Zeroth Moment: My Cheat Skill Is Stupid, So I'll Just Ignore It

The flight into the cold darkness above took, in Topher's estimation, an uncomfortably long time; for the first ten minutes or so, he could at least make the excuse that managing their velocity was taking up a good portion of his concentration. But as the silence between him and Hana stretched past awkwardness and into strained discomfiture, he began to find himself sweating despite the constantly dropping temperature. This blows, he thought to himself sourly. When I threw my little I'm-the-bad-guy-now tantrum back there, I wasn't expecting to have to sit next to the consequences for exactly this long.

Probably why smart people don't do that kind of thing at all, the distant part of his mind prodded him mercilessly. Topher snarled at himself mentally, but couldn't disagree, either.

"Bailey-sama," Hana cut in unexpectedly, "are you still accelerating us towards the moon? I think I can feel the inertia, but it's hard to tell without nearby objects for reference."

"Yeah," Topher admitted. "I don't want to drift off if I let up, or something."

The young Japanese woman held one hand up in front of her face with her thumb and finger in an L-shape, squinting at the approaching moon; she then twisted around and did the same behind them before sucking in a short breath. "Bailey-sama, you may need to begin decelerating at around the halfway mark, which I believe we're approaching. If we don't slow down, we might... ah, have too much velocity."

"Slam into the moon and explode, you mean?" Topher sighed. Well, I'd probably survive, but that doesn't mean I'd enjoy it. Plus, who knows what we'll be greeted with. Nodding, he stretched the tendrils of his will behind him and anchored himself equidistantly between the ground below and the moon above; instantly, he felt a sort of dynamic tension along his links, giving him a sense of his relative velocities. He wasn't approaching as fast as he'd feared -- the air resistance within the strange, non-vacuum void between the worlds appeared to limit his maximum speed to something close to what would have been terminal velocity in a standard atmosphere. He frowned. That probably shouldn't be enough to reach escape velocity. I guess maybe the gravitational pull is different here? "I think I've got it. Hold on..."

Slowly, he pulled back and forth between the two sources, braking and accelerating in turn, until he felt like he had a good handle on their movement; then, cautiously, he pulled more strongly on the moon, accelerating again. He was beginning to notice a slight gravitational pull from it now, which eased a worry he didn't know he'd been carrying. "I think we're good. The air out here prevents us from going as fast as we would in real outer space, back home; it's a little weird, since my connection to each point becomes stronger and weaker as we get closer or farther. But I can always cast Feather Fall once we get close to the ground."

Hana nodded, her limbs tightening around him a little. "Okay." She fell silent for a while, and they watched together as the moon continued to expand above them.

"I fucked up," Topher blurted suddenly, feeling awkward and selfish. "I almost did exactly what he wanted me to. And Quint and the others..."

"Will probably forgive you," Hana murmured. "They're people too, Bailey-sama. I'm sure they've had their fair share of... emotional difficulties."

Topher shook his head. "That's not what I mean." He crossed his arms over his chest, trying to keep the broken pieces of his heart together. "They'll be scared of me now. Quint especially. Up until now, they were all content to watch me get stronger, because I was on their side. But now they've had their faces rubbed in the fact that I can stomp all over them if I want, the fear that I might do it again will always be in the backs of their minds. Even if they forgive, they won't forget." He bit his lip. "I know I wouldn't."

Hana stirred against his back, as if beginning a protest, then stopped and fell silent. "I know. Just like you and Zee won't forget." Topher cursed himself; he'd made her struggles about himself again, as usual. "But Bailey-sama, don't make my mistake. Don't let fear push you into protecting yourself so much that you lash out at the people who want to help you." She shivered. "Why is it so cold? Shouldn't our items protect us from temperatures?"

Oh shit, I forgot about that. Topher exhaled, his breath condensing in front of his face; it wasn't that cold, but it was worse than he'd been expecting. "Weird. I thought I was just anxious, but..." He murmured the runes for Protection from Cold, but nothing happened; his eyes widened as the realization stole over him, and the slow, insidious deadness that had crept into him without his noticing suddenly became apparent. "Oh, shit. There's antimagic, just like when we fought Kalphegor and that undead elf archmage. Shit, shit...!"

The moon was growing so large in front of them that it blotted out the sky now; he shifted himself, rotating them both so that his feet pointed towards the moon, and his perspective moved along with it. The ground beneath them abruptly became a stone sky, distant and wisp-shrouded, where a barely-glimpsed moat of misty seas formed a halo around the strange, blotchy landmass in the center; conversely, the stony surface below them was becoming illuminated as the sun retreated into a glowing pool at the edge of the far-away ocean. It sets through the water, Topher marveled; and as the sun's radiance became dimmed by the briny deeps overhead, the moon's surface brightened in proportion, glowing with a cold, silvery radiance beneath their boots as they drifted nearer.

"Bailey-sama," Hana yelped suddenly, "Bailey-sama, slow down...!"

Topher yanked, hard, on his gossamer connection to Strathmore castle far above; their motion arrested, wavered, and paused ever so slightly.

Then the tether snapped, and they plunged straight down.

Topher's guts clenched, and he heard a short, gasping inhale from Hana -- a choked-off breath that might have been a precursor to a scream. But then they were through, passing unharmed through an argent sheen; it's an illusion of some kind, Topher intuited. But he had no time to marvel; without magic, he couldn't cast Feather Fall, couldn't arrest their velocity. He cast about, frantic, for anything at all above ground-level that he might use.

Then, whirling about, he spied it -- a tall structure, miles distant -- and in desperation he lashed out his will at it. It was far, and the angle was steep; but it was enough. Like Spider-Man saving himself from a fall by shooting a web to a distant skyscraper, he traced a contracting parabola between their current position and the ground, concentrating with all his might to hook into any and all points and objects -- rocks, dirt, distant stars -- that might help arrest their descent. He felt himself yanked wildly sideways, rolling onto his back to protect Hana, and then...

The impact was titanic -- a punch in the spine like the hammer-blow of judgment. The air whooshed from his lungs, and he felt his bones creak and warp as violence erupted through him with the pitiless force of physics. The world went black, and for a long instant, all he could perceive was pain.

Then, slowly, sensation returned; he lay, aching but whole, at the center of a ten-foot-long smearing crater, with black dust and rocks all around. Hana, groaning, was flopped across him like a drunken college student; as he tried to reassemble awareness of his skeleton through sheer determination, she rolled off him and struggled to her hands and knees. "Alive... alive..." she panted.

"If you can call it that," Topher groaned. "I feel like I've been bodyslammed by the Hulk." After a few moments, he managed to roll over to one side; he wobbled, stuck, like an overturned turtle before his limbs finally deigned to obey him. Raising his head, he beheld the true surface of the moon for the first time.

The surface was, as he'd expected, a wasteland of emptiness; dusty, desolate plains stretched in every direction, fading into gently rolling hills and ridges across the distance at the edge of his line of sight. But the ground was a dull matte black instead of the chalky gray he'd been expecting, and the distant structure which he'd used to save them loomed against the bright earth-sky in the distance, like a spire of night. Shakily, he got to his feet. "Come on. We can start searching there."

Their trek across the black, silent surface of the moon was surreal; nothing stirred, and no sound existed except that which their own motions produced. "There's no bugs or wind or anything," he marveled, slightly taken aback by the strangeness of it all. "Probably a good place to read a book."

"Or plot the destruction of the world," Hana countered, rolling her eyes. "It's creepy, Bailey-sama."

"Hey, live in a shitty enough situation for a while, and you might see the charm." Topher started to step up onto a large rock, then thought better of it and walked around instead. Could be moon snakes under it, or something. "The color palette's a little depressing, though."

"It's really weird." Hana pushed her hair back out of her face, rearranging it on the nape of her neck; Topher wondered how she kept it there so consistently without a hair tie or anything. "I thought it would look more like our moon, but... the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. With no reflected sunlight at night, it should always be invisible -- and it certainly shouldn't move through phases like it does."

"Hey, yeah." Topher blinked. "In my mage classes, a lot of the magic was concerned with phases of the moon. But there's no reason for that to exist here, right? Even if the moon mysteriously glows on its own at night, shouldn't it just always be full?"

Hana nodded and pointed upwards; the silvery illusion above them, nearly as bright as full daylight, formed the black landscape into a stark chiaroscuro of shadows and onyx. "But someone or something created this, Bailey-sama, to make it look like our moon. And not only for the purpose of illumination, but also the phases necessary to form an understanding of cyclical time."

"You're saying someone invented the moon?" Topher could barely believe what he was hearing, but it all made a sinister kind of sense. "Why?"

"Not just the moon." Hana gestured at the cthonic vista far above. "The sun, too, and probably also the stars -- maybe more. There's no logical reason for a sun that behaves like what we've seen unless you're trying to mimic Earth."

Topher froze. What difference to I, who have seen the rise and fall of the moon and the stars?! "Jesus Christ," he croaked, "you think that's what Vashyarl meant? That he'd been here when the universe was created?!"

Hana nodded grimly. "It seems likely, Bailey-sama. And that suggests a further realization."

Topher stopped; they'd reached the foot of the spire. He looked up at it -- a great cathedral of black stone, open on all sides, constructed entirely of columns and beams to form an echoing ebony space with intricate architecture that formed lines of support and force to carry the thrust of man's will into the sky above. He laid his hand on it, and felt the force within thrum against his palm like a radio transmission. It's a pylon. Like for power lines, back home. "Yeah." Forlorn, he hung his head and uttered the words he'd long suspected, but been afraid to voice since he'd held a battered old wallet in his hands.

"The Infinite King is probably an Otherworlder, too."