The Moons that Hunters Must Walk

 The Five Moons claim the sky with blood and cosmic violence. Crimson-saffron light splashes across the huge storm clouds beneath their fierce visages, and turns the world eerie. Dreamlike.

Haskes, the Moon of Windfall. Storms curl into whirlwind frenzies across the bone-colored face. It is the place of howling furies and hellish nightmares, where hunters must walk across the Stormchasm to stand strong against endless wind-- or be thrown into bottomless abyss.

Ahnios, the Moon of Waves. Hunters know the Tidesong, a deep welling howl of sorrow and exultance, the song to be sung out when those worthy sailed out across tsunamis vast enough to sunder continents into crushing abyss. A moon of an ocean untamed, beautiful, and unforgiving.

Khinq, the Moon of Dunes. Those beneath the chaotic sky know the Blood Passage as a time of fear and annihilation, a time when the Moon of Endless Sand has returned from distant void to once again reign among its brethren. Red glows like silent, crawling flame that announce plagues and famines. Crimson moonrises that spawn dark legions, supernatural creatures who devour even our greatest heroes.

Vestrev, the Moon of Ice. All dreams of this place are the same. Bottomless chambers beneath a glassy, frozen sky. Winding, frigid chambers reflective and labyrinthine, echoing with the voices of the damned as trickling water reverberates down, down, down.. Wandering hunters made deranged, savage; haunted by all those who they failed, those wronged in the path to supreme glory. The glaciers are alive and hateful, churning up dark earth in their wake. So many lost beneath and beyond, claimed by unending whiteness.

Xurs, the Black Moon. Onyx on ebony, obsidian on midnight. Darkness so dark that it radiates, burbles like a cauldron of starless night. A shifting surface molted and perfect and without blemish, slipping shades of blackness that makes its spherical width seem to pulse. The Trial that Decides. The Trial without a name-- the Trial without a victor. How many millions, how many billions summoned to the desolate, unforgiving surface.. How many generations more twisted and broken, violent, than the last, standing to face that impossible thing... It is the Moon the hunters pray to. It is the Moon that calls to them. And it is the Moon that holds all of their bones, all their lost and shattered corpses.

I stand before the Moons of Five, splayed out in the sky with their painful harmony. Even now I can feel the gravity pulling. Stretching. My exoskeleton embraces this stimulus, pulls me to their reach. Blood in so many shades coats me, rises in microscopic rivulets up my body to those eager harbingers. Cinom, the Coward-Star, has fled beyond the horizon. Blessed night will rise in its place. And I will ascend.

I am Kreskiss, a hunter.

I will walk the Stormchasm, unafraid of battering hurricanes and seething lightning.

I will sing the Tidesong, swept up on waves broad as mountains, brave trenches bottomless.

I will follow the Blood Passage, stepping between forbidden dunes and withered, ancient bones.

I will plunge into the Glacios, slaying lesser hunters turned into husks by frozen time.

And I will stand on the Black Moon, at the Precipice, looking to what has blessed my people with meaning.

I will win.