The Moonless Sky
The sun dips beneath the western horizon and night unfurls her banners. As the light fades, you can spot Miris, the First Star, flickering in the eastern sky. In a world of chaos, there is something comforting about Miris’s continued existence, something reassuring.
It’s hard to make out the stars these days. Flickering auroras of red and purple light undulate across the sky, obscuring the paler stars.
And there is no moon.
You miss the moon, more than you thought you would.
It vanished during the War, obscured by clouds of ash and fire. When the atmosphere had settled, the moon was gone.
Without the moon, the nights on Odekor are darker. The flickering auroras provide some illumination but not enough. The stars are obscured by those same auroras, except for the brightest and some of those seem to have changed position.
Some survivors have speculated that without the moon, Odekor’s axial tilt is changing. They claim that’s the reason for the shifting climate, the earthquakes and tsunamis.
The empyrean, Nelesene, claims that the moon was not destroyed but passed through a planar portal and now drifts through the Astral Plane. She is confident it will return to Odekor’s orbit at some point in the future. To date, no one has cared enough to dispute her prediction or question how she knows any of this.
The truth is actually much stranger.
Odekor’s moon has been devoured by a monstrous outsider called Yshaghal. The outsider swallowed the moon whole and has lapsed into a deep sleep, akin to hibernation, while it digests it. The auroras that paint Odekor’s sky red and purple at night are a physical manifestation of Yshaghal’s dreams.
When it finishes digesting the moon, Yshaghal will wake. If it’s still feeling peckish, it might try to take a bite out of Odekor itself. If it’s not hungry, it will probably excrete whatever’s left of the moon. This could result in Odekor being pelted by massive meteors in a literal apocalyptic shitstorm. Or the lunar remains could coalesce into a ring system around the planet.
Either way, in about fifty years, Odekor’s moon will reappear.
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