“Oh, damn!” Dal-Sun said as she and Ganymede entered the room where they’d be staying in the latest town.  “I told them to give us a room with two beds, but they gave us a room with a double bed!  Oh well, guess we’ll just have to share it.  You’re cool with that, right?”

As Dal-Sun flopped onto the bed, Ganymede settled into a chair at a nearby table, dropping her pack to the floor and resting her head upon her paw.

“You okay?” Dal-Sun asked.  “You know, you’ve been pretty quiet for the past couple weeks or so, today especially.”

It was true.  Ganymede had felt less inclined to talk to her companions ever since she had been brushed off for trying to make connections with the various people they’d met.  She felt a combination of resentment and guilt; resentment that her new “friends” would reject what she knew to be the most important part of seeking the moon, and guilt that she couldn’t understand her friends well enough to follow along in what they knew to be the most effective way of reaching the moon.  After all, Ganymede’s method was through making connections, and she couldn’t even make connections with those who were closest to her, who otherwise agreed with her on what was important.

And now the group was even less connected than before–with most of their bigger tasks taken care of, Dal-Sun had split off from the rest of the group in order to perform the “scouting” she had described to Ganymede earlier, but she had asked Ganymede to come with her so that Ganymede could learn how it worked.  The others had no disagreements with this arrangement, and Ganymede suspected it was because they had already grown tired of her and her inability to connect with what they were doing.

“Should I even be here?” Ganymede suddenly found herself asking Dal-Sun.

“What do you mean?”

Ganymede turned her head away.

Dal-Sun sat up, crawled over to the edge of the bed closest to Ganymede, and sat down again.  “You’re still having trouble adjusting, huh?”

Ganymede remained quiet.

“Well, you’re still dealing with a major life change, after all.  It’ll probably take a while before it really feels normal.  But if you’re feeling like you’ve lost some confidence in your ability to handle it, take it from me: You can do it.  I’m sure you can.  You’ve already accomplished much harder things.”

Ganymede remained quiet.

Dal-Sun smiled.  “You know, you’re so different.  You’re so different from anyone else I’ve ever encountered.”

“I know,” Ganymede said, her voice barely above a whisper.  “I don’t belong anywhere.  I never have.  Even here.”

Dal-Sun was quiet for a moment.  “Hey,” she said.  “Hey, look at me.”

Look at me, Ganymede’s mother had said.  Ganymede stayed turned away.

“That’s not what I meant, okay?” Dal-Sun said.  “I was complimenting you.”

A compliment?  “You’re different” didn’t feel like a compliment.  It didn’t seem to be a good thing to Arya and Martim.  It had never been used as a compliment back in Ganymede’s hometown.

Except when Jess said it.

Ganymede turned her head back towards Dal-Sun, but still couldn’t look her in the eye.  She fought to hold back tears.

“Look, I don’t belong most places either, you know?  But I’m proud of that,” Dal-Sun said.  “It shows strength and integrity.  A willingness to be yourself, to not let yourself get caught up in the flow of what everyone else is doing.  ‘Cause it’s not like anyone else really knows what they’re doing, anyway, right?”

Ganymede didn’t know whether others knew what they were doing or not.  But many of them at least seemed to believe that they did, which was a lot more than Ganymede could say for herself most of the time.  And if nothing else, other people at least knew how to interact with each other–even Dal-Sun did.

“Oh, that reminds me,” Dal-Sun said, “I wanted to talk with you more about that stuff you were saying about reaching the moon through connecting to inner passions.  It wouldn’t have been a good time to talk about it earlier, but we’re in private now, we can talk about it more freely.  Would you be up for that?”

Ganymede was still focused on her pangs of anxiety, but a hint of intrigue crept into these feelings, throwing her slightly off-balance in her own head.  She remained silent.

Dal-Sun chuckled.  “Wow, you must be really out of it, huh?  You look like you can barely understand what I’m saying right now.”  She waved her paw.  “Don’t worry about it, I’d rather have even more privacy than this before we talk about it, if I’m being honest.  How’s this: I’d like to take you somewhere tonight, while the moon is out.  Why don’t you take a nap now, so you’ll feel nice and fresh for it?  I’ll try to do the same.”

With this, Dal-Sun suddenly started removing her clothes, throwing Ganymede’s thoughts into further conflicted confusion.  Dal-Sun laughed.  “Oh, sorry,” she said, “I’ve just gotten so comfortable around you that I didn’t think anything of it, but I didn’t stop to think about whether you’d be comfortable with it.  Do you mind if I get naked?”

Ganymede stared at her.

“I’ll leave my underwear on, then,” Dal-Sun said, continuing to disrobe.

---

Ganymede didn’t know what “spooning” meant until Dal-Sun explained it to her.

Dal-Sun asked if Ganymede was uncomfortable with it.  Ganymede didn’t know whether she was uncomfortable with it or not, but she wanted to find out, so she said she wasn’t.

She had left her own clothes on, but this didn’t stop her from dwelling on the feeling of where Dal-Sun’s fur touched her own, on her arms, across her neck and cheek.  Dal-Sun pulling Ganymede into herself.  Dal-Sun’s soft breathing, so close to her own ears now.  Ganymede wasn’t used to being touched like this–not with such warmth–and it felt unreal to her.

This was its own type of connection, physical touch.  Ganymede focused on this fact.  If anyone else saw them, it couldn’t be denied that the two of them were connecting, in the most direct, literal way possible.  At least, Ganymede herself wouldn’t be able to deny it.

Even so, Ganymede felt very far away.

It reminded her of Jess.

It reminded her of her mother.

---

That night, Dal-Sun took Ganymede outside of the inn, as she said she would.  Instead of taking her somewhere else in town, though, Dal-Sun took her into a nearby forest.

It occurred to Ganymede that she hadn’t been inside a forest ever since she started traveling with her current companions, even though she used to head into the forest every day.  This realization dawned upon her when she noticed that she felt a certain comfort inside the forest that she didn’t feel outside of it.  It felt more like home, even though it very much wasn’t her home forest.

“Sorry I couldn’t talk about this before,” Dal-Sun said, keeping a brisk pace.  “It’s not something I could really bring up in front of the others.  I mean, you saw how antsy they got when you suggested doing something they weren’t familiar with.  That’s just how people are, though.”

“Mm-hm.”  The forest felt more secure to her, she thought, because there were fewer people in it.  Maybe Dal-Sun felt the same way.

“The fact is, there’s all sorts of political drama happening in the Lunites practically all the time,” Dal-Sun continued.  “Nobody really agrees on the right way to be doing things.  Be glad you haven’t gotten mixed up in it quite yet.  You got a bit close to it when you ruffled Arya and Martim’s feathers back at that bar, so to speak, but people like them are willing to brush that stuff aside as long as you drop the topic.”  Dal-Sun turned around to face Ganymede, but continued walking backwards.  “Not me, though.  And I’m glad you spoke up.  I had a feeling about you, you know.”

“A feeling about what?”

“I had a feeling you were on the same side of these things as me.”  Dal-Sun turned back around, but would still occasionally look back at Ganymede.  “You know, that community center thing you were building.  I looked over the designs.  The structure was meant to draw out creative potential for magic use, specifically, right?”

Up to this point, Ganymede had felt a little weary due to not getting any actual sleep during their “nap”.  However, Dal-Sun’s sudden unexpected comment had now cleared her head of any fog that had been pervading it.  “You could tell?” she asked.

“Yeah, I could tell!  Normal buildings aren’t shaped like that, hon.”

“Well, no, I know that, it’s just… it was based on a lot of different obscure things I’d read, a lot of which didn’t even have that much to do with each other.  I didn’t think anyone else would pick up on the exact purpose of it.  I didn’t even really think it would be likely to work.”  She looked down at the ground.  “They didn’t let me build it the way I originally wanted, anyway.”

“Yeah, I noticed that too, and that’s too bad.  But it’s okay, because now you’re with someone who’s gonna help you out with that kinda stuff.  That’s why I brought you out here, because I’ve got some things to show you.”

“Like what?”

“You’ll see.  It’s gonna take me a bit to find a good spot, though.  I’m not familiar with this area.”

They walked in silence for another minute, Ganymede’s mind now racing with new possibilities, quickly filling her with confidence again.  Once again, Dal-Sun seemed to know where to lead her when she felt lost.  Not only that, but Dal-Sun had apparently done studies very similar to her own, and perhaps had even found actual results with it.  Was Dal-Sun about to show her some real magic?

Ganymede blushed.  Was Dal-Sun about to connect to her in a way she’d never connected to anyone else?

“Anyway,” Dal-Sun said, breaking Ganymede out of her reverie, “I’ve gotten the impression that you’re kinda confused by our process, feel like we’re not going anywhere with it, and… yeah, I get that.  No one knows the right way to get to the moon, but we all have our own feelings on how it could be done better.  We’re just following Nicholas’s methods because… eh.”  She shrugged her shoulders.  “Nicholas happens to look like an authority figure.”

“Is he not?” Ganymede asked.

“Oh, he is.  In some ways.  He’s well-educated, he carries himself well, he speaks well.  He’s charismatic.  He has money and connections.  And he’s good at getting things done.  If there’s anything that very obviously needs doing, he’ll get it done, and he gets a lot of respect for that.  But when it comes to things that don’t have obvious answers?  When it comes to intuition?”  Dal-Sun shook her head.  “Nope.  He’s got none of that.  And no guts for taking risks.”

“I see.”  Ganymede wasn’t sure how much that mattered, but she listened intently to what Dal-Sun had to say.

“If you ask me, I think we’d all be better off if we were all off chasing our own personal ends.  Maybe most of us are wrong, but if we did that, I bet we’d find the right answers faster.  And more importantly, we’d be doing it by following our hearts, y’know?  But no.”  She twirled her paw around in the air.  “Too many people seem to think that we’re not going to accomplish anything unless we all work together on something really big.  So we send all our resources to Nicholas and his inner crew, and they decide what to do with those resources, and we spend a long-ass time going through a series of very slow experiments with only one set of eyes keeping track of them.  The rest of us run around like busy little bees working for our queen, and in the meantime, nothing real is getting done.”

“Do you… not like what the Lunites are doing?”

“Hm?  Oh, no, don’t get me wrong, Ganymede.  No group is perfect, right?  The Lunites are still the best crew for helping me achieve my goals.  It helps me keep a finger on the pulse of all moon-related research, and I have plenty of room to accomplish my own things on the side.  I’m sure it’ll be the same for you, too.  You just can’t fall in too hard with what the rest of the group is doing.”

Ganymede tried to process what Dal-Sun just said.  When she first met Dal-Sun, Dal-Sun had been doing her best to bring Ganymede into the Lunites.  Now, all of a sudden, it felt like she was trying to lead her back out of it.

A part of Ganymede felt some level of reassurance in this.  She had already been feeling alienated from the group–not for the exact reasons Dal-Sun was describing, but Dal-Sun’s words implied that maybe Ganymede had good reason to feel alienated, and that she wasn’t necessarily wrong about the moon just because the others thought she was.  Dal-Sun seemed to be expressing that she may feel a similar way, herself.  It was clear that she wanted to connect with Ganymede, at least.

At the same time, though, Ganymede couldn’t help but feel that she didn’t want to connect to just Dal-Sun, she wanted to connect to everyone.  It almost felt like Dal-Sun was trying to connect with Ganymede by breaking down her connections with others.  Ganymede didn’t want this; she wanted Dal-Sun to be able to connect with others, too.  She decided to try communicating that in a way Dal-Sun might understand.

“I think the way to get to the moon is by making connections with others,” Ganymede said.  “Even if I don’t understand everyone completely, and they don’t understand me completely, I’d still like to… find some kind of resonance with them.  Don’t you?”

“You can’t make connections with everyone, Ganymede, that’s impossible.  Besides, how do you define a connection?  There’s all sorts of different ways to connect to someone.”

“Yes, but I want… I want something specific.  I feel like there’s this… core to everyone’s being.  Something that they aren’t fully aware of, or keep hidden away.  I want to make a connection with that part.”

“That’s exactly what we’re out here to do tonight.”  Dal-Sun turned her head to make an excited grin at Ganymede.  “You’re gonna love this.”

“Oh.”  Ganymede decided to be quiet until Dal-Sun could find the opportunity to show what she wanted to show her.  Maybe it would resolve the rest of Ganymede’s uncertainty.

It took some time, Dal-Sun occasionally stopping to scope out a spot, then shaking her head and moving on.  They may have been out there for a half-hour or more.  Eventually, though, Dal-Sun found whatever it was she was looking for.  “This will do,” she said, placing her lantern on the ground so she could sort through her pack with both paws.

The first thing Dal-Sun pulled out was some chalk and some measuring tools.  With these, she drew some circles on the ground, some large, some small.  She marked some trees, as well.  After that, she returned the chalk and tools to her pack, then pulled out some small shiny objects–crystals, like the kind they had been collecting from the towns they visited.

Dal-Sun dug some small holes in the ground, in various spots around the circles she had drawn.  She placed a crystal in each hole, covering only the bottom half of each crystal in dirt, keeping the crystals upright.  As she did this, and as she started jamming crystals into the trees, Ganymede realized why the setup felt so familiar: it was very similar to how she had planned to structure the rooms in the community center, though she had imagined placing her personal crafts in the spots where the crystals now were.

“Have you… done this before?” Ganymede asked, a part of her hopeful, a part of her feeling some strange sense of dread, like she was about to witness a truth of her own beliefs that she hadn’t prepared herself for.

“Yes, I have,” Dal-Sun said, not interrupting her work.  “I haven’t shown this to anyone else, because I don’t want to think about what kind of trouble it would cause, and I don’t want them to take my crystals away from me while I’m still figuring everything out.  But I’m showing you, because I know you’ll understand.  I’ve figured out how to do actual magic.  And you were about to figure out how to do it, too, if your town had simply let you.  But again, that’s not how people handle these things.”

Ganymede put a paw to her mouth.  “Real magic?  What does it do?”

“Exactly what you said you wanted it to,” Dal-Sun said, seeming almost manic now.  “It connects to the core of a person.  It brings a person’s potential to the surface.  It’s wonderful, it’s absolutely beautiful.”

Dal-Sun returned to her pack and started digging for something else as she continued speaking.  “I don’t know exactly what effect it would’ve had if you had used something other than crystals.  I doubt it would’ve been as effective, but the art center was definitely on the right track.  It’s about tapping into that… that inner desire to change things, that inspiration.  I don’t know if most of your town even had that, honestly, but you clearly did.  Anyway, I’ve been wanting to show this to you ever since I saw that you had discovered the same things I did.  Been through the same things I’ve been through.”  She stood up, and rushed over to Ganymede to show something to her.  “Do you know what this is?”

Dal-Sun held what looked like a regular, gray, pock-marked rock in her paws.  “It looks like a rock,” Ganymede said.

“Well, it is, but… this is a rock from the moon, specifically.”

Ganymede’s eyes grew wide.  Suddenly, the rock she was touching felt infinitely more intimate, like she was touching a lock of someone’s hair.  Some vague instincts made her feel that she should pull away out of some sense of respect, but she didn’t.  She couldn’t.

Dal-Sun pulled away instead, taking the rock with her.  Then she knelt on the ground, pulled a small hammer and chisel out of her pockets, and started picking at it.  Ganymede gasped, “What are you doing!?”

“Don’t worry, I’m not gonna break it.  I’ve done this before and I’m being very careful.  But you have to do this for this to work to its full effect.  And you only need a little piece of it.”

True to her word, Dal-Sun broke off only the tiniest pebble.  Then she moved into the center of the biggest circle, knelt down, and placed the pebble in her mouth.  After a few moments of concentration, she swallowed.

This act in itself already seemed profane to Ganymede, but Dal-Sun had done it as if it was nothing.  Afterwards, Dal-Sun squeezed herself with her arms, hugged herself, as she kept her eyes squinted shut.  Ganymede couldn’t tell if she was concentrating, or in pain, or both.  In less than a few seconds, though, there was a blinding flash of green light–or there seemed to be, though whatever it was, it also felt unlike light, and it happened for only a moment.  Whatever it was, Ganymede felt her eyes and ears burning in the aftermath, and it made her question the vision now in front of her.

Dal-Sun had changed.  If Ganymede had tried to describe how Dal-Sun had changed, she wouldn’t be able to do it; Dal-Sun’s individual parts all looked the “same” as before.  But the light of the lantern no longer seemed to land on her properly.  Then Dal-Sun slowly stood up, and when she moved, it was as if she was moving through a fog–as though Ganymede couldn’t track her individual movements, but could still tell that she had moved from one point to another.  Dal-Sun took in a deep breath, and when she did, it sounded as if the breath itself was echoing–and then she opened her eyes, and they seemed to be glowing green, the same green as the flash of light.

Dal-Sun smiled and turned towards Ganymede, standing proudly, presenting herself as though she was posing for a painting.  She almost looked as though she was a painting.

In one moment, Dal-Sun was scooping up the moon rock.  In another, she tapped it with her paw, breaking off a perfect small piece of it.  In another, she was kicking the rock into a tree, where it bounded off of two other trees before landing securely back in her pack.  In another, she had her arm around Ganymede, sending chills through Ganymede’s body–hot and cold, painful and comforting–and she presented the new pebble to Ganymede with her other paw.

“Try it,” came Dal-Sun’s ethereal voice from all directions.  “Just do what I did.  Focus on the sensation growing inside you.  Pull on it.  Turn yourself inside out.”

Ganymede was paralyzed.  Suddenly, Dal-Sun was on the opposite side of her.

“Don’t you want to connect to the moon?” came Dal-Sun’s voice from within.  “This is your destination.  This is the reward for the efforts.  This allows you to connect to the moon.  This allows you to find the moon within you.”

Ganymede was drenched in sweat to the point that her fur was matted, sticking to her skin, and it made it harder for her to concentrate.  Whatever sense of wrongness she had felt when touching the rock, that wrongness was now magnified a thousandfold, every piece of her being screaming for her to run out of there as fast as she could.  And, as with the rock, there was still that part of her who wanted to see this through to the end more than anything.

She found herself kneeling in the circle.  She looked up at the moon.  It was perfectly centered in the opening in the trees, clearly a part of the setup that Dal-Sun had been looking for.  Ganymede thought she could see Dal-Sun’s eyes everywhere else, so she ignored those, and focused only on the moon.  The moon that she loved and trusted.  The moon that she was now touching with her own paws.  She closed her eyes and maintained that connection.

Her breathing grew haggard as she brought the pebble to her mouth.  She was already ashamed that she had watched Dal-Sun go through this same process, and now she was going through with it herself.  She didn’t want the moon to think that this was the type of connection she wanted to have, but now that she was in the middle of it, she was realizing to her own horror that it was something she wanted, very badly.  She craved the moon, craved to touch it, to taste it, to feel all of it in her mouth and jaws, to feel it inside her belly.  She had felt the distance too intensely for too long–she needed to annihilate that distance, right now.  She needed to devour it, and she needed to devour the moon herself.

As simply as that, the pebble was going down her throat.

And then she felt the sensation that Dal-Sun had just described.

It was unknowable to her, indescribable.  Unrecognizable.  But again, she followed Dal-Sun’s instructions, and pulled at it.

The world burst into flames.

As she pulled, she felt Everything pulling back at her, all the people she had ever known and would ever know, stretching her out, contorting her, squeezing her, compressing her.  She felt her arm break again, and every other bone as well.  She tried to scream, but instead heard voices screaming at her from all sides.  In the distance, she saw giant claws of beings she couldn’t recognize, grasping in her direction, but her view was suddenly wiped out by a flood of water, submerging her in bright green blackness.  But she hadn’t reached the moon yet, she had to keep pulling.

For a moment, she wondered how she was going to escape the water so she could breathe.  In her panicking, though, she gasped, and then realized she could breathe just fine.  Then she felt the warmth of her paw and looked at it, to see black flames coming out of it.  It slowly dawned on her that she was not being beset by chaos, she was the source of the chaos.  She was causing all of these things to happen.  And she realized that if she could pull through all the way, she could take control of that chaos, turn it into order, and bring that power into the real world.

And so she stopped pulling, and let go.

She felt herself become ejected from herself, and her head slammed into the ground.  She heard a strange howling sound.  At first, she thought she was still stuck in the nightmare, but as she opened her eyes, she realized she was back on solid ground, back in the forest.  Her body felt as heavy as lead, but she struggled to her paws so that she could look around for the source of the howling.

What she saw was Dal-Sun on her back, clutching her stomach, laughing.  The howling was her laughter.

“Oh my fucking god!” came Dal-Sun’s voice from every direction that existed, and every direction that didn’t.  “That was so fucking funny!  You just went, bleaahh and the pebble went woop!  And then you just fell over like pbbthh!”  Dal-Sun cackled and it sounded like lightning.  “I am never gonna get that image out of my head, holy shit.”

Ganymede only stared.  She couldn’t speak, or even feel anything.

After what seemed like several minutes, Dal-Sun’s laughter finally slowed.  “Goddamn, I’m sorry, girl, I just got so excited to show you this, and I wanted it to be a surprise, and I thought you could handle it.  But maybe it was too much to do at once, without any preparation.  But whoo, what a show!”

Dal-Sun was now on her paws and knees in front of Ganymede.  “I was hoping to be able to share this with you.  To show you everything that you were so close to uncovering for yourself.  And I wanted to show you that now you have someone here with you, helping you to look for it, just like I know you can help me look for it.”  Dal-Sun was now standing on one paw in the trees.  “But I don’t mind just giving you a demonstration of what you can do, once you are ready for it!  Watch me, Ganymede, watch me!”

Ganymede tried to follow Dal-Sun with her eyes, but Dal-Sun’s movements couldn’t be tracked in that way.  Dal-Sun’s movements could perhaps be sensed, vaguely, if Ganymede focused on all five of her senses and not on any of her surroundings.  More significantly, though, Dal-Sun’s presence could be recognized through the trees, because the trees were now falling, one by one.

Some were sliced.  Some were carved.  Some were dug up.  Some were pulled out by their roots.  But all of them were falling, falling away from Ganymede, and that vicious, unnatural laughter still filled the air.  “Look, Ganymede!” came the voice.  “I’m a lumberjack, just like you!”

Slowly, as she did her best to block out the view around her, Ganymede’s mind settled and focused on two thoughts: Dal-Sun might be her only friend, and Ganymede was more frightened of her than she had ever been of anything else in her entire life.