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Impulse slams his bed down before him with fleeting hesitation. Its legs crack and buckle under the weight of the mattress, scattering splinters from their bases like dust from a crater. With a cold, resolute determination in his eyes he draws his axe and raises it above his head, glinting in the icy gaze of the moon.
It is a saviour, never a threat. This— this place, and the weeping statues standing sentinel, helped him see the truth.
The axe blade bites into the side rails with a crunch , cleaving through polished planks and carved details and the soft wool comforter like a mulcher tearing down the ancient halcyon forest. Sawdust clouds the air like flocks disturbed from roost. There’s a certain catharsis, Impulse thinks, wood splintering and rending and giving under the power of his own weathered hands. He had been wrong to sleep the moon away. Wrong to be afraid of the what-ifs and the maybes of their world crashing down about their ears.
Why cower if there is nothing to fear?
He was wrong, Impulse thinks with a twitch of his lips, and with a final heft of the netherite blade hews the headboard in two fragmented pieces.
The moon glimmers like a cataractous eye in the desolate, cloud-sparse darkness. Impulse’s arms are bare and prickle in the bleak wind sweeping across Boatem, with some eerie sensation he can’t quite touch but strains for nonetheless. To obtain the unobtainable, sing the one pristine note bordering the sky and Hels.
She’s beautiful, and she always is. Impulse doesn’t know whether the moon attracts their world or if planet HC-8 calls at some frequency inaudible, like the syrupy beckon of a siren. Regardless, she hastens by the night. Bundles the skirts of space-time and hurries as a war-struck wife runs to her lover, transcending orbits and the delicate balance of their gravity.
He vaguely remembers Doc animatedly discussing the moon rock smashing through his chicken coop, and now—
Floating blocks? The world dissolving?
They'd laughed heartily and put the hallucinations down to sleep deprivation. Doc had laughed alongside them, too, but stopped far, far sooner than the others, discomfort then silencing the rest of their voices one. by. one.
And something Ren had mentioned yesterday, in passing— it was talking? Trying to communicate? His eyes were a little too bright, Impulse remembers. Bright and glistening and wet like the melting frost on the joints of the crawlers, and darting too. Observing everything dully as if there was nothing left worth seeing anymore.
(The most terrifying part of it all, Impulse believes, was that Ren looked more alive than he ever did throughout the season. He’d gotten accustomed to Ren’s deathlike pallor, and now his skin was flushed with colour; too pink with health, ever-so-slightly too saturated.)
His robes were edged with gold lace and swished like silk. Where— where did he get them from?, Impulse yearned to know.
( The moon, Ren would answer, eyes wide and head raised to the Lady of the Night, and Impulse would believe it best not to probe further.)
And the horns, too: tightly-coiled ram horns that flanked his face like ammonites, ridged and scarred, extensions of his skull where canine ears once lay.
The moon may have helped him see, Impulse considers, but it had deafened him to the world.
The next day, this morning: Doc had stubs of horns, one sleek cold metal and the other a protrusion of bone from his mossy fur. He wore the same glass-green cloak: absent of rips and frays and redstone stains and all those things unique to Doc himself.
Ren was right, is all he said, and his eyes bore the same bright, glimmering sheen like the fluctuating core of a nebula.
All Impulse knows is that something is very, very wrong with this cursed planet.
He draws his thoughts back into himself. It is still night and his factory hums in the distance. His bed; a heap of matchstick planks and a trickle of white feathers leaking from a rift in the mattress and the cornflower-blue cover shredded by the axe in his hand. The crescent-moon statue above him casts a deep shadow over his face; and behind it the Lady herself. She is enormous, and never more so than now as she blots out half the night sky, dwarfing even the fattest smoke towers at the rear of his factory.
His fingers twinge with splinters.
Gravel beneath and great rock above.
What— what was he—
You can join us, my child.
It comes from everywhere, but not everywhere: Impulse looks up to the moon, giantess, and the sonorous tones are emanating from her.
(The moon is everywhere. What difference does it make?)
Briefly, Impulse wonders if the rest of Boatem can hear.
Certainly not, he admonishes himself. Someone had to build this place, and it couldn’t have sprung up the moment Boatem rendered, so it must have been there for a while before. And he couldn’t hear the moon then.
So it’s just him, Ren and Doc, and the creator of this lunar shrine.
They both appear so blissful. What do they have that he does not?
We can save you all, the moon coos, and Impulse softens slightly at the honey-rich tone dripping with sugar and all the diamonds in the skies and for a moment, a thought warps and broadens until it occupies his entire consciousness—
This— this, is not so bad.
He can see why Ren submitted so easily. This new way of thinking, it is as smooth as silk and simple to slip into, like a robe perfectly tailored to your form.
He never slept much anyway. Surely— he can build more? Work hard and long until the small hours of morning become large, under the watchful, grandmotherly eye of the moon?
He could adjust, he thinks, and becomes suddenly aware of the bed mangled and in splinters before him.
Surrender your treacherous thoughts, says the moon. There is no need to fear the darkness.
Yes. No need. For what is more disturbing than this unnatural, maddening night?
Do not think. We sense your resistance. This is your calling, Player.
“This is my calling,” Impulse repeats aloud, and the words tumble from his mouth like water from a ledge.
You will be safe.
“I will be safe.”
Good, acolyte.
Impulse does not reply. Instead he sways softly on his feet, bathing in the moon’s filtered praise.
He doesn’t quite have control of his body from this point forth; his hands seem to move at some power unknownst, and he is observing through the lens of a camera positioned somewhere just behind his eye sockets.
His hands move, and they are his hands nocking the bow and touching a torch to the tip of the arrow so the air folds into itself with a whoomph of flame; his hands fumbling for the bowstring and releasing the flaming bolt that alights on the woodpile like a firefly. His hands, trembling as the fire devours. Columns of black smoke rise into the night.
The heat from the growing bonfire roasts his cheeks red, yet the chill breeze wreathing around his shoulders perpetually reminds him of the winter settling over the Continent. He wrinkles his nose at the stench of burning hair, from the woolen blankets and mattress consumed by the roaring flames.
This light, this warmth seeps into his bones, invigorating him. He is full of the scent of burning wood and the caustic tang of soot at the back of his throat, and oh, he has to shield his eyes from the bonfire blazing white-hot before him.
He will burn like a martyr. Flames licking at his skin and racing across his clothes, swallowing up the webbing between his wings and searing every pore of his skin.
The heat is a razor blade now, severing the air between Impulse and the inferno.
Impulse does not burn; he remains a constant two paces from the bonfire, the hairs on his face and arms singed to their roots.
The woodpile crumbles with a groan and with it follows the swift extinction of the fire. Gone with the sigh of the wind. A final salute of sparks like swarming fireflies, and the bonfire is reduced to ash and soot and smouldering planks.
Impulse shivers with the sudden plummet of temperature. He blinks ash from his eyelids where it had settled like snow, and takes a final glance at the moon looming above the chimney stacks.
There is no word in the Universe to express this frisson of excitement jolting through his core like molten lightning; the thrill of youthful rebellion and the heart-tug of the world falling into place around you, alongside you.
(He will ask Doc tonight if he can speak with the moon rock. Doc will reply in that corrupted, half-lilting tone of his, and Ren will continue in unison, as if their two bodies shared the same mind pulsing through each.)
(Impulse will think nothing of it.)
After all, what threat could one moon possibly hold?