Harvest 11, 855
As her blow fell, Sister Moon shrieked with rage and triumph. This boy — this mortal, Zadyan boy — thought he could defy her? The audacity lit a fire in her belly, burning hot and bright as she focused her power to a fine point. He should have knelt, begging to be her Chosen until he ran out of tears to beg with. Ungrateful piglet.
When you are the only ‘evil’ god in your pantheon, people attribute every bad thing in their lives to you. While this is terribly unfair, it does mean that while some gods only receive belief for a good harvest, or a healthy birth, you benefit from a rising tide of belief anytime something goes wrong – whether you had something to do with it or not. Goody-two-shoes gods only ever gain favour over one or two domains: war, or hunting, or motherhood. But as the Family’s scapegoat for all things evil, Sister Moon gained power over many, many facets of life: murders, monsters, darkness, nightmares, and – helpfully in this moment – madness. If the boy would not help her in his right mind, he would most certainly grovel for the chance in his wrong one.
If she had been in a physical place, subject to gravity and other nonsense, she would have toppled forward with her momentum as Buu disappeared. He vanished with a flicker, leaving her hands to close on empty air. For a moment, she could only blink at the space he had occupied.
The fire in her stomach reached new heights, heating her face as she gnashed her teeth. Skin prickling, Sister Moon bellowed wordless anger, vision going red as she took out her rage on the nearest imagined tree. She shredded it easily with bare hands and moved onto the next until she stood at the center of an empty clearing, panting and calm enough to switch faces.
With a shake of her head, her faces slid from one place to the next, making room for one another as they went. Her first face — the one she started with all those millennia ago — came to the fore once more, bringing with it calculation and cunning. She took a moment to smooth her clothes, willing away stray splinters and bark pieces from the shattered trees.
Now, why should we let him get away that easily? She thought to herself, and in a moment, she had stepped out of the nightmare. Her path to the living, material world of her followers opened itself to her, ethereal and nondescript. It didn’t take long before she saw ghosts.
Removing Tuag from his role as shepherd and putting him into a physical body had been a necessary step in her larger plans — a crucial proof of concept — but she had to admit, she hadn’t thought through the consequences. The dead meandered directionless through the between-places of the world, growing so thick in spots that Sister Moon had to do the spiritual equivalent of elbowing her way between them.
Things didn’t clear up much when she broke into the material, her consciousness travelling along a beam of moonlight. The world clamoured with spirits, wandering aimless and unable to push past their comrades to get anywhere else. Soon, not even mortals would be able to ignore them.
Here and there, living souls shone brightly, their glows ebbing and flowing with the slow, gentle breathing of sleep. She scanned them but saw no sign of Buu. She did spot Tuag, however, staring grimly at her moonbeam with the eyes she had given him.
The boy should have been right here. He should have been a bright, wakeful glow amongst the shuffling grey of dead souls. She had followed his nightmare here, but she couldn’t see him. When Tuag bared his teeth — those clever pieces of artifice that actually stood a chance of hurting a moonbeam — Sister Moon took one last look around, and left.
Why do you care? She thought, picturing Tuag’s defensive posture. She had assumed that his attachment to the boy had been an alignment of natures — the traditional reason for such things — but the boy had looked horrified at the idea of dominance. He held none of the hunger that drove the grimm.
The boy had to be close. Why else would Tuag bother being defensive if the thing he wanted to defend wasn’t near? Sister Moon considered looping back, waiting until the boy fell back asleep and snatching him into a nightmare before a dream could save him, but she felt the tug on her awareness. One of her other avatars asking for her urgent attention, a continent away. Distance didn’t matter to Sister Moon, but despite her four faces, she could only focus on one thing at a time. She would have to hope this Eastern mess held steady until she could return.