps: soaring) for hours, or days, or centuries even perhaps because light moves at it's on impossible speed but even so, time passes, in the strangest of ways the farther one gets from the Tellurian.

Instead she tries to vault it or circle it and cut off its path, feints perhaps when he tries to swing around her, above or below, shakes herself off then, all glowing and lolls her tongue, lapping at her muzzle.

Little sisterbrother, why do you run!

-ascendance-

They play a slow-motion

(lightfast)

game of very serious tag: she cuts it off, it zips around, she feints, it flashes, she is there, there before it for just an instant, face-to-glow. Why does it run?

Its light is erratic, panicked. A burst of music between Charlotte's ears: The shadow will eat us all! And then it swerves around Charlotte. Flees, even faster, toward Luna's face.

Black Sheep

This time she tackles the little ball-of-light. Tackles and holds and hums and glows and spins the spirit around though she can hardly tell which side is which is which: the lune is simply a small patch of immanent light to hopefully face the impossible, impassible vision of the earth-below, rimmed right round with all its closest loves.

No Look back, look down. Look with me. The shadow is already gone. Who do you think is stronger? The earth just knelt in front of Luna to confess his love, then turned around again. Look down. Has the shadw eaten anyone? Anything?"

Black Sheep

Tackle?

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 9, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 3

-ascendance-

[ITALICS AMOK. resist!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 9) ( success x 1 )

-ascendance-

How does one tackle light? How is it even accomplished, except in the mind, in the consciousness? Luckily for Charlotte, mind and spirit is all they are here. These are not bodies, see; they are just projections of psyche, of ego, of self, lit from within by that spark of triatic magic that makes them what they are. A spirit, in the case of the little lune. Half-spirit, more-than-half, in the case of Charlotte.

Regardless: she tackles the lune. And she connects, she feels the impact, she feels its form. Her mind interprets it as light. Everything is light, the whole world is light when she holds that small shard of the moon in her paws. She is blinded, she can't tell which way is forward on the spirit and she can't tell which way is earthward, but she makes her best approximation and points one to the other and

and the lune bursts out angrily:

What? No! Not EARTH'S shadow, stupid! Silly meat-thing! Stupid barking loud no-glow meat-wolf! Why I be afraid of earth-shadow! I not stupid silly barking loud! LET GO.

Black Sheep

Oh.

Oh.

This startled, startling pause from the chasing-wolf and her grip does not go slack but were the Lune a corporeal thing made of meat and blood and skin and it would feel how the news takes her by such surprise that she does not even seem to hear the invocations of herself as stupid silly barking loud!

(Though later, Charlotte will remember: how the moon's children sense the world.)

[i]Wait. What shadow do you mean? What shadow. Tell me and we will stop it, little sisterbrother, and keep you safe. [/i]

-ascendance-

The SHADOW, exclaims the little lune, quite impatient and exasperated and my if the wolfthings weren't terribly inelegant and noisy and clanky and slow. The shadow the shadow the shadow the shadow! How many times I say!

It twists itself adamantly from Charlotte's grasp. It spins, quite fast, whizzing around and around and around like a miniature moon gone mad, until every last strand of fur has been whirled away from its light. Then it settles -- somewhat -- into glowing, glowering indignation.

The BAD SHADOW, it repeats, very slowly now, that My Mother The Moon defeated and made-small and sent away many many many many turnings ago.

Except it bad, it not stay away, it comes back when her back is turned. We Lunes learned! We not slow-dumb like meat-wolves. We fast-smart. We learned be keep watch keep vigil keep careful when Mother's back is turned. We keep shadow where it belong.

But this time! Her back not turned. It just, stupid fat Earth put Mother in his shadow and Mother was all oh hello there and not looking and we not looking either. And the Shadow got out! And no one else saw! Just me. But it will get big big big again if I not stop it, so I have to stop it, so I have to tell My Mother The Moon that the Shadow got out, and then I have to stop it.

A taut silence, fairly vibrating with outrage. Then a very loud jangle of notes in Charlotte's brain:

SO GET OUT OF WAY, SILLY MEAT-WOLF.

Black Sheep

There is again and oh, and an oh, and an oh, echoing in her half-feral half-human, more than half-made mind and Charlotte-wolf cannot help but communicate that back to the spirit whom she has tackled in the gravity-less vastness of space.

Oh.

says she.

And, Well.

I'm going to let you go, but I'm coming with you then. We'll stop it together. Deal?

She does not need to wait for his assent, precisely. She can match his speed in this space that welcomes them, in the shadow of the impossible moon. She can match his speed -

- but Deal? you understand, is a pact, a negotiation, a pledge. She will release the Lune and let it go unimpeded. In exchange: it will allow her - facilitate, even - her following.

And they will stop the Shadow, together.

-ascendance-

Grumpily, the little lune shivers in place.

At last, a tiny concession: If Mother Moon is agree with.

It is the best she'll get for now.

-ascendance-

Onward they drift, then -- caught in the invisible embrace of Luna's gravity. It seems to take an interminably long time, and for quite a while they hardly seem to be moving at all. Perhaps Charlotte asks why the little lune doesn't just moonbridge home. If she does, she is met with a scathing silence followed, at length, with the chagrined admission that the little lune doesn't even know how to open a moonbridge yet, it was so recently dreamed into being.

Eventually, though, it becomes clear they are moving. Luna's face grows larger, and larger, and larger, and with every passing moment the increase seems to accelerate until -- at last -- they are so near that Charlotte realizes they are, and have been, moving quite fast indeed.

She can make out details on the surface below, now. Shifting, immaterial hints of moon-palaces and shimmering silver lakes; perhaps here a mighty warrior of Luna's personal guard, perhaps there a diaphanous moon-maiden. As they get closer still, those half-envisioned dreams coalesce into a single discrete impression. Charlotte sees a great silvery palace stretching horizon to horizon, rising to a black, star-strewn sky. In the naked light of the sun, the walls are mirror-bright, almost too brilliant to look upon.

The little lune, too, has taken a recognizable shape. It is a hare: small, scrawny, twitchy-nosed, long-eared. It carries on its back a tiny mortar-and-pestle, and a small satchel of ... something.

Impatiently, it runs ahead of Charlotte, every so often rising to its hind legs to look back at her. When they come to the base of those mighty walls, Charlotte sees that they stand before a set of great doors.

"You better not knock," the little lune cautions. "It burn you. I knock!"

And so it does. Tap, tap, tap.

Black Sheep

Charlotte cannot encompass all that she sees. She cannot contain it. She feels both whole and also somehow as if she were composed of something so essential and so entire that somehow it is being both constantly shed and continously renewed. She glows, too, of course, although the closer they come to Luna's face, the more feeble that illumination (so bright on the dark face of the earth) comes to seem. Dim, retreating, retiring.

Her mouth lolls open, droll, when she suggests a moon bridge and the small spirits admits that it doesn't know how and some part of her that is made of and by and for joy, light, brilliance and not merely madness must be aware of the droll picture they present: the small spirit and the small wolf, approaching the face of a Celestine. Her palace, too bright to look upon, but somehow -

- she thought that Luna's light would be cool. Isn't it Helios who burns his way through the sky? She barks/thinks as much at the little lune who cautions her against knocking, then sinks back on her haunches and rises,

and rises and rises,

into her formal warform. Crinos. It seems the only respectful way to approach a Celestine's gate.

-ascendance-

"It not hot," the little lune is exasperated -- but let us admit: also a little smug, a little proud, a little happy to be feeling a little superior right now, which is a feeling that is even harder to come by for this little lune than it was for the somewhat bigger Lune back home. "It made of moonsilver. It burn you, not burn me."

Anyhow: tap tap tap, and tap tap tap again. Then, after what seems like an eternity of silence, and all at once:

the mighty doors

begin

to open.

Light! A mind-shocking amount of light, pure and pale, yes, cold, comes flooding from that tiny crack, which is millimeters wide but miles tall. As the door swings wider, wider, wider, the intensity of that light grows -- and yet never quite blinds. It simply floods, overwhelms, thoroughly suffuses, until Charlotte feels she must be aglow inside and out, that even the pupils of her eyes must be full of light.

Inside, barely glimpsed: impossibly high ceilings, long hallways. Walls of blazing silver hung with tapestries of pure silver thread, where only a difference in texture and direction gives rise to form. Tall, slender beings, beautiful and eldritch and draped in cloths for which we have no name, move amidst those wonders.

Standing in the doorway is a mighty Lune. It has taken the form, more or less, of a man: a man twice as tall as a human, with skin like polished silver, with a face hidden behind a featureless, edgeless, smooth helm. The soft wings of a moth sprout from his shoulders, as pure silver as the rest of him, shedding silvery dust around his feet.

He eyes the odd couple on Luna's doorstep; or one supposes he eyes, because he lowers his chin and faces them. He folds his arms across his chest and awaits explanation.

Black Sheep

Oh,

sounds much stranger rumbled through a warformed garou's massive frame, and yet that is the sound she makes when the little lune explains: no, not hot. Silver. Fire.

But beyond, beneath, below that there is no suggestion of chagrin on the creature's face. Expressive as Garou are, there is little place for chagrin in their world. It does not suit them, so instead the lilt of a brow, the curl of the creature's maw, the gleam in her eyes read instead of pride, of purity, the echo of heroes long since dead and gone to ruin.

This SmallOne, rumbling and liquid and strange and nameless, the language of the spirits from the chest of a Crinos. She indicates, of course, the small lune, sent to Earth and Forgotten Questions to saw a shadow that had been chained and bound break free whe the earth shadowed the moon. No other saw the shadow break free. Little brothersister has come to warn her Mother of the escape, and I have come to aid him in returning the shadow to its chains.

-ascendance-

Towering over them, the guardian of Luna's palace listens silently, impassively. When Charlotte finishes, he turns without a word.

The door shuts.

The door opens: it is the guardian again, moth-wings draped like a cloak. For all his imposing size and stature, he has a voice as clear as bells:

My Mother the Moon acknowledges your news and grants you the honor of this quest. Go forth with Her blessings, small ones, and discover the truth of this unbound shadow. Uphold the glory of our Lady with all your courage and all your might.

Beside her, the little lune, who was quite dumbstruck in the presence of such a mighty brother, sweeps a startlingly pretty bow, right down to the shining ground. "Thank you, big brother! We not fail! Thank you thank you!"