The Curse of the Moons

The curse is a resonance disorder. In an afflicted body, Fortera does not flow evenly; it pools, snags, and answers to the phase of the moons rather than the will of the person carrying it. Between phases the sufferer may be indistinguishable from anyone else, slightly tired, slightly cold, occasionally uncanny in ways that could be dismissed. When the moons pull, the field pulls with them, and something in the afflicted answers.

Presentations vary widely. Some sufferers experience physical alteration: elongated limbs, changed eyes, teeth that ache and reset, a voice that carries further than it should. Others show cognitive and affective changes: prophetic fragments, compulsions to walk, spells of ecstatic clarity followed by exhaustion. A rarer branch of the condition manifests as pure Fortera bleed, the afflicted becomes a small unstable node that spoils compass needles, curdles milk, and makes Éterlumin lanterns flicker within a few paces. None of these categories are clean. Most afflicted show blends that shift across their lifetime.

The three moons weight the condition differently. Umbra, the dark moon, is associated with the classic transformative episodes the folk imagination fears most: violence, appetite, animal seeming, loss of governance. Sirulena, the silver moon, tends to draw out the visionary and the porous: sleepwalking, singing without memory, unwanted knowledge of neighbors' griefs. Veles, the green moon, is bodily and cyclical: fever cycles, growth spurts arrested and resumed, wounds that close too quickly or refuse to close at all. Nights on which more than one moon is full at once, rare, watched, dreaded, braid the effects together in ways no doctrine has ever fully mapped.

The moons are not merely astronomical bodies in Aeon; they are the visible pulse of Fortera itself. Their phases modulate the field the way weather modulates the sea. Priests measure the calendar in moon-nights because those nights are when the world is most legible: rites are stronger, oracles clearer, Éterlumin more responsive, and the afflicted more evidently what they are. Sailors read the same nights for a different reason. When the moons pull, water pulls with them, and the tide charts of the Golden Sea are drawn moon by moon rather than day by day.

Ordinary weeks in Aeon are unusually calm at sea. Mar de Oro sits in a sheltered Golden Sea basin with a modest base tide. Open continental ocean coasts carry a stronger everyday swing. But when a moon reaches its true full phase, and above all when moons align, the sea remembers what it can do. Certain narrow bays and resonant coasts amplify these nights into tides that would drown a careless port. Captains treat the moon calendar the way farmers treat the frost calendar: not as superstition, but as the calendar the world is actually running on.

The following tide bands are a working reference calibrated by moon phase and coastline. A Mar de Oro pilot accustomed to sheltered basin waters can be badly surprised by a narrow resonant bay on a true-full night. Strong and Cataclysmic share the same working height ranges in this reference; Cataclysmic names the more severe score and alignment, not a separate height estimate.

Below is the working almanac for Aeon year 7202, drawn straight from the tidal model. A notable night has at least one true-full moon or a tide score of at least 1.00. Tap a night to see the moons, tide score, type, and working heights for the basin, ocean coast, and resonant bay. Nights not shown may still have a lesser visible-full contribution; consult the model for an exact reading. Step the year to plan a season or find a stronger tide.

Every night has a tide score. At true full, Umbra adds 1.00, Sirulena 0.70, and Veles 0.50; in their visible-full days after true full, they add 0.50, 0.35, and 0.25 respectively. The contributions add together. The almanac labels scores below 0.50 Calm, 0.50 to below 1.10 Normal, 1.10 to below 1.60 Strong, and 1.60 or above Cataclysmic.

Most nights are Calm. In 7202, the model places 51 nights in Normal, two in Strong, and one in Cataclysmic. A score of 1.00 is still Normal; there is no fixed one-night-in-seven interval for any band. Even a Normal tide matters to a pilot in a narrow bay. Stronger alignments can flood harbors and make the curse in an afflicted character's blood harder to ignore.

In play, the tide score answers two practical questions at once. First, how high will the water rise? A low score means quiet water; a high score means a dangerous surge, especially in a resonant bay. Second, how strongly will the curse speak in anyone who carries it? The same pull that lifts the tide also tugs at the afflicted. The moons do not care whether the person feeling it is a harbourmaster or a desperate sailor.

That coincidence is not decorative. It is the heart of the setting: Fortera is one field, felt as water in the sea and as pull in the blood, arriving on the same nights for everyone.

When the curse runs past the edge of what a body can hold, the afflicted stops being afflicted and becomes something else. The pattern that ordinarily corrects itself between phases no longer corrects. What remains is large, luminous under the skin, and quietly still human at the eyes. A separate dossier collects what is known: the biological signs, the behavior, encounter advice, and, for GMs, the restricted archive on runaway correction.