Chapter 77: The Three Moons Converge
It was a phantom, I told myself. A simple hallucination born of exhaustion and a brain starved of blood. That had to be it. Everything was normal, except for the leaden weight in my skull, a feeling reminiscent of the fever I had just broken. It was the exhaustion, nothing more.
“Parula, you really need to sleep,” Jared insisted, his voice tight with an anxiety that was almost religious as he stared up at the sky from the entrance of our alcove. “The moons are about to converge.”
“Hmm?” I was genuinely curious what could make him so tense. I walked to the entrance and looked up. The sky was clear tonight, the usual smog having thinned, revealing a celestial display of impossible beauty and dread. Three moons hung in the blackness like the eyes of strange, celestial beasts, bleeding three different colours of light onto the fog below. Just as Jared had said, the largest moon, a great crimson orb, and the smallest, a sickly green one, were drawing close, about to overlap. But something was wrong. The green moon was less than half the size of the red one, yet the shadow it cast upon its larger neighbour was wrong. It was too large, too absolute, a patch of pure void that seemed to devour the red moon's bloody light, defying the simple laws of optics.
The city was eerily silent. I looked out along the waterway; even the vagrants were asleep, curled up around the dying embers of their fires or huddled together for warmth by the steam vents. Not a soul stirred. A cold wind snaked its way down the canal, and I shivered, shrinking back into the relative warmth of our hovel.
“It’s fine,” I told Jared, trying to sound reassuring. “It’s just a natural phenomenon, an eclipse. Nothing to be afraid of. Do they do this every night?” I immediately realized the folly of trying to explain celestial mechanics to a boy with no concept of astronomy, especially in a system with three moons whose orbits I couldn’t begin to calculate.
“No,” he said, his voice grim. “It only happens every now and then. But whenever any two moons converge, terrible things happen. And the old ones say that when all three converge at once, a great disaster is sure to follow.”
“Have you ever seen all three converge?” I asked, my scientific curiosity piqued.
“Once,” he said, nodding. “Three days ago. The whole city was in a panic. Everyone was saying a great disaster was coming.”
Three days ago? The words hit me like a physical blow. My blood ran cold. That was the day I had arrived in this world. The day of the so-called great disaster. Could it just be a coincidence? It had to be. My arrival, my small, pathetic life, it was hardly a world-ending event. I was just a pebble tossed into a vast, dark ocean, incapable of making a ripple, let alone a wave.
“So,” I said, my voice carefully neutral, “did you see a great disaster?”
“No,” Jared admitted, shaking his head. “Though, nearly being killed by a witch today was bad enough.”
“Exactly,” I said with a dismissive wave of my hand. “It’s all just superstition. You saw it with your own eyes. The three moons converged, and nothing happened.”
“But… maybe the disaster happened somewhere else,” he argued, unwilling to let go of the ingrained fear. “Somewhere we couldn’t see.”
“Alright, alright, I’m going to sleep,” I said with a sigh. It wasn’t his superstition that finally convinced me. It was the simple, undeniable fact that I was exhausted. While I had been engrossed in the grimoire, I hadn’t felt it. But now, with the book closed, a profound, unnatural exhaustion, cold and heavy as a shroud, had settled deep in my bones. My eyelids felt like lead weights. It seemed that deciphering those ancient, forbidden texts had exacted a heavy price on my mind and body. Yawn... I'd better get under the blanket.
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