Hands woven in front of him, tighter than a knot, Sir Leon Leeyung surveyed the measly crowd that had gathered before him. His eyes roved upon the arrangement of advisors, all of them tired or nervous shells, rattling breaths sawing in and out of their mouths.

Evern was braiding her pink-honey hair and bouncing up and down in her chair, disturbed by unease. Beside her, Sare, her uptight twin sister, sat stiff and unmoving. His eyes tired and sunken, Blythe was fumbling with the sleeves of their jacket. Ryatt, who treated life, even these meetings that Leon hosted, like a giant chess game, was fittingly playing with a queen chess piece in his hand.

He shouldn't have to lecture half of his politically inclined helpers as though they were damned children, but there he was, mouth curled, unleveled like old Earth's tectonic plates, words brewing in the back of his mind as he plotted what would carve the deepest scars.

Humans weren't made to be weak; his advisors' past debacles were pitiful, showcases that debilitated him. Their childish actions were the very reason his child was gone.

Leon wrinkled his nose.

He frowned and seethed through his teeth, "You're all imbeciles." His brown eyes, encircled by metallic rings of cold, paper gray, flickered underneath the chandelier's luminance, a burst within the otherwise dark room.

"And you're a feroxi and a half in a trench coat," Blythe deadpanned, the slightest smile tugging at the corners of their lips.

Agreeing, Ryatt tilted his head toward Blythe. "Indeed." He let the chess piece fall from his hands onto the table, where it reached a sudden halt. "We already have you figured out, Napoleon. Give us the bigger picture, would you?"

Heated anger and unamusement wormed its way around Leon's mind. It was just like his awful group of advisors to fumble around and make these mistakes, and then have the audacity to taunt him in such an important stage of the human's grab for power. His daughter may have just fucked everything up. Permanently.

And all of them had had the chance to bring her back, yet they'd backed out. They'd crashed.

They needed to own up to the consequences, before Leon delivered them to their doorstep.

Sare blinked, perhaps the only logical one at the table. "Everyone... this is a moderately serious matter. Stay on task." She adjusted her posture and returned her attention to Leon.

"Those comments may be... unfortunately... allowed outside of these meetings, but amidst one of the greatest conflicts Selino has ever seen on its soil, they are not, and I will not stand for them," Leon sneered at the group, tone rising with disdain. "Sit down. Know your place."

He waved his hand at them until they were all firm, all silent.

"Let us recap," he started, "in case you morons forgot the magnitude of your decisions." Leon rose from the chair of his desk, pacing around the expanse of the largest meeting room that the Leeyung estate was equipped with. It was lined with record books, overflowing with historical events and movements, each one arranged tidily, almost too tidily, upon old shelves. Windows encompassed the farthest wall, displaying the view of the courtyard and their flashing staircase. With one swift movement, Leon plucked a string nearby, and the window's blinds fluttered closed.

A screen lowered from the ceiling a heartbeat later. A presentation.

Leon knew that these presentations where he lectured them, discussed with them, and entrusted them (though the latter was likely a poor decision), bored all of the advisors. Nevertheless, he compiled speech after speech. He showed them their mistakes and how to fix them.

After all, he was Leon Leeyung, and he couldn't have any misplaced foundation making the building collapse.

An array of photos, all of different, scrawled-out documents, arranged themselves onto the screen with a flick of Leon's finger. "Based on the reports all of you gave me," he started. "Earlier in the month, you all followed a girl who you believed to be Cynth, with the same hair, same demeanor, only to find that she was being posed as. By a girl in a wig, resembling Cynth's hair."

Leon wouldn't let any of them know about Cynth's inane tendencies. She was a monstrosity, with how she plucked the hairs from her face, from her scalp. How she just went on, not doing anything about it.

Leeyungs should have more control.

Everyone needed to at least think, needed to know they had more control.

"Phori." Leon swiped across the screen again, revealing a photo of Phori, tall and bony and ghostly. "However, you quickly debunked her as a fake and sent her on her way after uncovering information, correct?" He didn't wait for a nod, a response, or even any indication that his words were accurate. Leon simply moved on. They were barely worth his time. He wouldn't even have the advisors if it didn't make him more favorable, if they weren't useful tools to be operated and displayed like Cynth. "With the information she provided, you hunted down Cynth, got the rest of the advisors entangled in a fight for information about the all powerful items we've been vying to get our hands on, and chased Cynth. Then you let her go, knowing the weight of the world was on her shoulders."

Ryatt slotted his palm across the table, his black fingernails slashes of the night across the white table. "Well, yes. But also no. It seemed like the best option at the time. We didn't know she'd do this. And is it really... that much of a deal?"

Leon fisted his hands in his hair, exhausted from dealing with the lot of them. He waved his hands around dramatically. "This is a big deal. Cynth managed to get her hands on the source, brainlessly lost it, and then got her ass arrested. What part of that isn't a big deal, Ryatt Chess?" Ryatt fell silent, staring down at his hands, hazel eyes blank. "I'll wait for an answer."

"So maybe it looks a little bad," Evern wisely intervened before Ryatt could dig further. Attempting optimism, her eyes glistened with scattered thoughts. "We can fix this. Get Miss Leeyung out of jail."

Leon chuckled, a bubbling noise that simmered in the back of his throat. "Fix this? My daughter did this to herself, Evern. Don't think of it as giving her freedom back on a silver platter, Evern. Think of it as getting her back so we can utilize the information she recovered on her reckless path across Altiu."

Leon had different motives for obtaining the information than the rest of his company, but they didn't need to know that. The time would come, where moon dust would rain from the sky and encase their inferiors.

And it would come soon.

"If you halfwits want to redeem yourself, prepare and gather details on Cynth's whereabouts. My sources tell me that she's been arrested, but that's the extent of my knowledge. I hope to negotiate for her return tomorrow, and hold a conference shortly after to reaffirm we are still in a position where human power is paramount."

Paramount, Leon reiterated in the back of his mind. Their success was the only tower he had left to climb, and once he climbed it, nothing else would stand in his way. Nothing.

Sare and Evern left, their shoulders bumping as they clambered out of the door. Whispers clung to the hallway's walls as they murmured amongst themselves, sporadic footsteps lingering within the floorboards, their presence fading like dying light. Blythe got to their feet and asked Leon, "If she doesn't get the source... everything falls apart. What if it does fall?"

Leon huffed, smoothing him out with his steely glare. "Blythe, you know better than this. We humans don't fall. We dominate." He tore his hand through his slicked-back, dark hair. When he pulled his hand away, they were still standing there. "Run along, now. Join Evern and Sare in the estate's library, perhaps. Or the communications room. Either works for the research that is required. Find a list of prisons in the area, find me a contact that can act as a bridge between me and her captors, do what is needed to get the facts. I don't have time for these meaningless things, not with Conclave coming up."

Conclave. The dreaded political tradition that only happened once every six decades, in which humans and all of the patrias met underneath the same roof to mingle and sign treaties. The dreaded political tradition that was left for Leon to plan the vast majority of.

Blythe walked away, head dipped. Leon assumed that Blythe no longer wanted to hold a discussion. That or they wanted to stifle the joke that had been on his tongue seconds ago.

Though he hoped that Blythe was going to do what Leon had asked of him. Leon's tolerance for them was turning more hollow by the second. Soon, he'd be exiling them out of the estate until he could prove himself and his worth to be seated with the rest of the humans' most prominent political figures.

Only Ryatt remained, the tips of the chess piece protruding out of his tightened, bone-white fist. He stood outside of the doorway to the meeting room, but didn't move away from it. Distantly, he told Leon, "I was the one who let her go. I made the decision." The words hung in the air, heavy like the moons during the festival that continued to rage outside.

Leon let out a slow, tired exhale. Tired from dealing with everyone who failed to understand the entirety of his plan, who failed to assist him in achieving it. Tired from having blocks fall out then and there. Tired from having to replace them over and over. "I figured just as much, Mr. Chess. No admittance was required for me to connect those dots."

"Oh." Ryatt quietened.

"You show promise, Ryatt. Don't let it go to waste by showing those hibri, or my daughter, for that matter, sympathy. Your one fault is caring too much."

Ryatt lingered in the room, teeth biting down into his lower lip, other hand clenched in his pocket, and chess piece flipping upside down inside of his clutches. "It's what makes us human, after all."

"Caring isn't human, Chess. It's weakness. Humans don't have weaknesses."

Leon slammed the door in his face.

｡･ﾟﾟ･｡

Stars glimmered, thousands of wide-opened eyes in the sky, above the Almoons Festival where hibri and patrias touted their obvious unfit-for-society status. Each star watched him, making the choices that would ultimately decide the fate of Selino and its inhabitants.

The stars seemed to blink at once.

Part of Leon nagged at him to close the blinds, hear them fall into place, to block out the rest of the world and turn back to scheduling Conclave events. To go back to what he'd been doing before the news that Cynth had been such a rash fool, enough of a rash fool to get herself arrested.

But he couldn't.

Thousands of hibri and patrias scuttled around in the distance, even though he couldn't see them, just specks upon Altiu's terrain. Specks that were celebrating something unworthy of his attention.

Specks that Leon didn't necessarily want to destroy, but specks that he wanted to be equal to. At least in terms of power.

So many people were quick to assume, Cynth included, that the sources were made to be destroyed. To eradicate the power of the species as a whole.

To eradicate them as a whole, so that they could dictate those who remained into doing whatever they wished. To transform Selino into another Earth, just running rampant with humans.

Except that wasn't what Leon, or any of the other reigning human officials for that matter, truly wanted.

They wanted the power that the selfish hibri harbored for themselves, and they would get it, even if it sent them down in a blazing fire. Even if it sent them drowning within the six tides that the hibri cursed throughout their days and nights.

Leon braced himself against the window sill, clenching the wood with his fingers. It was bitterly cold in the estate, just the way he and Zoya preferred it. The temperature was freezing enough for his breath to cloud out into a fog and web across the window panes. Frosty enough to cling to his skin and settle around his bones.

Cold enough to freeze hibri in their steps.

An arrangement of firework-like displays leaped into the air, the symbols of the hibri. A splintery tree for the fabri, a mountain for the caeli, waves for the ranae, a silhouette of a snake for the anguis, and three swords for the maxis.

A byproduct of faber magic, illusions that could be conjured up at will. But not without consequences, as their limbs and other features tended to disappear when the skill was overused. With the magnitude of those illusions above the entirety of Altiu, crackling with noise that slipped into the foundation of the estate itself, and gleaming above everything, it had probably taken a full team of fabri to pull it together.

Humans would be able to do that, among other skills, someday, but not without the expense of those in their way. And there were plenty of people in their way.

Leon directed his attention to the six moons overhead, heavy on Selino's dark sky. They beamed like the lights of a lighthouse, shrouding what was below in graphite beauty.

There was something mystical about being one of the most powerful humans on the planet, a thrill that was nearly addictive. All of the patrias, all of the hibri, they would fall at his hand. Their power would become his.

Ships pulled in and out of Selino's ports, crossing the tides as they came. Below, patrias milled about, celebrating for the final time before everything would fall apart. He would steal their magic, make it the humans', and then he would ensure that no patrias ever stood in his way again.

Leon yearned for the power and yearned even more for the control.

One way or another, he would secure it.

One way or another, he would win.

Leon didn't care what he had to do to get that done — if he had to kill countless species, if he had to burn everything in his path, and even if he had to send the moons falling from the sky.

☽☽☽ ALMOONS: THE END ☾☾☾

TO BE CONTINUED IN BOOK TWO: CONCLAVE

FINAL AUTHOR'S NOTE OUT SOON

- GOOGLE FORM CREW

(G.F.C.)