The first thing Clyde noticed after activating the enhanced Lunar Flow Analysis was how much information the world was suddenly trying to give him all at once.
Every person in the boarding house was visible to him through the walls as a warm frequency signal, their Lunar Ichor moving in its individual rhythm, each one distinct, each one broadcasting details about its owner's current physical state at a level of resolution his first-phase perception had simply lacked the range to receive. He could read the amplitude of their waves. He could sense the quality of their output, which ones were resting, which ones were active, which one down the corridor was running at the elevated rate of someone who had been exercising recently.
It was remarkable for approximately forty seconds.
Then his head began to hurt.
The information volume was the problem. His perception could receive it but the processing overhead was considerable, the brain managing simultaneous frequency inputs from multiple directions at a depth it had never been asked to manage before. His Lunar Ichor reserve dropped at a noticeable rate, the drain of sustained enhanced perception significantly higher than standard Hollow Eyes activation.
He deactivated the ability and pressed two fingers against his temple.
Useful, he thought, and currently very expensive to run for any length of time. That will improve with practice.
He sat on the edge of his bed and thought about five months.
Five months was a specific number. It was long enough to matter and short enough to be frightening, the kind of timeline that made everything else feel suddenly more urgent. His current phase, the abilities he had, the constellation slots he had filled, the rate at which he had been developing — none of it added up to something that could meaningfully affect an event of the scale that a descending moon goddess implied.
I need more, he thought. Faster.
He got up and knocked on Aurelian's door.
Aurelian opened it in his shirtsleeves, his coat draped over the chair behind him, a book open on the desk.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"Are there any Howling commissions available right now?!" Clyde asked. "High phase if possible."
Aurelian looked at him for a moment, reading something in his expression.
"There aren't active commissions right now," he said, "but that is the smaller issue. Aldric sent a message while you were in your room. He wants us back in Cristae temporarily."
"Why?!"
Aurelian exhaled, the exhale of someone about to say something they would prefer to be saying in different circumstances. "The rain in Cristae has been wrong for the past several days. Not wrong in quality, wrong in behavior. And the earthquakes are getting more frequent. Aldric thinks something significant is building."
Clyde looked at him. "We go back to Cristae and then what?!"
"He also told me to tell you something else," Aurelian said, his voice dropping slightly. "There is a card involved. A sealed card, banned across every major organization and cult without exception."
"What card?!"
"The Card of Berserk and Madness," Aurelian said. "That is the working name for it. What it does is cause natural disasters in its immediate region and broadcasts a frequency that disrupts the wave of any Ichorborn within range. Ichorborn have some resistance to it because of the stability of their established Astral Cards, but ordinary people with low Lunar Ichor reserves are extremely vulnerable. The disruption is enough to collapse their Lunar Sigil alignment entirely."
Clyde sat down on the edge of Aurelian's bed.
"They turn into Howlings," he said.
"Rapidly. And in significant numbers, given how many ordinary people are in Cristae." Aurelian folded his arms. "How many Howlings can the current Sentinel roster handle at once?!"
"Not that many," Clyde said, and the number implied by the question sat between them with considerable weight.
Then his vision went dark.
Complete, immediate darkness, the visual feed from his eyes simply gone, replaced by a perception of frequency without any of the normal visual layer. He could sense waves, dozens of them, but all of them were flat, amplitude zero, the signature of frequencies that had ceased to pulse. Like reading a room full of stopped clocks.
Then one wave jumped.
A single frequency, blurry at the edges but unmistakably present, radiating a purple color so deep it was almost violet, and then the darkness snapped off and his normal vision returned and he was sitting in Aurelian's room with both hands gripping the mattress edge.
"Clyde?!" Aurelian said, immediately in front of him, crouching to eye level. "What just happened?!"
"I don't know," Clyde said honestly. "I saw flat waves. All of them. And then one purple one."
"That doesn't sound like normal Hollow Eyes behavior."
"It wasn't."
Aurelian studied him for a moment with the focused attention he brought to things he found genuinely significant. "Go train," he said finally. "The Academy training hall. Get your body moving, get your ichor circulating properly. We leave for Cristae tomorrow morning."
Clyde nodded and stood.
He was halfway across the Academy's central plaza when his class teacher intercepted him.
She was walking from the direction of the administration building with a purpose that resolved into being about him specifically when she adjusted her direction to match his.
"Clyde Nox Pvolae," she said, stopping in front of him.
"Yes."
"We found a Hollow Star Holy Spring," she said. "It was located during a survey of the Academy's underground resources last week and confirmed yesterday. Given your enrollment timing and your assessed phase progress, the faculty has determined you are eligible for baptism." She looked at him directly. "Would you like to proceed?!"
Clyde stood in the plaza under the artificial sun and felt the particular quality of a moment when too many things are happening simultaneously and the mind struggles to decide which one to process first.
Everything is accelerating, he thought. The Noxella incident was a dream I survived. I identified a Noxar clone and drove a blade through it on my first proper mission. The centipede was the first large-scale Howling I faced and I pushed through it. The vision just now. And now this.
Why is everything happening at once?!
"I'll proceed," he said.
The teacher looked at him with the measured assessment of someone whose professional experience told her to ask the next question. "Are you certain?! We can conduct a mental stability assessment first. Baptism without adequate psychological preparation carries significant risk."
"I'm certain," Clyde said.
He was not entirely certain. But five months did not leave room for the kind of preparation that certainty required.
Aurelian found out within ten minutes, which suggested the Academy's information moved faster than its corridors implied. He appeared at the entrance to the underground chamber stairwell with Eira immediately behind him, both of them wearing the expressions of people who had been moving quickly to reach a location before a specific event occurred.
The baptizer was already waiting when they arrived. He was an older man with the particular quality of composed authority that came from having conducted this ritual many times and having a genuine understanding of what it required. He looked at Clyde with a brief, assessing gaze and then looked at the spring.
"I'm sorry," he said to Aurelian and Eira. "You need to wait outside. Baptism requires complete focus."
They both looked at Clyde. Aurelian's expression carried something warm and slightly worried. Eira's expression was its usual controlled surface.
"Don't die," Aurelian said.
"Working on it," Clyde said.
They left.
The underground chamber was old.
The walls carried drawings that predated every architectural style Clyde had encountered in Cristae or Matrix, figures rendered in a style that suggested the Egyptian-era civilization his historical analysis had taught him to recognize. People kneeling beneath a moon. Figures with their hands raised toward a light source above them. And among the images, interspersed between the devotional scenes, mathematical patterns, frequency diagrams, wave illustrations, rendered by hands that understood the underlying physics of what they were depicting.
At the center of the chamber, the spring.
Purple. A deep, specific purple that was his purple, the exact shade of his Lunar Ichor, the color of his personal frequency. It glowed from within, and the symbols surrounding it, constellations and the specific geometry of the Hollow Star's sigil, were illuminated by the glow, each one carved with a precision that suggested whoever had made them had access to frequency perception at a level far beyond what the carvings alone implied.
Clyde looked at the symbol etched into the spring's stone surround.
Two rings, connected and intertwined, forming an infinity symbol.
Multiple states, he thought. Multiple worlds. Multiple possibilities intersecting at a single point.
The spring responded to the thought.
The symbol lit up, the purple of it intensifying, and the candles around the chamber's perimeter ignited simultaneously with a flame the same color, the purple fire steady and warm.
The baptizer came down the stairs behind him and stopped when he saw the candles.
He looked at them for a moment.
Then he smiled, a specific smile, the smile of someone who has seen many baptisms and has just observed something that belongs to a different category than most of them.
"You are in an exceptional state," he said, moving to his position beside the spring. "The spring has already acknowledged you. That is uncommon." He looked at Clyde directly. "When you enter, absorb the energy as though it belongs to you. Because it does. Remember your drive. Your motivation. Who you are and what you are working toward. That alignment is what allows your Lunar Ichor and the spring's divine frequency to harmonize without conflict."
He paused.
"Are you ready?!"
"Yes," Clyde said.
The baptizer raised his hands and began to chant, the Latin arriving in the underground space with a resonance that the stone amplified, the old walls of the chamber conducting the frequency of the words into the floor and the spring and the air simultaneously.
"O Dea Lunae, spes nostra et salus, hunc puerum ascendere sinas. Fragmentum potestatis Stellae Cavae ei concede. Lucem tuam super eum effunde, malignum reprime, et iter eius protege."
(O Moon Goddess, our hope and salvation, allow this boy to ascend. Grant him a fragment of the Hollow Star's power. Pour your light upon him, suppress all evil, and protect his path.)
The moonlight came through the chamber's high narrow window and brightened, the natural cobalt of it intensifying as though the sky above had registered the chant and decided to respond.
"Deus Nihili et Nihilismi, audi me. Sine hunc puerum virtutem tuam mutuari. In nomine tuo oramus, ut Dimensionem Ichoris intret et ultimum obstaculum frangat."
(God of Nothingness and Nihilism, hear me. Allow this boy to borrow your power. In your name we pray, let him enter the Ichor Dimension and shatter the final barrier.)
The baptizer lowered his wand toward the spring.
"Clyde," he said, his voice shifting to direct address. "Enter the spring. When you reach the barrier, break it. The spring will supply what you need. You only have to be willing to receive it."
Clyde stepped into the spring.
The purple liquid received him with a warmth that was not temperature, a frequency warmth, the sensation of something recognizing him at a level below physical sensation. He sat down in it and let it come up around him and felt the spring's frequency moving against his own Lunar Ichor wave with the gentle insistence of something that knew the shape it wanted to produce and was waiting for cooperation.
He closed his eyes.
The ichor dimension received him.
The card was there, and the barrier below it, and the spring's energy was visible here as a supply of purple light flowing inward from every direction, inexhaustible, the kind of abundance that made the careful management of his normal Lunar Ichor reserve feel like a different kind of problem entirely.
His Astral Card began to descend toward the barrier.
Then the barrier reached up.
It formed around him, the transparent cocoon of it sealing with a completeness that left no gap, no margin, and the spring's purple light was inside it with him and rising and the pressure of it against his lungs was immediate and comprehensive.
Break it, he thought. I just have to break it.
He channeled his Lunar Ichor into his right hand and hit the barrier.
Nothing.
He hit it again.
Nothing. The material of it distributed the impact across its entire surface without concentrating damage at any point.
I can't breathe, he thought. If I don't break this I am going to—
"Don't panic!" The baptizer's voice reached him even in the ichor dimension, carrying through the frequency layer rather than the air. "Control your wave. Perfect resonance. That is the only thing that will shatter it."
Clyde stopped hitting.
He stopped panicking, which required more effort than the stopping-hitting part had.
He breathed with what oxygen remained in the space.
He thought about Luchian.
Luchian with paint on his knuckles counting coins at the kitchen table. Luchian with his brown cap slightly askew saying be careful in the tone usually reserved for something incidental. Luchian standing in the Matrix street with a queue of four people at his newspaper stall, moving fast and thriving.
He thought about the clock tower in Matrix, visible across multiple districts because it was enormous. He thought about the Bleeding Moon Cult's letter, the bloody handprint at the bottom. He thought about five months.
I want to live, he thought. I have things to do. I have Luchian to look after and a doomsday to prevent and I have been rich for approximately six weeks and I would like more time to experience that before anything ends it.
He pulled his Lunar Ichor into his right hand.
The wave aligned.
Perfectly, cleanly, every particle finding its correct position without being directed to it, the resonance building not through effort but through the complete absence of resistance, the wave moving into the hand the way water moves into a space that is ready for it.
Twelve stars formed in the spring around him, visible through the barrier's transparency, each one finding its position in a circle, and then connected, and the completed constellation blazed.
He hit the barrier.
CRACK.
It shattered.
The energy of the spring entered the Astral Card in a rush that traveled through his whole body simultaneously, and the card blazed with a purple so intense it was almost white at the center, and then it began to change.
New chains formed. Six of them, locking the new configuration of the card in place, the chains of the second phase's undiscovered abilities waiting for the same process to unfold again.
One of the twelve stars in his new Astral Card ignited.
An eye opened behind him.
He did not see it directly. He felt it, the specific quality of something vast and ancient becoming momentarily aware of him, not with hostility, not with warmth, simply with the complete and total attention of something that existed at a scale where individual attention was its own kind of overwhelming presence. It had two infinity symbols, one vertical and one horizontal, meeting at their centers, with triangles on four sides and complex markings in the spaces between them, and it was purple, deeply and completely purple, and then it withdrew.
Clyde opened his eyes.
The spring's color had changed. The purple was gone from the liquid, transferred into him, the spring now running clear and cold. His hands carried the glow where the spring's color had been, the purple of his personal frequency more vivid than it had ever appeared before, the waves visible through his own skin without needing the Hollow Eyes to see them.
The baptizer was smiling.
"Phase Two," he said. "Hollow Star, Phase Two. Waxing Crescent."
Clyde looked at his hands.
He could feel the difference everywhere. The density of his Lunar Ichor was different, richer, the reserve larger and the flow through his body smoother, the wave moving with a coherence that his first-phase ichor had only achieved under perfect resonance conditions and now maintained as its baseline.
"Try the floor," the baptizer said. "Strike it with your fist."
Clyde stepped out of the spring, crouched, channeled his Lunar Ichor into his right hand until the purple was visible at the knuckles, and hit the floor.
CRACK.
The stone fractured outward from the impact point in a spiderweb pattern, the cracks running half a meter in every direction, the depression at the center several centimeters deep.
He straightened up.
Footsteps on the stairs. Aurelian came through the doorway first, moving faster than his cracked rib should have allowed, with Eira immediately behind him.
They both looked at Clyde. Then at the floor.
"Phase Two?!" Aurelian said.
"Phase Two," Clyde confirmed.
Aurelian's grin arrived with the specific quality of genuine delight, the expression of someone who had been waiting for good news and had just received it better than expected. He crossed the chamber and put both hands on Clyde's shoulders and shook him once, which expressed more than a longer response would have.
Eira looked at the cracked floor. Then at Clyde.
"Congratulations," she said, in the flat, even tone that was, from Eira, the warmest available register.
Clyde felt the power moving through him, dense and ready and considerably more than what he had carried into this room.
Five months, he thought. Six chains on the new card. A lot of work still to do.
But maybe, he thought, looking at the fractured stone at his feet, maybe I have a chance now.