Moonlight Relic, Ch 17: Moonrise (Patreon)

Sam frowned at the sun as he ran. It was too bad he couldn’t make it move backward. There were only four and a half days left until the alignment now. By the time they returned to the village, it had already been evening and his aura was fluctuating. The star had insisted he rest again to stabilize it.

His healing had advanced by another 7%, helped along by a couple more drumbeats from the dwarves. It left him at 33.5%, but the lost time bothered him and he was going to make it. He needed 28 hours to repair the relic, assuming nothing went wrong, and he planned to get it done in one go. Sleeping again could wait.

The star was tracking the adventurers and monsters that had flooded the ruins, and so far only a few had made it to the first layer. None of them had bothered Lesat and Lenei yet, but things could change quickly. Eventually, something was going to cause a problem.

How many now? he asked. Are they heading for the peak?

More than 1,200 adventurers are currently within the domain of the relic, the star replied instantly. The number of monsters has passed four hundred and is increasing. It has doubled since yesterday. The bottom three layers are flooded with battles, but the average level of the monsters is relatively low at 48, which is limiting trouble for now. Stronger ones are trickling in.

Sam nodded. Many of the higher-level monsters in the ruins had been killed recently. He also wouldn’t be surprised if Elsanar and the other ice drakes were targeting the strongest of the new arrivals and eliminating them before they could become a threat. The peaks were their territory.

Unfortunately, there weren’t that many of the drakes. If too many monsters came, even with their help, it would be a bloodbath. He felt a little responsible for that, but he also hadn’t encouraged all of the adventurers to come here. They were seeking wealth and fortune. If they got in over their heads, that was on them.

What’s the average level of the adventurers?

56, if you only count the ones below Level 100. However, there are 39 at the First Evolution and that number continues to increase. The Light of Silvas has attracted the attention of the stronger local forces, as well as some that are more distant.

Small contingents of the Highfold city guard are now patrolling the first two layers where they border the city. They are killing the monsters they encounter and attempting to prevent disputes.

The number of adventurers was growing by the hour. He’d known the light would attract attention, but he hadn’t realized just how much. The repairs needed to be completed as soon as possible and then he’d find a way to bunker down and stay out of conflicts while waiting for the alignment.

If they let him. He snorted as he pushed the thought away. He would deal with visitors as they came. A few moments later, another drumbeat resonated through the valley. This time, he just let out a hiss of air as he doubled over, doing his best to keep his muscles under control as they tried to shudder.

His attention fixed on the wave of energy from the drum as he tried to analyze it, but it was gone in a flicker. The star’s voice resonated in his mind, telling him that his aura had stabilized by another half a point.

A moment later, a distant roar tore across the slope in response, echoing between the peaks. It was a strange, quavering roar, halfway between being a cough and a scream, as if were stuck in the throat of the monster, but it carried a force that rattled across the snow and sent mini-avalanches from the roofs of the ruined buildings.

It was not a reassuring sound and Sam’s head snapped toward it, analyzing the distance and what it could be. A crack of lightning flared through the sky, slamming down toward the origin of the roar.

Battle detected, the star announced calmly. A Level 116 White Mountain Jaguar is fighting a Level 174 Aether Mage-Storm Knight. Range: 9.7 miles.

After a moment, the roars grew faint as the battle became more distant, but it left a deep frown etched on Sam’s features. The jaguar might be manageable, but he didn’t want to meet whoever the adventurer was. He didn’t have a good way to deal with someone at that level.

“Let’s get up to the peak,” he muttered as he began running again. “The sooner the repairs are done, the sooner we can let the adventurers fight it out amongst themselves.”
---

It took him another hour to reach the peak. On the way, he checked on Lenei and Lesat. They had finished fortifying an old house as the camp and had done their best to camouflage the entrance, making it look like a pile of snow and rubble except for a small entrance on one side. So far, they had avoided attention. A lot of that was because communication artifacts and sensing spells didn’t work well in the ruins, especially near the peak. Not without the relic’s authorization.

The teleportation tore at his aura as he transferred up, ripping away the benefit he’d just gained from the drumbeat. He let out a deep breath as he located the next repair point and glided down from the plateau, preparing himself for a long session.

The wind howled with cutting force against the ledge as he landed and he redirected it to press him against the cliff. The stone beneath his feet was only a couple of inches wide, not even enough to get his boots all the way on it. He braced himself on the toe of one foot and the edge of the other.

This area was smaller than the last one, a shallow indent in the cliff that might once have been a decoration, but whatever was here had been torn away, leaving layers of shattered greenstone behind. The transfer line had crossed through here, but much of the greenstone that had shaped it was missing and the aura was scattered.

Ripples of moonlight flowed around him as he sank his hands into the stone, digging out handholds as he forced the greenstone aside. His new authority made it possible to move the material now, but it took a lot of effort. Every piece of it was interlocked with the rest, with bonds stronger than a diamond, and he had to force them to move.

How it had been broken in the first place.... He shoved the question away as he poured his aura into the wall and settled in for the work ahead.

---

The sun passed noon and fell as the heavens turned to dusk, replaced by the three moons. This night, they were different than before. As they crested the horizon, they rose like looming giants above the world. They were so close it felt like he could reach out and touch them, at least four times their normal size and nearly full, with just a sliver missing. As soon as they were visible, dense fluctuations of energy flowed from them with a heavy, rippling weight that pressed down on the peaks.

When the first beams struck the relic, the ruins shuddered. It felt like the mountains were heaving, as if a giant beast suddenly awoke and shook its back. The cliff beneath Sam’s hands felt like it was pulling away from him and then slamming back, although his hands never left it. It was enough to tell him that it wasn’t a physical movement.

The energy sank into the stones, flooding the cliff beneath his hands and the ruins that sprawled for more than a hundred miles in every direction. Chimes called to chimes throughout the relic as points of power awoke. Sudden avalanches tore down the slopes as buildings shook free and pillars began to rise into the air.

In some places, a field of snow covering a basin suddenly melted, leaving a shallow pool at the bottom that began to slowly churn, filling with energy as it turned to a crystalline liquid glowed a deep green. In other places, it was blue or yellow, red or white. In other places, the pillars rose upward as rippling bands of energy flared from point to point between them. Runes were born as the lines connected, decorating the sky between the buildings and the moons.

The pillars glowed as energy poured down them, flooding the stones beneath. Anyone under the First Evolution who happened to be sleeping or fighting in the buildings below them was bombarded with mana so intense that they couldn’t breathe. The old shielding enchantments that would have redirected the energy were gone and unable to protect them. Their skin began to rupture, their meridians fraying as they were slowly burned.

They ran or they died where they stood.

The point of Winter Peak to the south and Sky’s Descent to the north began to burn with a three-colored flame as the ice sealing them shattered. Great plateaus unfolded at the top as massive crystal spheres appeared, rising into the air. At the top of Sun’s Rest on the control plateau, the central pillar burned with three-colored runes as it rose upward, until a sphere of roiling energy surrounded it like the heart of a star.

The pillar’s presence burned in Sam’s mind like his own heartbeat, and even from the cliffside, he could see it in his mind as clearly as day. Runes arced around it like solar flares, flaring as part of the core enchantment was visible. The pillar was hidden behind the plateau’s command shield, but the rounded edge of the barrier glowed with the energy, turning the entire peak into an enormous sphere of power that matched the other two mountains.

Four nights remained until the alignment, but the relic was awake. The moons were on their closest approach to Aster Fall and the energy from them was enough to activate the enchantments that still functioned. And it didn’t stop there.

Pillars of energy shot upward from each of the massive crystal spheres on the peaks, flaring away as they approached the moons. Blue from Sun’s Rest stretched up to Caelus, green from Winter’s Peak reached to Silvas, and purple from Sky’s Descent reached to Amaris. When they touched the moons, the pillars doubled in size and reversed their flow as energy poured downward with a mighty thrum that shook the earth again.

From peak to peak, in the neighboring mountains of the Western Reaches, clear pillars became visible, marking out a line that stretched to the horizon. They weren’t the moonlight crystals of the relic, but instead placeholders, marking out where the line of guardian artifacts would have been. Then, on those same peaks, foggy figures began to fade into existence, becoming more corporeal by the instant.

On one peak, there was a sinuous, curving drake, ten times larger than Elsanar, whose body shone with translucent, ice white scales. On another, there was a thin woman in a white robe, her hood pushed down on her back. She held a pale staff in one hand and her hair was a flowing river of water that poured out onto the ground behind her, and her eyes were deep crimson. On a third, there was a twenty-foot-tall minotaur, his body as powerful as a giant, as he lifted a boulder above his head.

Then a tree, as thick across as a dozen men, its emerald branches towering outward as gnarled roots wrapped around the slope below, and a floating, opalescent sphere whose surface rippled like water as it hovered there. There was a large leopard, its fur as dusky as shadows that blended into the night, with eyes like yellow diamonds and enormous claws that glistened with shining blood, and finally a great icy whirlwind that spun in place as jagged, lightning-edged eyes shone from the center.

One by one, the figures turned their attention to the moons above the world, their gazes solemn and unflinching as they witnessed their rise. And then between one moment and the next, they were gone again, their forms dissipating from the peaks as the wind howled in the night. Whether it was due to power or tradition, none of them stepped foot on the central mountain. They only watched from a distance.

Sam’s mind shook as a tidal wave of force crashed through the transfer lines. Unwilling to let go of his work, he poured all of his energy into maintaining his hold on the gathered aura.

A rolling vibration of energy passed through the relic, echoing through the greenstone as it passed from one peak to the next, until all three mountains were humming, each of them a different, deep note that vibrated in the earth and rose up to the heavens.

At the same moment, the rolling drumbeat of the dwarven drums echoed through the earth, as if they were welcoming the arrival of the moons. This time, it wasn’t just one drum, but many sounding one after the other. A rolling cascade of bass notes rippled through the world, adding an accompaniment to the song of the mountains.

The energy from every side struck Sam like hammers, slamming into his meridians, heart, and hands that were gripping the greenstone, making him shudder like a leaf in the wind. The scattered aura he had spent the last ten hours working on burned, twisting powerfully as it was pulled by a massive current. It surged like a boiling sea as it flooded toward him, tearing through the stone as it headed toward the closest intact line in the relic.

He growled as he threw himself into the middle of the surge, placing himself like a rock in the middle of the flood as he tried to split part of it away, pushing it toward his own line. There was no way he was letting it escape from his grasp. If it wanted to find a transfer line, it was going to find the one he’d just carved. His mind was a knife blade dancing on top of a drum as he pulled at it.

The torrent crashed into him with an explosive echo that resonated through his bones. If he had been any other entity, it would have burned through him and out the other side, but in him it found its own pattern. He was connected to the relic, and it poured through that channel. All around him, a moonlight aura flared upward, rising higher and higher into the sky until a new pillar of light reached to the heavens.

Crackling pain flared through his battered consciousness as he struggled to shove the aura toward the new line. It was like pushing at an approaching tide, a thousand times stronger than what he’d been trying to gather. The only thing that let him endure was his aura absorbing nearly all of the energy.

The relic recognized its own and poured into him the same way it would into any enchantment forged in greenstone. An explosion of silver light burned through the new transfer line, but at the same time, his aura grew at a reckless pace, towering higher and higher into the air.

He struggled to drag himself out of the torrent until a crashing wave of energy struck his back and he flew free. His feet slipped from their perch and the handholds that he’d carved were nowhere to be found. His attempt to grab the cliff failed as he twisted wildly. Air whistled past his ears as he fell. His aura continued to flare around him, leaving a bar of triple-colored moonlight streaking through the dark. One new pillar joined the others, this one stretching from sky to earth.

His mind was alive with pain as every nerve in his body screamed at him and his meridians began to twist out of control. He was surging with a massive amount of silver aura, so much that he couldn’t channel it. It roared through his muscles and bones with violent explosions of power.

Craaaack!

He was already saturated with experience for his Evolution, but this aura was exponentially more powerful than what was there. His body let out a series of snapping echoes as his joints and meridians realigned, compressing and then expanding again as new space was created, over and over, and the energy continued pouring through him. The cycle was so fast that he could barely comprehend it, with multiple revolutions in a split second. There was just a tearing pain.

Fortunately, the aura intended him no true harm. It was empowering something that was part of it, as it had been designed to do. His moonlight aura, battle aura, racial abilities, and body were formed from essence and the elements. He was very similar to a complex, living enchantment. The aura flowed through the pattern it found and activated it.

All Sam could sense was the width of his meridians and his muscles expanding and contracting again, ricocheting back and forth in a violent cycle as he was torn and reformed. His innate Fire Affinity and other racial abilities burned higher as they absorbed the silver aura, and he felt his attributes changing. His body expanded, his horns stretching upward as they curved over his head. His height increased by a foot, and his muscles swelled.

The figure falling through the air rippled as the Horned Hunter of the Moons appeared again. The last time he’d been seen on the mountain, he was shrouded in an illusion of moonlight and shadow that made him appear taller. This time, there was no illusion. A muscular, seven-foot-tall demon with horns that added another foot roared with pain as he crashed into the snow.

His voice tore down through the mountains in a shock wave that echoed past the fighting adventurers and terrified the monsters as it resonated from cliff to cliff. His voice was deeper than before, layered with a compelling depth from the power resonating in it, but it was still the same roar that had echoed out on the night the Grand Flaw was closed.

The inhabitants of the valley turned their heads toward the mountain, looking up to the peak of mountains where the Three Crowns were visible for the first time, as they searched for the form of the Horned Hunter that the rumors spoke of. In Highfold, banners and fireworks unfurled as the celebration truly began.