Heavenly body
The Moon
“It wasn’t a hunger to eat. It was a hunger to keep.”
Noctra is the name that the books of the Ancients gave the Moon. During the Equinox she was the dark disc that covered almost all of the Sun, a coin with a ring of fire around it. Awake, she rises out of the Dew Sea in the west, enormous, white and whole, “as if the waters were pushing her up”. Her light falls like spilled silver, makes everything cold and sharp and blue, and turns the faces of the living white as the faces of the dead. Anyone she looks at feels it, like a cold hand on the back of the neck.
She wants rest, secrecy and memory, and she keeps the dead. Her excess is the cold that freezes the world for ever. In the chest of anyone with a silver Core, she pulls “like a fishhook”. Her cycle runs for thirty nights, and no one in Vesper had known what phases were.
Her land is the west: Nocturna, the city of glass on its black islands, the mist of the Dew Sea, and the moors down to the Vale of Echoes. Choose one of its places to continue.
Places
Nocturna
A city of dark glass towers on black basalt islands, where the Dew Sea reaches into the land and time is told by the mist.
The Glass Palace
Seven towers of violet glass bound together like a sheaf of spears, with no doors, only curtains of black silk: the seat of the Court of Night.
The Glass Market
A flat slab of basalt crowded with stalls of wood and glass, lit by moonmoss lanterns: the first square a stranger sees in Nocturna.
The Dew Sea
The dark ocean around Lumen: mist that never ended, dew that becomes light, and the islands the Court calls its own.
The Night Moors
Three strips of heather, peat and saltmarsh between the Twilight Line and the sea, which flowered violet in the first week of sun.
The Vale of Echoes
A granite gorge scattered with nameless graves, where the Echoes of the unwanted dead have always gone, and where something starless has begun to feed.