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 basin whose base tide is little more than the wash of the Caribbean on a quiet afternoon. Old-world coasts, the ocean shores of Valdegracia, Albionis, and Stroomdijk, carry a stronger everyday swing. But when a moon reaches its true full phase, and above all when two or three 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 the working reference the Admiralty offices of Valdegracia, Albionis, and Stroomdijk use in practice. They are calibrated by moon phase and by coastline, and they are why a Mar de Oro pilot who has only ever worked home waters can be badly surprised the first time he takes a hull into a Brittany-analog bay on a true full night.

Below is the Admiralty's working almanac for Aeon year 7202, drawn straight from the tidal model. Every notable night, meaning any night on which one of the three moons sits at, or immediately adjacent to, its true full phase, or on which the tide reads at or above 1.00, is plotted month by month. Tap a night to open its full reading: which moons are full, the tide score, the tide type, and the working heights for a Mar de Oro basin, an old-world ocean coast, and a resonant bay. Nights not shown read zero: calm water and quiet blood. Step the year to plan a season, verify a rite, or find the next Cataclysmic night on the horizon.

Every night in Aeon has a tide score: a single number that tells you how hard the moons are pulling. A moon at its true full phase adds one point; a moon that is only visibly full, one or two nights to either side, adds half a point. The three scores add together, so the highest possible reading is 3.0.

Most nights the score is zero and the sea is calm. About one night in seven it reaches 1.0, a normal tide, enough to matter to a pilot but survivable anywhere. A handful of nights each year climb higher. Those are the nights that sink fleets, flood harbors, and make the curse in an afflicted character's blood impossible 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.