I slept horribly that night.

To be fair, it’s hard to sleep when you can see zombies – or undying, or whatever – roaming through the village you’re sleeping in all night, and even harder when the building you’re taking shelter in doesn’t have a door to keep them out.

Not that the Altar of the Sun needed it. To my surprise, when the sun dropped from the sky, the windows overhead darkened and grew opaque, blocking the moon’s silver radiance. The white stone slab at the center – the one I’d laid on when Viora purged the poison from me – began to glow with a soft radiance that filled the space, giving me plenty of light to see and also seemingly keeping the zombies at bay. Several of the creatures tried to surge into the space, but the moment the altar’s light touched their gray, rotting flesh, it blackened and burned. Most of them fled at that point, but a few tried to brave the light and ended up as piles of ash before they could cross the threshold.

“All magic comes from the heavens,” Viora explained when the first creature fled from the altar’s radiance. “The power of the sun promotes healing, cleansing, and purification. It’s the source of all life on this world. Without its warmth we’d be a frozen ball of ice without a single living creature on it, a world overrun by the dead.”

“Wouldn’t you need living things to create undead?” I pointed out.

“A reasonable assumption, but an incorrect one, Ionat. The moons can generate creatures from nothing, beasts comprised of pure magic.” She gestured outside. “That’s why the undying rise during the close moon of Moarte.”

“Moarte?”

“The scientific name for the silver moon,” she smiled. “Few know it, but those who would master the magic of the sun must since the power of the three moons is the bane of all who walk in the light.”

She walked over to her heavy wooden desk, and I followed at her gesture. There, she took a rolled sheet of paper from a drawer and spread it out on the scarred wooden surface. I looked at it in confusion; the paper showed a blue-green orb in the center surrounded by odd symbols, curving lines, and weird formulae.

“It’s a celestial map, John,” Sara told me a bit excitedly, suddenly appearing to stand beside the desk, unseen and unheard by Viora. The AI reached out and touched the dot in the middle. “This is Soluminos. They still must believe that their world is the center of the universe, and everything else revolves around it.” Her finger traced a looping, curving line. “This is the projected path of their sun, as seen from their perspective. Their star must be a small but bright one for this course to be so erratic.”

“This is a map of the heavens,” Viora confirmed Sara’s conjecture. “Don’t be alarmed by its complexity. It takes a great deal of study to truly understand it, but once you do, you can predict the ebb and flow of magic, the waning and waxing of the sun’s power, and the close moons.” She smiled at me. “In fact, that’s a large part of what I do for the village, Ionat. I warn them of the danger from the moons, so they can prepare.”

The priestess or sorceress or whatever touched a long and barely comprehensible equation. “This is the formula for Moarte’s path through the sky.” She hesitated. “At least, it’s our best formula to date. Measure the size of the silver moon and the angle that it forms with a specific star on any given night, and you can predict its behavior and size on any given day with reasonable certainty. With the correct math, you can even determine when its size will grow to the maximum, the close moon.”

“They know calculus,” Sara observed. “That’s how they derived this formula. I think their Technology Rating is higher than I’d anticipated, John.”

“How much higher?”

“It’s hard to say. I need to see a complex machine at work, so I can judge how the ambient energy interferes with its functioning. That’ll help a lot.”

“There are similar equations for Sangue, the red moon, and Fiare, the brown moon,” Viora touched two more of the complicated formulae. “Mastering the math behind these isn’t easy and can take years of learning, but once you do, you can time rituals and spells to come to completion when they’ll have the greatest effect.”

She rolled up the map and turned toward me. “All of this is in the book I gave you, including examples of how to calculate using these formulae. You probably won’t understand it – few do who haven’t spent years in study – but it’ll show you what’s possible if you dedicate yourself to the path of the sun.”

After that, I settled in for the rest of the night, alternating between reading and sleeping. At least, I tried to sleep. Viora herself seemed to have no problem dropping into slumber while the zombies kept trying to enter, but I couldn’t be that blasé about it. Every time one of them burst into flames, the flash of light startled me, and I woke in a bit of a panic, my hatchet leaping into my hand almost of its own accord.

The upside was that I learned a great deal about the basic principles of magic on this Doorworld. The book was basically a treatise on magical theory – where the power came from, what it could be used for, how to calculate the best times for magic, even when to use it and when not to. What it didn’t talk about even a little was how to cast spells, but even so, I understood the concepts of magic in this world much better than I had.

As Viora said, all magic seemed to stem from the sun and the three moons. The book touted the benefits of solar magic in great detail, talking about the wonders that could be produced from it and how beneficial it was to the world. Solar magic healed, strengthened, and reinforced. It could be used to make things stronger, thus the “sun-blessed” wagon Emilina described. It could make plants grow, heal wounds, cure diseases – the list went on and on about how great solar magic was.

In contrast, it had nothing but venom for the three lunar magics. Moarte, the silver moon, bathed the world in death energy. Sangue, the red moon, was the source of all blood magic. And Fiare, the brown moon, poured bestial magic on the planet. The book didn’t say much about the kinds of things that could be done with those types of magic beyond cursing them as vile and foul. According to the text, every evil that befell mankind – or omeni-kind, I supposed – stemmed from those moons. Blood magic caused things like disease, blight, plague, and various bodily ills. Bestial magic was the source of all negative emotions, like hatred, anger, and fear. And death magic, obviously, killed living things.

To be honest, I was dubious about how trustworthy the book was. It had obviously been written from a specific point of view, that being that solar magic was good and lunar magic was bad. I supposed that was possible, but that felt like the book was assigning morality to a celestial object. That was like saying the hatchet I wore – or the guns I’d once used regularly – were inherently good or evil. They were just objects, tools that could be used for multiple purposes. Even poisons weren’t inherently evil, since most of them could be used medically in small enough doses, and most medicines become poisons when they were misused. Everything is deadly if you ingest or inject too much of it, even water or oxygen.

There was no arguing that was the case for lunar magic. It was obvious that the three moons revolved in a way that every so often, one of them would come very close to Soluminos, vastly increasing its influence, while the others were pushed away, reducing their power. When Moarte came close, the increase in death magic actually made undead appear from nothing, and apparently, each moon raised its own types of creatures to plague the planet. Fortunately, the close moon usually only lasted a few days, and once it ended, it was usually months before another came.

The sun’s nearness also affected the power of its magic, but its movements were more predictable, since the planet obviously traveled an elliptical orbit around the star, even if the omeni hadn’t worked that out, yet. The sun was considered close for a month at a time, twice a year, and was far for two more months a year. During those times, solar magic grew stronger or weaker, and the effects of the close moons were either reduced or enhanced.

All that reading and studying had a tangible benefit, as well, at least according to the notification that appeared.

Skill Gained: Astronomy

Astronomy (Neophyte 3)

Benefits: +1% to magic of celestial origin per skill rank

Profession: Scholar has gained a level!

New level: 2

For every level of Scholar, you gain:

Reason +1

1 Skill Point

Partial Adaptation!

You have begun to adapt to the Doorworld of Soluminos!

Adaptation Level: 15%

Bonus: Mental stat penalties reduced by 25%

That was great, but there was a huge downside to having all that time to read. I might have gotten a total of two hours of sleep that night, stolen in little chunks. When the morning came, I had a nasty headache behind my right eye, my eyes felt gritty and sandy, and I was irritable as hell.

That made me fairly surly when Renica came to get me in the morning, and I spoke in one-word sentences, grunts, and growls for a while. Fortunately, a bit of breakfast helped settle me, and I spent a pretty enjoyable morning with the woman traipsing through the forest. She showed me how her crossbow worked, and we spent an hour tracking an animal she called a cerbak that turned out to look like a smallish deer with lavender fur and two spiraled antlers instead of branched ones.

She showed me the creature’s tracks in the forest floor, squatting down and snapping a finger over them. Vikarik, her giant canine companion, sniffed the prints and shuffled off into the forest, apparently following them.

“He’s well trained,” I told her, watching as the dog halted before it left our vision and waiting for us to follow.

“Yes, she is,” the hunter laughed quietly in the morning stillness, moving to follow the animal. “I found her when she was just a pup – her mother started attacking the vasak herd, and I had to hunt her down. Turned out she was getting food for her litter, so I adopted Vikarik and raised her to hunt with me.”

She whistled softly, and the dog resumed its trot into the trees. “Cairniks are very intelligent and easy to train, especially if you start young. Unlike most predators, they form bonded pairs that mate for life, so if they bond with you, they’ll serve and protect you forever, no matter what you’re facing.”

“Do you really need that much protection?” I asked, glancing around. “Is the forest that dangerous?”

“It can be, yes.” She pointed to a nearby tree, and I could see that something had torn a hunk of bark off it about chest height, leaving a scar on the wood. “That’s the sign of a leurik marking its territory. Have you ever seen one?” I shook my head.

“They’re about as tall as I am when they’re on all fours,” she said. “They almost look like someone took a pisik, added a heavier ruff around its neck for protection, and grew it until it was omeni-sized. There’s one that calls the Darkwood home.”

“How do you hunt something like that?” I asked curiously.

“You don’t,” she laughed. “It hunts you, and you try to stay alive. If you’re dangerous enough, it’ll leave you alone; leuriks hunt for food, not sport, after all.” She grimaced. “Except during the brown moon, of course.”

“The forest is more dangerous then?”

“Absolutely. You know how the close brown moon makes animals crazy?” She shuddered. “Imagine that in a forest. Everything goes into a fury. The animals attack anything that moves, even each other. Bonded mates forget their bonds; parents slaughter their young; prey animals attack their predators.” She glanced at me. “We don’t go in the forest during a close brown moon. We dig a trench around the village, use the dirt to erect a wall, and hunker down behind it at night. Then, we kill anything that comes out of the forest hunting us.”

I nodded; that tracked with what I’d learned last night. “Why don’t you do that all the time? Keeping the trench, I mean, and maybe using the darkwood logs to erect a palisade around the village?”

“It wouldn’t help against the undying or darkchildren,” she shrugged. “As you know, the undying aren’t fast or agile, but they’re strong and relentless. They’d climb a wall and not care about taking damage from falling. And the darkchildren…” She shuddered again. “No wall can hold out those bloodsuckers. They’d rot it in the course of a night unless the entire thing was made of sun-blessed wood – and there’s no way we can afford that, even if we saved for a hundred years.”

“Viora can’t do it herself?”

“She’s a Sorvaraji,” Renica shook her head. “She heals and guides. You need a Fermaraji to create sun-blessed wood, and those don’t live in little villages like this.”

It took us over an hour to track the cerbak, and during that time, I saw the oddness Renica spoke of the day before. A small animal that looked like a weasel with long, fox-like jaws and dark brown fur charged at me while Renica stopped to show me the cerbak’s scat. It was only about eighteen inches long, with a narrow body and sharp but short claws, and a single blow from my hatchet killed it before it could do more than gnaw on my boot; this animal had no business attacking something as large as I was.

It wasn’t the only one, either. At one point, a flock of hand-sized, blue-green birds swarmed us, grabbing and pecking any exposed hair or skin. A single bark from Vikarik knocked most of them from the sky, where they were easy enough to kill. At another point, three creatures that looked like rabbits with shorter, wider ears and steel-gray fur charged Renica, and she killed them by kicking them to death. None of the animals were particularly dangerous, and none of them should have been attacking.

“This is ridiculous,” the woman sighed as we cleaned the three rabbit-like creatures. “Iupaks are the most fearful animals in the Darkwood, Ionat. They run from a falling stick or a strong breeze.”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “It kind of sounds, though…” I fell silent, thinking, and she elbowed me in the side.

“Sounds like what?”

“Well, like your description of when the brown moon is close. Is that like this?”

“No,” she shook her head. “It’s much, much worse. Imagine this but with every creature in the forest swarming us – and each other.” She frowned, then shook her head again. “There are some similarities, but the brown moon is tiny right now. It’s not possible. Something else must be happening.”

“Well, hopefully we’ll find out today, with the augury.”

“Hopefully.”

We stored the carcasses in a large pack that Renica had me wearing on my shoulders, one that she said would keep the scent of the dead animals from drawing predators and wiped our hands and clothing down with dark green leaves that she assured me would do the same thing. The leaves had a strong minty smell when I crushed them, but more to the point, the brownish bloodstains on my hands and clothing vanished seconds after I wiped them down with the leaf’s sticky sap.

“That’s amazing,” I breathed.

She nodded. “Bloodleaf absorbs the light of the red moon, and it draws blood into itself. It can only be harvested during a close red moon, though, or it dries up in hours and is useless.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“It would be, if we came into the forest to gather it,” she grinned. “Fortunately, we grow it ourselves, so we can pick it safely.”

“Smart.” I realized that I’d been questioning how the village did things quite a bit. The place just seemed so – backward, compared to modern Earth, that I found myself looking down on the people there without realizing it. However, they were obviously as intelligent as humans, and they’d lived in this world for who knew how many thousands of years. I had to remember that they probably knew what they were doing, and that in this world, I was the backward, clueless one.

We finally caught up to the cerbak drinking from a stream. We approached quietly, coming from downwind, and when we neared it, Renica handed me her crossbow. It was heavier than the fiberglass one I’d learned to use, and it didn’t have a handy lever I could pull to cock it. She showed me how to use the attached windlass to crank the string back into position, and I sighted on the large animal.

The moment I looked through the simple notch sight, my entire body seemed to relax. My finger rested naturally alongside the trigger without touching it. My cheek rested on the stock without jostling it, and I tucked it in tight against my shoulder to reduce the possibility of recoil. I dropped to one knee for extra stability and examined the sight picture closely.

The needles flickering in the ever-present breeze were all the windspeed indicator I needed, and I adjusted instinctively to compensate for the distance and wind, then added a bit more. The bolt would be slower and larger than a bullet, which meant it would both drop and drift more than I was expecting. I could practically feel the spot in the air where the end of the crossbow should rest, and I twisted my torso rather than my arms to place it there. I took a deep breath, and as I let it go, my finger curled around the trigger and squeezed.

The crossbow jerked slightly with a loud twang, pressing back against my shoulder, but the recoil was far less than a high-powered rifle’s and I absorbed it easily. The moment I fired, I dropped the bow and started winding the string back; it was always better when sniping a target to assume your first shot would miss. Fortunately, it wasn’t necessary.

The bolt darted through the air, a dark streak that arced and curved toward the deer. The animal’s head jerked up, and it tensed to leap as the sound of the bow reached its ears, but the bolt slammed into its side before it could move. Renica whistled as the cerbak took a hesitant step, and Vikarik rushed forward, growling as she surged toward the deer, but before she could reach it, the animal dropped at once.

Renica took the bow back and whistled softly in amazement. “Nice shot,” she said approvingly. “I think you got it right in the heart!” She looked almost accusingly at me. “You’ve shot a crossbow before, haven’t you?”

“A few times,” I shrugged. That wasn’t really accurate. I’d trained with one for a couple years. A crossbow could be made entirely of fiberglass and carbon composites, without any metal parts needed, and no one tracked crossbow purchases or the ballistics of their bolts. It was easier to smuggle one into a high-security area than it was to get a rifle inside, or at least, so my reasoning went. Reality was quite a different story.

The big issue I faced was that crossbows were meant for hunting, not for killing people. They were designed to wound a large animal and slow it enough that a hunter could track it down and kill it with another bolt or by slitting its throat or whatever. They weren’t meant to kill with one shot, and they definitely weren’t meant to penetrate a human skull or ribcage with any effectiveness. The first time I’d tried using one had been – messy. After that, I only shot them as a hobby, not seriously.

That lack of intense practice showed. While I’d killed the deer, I’d been aiming for its neck, not its side. The bolt had dropped and drifted farther than I’d expected. I’d need more practice to really get it down. I wasn’t about to tell the hunter that, though.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she complained. “I could have brought a second bow, and we both could have hunted.”

“You didn’t ask,” I shrugged. “For the record, though, I can use a crossbow, regular bow, knife, axe, or musket just fine.” I was guessing about the musket, but I assumed that I could treat it like a slow .22 caliber rifle, more or less. “I’ve never learned how to fight with swords or spears, and if you have a shooting range, I’d prefer to practice more with the crossbow. I’m kind of rusty.”

“I do, and you’re welcome to use it – after we dress this cerbak, drag it and our other kills back to the village, and I teach you how to skin and process it to get the meat off.” She looked at me. “And on the way back you can practice moving quietly and spotting tracks.” She grinned at me. “You’re a fair shot, but you move like a vasak.”

She produced a sled to haul the deer’s corpse back on after we’d cleaned and dressed it, and she attached the straps of it to my pack so I could drag it along the needle-covered ground. All told, I figured I was carrying a hundred pounds of meat, bone, and fur in the pack and dragging another hundred, but as I strode silently through the forest, I didn’t feel tired at all. Just as the day before, I felt oddly energized, and my muscles never wearied or protested from the load.

We got back to the village just before lunchtime, and Renica had me skin and filet a few of the smaller animals just to see how it was done. I was good with a knife, my hands deft and sure, so it wasn’t too difficult for me, but I did botch the job a bit, slicing the hides in a couple places and leaving too much flesh on them in others.

“This is why I had you practice on the iupak hides,” Renica grinned, holding up the rather pathetic results of my efforts. She’d skinned most of the other small animals in the time it took me to finish my three. “They aren’t worth much this time of year, when they’re fur’s so thin, so losing them isn’t a big deal.”

“When are they worth more?” I asked.

“Early winter. Their coats are thicker, and they’re fattened up to make it through the season, so their fur is glossier. That’s when I go from being a hunter to being a trapper. I’ll lay trap lines in the forest to catch the iupaks – and the vulpaks that hunt them.” She held up the dark fur of the weasel-like creature I’d killed, poking her finger through the huge gash my hatchet had left. “Traps do less damage to the furs, so they’re worth more.”

She gathered my hides and deftly scraped them free of extra flesh. “Now, I’ll mount these on drying racks, comb and scrape them to make sure they’re clean, and stretch them so they keep their size,” she said. “Once they’re ready, I’ll pack them up with the others until Florin comes around at the end of the season.”

“Florin?”

“The local fur buyer. He visits all the Darkwood villages the same way Gogu does, buying whatever we have so he can resell it in a larger town, like Dutica or Petronik.” She laid all the hides together, keeping fur touching fur and inside touching inside. “You should go grab something to eat and see the Sorvaraji. She said she wanted your help for the augury, so I’m sure she’ll have things for you to do.”

I tried to hand her back the knife she’d given me, but she shook her head. “Might as well hold onto it. You don’t have a belt knife, and you can’t get along hereabouts without one.” She shooed the back of her hand at me. “Now go on, get out of here. You still have things to do today, and so do I.”

I left her to her work and headed toward the center of the village, checking my waiting notifications as I did.

Skill Gained: Weapon Focus (Crossbow)

Weapon Focus (Crossbow): Initiate 4

Benefits: +1% per skill rank to attack and damage with a crossbow, +1% per skill rank to reload speed

Skill: Tracking has gained a level.

Tracking (Initiate 2)

Benefits: +1% chance per skill rank to determine individuals among tracks

Skill Gained: Weapon Focus (Knives)

Weapon Focus (Knives): Initiate 5

Benefits: +1% per skill rank to attack and damage with a knife, add skill rank to non-combat knife usage

31 Unassigned XP

Unassigned XP can be divided among the following professions:

Warrior, Investigator

You have 24 hours to assign this XP or it will be randomly assigned

I smiled as I perused the black screen. My new Weapon Focus skills had started higher than normal because I’d had previous training with both, meaning that I could level them up faster than I might have otherwise. I still had a free Skill Point, and I was tempted to drop it into Knives just to boost that to the Adept level, but I held off. I was supposed to be doing some axe training later that day, and I didn’t know if helping Viora would give me any skills that might benefit from a boost.

Instead, I made my way toward the village, where I hoped food was waiting. I was starving again, and I had a feeling the rest of the day was going to be much longer than the morning had been – and probably a lot less fun.