Chương 4: Five Moons

His mother always woke before anyone else. Mark knew the pattern by now: the creak of the bed, careful footsteps across packed earth, then her face above his crib. She always studied him for a moment, as though confirming something only she understood. Sometimes, while the house was still quiet, she rested her chin lightly on his head. Some part of him had begun to wait for it. Mark blamed the child's instincts. Naturally, he intended to keep blaming them. Mari wasn't warm the way Sari was.

Sari was all noise, instinct, and laughter. Mari's affection lived in moments no one else was meant to see. When Mari went outside, she moved carefully enough not to wake anyone. She returned later with a bucket of milk and a basket of eggs, and only then did the household begin to stir properly. That morning, his three sisters went about their chores with practiced efficiency, each already knowing what needed to be done.

Mark, meanwhile, was so focused on his usual exercises that he didn't notice Sari approaching his crib until she touched him. Apparently, he would be "helping" prepare breakfast today. His sister picked him up confidently, and he let out a cheerful giggle. Their mother glanced at them disapprovingly, but said nothing. While Sari worked, Mark watched the others move around the room. Lisa was slower than her sisters, never quite hurrying even when Mari called for something.

Her long blonde hair was woven into a different arrangement of braids almost every day, giving her a seriousness that usually vanished the moment she opened her mouth. Perhaps she simply preferred saving her energy for talking. Alia was the opposite. The youngest of his sisters was so slight and quiet that Mark sometimes forgot she was there until she appeared beside Mari with something already in her hands. Terry contributed considerably less.

Mark's father eventually got up, settled beside the window, lit his pipe, and began studying the sky with far more concentration than he showed anything happening around the table. When breakfast was ready, Mari woke his brothers, and they all gathered at the table. Mark felt his invaluable contribution of moving pieces of cheese from one side to the other deserved at least some of the credit. They began with something like a prayer.

Mark inferred as much from the reverent silence and the way Terry raised his hands toward the ceiling, speaking calmly as he stared at the planks darkened by years of smoke. The portions made a quiet kind of sense. The children got bread, cheese, and milk, while Terry and Mark's eldest brother, Wod, got eggs, lard, and beer. They would spend the next hours bent over a plow, after all.

At around fifteen, Wod already resembled his father more than any of his siblings, with black hair, deep-set eyes, and a sharply defined jaw. Mari ate last, usually standing, from whatever remained, her eyes already tracking who needed what next. Once breakfast ended, the household scattered into its usual routine, leaving Mark mostly to himself again. Mari or Sari returned from time to time to check on him, and Sari rarely wasted the opportunity.

She pointed to people, objects, and parts of the house, repeating their names slowly and clearly until he reacted in a way she considered satisfactory. Thanks largely to her, his understanding of the language improved much faster. More and more conversations were beginning to resolve themselves from meaningless noise into recognizable words. For some time, he had been horrified to think his name was "meme," but it turned out to simply mean "child." He suspected he didn't have a name yet, which unsettled him deeply.

There was something unnatural about it. Sari also had a habit of talking to herself, usually while staring dreamily somewhere beyond the walls. That morning, she stayed with Mark until Mari called her away to another chore. Mark was left to entertain himself until, some time later, Mari settled beside the window with a pile of clothes that needed mending and placed him on the packed earth floor near her feet. Mark immediately recognized an opportunity.

He had caught glimpses of the outside world before: the well, the barn, the fence surrounding the yard. Never more than that. For months, the house had been his entire world, and he had decided it was time to change that. At first, he crawled around Mari's legs as usual, waiting for her attention to drift. The moment she became absorbed in repairing a tear in Wod's work trousers, Mark gathered his strength and made for the door. Freedom was only a few steps away. Hands closed around his middle. Damn it.

"Bad child! Why are you always running?" Mari exclaimed. He recognized amusement rather than anger in her voice. Two failed escapes later, exhaustion returned him to his crib. Toward evening, Terry returned with the boys, all three sweaty, filthy, and ravenous after a day in the fields. They attacked the meal Mari had prepared like wolves. Only once they had eaten, they disappeared outside again and returned some time later soaked but considerably cleaner. Mari and the girls ate afterward from what remained.

As dusk settled over the house, Terry brought out what was clearly one of its more valuable possessions: an oil lamp. He placed it carefully in the center of the room, filled his pipe, and accepted the beer Mari set beside him. By now, Mark understood what came next. If Terry turned toward the window, there would be no story. The children would return to their games, Mari would clean or prepare the bedding, and Terry would smoke in silence, occasionally exchanging a few words with Wod.

Mark usually spent those evenings collecting new words or mentally cycling through commands in another futile attempt to unlock the damn System. Tonight, Terry didn't look toward the window. Instead, he leaned back in his chair, stretched out his legs, and began to tell a story. He spoke at length, as if making up for entire days of silence. There were still too many words he didn't know, but by now he could usually piece together the stories from the ones he did.

Most seemed to involve distant places, dangerous journeys, monsters, or someone doing something spectacularly foolish. Even when he missed half the words, the laughter, groans, and interruptions around the table usually told him enough to follow along. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. What puzzled Mark most was how difficult it became to focus on anything else whenever Terry told one of his stories.

At first, he blamed the atmosphere: the quiet attention of the others, the oil lamp between them, his father's suddenly animated voice. After several evenings, though, he began to suspect something else was happening. Looking away required effort. More strangely, whenever Mark decided to crawl off and occupy himself with something else, the intention seemed to fade before he could act on it. Tonight, he decided to see if he could push through it. He fixed his attention on the doorway and started crawling.

Terry's voice followed him across the room, tugging at his attention with every sentence. Twice Mark slowed without meaning to. Once, he caught himself turning back toward the others before forcing his gaze ahead again. This time, he kept going. By the time he reached the doorway, he half expected Mari's hands to lift him away from his goal. Nothing happened. The door stood slightly ajar. Mark squeezed through the gap and crawled outside. Cool evening air washed across his face, and Mark stopped.

For months, his world had smelled of smoke, bodies, damp wood, cooking fat, and whatever happened to be drying beside the hearth. Outside smelled of grass and earth. More than anything, it felt open. Mark drew a deeper breath. From the yard, the house looked smaller than he had imagined. For months, it had been his whole world. Now it was only a house. The grass scratched against his palms as he crawled farther into the yard. It was nothing like the trimmed lawns he remembered from Earth.

It was rough, uneven, and half wild, with hard stalks catching against his fingers. As his eyes adjusted, he realized that despite the night, it wasn't as dark outside as he had expected. A worn dirt path led away from the door, compacted by years of footsteps. It curved past a shallow well reinforced with old wooden beams, darkened by age and weather.

Farther into the yard stood a long, low building, probably a barn, though it looked as if it had been expanded and repaired so many times that its original shape was long gone. A chicken coop had been added to one side. A tall wooden fence enclosed the property. Past it were only darkness and the faint outlines of trees, with no lights, roads, or distant glow to suggest how much farther the world extended. Just emptiness. A pair of hands suddenly closed around his middle, and the ground vanished beneath him.

Mark stiffened at the firmer, rougher grip, so different from Mari's practiced gentleness. Terry. As far as Mark could remember, his father had never held him before. Up close, he could see the weathering around Terry's eyes and smell pipe smoke clinging to his clothes. Terry studied him for a few seconds, looking almost uncertain what to do with him. Then Mark's gaze drifted past his shoulder, and he froze. For a moment, his mind refused to make sense of what he was seeing. Five moons. Five.

They hung scattered across the night in different colors, four slightly smaller than the Moon Mark remembered from Earth. The fifth dwarfed them all, a vast silver-pink sphere at least three times larger, dominating the sky with an almost oppressive presence. Mark slowly reached toward them, an involuntary sound escaping him somewhere between awe and fear." Moeth? You like moeth?" Terry asked, sounding genuinely surprised.

He followed Mark's gaze, then shifted him slightly in his arms to give him a clearer view of the sky. Mark answered with a small, delighted laugh. Terry blinked. For a moment, he seemed uncertain what to do. He glanced toward the house first, then back at the stars.

"The smallest one is Nuk. Always liked that one. Its color reminds me of summer fields at dusk." Terry smiled as he spoke and Mark could tell he was talking about something he genuinely loved. Mark looked back at the sky. His grip on Terry's shirt tightened. He kept staring at the moons. For a little while, Mark forgot about the System, the priest, and all the questions he still had no answers to. There was only the sky above him and Terry's arm around his back.

"See that one?" Terry pointed toward the enormous pink moon.

"People used to think it was the eye of some sleeping god. My grandfather swore it blinked once during his lifetime." Terry chuckled.

"Of course, he also thought rainstorms were messages." Mark's chest tightened with something dangerously close to relief. Terry adjusted his grip, a little more carefully this time, as though only now realizing how small Mark actually was. His breath smelled faintly of smoke and beer.

"Funny thing," he continued, almost to himself.

"When I was young, I used to think if you stared long enough, you could hear them moving." He paused, and when he continued, his voice was quieter.

"Never managed it. But I still try sometimes." Terry fell quiet, but Mark kept staring upward, tracing the unfamiliar stars between the five moons. That was when he noticed something behind them. A faint haze stretched across the heavens, so thin that at first he mistook it for a cloud. But the longer he looked, the clearer it became. A pale glow seemed woven through the night itself. His attention narrowed around the haze until Terry spoke again.

"And over there are the stars of the Abyss. People say looking at them brings bad luck. I don't believe that myself." Mark followed his father's finger. Sure enough, that part of the sky looked like spilled ink, its stars casting a faint crimson glow. Something inside him stirred at the word. The Abyss. The name had followed him since the priest's test, but this was the first time it had pointed to something he could actually see. Mark tried to look away and found that he couldn't.

The darkness between those crimson stars seemed to move. At first it was only a subtle shift, something his eyes might have invented, but then the blackness spread outward and one star disappeared. Then another. And another. Mark stopped breathing as the darkness continued swallowing the sky, until even the five moons vanished inside it. His heartbeat hammered as the final trace of light disappeared. What was happening? Had he done this? Then the darkness began to descend.

For one impossible moment, Mark had the absurd impression that it knew the way. His fingers clenched around Terry's shirt. The darkness kept coming, swallowing more of the sky as it drew closer. His heart hammered against his ribs, and every instinct screamed at him to get away. There was nowhere to go. What have I done? The darkness seemed almost close enough to touch. The world lurched. Terry had swung Mark over his shoulder, breaking his view of the sky.

Warm fabric and the smell of smoke replaced the darkness so abruptly that for a moment Mark could only stare at his father's back. Terry, at least, behaved as though nothing had happened.

"Sometimes I even think they're beautiful, don't you?" Terry chuckled.

"Just don't repeat that to a priest. Otherwise, he'll think I'm some sort of Abyss cultist, and then they burn the whole family just to be safe."