Moira #23: Bona Fide Blast Zone (Patreon)

After a single taste, Rhiannon’s eyes widen, and she stares wonderingly at her bowl of gazpacho. “I got to go to a five-diamond restaurant once, paid by the company I worked at then,” she says. “Just for lunch, and it was still close to a hundred per person. I started with gazpacho there, and it was amazing. This makes that stuff taste like they dumped it out of a can.”

Briley laughs. “That’s sweet, dear, but don’t go overboard. I just have good ingredients, is all. Other restaurants can get tomatoes as good as these.”

Moira looks across the supper table at her. “Only if they get them from you.” She waves her spoon at the mouse. “And don’t pull that aw-shuck-my-husks act on us. You’ve been cooking since—since there’s been cooking. And baking! Your cardamom mango cake is, and I say this as the goddess of love, fucking orgasmic.”

Briley blushes. “Moira!”

Stetson clears his throat, ears slightly red, and pays very close attention to his soup bowl. “It is amazing soup, Lady Briley.”

“Thank you.” The mouse looks from Stetson to Moira, and stage-whispers, “He’s cute.”

Hazel grins. “Couldn’t you just eat him right up?”

Stetson’s ears fold down.

Briley arches a brow. “You haven’t been teasing the boy about eating him, have you?” she says to Hazel.

“I may have also been teasing him about you eating him.” Hazel grins ruefully.

“You scamp.” Briley pats Stetson’s shoulder and barely contains a mischievous grin. “Don’t worry, dear. I’d never eat you without Moira’s say-so.”

Both Stetson’s and Hazel’s eyes widen. Moira snickers.

The main course after the soup is a salad of four or five different greens, with roast carrots, roast chicken, and a crumbly cheese all served on the side (“so you can decide how omnivorous you’re feeling,” Briley says). True to the harvest goddess’s style, it’s simple, yet somehow built on the best possible version of everything.

Near the end of supper, Hazel says to Rhiannon, “You’ve been quiet.”

“I’m usually quiet.”

“That’s debatable. But okay, let’s say quieter than usual.”

Rhiannon shrugs. “Sorry. I guess my mind started drifting to some of that philosophical tail-chasing you tease me about.”

Hazel grins. “It’s one of your more endearing qualities.”

The squirrel smiles awkwardly.

“So what’s your mind been drifting to?” Briley says. “Questions about your mysterious missing town?”

Rhiannon hesitates, then waves a hand in the air self-consciously. “Like, I don’t know, is there really such a thing as love at first sight?”

“Oh, goin' right for the easy ones, I see.” The mouse laughs.

“I love questions that don’t have answers, I guess. That one’s just—”

“Yes,” Moira says.

Rhiannon stops and furrows her brows at Moira.

“Yes,” Moira repeats, tone gentle. “But not the way most people mean it.” The hare tilts her head to the side and smiles. It’s a small smile, but it’s sympathetic, compassionate. “It’s easy to fall in lust at first sight. But lust is a hurricane. Love, though? Love is a flower. It doesn’t grow and bloom in the snap of a finger. It takes time and attention.”

Rhiannon bites her lip, expression shifting as she fully digests that she just asked a rhetorical question about love to one of the few beings in creation who wouldn’t take it that way. She swallows, then suddenly words tumble out of her in a rush. “How do you find the right person? Does everyone only have one right person? Is it possible you never find them?”

Hazel gives her roommate a confused, skeptical look, but Moira just sighs, still smiling. “There are lots of right people, but what ‘right’ is means so many different things. People are…” She spreads her hands. “They are what they are. Proud, shy, frightened, foolhardy. But when you meet someone who could be right for you, whatever that might mean for you, then there’s a spark, a seed for that flower. You’ll feel it.”

Looking away, Rhiannon twists a hand in her hair, then nods. She looks back, realizing most of the table’s looking at her, and clears her throat. “Like I said, philosophical tail-chasing.” She shrugs. “I had a period in high school when I was secretly reading romance books, and I guess they stuck with me.”

“Hmm.” Briley finishes her salad, and taps her fingers on the table. “Not to change the subject, but I don’t suppose any of you took a photo of that star clock.”

“No.” Rhiannon immediately looks more interested. “Did you think of something?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” The mouse leans back, folding her arms. “Moira said something about it seemed odd, and that just keeps ticklin' the back of my mind.”

“The context is what’s odd,” Hazel suggests. “A giant mechanical clock with multiple nested dials, on the wall of a secret laboratory, under a house in a rural town.”

“No, there was more to it than that.” Moira purses her lips, back to her harder-edged air. “I don’t suppose either of you have a photographic memory.” She glances between Hazel and Rhiannon.

“She does,” Hazel says, jerking a thumb at the squirrel.

“I don’t,” Rhiannon protests. “It’s not fully eidetic.”

“Let’s see what we can do with partially eidetic, then.” Moira motions Rhiannon forward, and takes her hand when she’s close enough. “Picture what you saw as we walked down that staircase and entered the weird laboratory.”

“Fine.” Rhiannon sighs, closing her eyes. “We walk in that door, and the will-o-wisp goes to the roof and lights up a lot of machinery—”

“Open your eyes and make the view look that way.”

Rhiannon opens her eyes. “The what?” She sees what she’s facing—a floor-to-ceiling glittering black square—and literally jumps. “I can’t just…uh.” She swallows, facing the square, and her huge tail twitches. “We need a will-o-wisp.” She points and a bright spot of light appears, floating in the blackness. “And, uh. It goes to the roof, and lights up a lot of machinery.” The light floats up in the blackness, and gradually the room starts to appear.

Moira turns to Stetson and Hazel. “Does it look right to you two?”

“Spookily,” Stetson says. “What's…actually happening here? Are we seeing Lady Rhiannon’s projected memory?”

“Yeah. I mean, I guess.” Moira glances at Briley for a better explanation.

The mouse waggles a hand. “That’s probably the best way to put it. We could walk in there, if we wanted to, look around like time travelers. But we couldn’t change anything.”

“Because it would break time?”

Briley grins at the coyote. “Because we can’t. Despite all those stories y'all tell about time paradoxes and flappin' butterfly wings, nobody gets to change what’s already happened. I don’t think even Daranu could do that.”

Rhiannon allows herself to break into a smile, taking a deep breath. “Wow. Okay. Read-only time travel. Well, let’s see if we can get a good look at the clock.” The view pans to center the clock, the will-o-wisp moving to hover over it.

“Hmm.” Briley stands, looking at it. “What’d you think was odd about it? Looks pretty normal.”

Hazel snorts. “Normal for a mad science lab.”

“Normal for a star clock.” The mouse points at the outer ring. “Twenty-four segments along here for the hour, which matches this hand here.” She moves to the next ring. “This is a calendar. Twelve segments, twelve months, on this hand.” The next ring is also twelve segments, offset. “The moon and the sun’s position in the zodiac. The sun and moon phase in the center, around a minute dial.” She hmms. “Don’t see minute dials too often on these, though.”

“It’s not normal for a mad science lab,” Hazel protests. “Mad medieval clockmaker, sure. But there?”

“True enough,” Briley admits, stepping back and rubbing her chin. “Don’t see how it’d be connected to all that modern equipment.”

Rhiannon purses her lips. “Nothing in that place looked modern.”

“We’re on different scales for ‘modern,’ dear.” Briley shrugs after a few more seconds and sits down with a sigh. “But I don’t know what I was thinkin' now, I’m afraid. I’ve seen a few of these things, they all have their own unique look, but nothin' about this one strikes a bell.”

“No, I see it,” Moira says, moving forward and pointing at a bronze arrow at the twenty mark on the outer ring that points toward the center, and another one on the zodiac ring, and a third on the minute dial. “Those things. What are they?”

“Markers,” Hazel says after a moment. “Together they’re marking out a specific date and time. Eight-sixteen p.m. on…no idea.”

“It’s the current zodiac sign, it looks like…six days past its start point.” Moira squints. “We’re nearly through that house, so about three weeks ago.”

Rhiannon’s eyes widen. “That’s when all the evidence of Black Oak’s existence started disappearing.”

“Along with the town.” Briley grunts. “You don’t pick a wackadoodle time like sixteen after eight in the evening without a good reason. Somebody knew something was going to happen right then, and they had to take advantage of it.”

“So it’s a giant astronomical alarm clock?” Hazel crosses her arms. “Letting them know just the right time to do whatever the hell they did?”

“It might be a switch,” Stetson says hesitantly. “Like a sprinkler switch.”

Briley and Hazel look confused. Moira arches a brow. “Like fire sprinklers?”

Rhiannon lights up. “No. Like lawn sprinklers. I’ve seen light timers like this, too. They’re just simple analog switches tied to a clock dial. You set one slider to the time the sprinklers, or the lights, are supposed to go on, and another to the time they go off.”

“Huh.” Moira studies it a couple of seconds. “But there’s only one time this can set, isn’t there?”

Stetson nods. “They might have only needed it to come on, and just…run until it was finished.”

Briley makes a huh noise. “Did the clock keep running afterward?”

They all look at one another.

The mouse shrugs. “Maybe it’s not important, but I’m wondering if the markers ever moved.”

“Worth checking, I guess.” Moira claps her hands, and the view changes to: nothing. Instead of the underground bunker, it’s a nearly flat, featureless plain under the prairie sky. She furrows her brow.

Stetson blinks. “What are we looking at?”

“We’re supposed to be looking at the clock, right now,” Moira snaps. She holds her hands out, then waves them up. The window’s view rises, as if from a drone flying straight up.

With the expanded view, what they’re looking at seems more like a dry lake bed—a deep lake. The higher the view gets, the more it looks like a crater, with a big jagged crack running roughly along the center.

Briley leans forward and grunts. “I’d ask if you were sure you’ve got your magic camera in the right place, but I’m gonna guess somebody got their knickers all in a knot when they realized their magic history eraser button didn’t work on immortals.”

“Well, we knew we were on to something when security showed up.” Rhiannon sighs, and waves a hand. A second, small floating window appears in front of her, this one more like a computer screen. She reads for a few seconds. “I see reports of an anomalous earthquake in that area from a day ago. I guess that’s the story for anyone who felt the demolition, although I can’t figure out what the hell they used.”

“A paw.” Moira crosses her arms. “Somebody stomped it.”

“What?” Hazel gapes. “Even setting aside how gigantic somebody’d have to be to pull that off, nothing there looks like a paw print.”

“She didn’t say a step, she said a stomp.” Briley leans forward, squinting at the crater rim. “You get big enough and smack your paw down with all your speed and strength, you don’t get a nice, pretty outline of your pads. You get yourself a bona fide blast zone. All that air under your paw has to go somewhere, and it does it real fast and real hard.” She traces a claw tip along part of the crater surface. “And I think that is a faint outline of the side of the paw. Can’t say what kinda paw, though.”

Rhiannon half-smiles. “Should we all be disturbed that you’re talking about this like you have first-hand knowledge?”

Briley laughs. “Not that I can’t get showy if I put my mind to it, but that kind of thing’s not my style. I’m just sayin' I got to see a few ‘crater lakes’ at creation, and despite what y'all mortals think, they’re not all volcanoes or space rocks.”

Stetson rubs his face, muttering under his breath. Moira gives him a quizzical look and the coyote clears his throat, looking away. “Sorry, it’s just hard not to try and picture one of you four at a thousand feet tall now.”

Moira shakes her head. “We’d have to be closer to a mile to do that.”

The coyote makes a soft strangled noise.

“Oh, he is cute when he’s flustered, isn’t he.” Briley grins. “Anyway, seems like somebody sure wanted to keep you from doin' another search around there.”

“Yeah.” Moira drops back into her seat and grunts. “But we have a date, a time, and a location to look up. That’s at least something.”

Rhiannon snaps her fingers. “Of course. Maybe we don’t need that clock.” She steps away from the group, summoning a few more virtual computer windows.

Briley sits up straight. “Môrdinas.”

Moira looks blank. “What about it?”

“That’s the other place I saw an astrarium with a minute dial set up just like that one. It was new when I saw it, too, just finished.”

“Did it have the sprinkler switch bits?” Hazel asks.

“I don’t know.” Briley shakes her head apologetically. “And I don’t think I remember enough of the place to do that time walkin' trick.”

“And I only really knew the parts around the coastline,” Moira says. “Which didn’t include any astronomical clocks. Where’d you see one?”

“It was somebody’s temple.” Briley thinks. “I don’t know. As I recall, Môrdinas didn’t have many temples to major gods, but had a passel of little temples to demigods nobody else cared about. Daughter of the music god, son of the ocean god, that sort of thing.”

Moira snorts. “Didn’t he declare himself god of lakes?”

“Bays and coves, I think. Real narrow.” Briley laughs.

Hazel drums her fingers. “So Môrdinas was full of proto-hipsters. No demigod of clocks or planets or stars or something else astronomical?”

“Don’t recall one. All that fell under Daranu’s aspect anyway, as the god of the sun.” Moira shrugs. “Could’ve been one of his kids, maybe.”

“Maybe. What’s worryin' me is the thought that I first caught sight of that clock not too long before Môrdinas disappeared.”

“Huh.” Moira furrows her brow, leaning back.

“If they’re connected,” Hazel says, “maybe this underground facility was a temple to the same demigod?”

“It wasn’t a temple.” Moira shakes her head. “I’d have felt it. You’d have felt it, even if you wouldn’t have known what you were feeling. But if Briley’s remembering right—”

“Which I am,” Briley interjects.

“—it’d be a hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t it.”

Rhiannon looks over from her nest of floating windows. “So occasionally I get cryptic information bits from people working with me, what they’re able to sneak out of top secret networks I can’t get into otherwise. Something I got a week ago included a small list of times and what I now think are geocodes, because one of those times matches the mystery clock markers in Black Oak. I’ve been trying to find why there, specifically, but no luck. No concentration of natural resources, no seismic activity before that mega-stomp, no history of supernatural events, no ley lines. Ley lines are bullshit, aren’t they?”

“They’re bullshit,” both Moira and Briley say together.

“I figured, but still a little disappointing. Anyway, I can find something interesting about the time: it precisely matches a full moon.”

“I gather full moons are, ah, somehow special?” Stetson says.

“Depends on the god.” Briley rubs her chin. “The sun and the moon in syzygy does sound like something Daranu would care about, though.”

Rhiannon squints. “We’re not back to thinking Darren Nunwick is actually Daranu, are we?”

“No, but that doesn’t rule out a connection.” Moira scowls.

Hazel straightens up in her chair, looking over at Rhiannon excitedly. “You said the Order of Caeles was some kind of cult that worshipped Daranu and its followers want to ascend to godhood.”

“Yes,” Rhiannon says cautiously, then looks stunned. “You’re saying it’s not that Nunwick is Daranu, but that he wants to become Daranu.”

Hazel nods. “And he’d have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for us meddling gods.”

Moira and Briley both look blank. Stetson stifles a laugh.

Rhiannon frowns. “Ha ha, but first off, that doesn’t explain the seeming connection to Môrdinas—”

“I’m working on it,” Hazel says.

“—and second, if that is his plan, we haven’t stopped him from getting away with it yet.”

“And you don’t know the how or the why, either,” Briley adds.

Rhiannon holds up a hand. “But if I can figure out the geocodes on that list, we might know the next where.”