Sisters of the Sun and the Moon

Movement in the grass caught her eye. Between her feet, there was a wispy mushroom with a battered yellow cap waving up at her.

“Hello, little friend,” Oasis whispered. “Ava will have to wait. I’m busy.”

Elbow deep in water, Oasis pulled at a gigantor snail and it came free with a satisfying thunk. She positioned its undulating muscles over a hairline crack in the crystalline wood and the steady dripping ceased.

Shaking dry, she removed a sealant from one of the many pockets in her tool belt. As she crouched below the structure, she found the mushroom had been attempting to climb atop her boot.

“That is a risky game,” she said, extending a hand down to it.

It stepped on and tickled her skin with soft, many rooted feet. She slid it carefully into her breast pocket to continue working when one of her mothers, Minka, emerged from the Day Center just ahead. She was cheery and overflowing with life despite the endless festival preparations. Minka was the kind of woman that entered a room and made everyone feel at ease, which made her something of a legend in the Day Center community. She directed her wheelchair along the yellow clay path toward her daughter.

“Oasis! I’m so happy you’re here. I’ve been getting lots of compliments today about my daughters’ good work. And I must say, the Flow System is absolutely stunning. I can’t believe it, but you two have outdone yourself again this year.”

“Thank you, Minka.”

Minka squealed with delight as a Dialite trout leapt through water streaming above her head and landed with a splash in the other side. Oasis, now sodden, smiled widely.

“This Day Center will be the main attraction across every glade in the realm tomorrow. The soon-to-be mothers inside are all giddy about it!”

“I’m glad they like it. This section in particular has been a bit of a nightmare, but once I got the idea flying fish sunrise rainbow in my head…” Oasis finished the thought with a shrug.

Together they watched the snail move glacially forward and Minka squeezed her daughter’s shoulder when the seal held. Oasis leaned back, admiring the Day Flowers behind the clear, protective dome of the Day Center. The fiery orange, purple, and white petals were so radiant in the late afternoon sun that their reflections shone clearly in the aerial stream. The spectacle was unlike anything the festival had seen before and Oasis hugged herself tightly, keeping the swelling pride within her carefully contained.

“The Queen is going to love it, darling.”

Oasis started.

“The Eternal Queen is coming? Here?”

“Yes, here! I know, it’s probably been eight decades since she’s come to Mountainshade. My mother was a little girl the last time.”

“Do you think she’ll still look the same?”

“I’m sure. She looked the same when I first saw her forty or so years ago. It is a wonder how she does it.”

A sudden breeze kicked up and a hooded woman appeared beside them- unmistakably a messenger from the Nomad’s Steppe, as she was wrapped entirely in bright orange robes. Her tall, opposing figure leaned over the Flow and watched a many-legged insect dart beneath a tuft of moss in the current.

Minka leaned toward Oasis conspiratorially.

“Joane told me the news this morning: The Eternal Queen selected Mountainshade for her tour because she heard about your unparalleled work with the crystalline trees and she wants to see the Flow herself! What’s more, the Queen has an announcement to share that has been kept very buttoned up.”

The pride Oasis felt a moment before morphed into an apprehensive churning in her stomach.

“Sounds exciting.”

Minka’s smile strained slightly- an imperceptible change to the untrained eye.

“Have you… heard from your sister today? You’ll make sure she’s here at sunrise, right?”

They both knew what Ava was doing today. The anniversary always fell directly before the Day Flower Festival. In years past, Oasis, Minka, and Joane would take time throughout the day to check in with Ava. They would find her sitting by the water, contemplative or distracted, and never much in the mood for talking. This year, they decided maybe it was best to just give her space.

“She just sent me a message actually; I’ll check it when I get a moment.”

Relief could not quite replace the worry in Minka’s face.

“Very good. Well, I hear your dandelion wine fountain from last year is still a big hit. I think I’ll swing by there to give it a once over before I return for the night’s events!”

She winked at Oasis, giving her one last squeeze, and turned to leave.

“Oh, hello Patrice! Nearly bumped into you there! Excuse me, girls.”

The churning devolved once more and solidified into an angry pit as Oasis turned to find Patrice’s smug smile. As always, Patrice was ringed by no less than three of her most convenient friends.

“What do you want?”

“Your mother sure is in a hurry to get to that wine, isn’t she Oasis?”

The girls around her snickered in a chorus of petty encouragement. Oasis stared at her flatly.

“She must be rather worried,” Patrice went on, “Do you think the Hermit will emerge from the deep woods to grace us with her presence? Or do you think she’s finally slipped into the falls, too?”

Oasis squared her muscled shoulders to the girls and placed a hand casually on each hatchet, which lived securely attached to her waist unless she was using them or sleeping. Despite her average stature, Oasis carried herself with an intensity that her peers found generally unnerving.

“It’s a wonder she doesn’t like spending time here with your welcome committee prowling about. Don’t your sheep have a bake sale table to stand behind?”

Patrice uncrossed her arms and took a step closer but stopped, looking over Oasis’s head.

“See you at sunrise, builder.”

It was meant to be an insult, having a job that was historically done by men, but Oasis never cared much about old stories.

Patrice cast a final look of disapproval and the girls followed her, glaring at Oasis in unison.

“Can’t wait,” she mumbled, turning to pick up her tools. “I wonder if they practice walking around like that.”

Oasis jumped as she found herself looking up into the desert tanned face and sage green eyes of the Nomad. In this proximity, it was rumored that Nomads could whisk the breath right out of a woman’s lungs. They spoke as rustling leaves through the forest do and were known to run on the wind itself.

“Um,” was all she could muster, and Oasis could not stop the blood that rushed into her cheeks.

The Nomad’s eyes flicked down to Oasis’s shirt.

“Oh.”

The mushroom had been climbing steadily up and was now attempting to grab the ends of her bobbed hair.

“Thanks,”

She collected the mushroom once more in her hand, finding afterward that the woman had disappeared, but the cool breeze she rode on still lingered.

“Okay, little friend. I’m sorry, what is it?”

To hear a mushroom speak is a practiced skill that Ava taught Oasis when they were little girls, back when they called themselves the sisters of the sun and the moon. As far as Oasis knew, they were the only two women in all of Dialite Hillsides that could speak to any creatures of the forest. It became a secret code and that came in handy time and time again, and the mushrooms always enjoyed being included. They do not speak the common tongue, but some other language that can only be heard with a quiet mind.

Oasis moved to stand beneath the arcing current of water. Amid the rushing sounds of life it carried, she found a silent pocket between her many thoughts. She closed her eyes and held the mushroom close. She couldn’t help but smile as it grabbed onto her ear with its small arms. The silent spot in her mind was fluttering about like a bird in springtime, but as fleeting as it was, she heard the message urgent and clear.

Danger.

An image of Ava’s blue lips and pale cheeks flashed before her memory’s eye and Oasis took off running, cupping the mushroom carefully in her hands.

She took the most direct route to the Furthest Glade through the village center, which was packed with women from across the fourteen realms. Oasis weaved around women dressed in traditional garbs, past food stalls with delightful wafting scents of fruit and herbal delights, and accidentally crossed beneath the long-stilted legs of a woman from the Shrouded Swamps.

“Sorry, sorry. Excuse me!”

Just as her throat became hot and constricted, she emerged on the other side of the crowd and was hit with the cool evening air. She took the well-trodden foot path through community gardens and the spaces between homes. Upon reaching the tree line, she placed the frazzled looking mushroom down among the tangled roots. With a tiny arm it reached out to steady itself on the knotted bark and with the other it waved her on.

Oasis darted up the terrain toward a pass between the hills. Her heavy breathing sounded frantic in the still underbrush. It was too still. One thought staved off utter panic: she knew exactly where Ava would be.

Ava had always been drawn to wild, powerful things. It was she that first found the headwaters of the Mountainshade lakes. Their glade is the furthest developed area in all Dialite Hillsides; nobody dared build a village closer to the Shadow Clan. To many, living in the darkness cast by the black mountains was a bad omen. They rose up on the horizon like an inevitable storm cloud and the Furthest Glade went largely untraveled because of this.

Oasis ran now to the massive, rushing waterfall at the foot of the nearest mountain. It had no name on any map they could find, so on her twelfth birthday Ava dubbed it Rainbow Falls for the countless prisms that burst forth from the perpetual mist on sunny days. This was also the place where Ava’s childhood love, Gabriel, had gone missing three years ago to this day. Each year, the day of the summer solstice, Ava would disappear to Rainbow Falls from sunup to sundown to hold a private vigil. Some, such as Patrice, would call this a bit dramatic. Others in the village deemed it an uncomfortable, lingering grief. But it was not their business, and Oasis knew they were all wrong anyway. Her sister was neither dramatic, nor excessively grieving. She was waiting.

Oasis crested the hill and spied a break in the trees where the river passed below. Beneath the rising moon she could only see shadows stretching over the canopy but she heard, carried by the wind, the howling of Ava’s steele dog, Menace, in the valley below.

Her heart pounded, insufficient, as Oasis was caught between where she was and where she needed to be. Her feet flew along the winding trail through the grove of crystalline trees that Ava had planted and grown. The house they had built together was quiet, lit only by the glowstone that had awakened inside. On she ran, following the path in the dim starlight as much by memory as by sight. And at the edge of the glade, she saw Ava’s yellow hair beside a hulking, awkward figure.

“Menace!”

The steele dog’s mouth was secured to the nape of her sister’s shirt as he dragged her along the ground. He tried to speak without letting go.

“I can’t understand you. What happened?”

Oasis dropped to the ground and cradled Ava’s head, inspecting her closely with hurried, shaking fingers.

Menace let go and panted, likely from stress rather than exhaustion.

“There’s a thing- Oasis, there’s a thing in the woods. I don’t know what it is. I’ve never seen anything like it. It popped out of the water and attacked her and she fought it off and passed out. There was nothing I could do- they were in the water. She barely made it ashore and-”

Oasis shot up a silencing hand.

“Okay, shut it. Let’s get her inside and then we can think about the thing in the forest, alright?”

Menace nodded vigorously as Oasis unbuttoned her shirt and smoothed it across his broad back. His needle-like fur would shred Ava’s skin otherwise. With a heave, she pushed Ava up. After long minutes and with no small difficulty, they made it across the threshold of Ava’s house and tumbled to the ground.

“She’s so cold. How long were you two out there? I’m going to get her in the shower. I need you to go get Joane, alright? She should be home, take the back way since the festival is starting. Bring her right back here.”

Menace nodded and ducked back out the house, his metal sides scraping the doorway. He huffed an apology before thundering away.

Alone with her sister now, Oasis looked down upon her quiet features.

The women of Dialite Hillsides are renowned across the realms for their healing capabilities. With a natural adaptation of their eyes and dedicated practice, they are able to see and manipulate the energy of living things. Depending on the color they are born with, their strengths differ. There is a reason that Oasis and Ava work with plants, and it was not serving them now.

Oasis’s blue eyes melted to silver, and she saw tangles of blocked energy with dark spots wherever mud and debris were caked onto Ava’s body. After tense minutes of warm water and scrubbing, the mud from the riverbank began to slide across the bathroom floor. Oasis ran her hands over the indecipherable energy patterns, and it may have helped some, but the warm water helped more. Color returned to Ava’s cheeks and she began to stir.

“Ava? Ava, what happened? Menace was a mess; he couldn’t tell me. He said there’s a thing out there in the woods that attacked you.”

“Oasis? Hi,” Ava smiled up at her, “Thank you, I was pretty cold.”

“Yeah, no kidding.”

The fraying of her nerves wore now on Oasis, and she sighed, both relieved and exasperated.

Then, Ava gasped and shot up to a seat, grasping at Oasis.

“There was… A human out there.”

“Some women did this to you? Was she a traveler from the festival?”

Ava’s forest green eyes caught her sister’s, suddenly lucid.

“It was a human man.”

Oasis fell silent and with a grunt, Ava moved out of her sister’s lap to sit against the wall.

Gabriel’s anniversary has been marked each year by strange occurrences, but a human man? This was far-fetched to say the least.

“Men are extinct,” Oasis countered.

“Not this one. He’s out there now on the bank of Rainbow Falls, unless he’s woken up and wandered off.”

This thought struck fear into Ava’s features.

“The festival. I have to go back and get the man,” Ava said.

Ava pressed a hand to the wall to rise, but Oasis guided her back into the steaming water.

“You stay here. Menace said you overpowered him, I’m sure he’s still unconscious. Joane is on her way and if both of us are gone Menace will put her over the emotional edge- you know how little patience she has for him. Right now, you need to get warm.”

Ava made to protest but instead flinched, cradling her head in her arms.

“I do feel terrible. I had to use Diamond Eyes to stop him from…”

Ava’s lips pressed into a hard line.

“Oasis.”

“Yeah?”

Ava grabbed her sister’s hand and held it tightly.

“There is something wrong about this human man. A veil of shadow shrouded his face, and his eyes… They were black and unseeing like he was not in control.”

Oasis stood now, laughing weakly, this was getting to be a bit too much. She took stock of her tool belt even though she knew what it carried and where.

“Actually, what was I thinking?” Ava went on, “We should wait until Menace gets back. I’m sure I’ll be better by then and we can all go together.”

“No, no thank you. Menace is as helpful as he is going to get tonight with his current task and you look like you should sleep for a week. The longer we wait, the more likely it is that a mindless, dangerous, human man will be running loose at the festival. Which reminds me, we have until sunrise.”

Oasis turned to hide her shaking hands from Ava, filled a glass of water, and drained it. She stared into the mirror, eyes still silver, and fortified her resolve. The billowing colors of her aura grew steadily. Ava knew that look well enough, and in her current weakened state, she could not stop Oasis now.

“There’s a stone on the bank next to him that feels as though it is sick. If you can, bring it back here but don’t touch it. I think it’s dangerous.”

Oasis patted her sister’s hair. She had too much racing through her mind now to ask about the rock.

“One more thing,” Ava’s voice strained, “He’s huge. There’s extra rope around back.”

Oasis nodded and stepped out into the night. The open and endless sky above her peered down, setting her pale hair ablaze with silver moonlight.

“It’s alright, Ava. I’ll get him,” she said with feigned confidence.

And Oasis left into the night.