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(Five) ◀◀◀◀◀ Chapter Six ▶▶▶▶▶ (Seven)

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But was it really so ridiculous a question? What is a Moonshade, anyway? And could one really adequately qualify the many wondrous natural features and colorful characters that occupied the Isle of Beyond with words, plain old mortal human words?

Or at least, that is how Giselle Gizzard (Avatar by trade) felt about it whenever she thought about it; a frustrating oscillation between strong sensations that desperately needed words, and a complete inability to conjure them.

Perhaps it all boiled down to a case of Emotion versus Logic. As Sethys informed her—while abed in the Monk Isle infirmary, resting off some 8,700 years of remand (without trial or bail, or so much as a courtyard to longingly peer into) so Giselle made sure to take whatever he was dithering on about with a sizable grain of salt—those two tenets were the easiest to understand individually, but the most difficult to reconcile and master...

"...at least, for a Balance acolyte. Rationality was always the smallest of temples. Most neophytes give up somewhere around Logical Ambivalence… Oh! By the way, did you know? This island is where the Temple of Rationality used to be. One of the monks—Miggim, I think, was telling me about how bits of the place keep turning up on the grounds, like every now and then they'll dig up an old slide rule in the potato patch or whatever, and they're always mystified by it. But I guess I would be too; one time, I was digging for mandrakes and I found this incredibly old coin with King Shamino's face on it—wait! Do you know who he was...?"

Or, perhaps she had yet to become spiritually accustomed to a land so deeply steeped in its own cosmic Imbalance, if such a thing was even possible (it certainly seemed so for the natives, anyway). After all, only a few months had elapsed since Giselle and her companions first crashed their ship through the Serpent Gates and onto the shores of the fragmented realm they called New Sosaria, but since that day she had seen her fill of the place and then some. The initial excitement of visiting a new world wore off fairly quickly—perhaps immediately even, after those confounded lightning storms made a complete hash of her supplies, to say nothing of her companions themselves.

But as such adventures usually go, all was well in the end, or at least well enough until things weren't well enough or even well at all anymore. Over several more cycles of Well Enough and Not Well At All Oh Dear Me What Is Happening Now, the Serpent Isles unfurled before Giselle and her companions, revealing a wildly changeable world at constant odds with itself, stained by its enduring legacy of tragedy and violence, as if such things had been dyed into the wool of its creation.

The Lands of Danger & Despair indeed. Giselle visited vast underground cities, their ancient histories forever lost to genocide or lava floes or clockwork servants, tick-tocking away the millennia, endlessly patrolling and defending derelict halls for the sake of masters who would never return. She braved the dream-haunted swamps of Gorlab, a place so ancient that even the Ophidians described it as such. She prowled the glacial valleys of the Northlands, plumbed forgotten tombs and temples, breached Time itself.

She caught up with an old enemy. She lost her three dear and stalwart companions, possibly forever.

She caught up with an old friend. She assembled a band of new companions—misfits all, hardly Avatar material, but perhaps dear in their own strange ways.

But through all of the pain and joy and nonsense and trials and kidnappings and poison traps and prophecies and goblins and serpent's teeth and misplaced stockings and malfunctioning automata, one especially spectacular memory dominated them all. Picture It: New Sosaria, Year 453 (New Freedom). Captain Hawk just docked The Arabella at the Moonshade Harbour—which is incidentally located a handful of miles southwest of the city proper—after a brief but intense ferry across the Strait of Bulldozer, a journey that vividly brought to mind the experience of being a handkerchief in a tumble dryer. The Captain and his passengers narrowly escaped another teleport storm and were duly rewarded with a warm welcome to the very fairest of the seasons. For it was always Spring-Autumn on the Isle of Beyond, the precise time of the year when the air begins to freshen and the skies appear just a little bluer, a little deeper. In the distance, a riot of color awaited the party, the ever-flowering foliage of the Forest of Beyond. The sights, the smells of linden and apple blossom, the tender birdsong and the plaintive screeching from a nearby harpy's nest, all enough to make one forget that it was actually still winter…

It smacked of magic, some widespread glamour to enhance the natural beauty of this little islet; Giselle had been around the block enough times to recognize an enchanted forest when she saw one. While she stood on the docks and admired the enchanted linden trees and apple blossoms and birdsong (and screeching), Shamino dropped to his knees and crawled towards a nearby enchanted bramble patch, retching the whole way, with that blasted parrot toddling after him, screaming "Ale! Ale!".

Even Dupré got a little worried. Shamino was normally made of stronger stuff than that, but something about this place had sent him off-kilter, just a little awry. Askew.

Amiss, even.

They all felt a little amiss. And with hindsight being what it was…

But today, images and words came easy for Giselle; Shamino's unmistakable visage and voice dominated her thoughts. She had her present company to thank for the Rational reprieve, for the man so closely reminded her of old boon companion, if only in subtle ways. Ernesto was a Moonshadian Ranger after all, dubbed in tribute to the Rangers of Skara Brae, though Giselle doubted the similarities extended further than that. He was an attractive enough fellow, rugged but sensitive—the type who probably had to "fight 'em off with a stick" (as Iolo would've put it). Indeed, Giselle could recall meeting several ladies in town (and more than one gent) who would've leapt at the chance to spend one dreamy afternoon with Ernesto the Ranger, their hearts a-pitter-pat.

Alas. Giselle wanted nothing more from the fellow than information, but much like his dream lovers she too was willing to endure a full afternoon's worth of duck hunting to obtain it. As near as she could tell, "duck hunting" to a Moonshadian Ranger mostly entailed milling around the woods south of the Seminarium, debating the merits of flapjack vs. mintcake while failing to identify distant songbirds.

Were there even any ducks left on the Isle of Beyond…?

"Now, I actually went hunting here once with your friend, uh, Shamino," Ernesto hesitated, as if scared to repeat the name out loud. "He told me he was a Ranger as well."

"That's right, honey. From Skara Brae—the original Rangers," said Giselle. "Seekers of Spirituality. Woodsmen. Lore-masters. And actually pretty good vintners too now that I think about it."

"Is that right? He was a nice enough bloke, I suppose. Hell of a tracker. But he seemed a little aloof. Or just intense."

Giselle laughed to herself; that dear old friend of hers really could be a tough nut to crack. Rarely unfriendly to strangers, but difficult to truly know. "That's Shamino for you," was all she said.

"I s'ppose. That day, when he returned to town, when Anarchy—I… I'm… Uh…"

The man looked down, keeping his eyes on his boots as he and Giselle kicked through the forest's sumptuous carpet of fallen leaves.

Fallen leaves, no matter how enchanted, couldn't possibly be that interesting.

"What is it?" Giselle probed.

"Look. I know that I didn't know Shamino very well at all, but you have to know that, inside that body, it's not him. Anarchy—that Bane or whatever you called it, it wears the body of your friend like a hand inside a puppet—it's not Shamino in there anymore," Ernesto spoke mostly to his boots and the leaves.

"Aw, I know that."

"But have you seen him? Have you seen his eyes, Giselle?"

She shook her head. "I haven't seen him up close since Anarchy took over, no. I do know he glows in the dark now, but I couldn't tell you what that's all about."

Ernesto shuddered. "Well, if you ever meet up with him again, don't look into his eyes. I swear he killed the Magelord just by looking at him! One glare and Filbercio dropped to the palace floor like a wet sack of snails," he said. "No wounds or burns that we could see—not a scratch on him, save a trickle of blood running out of his nose and ears."

"Mm-hmm. Past few weeks, I've been getting real familiar with the Chaos Banes and how they operate. Thing is, their powers go far beyond what any of us plain old mortal human folks could ever hope to grasp."

"And Filbercio was only human, in the end. A plain old mortal human, like you said," rounded Ernesto, grimly. "Torrissio reckons his brain exploded, but nobody wanted to crack open his skull and find out for sure."

"Probably for the best."

"But I still don't want you to blame Shamino for what happened. I feel bad enough for what happened to our town, what I did—what we all did," he went on. "Because we did this, you see? We wrecked the place, ruined our lives, squandered our future. We couldn't figure out how to get along with each other so we killed Moonshade. Anarchy just handed us the axe, that's all."

"That's all, huh."

"I just want to make sure someone understands that. It's the least I can do after everything else I did."

Giselle tried reassuring the man with a smile, even while he still could not bear to look at her. "And I need you to understand that what's done is done, and beating yourself up about it ain't gonna do you or your friends any favors."

"I suppose. That's what Bucia keeps telling us, anyway."

"Bucia?" Now that was a name Giselle had never again expected to hear in the present tense. Surely the shopkeep died in the onslaught…?

That's right. And fair warning, she already knows you're back in town. I reckon she wants to have a word with you, but you know Bucia! One word to her means a whole bleedin' confab—"

Nearby, some bird commenced a ceaseless squawk, no doubt heralding the palaver to come.

"You mean, she's alive?" Giselle blurted in disbelief.

"Wha…? Well, yeah! Bucia's alive, right as rain. Took a lot of coaxing to get her to come out of hiding, though," said Ernesto. "Actually, it was Ducio who got her out of her house, of all people. Told her the gophers were eating her peonies."

Suddenly, he craned his head, listening for a moment.

"…ah-ha, now that bird call. That's a Moonshade kelp gull, probably a hungry juvenile."

"…ah-ha, now that bird call. That's a Moonshade kelp gull, probably a hungry juvenile," he confidently observed as a boot-snapped twig flushed the misidentified blue jay, sending it flapping off its home snag and into the sky. "Guess it could be one of those too."

"You like birds, eh?"

Ernesto chuckled, sheepishly. "Yeah, sure. I'm a lot better at watching them than hunting, and you just saw how good I was with that blue jay," he said. "Actually, I can't stand violence and killing things—like seeing a little dead bird or deer or bunny rabbit. Some of 'em got babies, you know? Nests with a dozen tiny gaping mouths to feed. I don't even really like fishing that much. You ever hold a trout in your hands and watch it gasp for life, just staring at you, like it knows what you done to it?"

Brr. Bracing stuff. Even Giselle had to admit, to a certain sort of person that experience could be harrowing, even traumatizing to a degree.

She gave silent thanks that she was not one of them. "I'll be damned! A genuine oddity," she said. "A Ranger who can't hunt."

"You're telling me! 'Strewth, if I wanted to spend all my time hunting and slaying things, I'd be a mercenary. Pay's probably better, anyway!"

"But you were providing food for the folks in town!"

"I have," he agreed, though a vague greenish cast washed over his face. "And up 'til now I've been able to get away with it."

"Away with what?"

"There's a little cave 'round the side of these cliffs that we Rangers use as a kind of storeroom. It's naturally cool in there, so it's ideal for emergency tucker—jerky and hardtack, salted fish, cured ham, that sort," Ernesto told her. "Everyone in town expects me to be this deadeyed hunter just because I'm a Ranger, but put a bow and arrow in my hand for real and I reckon I couldn't hit the broad side of a barn."

Giselle tried to stifle a laugh, resulting in a counterproductive snortle. "Ahh. So you've been, shall we say, window hunting."

"Whenever someone asks me to go out and get some meat, I set out for a week or so, make a little camp, do a little birdwatching, doze in the sunshine. Then when it's time to head home, I pick out something from the cave and bring it back to town."

"Don't they notice that the meat is already salted and cooked?"

The man shrugged. "If they do, I just tell them that I prepared it for them back at my camp, to keep it from spoiling and whatnot. But see, now our little storeroom is starting to run low—with all the other rangers gone, I won't be able to keep up the farce for much longer. I suppose I'll need to find another supply."

"No no, my dear birdbrain. What you need to find is someone who can actually bag a goose," Giselle intimated, lips stretched with the telltale grin of heroic confidence. "Now I can't promise nothin' for future excursions, but for today? Just leave it all to the Avatar…"

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