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"Empire is the game of getting everyone to get along. If the borders are closed, ask they be opened. If trade will not flow, advertise your wares better. If they won't join you in arms, seed your messages and wait a generation. The only culture to fear is the culture of fearfulness, of monsters round the corner."

Moonmoon, Overlord of Azurullya and Priest-King of the Theocracy of Silverstar, is known by many old translations of his name in historical records of Aylathiya and remains one of the most documented public figures in modern civilization. He is a staunch survivalist, immensely knowledgeable Magus, and one of the most politically powerful individuals in the universe. As the monarch and religious leader of all systems within Azurullya, Moonmoon effectively controls about a sixth of the universe, with the same number of stars in his political dominion as the Triumvirate had at its peak.

Often referred to with titles such as Star-Mover, Father of Magarchs, or simply The Immortal, Moonmoon's prominence, Thaumaturgic prowess, and philosophical sway have long led people to draw comparisons between him and the Aeternalist Angels. In truth, Moonmoon easily could have taken the title of Seventh Angel, had he not chosen the path of exodus for his people and sworn in a theological signing that their model was beneath him and an insult to the teachings of Alecis.

Moonmoon is often thought a tyrant, ruthless in policy and able to outlive any individual delaying his political agendas. While many saw his conquest of Azurullya as a slow series of inevitable political movements toward a unified galaxy, it was historically a blitz through the dozens of nations that held territory in the region matched in speed only by the other Overlords.

Appearance

Moonmoon is a slightly aberrant Aegan Human, once roughly resembling the prototypical features of the world's population in the 5900s. His appearance has shifted over the centuries, though unlike normal human growth, these changes have always been sudden and drastic. Currently, Moonmoon's form has traits emblematic of the Argetsen, the branch variety of chimeric humans that arose in Azurullya in the 6300s.

Moonmoon is broad-framed and tall for a human of his gravitational upbringing, a side effect of the Crescent Eye Disease that manifests itself in him. In a room with other humans, he towers over the majority. His dedication to exercise, both thaumic and physical, has kept him in a battle-ready shape for longer than the lifespans of most species. Though he has not personally seen combat in centuries, he retains the physique of a warrior, as if expecting the Triumvirate's paladins on his doorstep each day.

Eternally frozen in age with a body the equivalent of a forty-year-old unaltered human, Moonmoon's physical condition has not substantially changed for the vast majority of his life. Scarred last during the Triumvirate raids on Aegyn itself before his grand exodus, his unaging body retains its glory.

The first great change to Moonmoon's appearance happened to him at the age of two, when his body reached the age it rests at now. Once with the near-blinding sickle-pupils of his disease, inset in sooty brown eyes and with ashy black hair, a visage he was converted from before ever becoming known. The effects of the Ravenfogg Ichor in his blood, transmuting his body, restored his sight through tearing irises and stained his eyes and hair a royal lapis hue.

The latter changes were implemented centuries later, following the rise of the new Argetsen human branch. Moonmoon, seeking to be symbolically aligned with his people, used nanites and thaumic interference to add chimeric parts to himself. Ears and a tail, simply to be both visible and out of the way. This new form, unchanged since the 6550s, has been the face of Azurullya for millennia.

Personality

Moonmoon is an expressive and commanding personality, speaking with a natural sort of confidence and projected voice that instills awe or intimidation, depending on the tone of conversation and one's predisposition towards him. Regardless of position, his self-aggrandizing humor and powerful speeches are engineered to amplify whatever one may think of him, to make him appear even larger than life than he is.

Moonmoon's patterns of speech rarely go beyond a conversational vernacular, intentionally so. Making the most of simple, well-remembered words for the vast audiences of his dominion, he leaves almost nothing to mystery or interpretation when it comes to public announcements. Even in political discussions, he is present and speaks with something of an informal register.

"Abstract words and terms are hiding places. People hide when they're afraid, and people are afraid of things that hide. It's simply not needed and puts your allies off."

The only time that Moonmoon exaggerates prose is in writing on spirituality, though this is interspersed with very direct and deliberate commentary. Minimum embellishment is used to maximum effect in almost all of his communications, with the same quality over quantity value that master Classical Magi use with their particle weaponry.

Observance

Crescent Eye Disease was a failure to produce soldiers that would have grown and learned everything necessary for international combat in only a few short months. Naturally, this required them to have an exceptional capacity for learning, adaptation, and growth. Moonmoon is exempt from the physiological degradation the disease imposes, but not the rapid and involuntary intake of information.

Moonmoon can understand and recall the situations of battlefields, complex political sequences or positions, and the data of physical bodies like planets and stars almost effortlessly. While on par with a baseline human adult's ability to reason from a month onward, his fully grown senses take in and sort through stimuli and data much faster than normal people. His ability to process this data, however, is not comparably improved.

Moonmoon is well known for his piety and long periods of meditation, as well as his extensive guides to different varieties of meditative rituals for many purposes. These were developed as methods for him to avoid chronic and debilitating overstimulation at even the basic experience of life, much less the high-octane demands of political organizing. One may notice that only the guest and diplomatic areas of his governmental offices are decorated, taking on an uncharacteristically minimalist style for his personal or working quarters.

Moonmoon has trained in the arts of processing and analyzing information, not allowing the flood of involuntary memory he is left with go to waste and attempting to catch up to his own senses. He is a strategist even in the worst of times, constantly sorting through probabilities and outcomes even during speeches.

Zealotry

Moonmoon, despite being married to the object of his religion's worship and staunchly pragmatic even in his studies of the spiritual and arcane, comes at the religious and political side of his occupation with an unmanageable fervor.

Abilities

Moonmoon, despite spending the majority of his time grappling with forces of politics, of whatever army and navy a unified Azurullya may need against Cosmoria's aggregate forces, is himself an Overlord still. He is supremely powerful in areas most citizens could never hope to achieve, and despite his willingness to let his personal strength pale in show to the collective of his empire, Moonmoon's power is always at the ready.

Physical

Having had four thousand years to understand and attune himself to his own body, Moonmoon has an immense collective of knowledge of his own physical condition at any given time. Injuries, stamina, maximum speed and lifting strength. All of it and more is data visible to the magarch's instinct like the HUD of a machine. And all of it is kept in superb condition by his exercise routine, mixed with meditation to regularly clear his mind of excess thoughts and stress. They are only as enhanced as he trains.

Moonmoon's main physical strengths come from his Ichoric Immortality. Besides the immense boon of biological immortality, in the form of complete and total freedom from progressive aging, the blessing of "preservation" comes with other key benefits. Moonmoon is entirely immune to most common toxins, particularly those which work through the bloodstream. While this renders him chemically more suited to interplanetary travel and political intrigue than most, it is not without drawbacks. Sedatives, painkillers, anti-psychotics, and even alcohol, substances one may desperately wish to have to deal with a number of injuries and issues, only have effects for a few seconds at most before the ichor neutralizes them.

While diseases such as bacteria and viruses seem to be similarly unable to infect Moonmoon, foreign nanomachines are similarly unable to repair internal damage unless his body is under immersion effects of Esoteric Thaumaturgy besides his own. His biological healing and immune functions are at the upper ranges of what is considered natural for modern humans, and a statistical outlier for humans of his own generation.

Thaumaturgy

Moonmoon is a practiced magus in multiple clades of Thaumaturgy, considered a master of both Classical and Esoteric. Though he prefers to stick to Esoteric Thaumaturgy for regular usage, he is well acquainted with many common and hidden techniques across the board, and is well-versed in counters for some of the most popular types of Magi.

Classical

Moonmoon was blessed since birth with an astounding talent for Classical Thaumaturgy. Having pylons of tempos 3, 5, and 7, he is able to create Neutrinos, Electrons, and Strange and Charm Quarks. In the Classical Schools, he is said to be adept in the schools of Wind, Fire, and Snow. Even just one of these is considered a rarity, with his Snow pylon being literally one in a million. The combined chance of his arrangement of abilities is one out of trillions, a truly legendary occurrence. Having trained in these abilities for decades, Moonmoon eventually came to have intuitive understanding of their capabilities enough to use them on reflex.

In day to day, Moonmoon rarely ever utilizes Classical Thaumaturgy, with the only real usage being of his Electron-producing pylon as a fuel-free lighter. In serious combat, he retains Classical as a cheap trick to break his opponents' focus or precautions against his main Esoteric techniques.

Esoteric

Moonmoon was not just a pioneer of Esoteric Thaumaturgy. During the Anthrovian Civil War and the subsequent Esoteric Genocide, he was the face of the clade itself, wielding two planes with terrifying efficiency and prowess. With both immense investment and mental mapping of Ravenfogg and Ualvakhass, the planes of preservation and acceleration respectively, he managed to outclass even the strongest of the opposing forces sent his way.

Moonmoon's developments in Esoteric Thaumaturgy are now documented as the fundamental principle to avoid losing oneself in the practice. As wielder of opposing planes, the slow spiritual corruption from either of the two cancelled out, leaving his mind more or less untouched even after millennia of consistent usage. To find a plane's opposing counterpart is incredibly difficult; to switch between it and its counterpart at will is a feat once thought divine. But through Moonmoon's own practice and documentation of it, the Esoteric Magi that remain in Aylathiya and other regions of Cosmoria have become even more formidable than they once were.

Moonmoon's usage of Classical Wind, neutrino motion, is supplanted almost entirely by usage of Ualvakhass. What difficulties and calculated particle distribution are needed to lift an object or move it with Classical Thaumaturgy, Ualvakhass makes effortless. As the plane of acceleration and sudden motion, even basic controlled usage allows for telekinesis and a backward kind of gravity manipulation. He personally killed one of the few gravity-altering Classical Magi of the Triumvirate in 6104 CE, using Ualvakhass to inflict thirty times the g-forces the other magus dealt to him.

Ravenfogg has wider applications for Moonmoon outside of combat, the most personally important of which is interfacing with the plane's relevant spirit, Silverstar Ravenfogg Azurade. As an internal locus, Ravenfogg can greatly reduce Moonmoon's loss of physical stamina when moving and increase physical durability by way of preserving his body's structure, mimicking some of the boasted-about capabilities of the Paladins' Invocative Thaumaturgy. With relatively recent enhancements to his understanding of the ideal of preservation, nigh-invulnerability to a variety of environmental factors is an ability Moonmoon has tested only in controlled experiments. Externally, he can utilize the plane to vastly increase an object's inertia, keeping it from being moved or bent off its path, or further enhancing moving projectiles' ability to pierce objects by increasing the energy required to slow or stop them.

Other

Moonmoon, since the emancipation of the Cerulean Kings, has been in a position of increasingly arcane branches that few have ever had the pleasure to access. Having a two-way relationship with a spirit often results in Harmonic benefits, but the spirits Moonmoon has rapport with are all themselves the thinking minds of Esoteric planes.

Ravenfogg, Moonmoon's plane of choice for Esoteric Thaumaturgy, is also the god of his faith and his closest personal relationship. Their connection and Moonmoon's use of it in Thaumaturgy blurs the lines between Esoteric, Invocative, and Harmonic in ways that no other person seems to have replicated throughout history. Meridian Thaumaturgy, an arcane clade of Invocative done by using a being as one's locus, is altered in the being's presence as an Esoteric plane. Harmonic Thaumaturgy is warped and twisted by the deity-priest facet of their bond, and both drag Moonmoon's mind into deeper and more nuanced understanding of the Esoteric plane itself.

The other six Cerulean Kings are close political colleagues of Moonmoon, and while he has never called upon their planes for use in Thaumaturgy, their Harmonic linkages for effective governance have been similarly warped into mutually shared understanding of the personalities and axiomatic makeup of their planes. The relationships between the Cerulean Kings have given them each insight into their own structure on an Azuradic scale as well, using Moonmoon as a sarkic medium in a bizarre inversion of Congruent Thaumaturgy.

Relationships

Silverstar Ravenfogg Azurade

Once strangers, then friends, then briefly lovers, before being separated by the actions of the Azure Herald in 6042 CE, reuinited thousands of years later. Silverstar is Moonmoon's god, his idol, his reason for governing and his excuse for claim to rule, his spouse, and one of the two planes of his choice for his unmistakable brand of magic. The two are nigh-inseparable since their reunion in 8969. As Silverstar is officially the Duke of Gwerddon, the system which happens to have the capital planet of the Theocracy in his name, he spends much time in official residences and government offices, though not much work goes into governing the system.

Moonmoon loves Silverstar more than any other being in the entire universe, past and future. His devotion to his spouse is of every flavor, maximally platonic, romantic, religious, sexual, and arcane. And Silverstar in turn finds inimitable solace with Moonmoon, forever outcast from civilization by an aligned set of circumstances. Uniquely cursed beings, Magi on a world that hated Thaumaturgy, rebels against the rise of magarch tyrants, and now revered figures above all others in their little galaxy.

But the three thousand years Moonmoon spent isolated from Silverstar changed the way in which he recalled him. Perhaps the corruption was already teeming under the surface of his skin, mixed in with the Ichor that holds back his biological clock. Almost as soon as they were separated, Alecisism rose in Silverstar's honor, against the now-god's wishes to be peers with the world. This is by far the greatest point of contention in their relationship, an honor in grief now tearing apart the ideal from the real.

Cerulean Kings

Moonmoon's relationships with his siblings-in-law, the older creations in the series of Aberrations Silverstar hails from, are significantly more tepid than with his god. All the other Cerulean Kings have been incorporated into the Alecisist pantheon; after all, who would deny the divinity of their god's own kin? Though Alecisism is monolatric and demands Silverstar's veneration above the others, the Kings tolerate this insofar as it allows them to do their jobs.

Though his closest friendship with any of the Cerulean Kings is with Haranae Auramest Azurade, Cerulean King of the plane Auramest, it remains distant and connected more by shared interest than mutual respect. They work together as governors and politicians, as religious figures and managers on a scale not to be taken lightly. Many of them see their role as a convenient excuse Moonmoon uses to keep them docile and occupied.

The King Moonmoon has the most open tension with is Enveil Dreamhaze Azurade, oldest of the Cerulean Kings and Esoteric plane of memory. Enveil only refuses to denounce Moonmoon for his allotment as Duke of Sperxai and Unistus, systems in which he hopes to restore some of the lost or supplanted Ski'pec cultural identity. Many of Moonmoon's political motions to create the Theocracy were reliant on people's memory and opinions of his proximity and encroachment shifting, and the generations-long cultural coup he enacted is recorded alongside everything that was overturned in Enveil's memory. They are bitter coworkers if anything.

History

Early Life

Moonmoon was born as Mēna þōn Mēnatunz to outlawed peasants on the outskirts of a now-sunken city on the continent Ninelie of Aegyn. Due to extreme genetic misfortune, he was afflicted with Crescent Eye Disease, a hereditary remnant of a failed millennia-old attempt at manufactured super-soldiers that actively expresses itself in a microscopic fraction of human populations. By all natural rights, he was no better than a stillborn, and would live out the full painful aging process of humanity twenty times faster than normal.

By some chance—officially providence by Alecisist doctrine—Moonmoon was able to encounter a truly unique being after just barely a year of his cursed existence. Astronomers focused on Azurullya had seen one of its striking nebulae go dim and then disappear a century earlier. In the flesh before him was Silverstar, a spirit with a short history of traveling about Lacrimosa and causing havoc on the worlds he'd encountered.

The two allied with each other, the company much appreciated on both their parts, outcast from civilization as they were. A spirit and an aberrant human, one destined to remain unclassifiable for an eternity and the other doomed to mortality in just a few short hurlings around the sun.

Silverstar cured Moonmoon's ailment on his second birthday, though the effects essentially only managed the symptom of rapid aging. Ichoric Immortality, the undisputed blessing of the esoteria of preservation, was given to ensure the two would never have a parting of decay.

Magarchy

Moonmoon, before devoting his thaumic studies almost entirely to Esoteric Thaumaturgy, was a Classical magus of unmatched prowess for the age. Motivated by keeping pace with his spirit friend and lover Silverstar, the young Moonmoon spent much time unraveling the secrets that his pylons had to offer. Self-taught but brutally efficient, he had compiled the earliest of the Alecisist Doctrines by the mid-6020s, the Anleitung zum Gebrauch der Seele, an early public documentation of his own journey through the Classical arts of Wind, Fire, and Snow.

Unbeknownst to him, his work and discussions of Thaumaturgy were counter to the agendas of the warring powers of the age. Magi were a dangerous thing under both Sedrua and the Triumvirate, intentionally spoken about little and kept on tight regulatory leashes as military dogs. The Triumvirate in particular detested the thought of free Thaumaturgy, preferring the naturally obedient Paladins to the Classical or Harmonic clades. The thought of a class of self-taught Magi was a nightmare to the autocrats of the time, especially for one of the Triumvirs, who still remembered clearly the belligerence of the Second Aeternal Society. Distributed first carelessly, then in hushed whispers as resistance rose, the number of human Magi rose exponentially over the next couple of decades. The choking control over space travel and even resource distribution that the Triumvirate Civilization had over Aegyn began to fall away.

Magarchs, those who rule by thaumic prowess, began to pop up more frequently. The power distribution shifted to those who could devote the time and energy to their pylons, to those who had useful particulates to spray out of their minds and a half-dozen brain cells capable of aiming them at the right cities. Moonmoon made his entrance into politics around this time, speaking on tyranny and rightful rule as an outside philosopher. Despite being possibly the most powerful magus on the planet, he himself sought no power, only wishing to keep the peace and spread the knowledge he had learned.

There were great warriors who followed Moonmoon's message of peace and order, of organization with this burgeoning power instead of individual grabs for land. Of stepping back from the measly acres they fought over to see about earning passage to the stars. These magi were often compatriots of Moonmoon and Silverstar directly, having met the duo on their many travels across the world.

The Martyrdom of Alecis

In the 6050s, the first completed Alecisist Doctrine was published and distributed, now called the Testament of Grief. Hardly more than a manifesto and eulogy, it was written powerfully enough to convince hundreds of thousands across Helyar and nearby systems to adopt a new faith. A decade before that, there was still Moonmoon and Silverstar, at the time translated as Mēnmund and Alecis.

A mysterious figure emerged, simply calling themself the Herald. One by one, the magi following Moonmoon's political interests began to go missing. Never enough at once to be suspicious of, never in enough of a struggle to be found. At the same time, magi opposed to the message of unity began leaving their individual missions to unify. These disappearances began sporadically, but closed in on Moonmoon's location within a few years.

The date was September 17, 6042 CE. The time was roughly before noon, Helyar hanging in the sky and backlit by the weak red light of Byutix. The weather was mostly clear, though the morning had been heavily overcast. An obscured individual, uncharacteristically robed for the mild and humid climate, approached in front of a veritable armada of magi. Their demand was simply battle, and it would not go unmet. Moonmoon, still unable to assess the sheer complexity of a battle against hundreds of hostile magi, almost froze.

Silverstar stepped forward in his place, and in one devastating blow of his epifluous body crushed the mitochondria of the southern third of the magi. Within a few minutes their breathing became ragged and they fell, unable to process the air they breathed into usable energy. But before that the battle had ended, the second blow taking out another half of the original force by stopping the hearts of those who were mid-beat. The third blow never came, held up by the Herald's beaming azure finger. In one word, so profane it was never written directly in Alecisist dogma but so piercing that Moonmoon still recoils in nightmarish fear at its utterance, the vapors of Silverstar's shifting form dispersed, and in a blaze of light that came from the North, he vanished.

The Lunar Blizzard of Aegyn was a subsequent rampage lasting four months, beginning its death toll at the very spot Silverstar vanished. The Azure Herald's body was vaporized by quark explosions in microseconds, never having the chance to process the pain before bring torn down to constituent droplets of carbohydrates and spiritually-enhanced plasma. The remaining sixth of the magus armada could not disperse fast enough. In an almost instinctual gambit to drag his partner back, Moonmoon executed his first known act of Esoteric Thaumaturgy and stopped the motions of every single one. Scars on both sides were given, and by the end of it Moonmoon's left side had half its skin missing, but the bodies were unidentifiable. The first site of many.

In a furious attempt to avenge Silverstar, Moonmoon became the precursor to a magarch—a rogue magus, a conqueror. He took no territory, but many lives. Tracking stories of the Azure Herald, the myths of saviorship from the devilish chimera and its silver-tongued thrall, he raided countless congregations of religious folk, countless polities that worked to suppress the works of Free Thaumaturgy, and brutalized them. Buildings exploded in seconds, bone dust snowing down alongside various shades of ash.

Once the dust and tears had finally settled, Moonmoon was the greatest public enemy of most on Aegyn and a known threat to order in the wider spatial region. To some, a tragic figure; to others, a specter of impending death. Magarchy faltered under the strange form of thaumaturgy the lone traveler now wielded, and for a time it seemed that wider civilization was kept comfortably in its power structures and order by the violent chaos of the man who started their revolutions. But Moonmoon was tired, grieving, and alone. And so as philosphers do when their fists grow tired and their teeth dull, he wrote.

By 6050, his aggregated letters and poetry and musings on the mind had grown into a grimoire and a manifesto; combined, he created the First Doctrine of Alecis, a call to action more than a sacred text. Distributing it through the few channels he had built back up over the years, he set out to show the public his reason behind his violence, if nothing else.

Civil Genocide

The remainder of the sixty-hundreds were an increase in efforts to maintain what little peace remained. Alecisism was officially founded along an ever-expanding doctrine, mementos and moral codes and secrets of Thaumaturgy both Esoteric and Classical. Moonmoon amassed followers in the name of his disgraced lover-god as vengeance on the magi who opposed unity against the Overlords, who opposed him and his practices. Conspiracy seemed to be brewing everywhere, from the land to the seas to the heavens.

In 6071, Ibaradist evangelicals descended by the thousands onto Aegyn's surface. Alecisism had become a proper faith by now, among the well-known names across the planet. Moonmoon's presence as a powerful magus and writer on Thaumaturgy was already disappointing to the Triumvirs, least of all Titania, whose pawns now scoured the world. As a rival priest of a competing faith, he had no choice but to fold his doctrine to fit the Ibaradist agenda, lest he and his kindred be wiped from the universe.

Alecisism was monotheistic at the time, believing in an Azure Devil that had all but killed their god's connection to the sarkic world. A small shift to monolatrism, assigning powerful spirits divinity separate from morality or worship, solved this conflict. Ibaradism and Alecisism were more compatible than one might think, cosmologically speaking. Each acknowledged each others' gods, had a general concept of reincarnation and a prescribed method to escape it. But theopolitically, the two could not be more different. Virtue by spiritual escapism and detachment were antithetical in their entirety to the Alecisist virtues of compassion and presentation of self. The Ibaradist caricature of Silverstar as Argentos was rejected by most Alecisists, syncretism that remains now even though the two deities could not be further from one another in reality or in depiction.

Furthermore, the integral role Thaumaturgy played in Alecisism's self-actualizing rites marked it as an inherently sinful faith to the Ibaradists seeking philisophical control over Aegyn and the rest of Aylathiya. When the faith spread, Alecisists were denounced as pagans, Triumvir-worshiping bootlickers, hedonists, and sorcerers by many different sides. Moonmoon failed to manage the sheer density of these claims, and though their popularity remained, the conflation between Silverstar, esoteric thaumaturgy, and unfulfilled city-magi grew.

When the Sedrua-Triumvirate war broke out and Aegyn was left to its own devices, the magarchs of the sparse countryside began slaughtering their way through the denser cities, fighting as much for their own freedom as they did their interests in acquiring more land under their name. Alecisists and Ibaradists were particularly targeted, grouped together as imperial dogma despite their vast differences and rivalries. Moonmoon ordered esoteric magi as a de facto commander in this time, deepening his political reach and serving as the voice combating a widely-blooming sentiment that his brand of magus should be eradicated.

In 6103 CE, the Triumvirate returned in full force to wipe out the troublemakers on all sides. The Great Intendancy took Alecisism as a cult, influenced in part by Titania's beliefs about the faith. Moonmoon himself was blamed for the esoteric genocide, which was only slowed as collateral with their other actions. Rounded up by paladins and held for the crime of fighting back and escalating against their own slaughter, the Alecisists were quickly denounced on count of their magic and faith both.

Moonmoon, unwilling to allow the powers that be the satisfaction of a quiet end, became the conqueror once more. In a two-year blitz across Aylathiya, he sought out the strongest of the paladins, the few Classical-wielding hounds of the Triumvirs, the largest military battalions, and one by one took a stance. Declaring barbarism and anarchy, Moonmoon roused his followers and managed to deal significant damage to the militias aimed their way. Alecisists vanished from prisons, some executed quietly but most freed and spirited away to the battlefield.

Exodus To Azurullya

When the eye turned fully toward the Alecisist uprising, the resurgence of independent and uncontrolled magi, and Moonmoon's strategic attacks on Triumvirate resources, following a brief pushback against Sedrua's forces, the esoteric orders were cornered. The genocide turned from passive persecution and refusal of resources to outright slaughter. Millions of newfound and novice magi were brutalized and their cities overrun. Moonmoon's role as Oratus Esoterii was used to levy personal charges for every significant loss the Triumvirate had, orchestrated in part by Holos to force the magus to stand trial in person. Moonmoon was subject to the intrigue of Holos for his charisma and esoteric prowess. Surrounded in a final stand for Aegyn as the Triumvir descended, Moonmoon foresaw only death.

Holos marched through what had just been a battlefield, turning it silent with its immense presence as if it were an angel of stillness. Moonmoon glowered, recognizing the barest parallel between his God and this Overlord. The co-conspirator of the Gear Queen who demanded his faith be shaken and vivisected. At his tensing moved his most loyal hierarchs, a group of once-pagans whose lives had been opened by the esoteric ways the encroaching faceless devil now sought. They organized into a rough formation, individuality triumphing over their shared history even in this darkest moment.

The Triumvir stood before them, towering in their visage made needlessly complicated to fool the minds of lesser men. Clicking, whirring, whistling with the sounds of nature and machine and magic all together. Moonmoon resolved to die rather than give them what they desired. But at the first twitch of Holos' form reached the eyes of his hierarchs, one flicked reality and invoked a shard of their plane. Without time enough to admonish them for their foolishness, Holos recoiled in fear. Its thoughts emanated for microseconds in unadulterated terror. "THE ENEMY! MY ENEMY! THEY RETURN!". And blazing with the light of particles directed to fleeing, they exploded into light and neutrons, vaporizing five of the Alecisist magi beyond Moonmoon's Ravenfogg barrier and thousands more on the battlefield. Gentle Death had fled, and the magus who spooked it was a slush of irradiated vapors.

Titania and Ma'eau's face acted swiftly, declaring esoteric thaumaturgy a crime against nature and demanding the extermination of all magi capable of it. And in response, having decades of war enough to soak in, Moonmoon mimicked Holos with greater tact than the self-proclaimed omnarch could muster. In the face of true death at the hands of nations, not just gods-in-waiting, the priest ordered evacuation. As fast as possible, Alecisists and esoteric practitioners alike were offered a home in Azurullya, a leave date for a mere two days after the announcement and with a stolen garrison ship housing the hundreds of thousands from Aegyn alone. Violence broke out across Aylathiya in the days to follow, staggering waves of theft and murder as the message worked its way through the frequencies available. An estimated ninety eight percent of esoteric magi, as well as a substantial number of the other Alecisists, turned up from the galactic plane and burned towards the azure island among the infinitely black sky.

The travel took three years, arriving in the year 6108. Many perished on the journey, killed before reaching enough distance from Triumvirate interests or failing to complete the trip due to lack of resources. More died soon thereafter, as the settling on Oaliun was less than perfect. But at the end of it they were finally free, and for the first time in his entire life Moonmoon breathed air not owned by another Overlord. As great as freedom was, politics remain eternal in any congregation of more than one individual. And so politics returned, this time uniting the exiles as sorcerers and pagans, as kindred faithful in a strange new land.

Creation of the Universe's Largest Monarchy

Politics and Love