On the Origin of the Seven Moons: An Excerpt from the Gwehelyth Commentary
The following is an excerpt from On the Lineage of the First: A Commentary on the Gwehelyth, compiled in the third age of the long peace. Translated for the Archive of Anora by order of the High Priestess.
On the Nature of the First Light, and the Stillness of the Moons
On the question most frequently posed by the uninitiated: where does the light come from?
It is a question that betrays the limits of a mind that has not yet learned to look inward. Young scholars, born under this sky, breathing this air since their first breath, will sometimes pause in their studies and ask it as though the thought is original. The sky is bright. There is no star to account for it. Where, then, does the light come from?
The Gwehelyth does not address this directly, as its authors had no reason to. To them, the constancy of the light was as unremarkable as the constancy of breathing. It simply was, as it had always been. It is left to the commentator, then, to supply what the original text assumed.
The Aspects, those six first beings of whom the Gwehelyth speaks with a reverence bordering on silence, did not inhabit Khromie as we inhabit the capital. They did not settle here among us. They are here, in the oldest possible sense of that word. The capital planet was not built for them. It was made from them, or rather, it condensed around the place where they first existed, the place where their combined presence was simply too dense and too radiant to be nothing. They were magic. And from magic, given enough time and enough harmony, all things eventually take shape.
Their energy is the light.
This is not metaphor, nor theological poetry, though theologians have since made considerable poetry of it. The six Aspects, each radiating their nature into the world, Courage, Freedom, Faith, Justice, Curiosity, Patience, produced between them an energy that required no source and no direction. The same energy every Khromie draws into their lungs with every breath, the energy that fills every moon according to its nature, is the very thing that makes the sky bright. There is no point of origin to locate, no beam to trace back to its source. The light does not come from anywhere. It is simply what energy looks like when it has been present long enough, and in Khromie, it has been present since before there was anything else.
This is why there is no darkness here. The sky is energy, and energy does not dim.
Those who have observed the capital from the moons, and every student of the trials has done so, tilting their head upward during the crossing, report the same thing, reliably and without exception: a small, white ball in the sky. Not blinding. Not harsh. A light that does not demand to be looked away from. The old commentators called this the gentlest thing in all of Khromie, and there is a warmth in that phrase that more precise language cannot improve upon.
On the Position of the Moons
The second question that troubles the uninitiated, closely related to the first, is why the moons do not move.
A moon that does not orbit seems wrong to some. Broken, even. A body suspended without motion, anchored in the sky at a fixed position, visible from the capital at the same angle on the thousandth morning as on the first. The Gwehelyth again offers no explanation, for the same reason a person does not explain why their home is where it is: because they placed it there, long ago, and the placing was the whole of it.
The text tells us that each of the six Aspects, in the age before memory, departed from their first home and made their own world. Modern readers often imagine this as something grand, a migration, a construction, an act of titanic will. The older commentators were more restrained. Elder Cavanth of the nature-moon, writing in the second age, suggested that the moons were not built so much as exhaled: each Aspect, taking leave of the others, carried their nature outward until the energy of that nature became dense enough to crystallize into ground, into atmosphere, into the particular beauty that we now call a moon. Where the Aspect settled, the moon was. And having settled, neither the Aspect nor the moon had any reason to move.
There is no force pulling the fire-moon around the capital. There is no elliptical path, no wobble, no drift. The fire-moon is where Behemoth came to rest, eons before the first Khromie took their first breath, and there it remains, fixed in the sky like a stone set into metal, glowing with red courage, its Bleeding Mountain a permanent fixture in the eternal middle distance.
The same is true of the other five. Each moon sits precisely where its Aspect chose to be. To understand this is to understand something essential about the nature of Khromie: nothing here drifts by accident. Every position was a choice.
The moons are homes, not satellites. The distinction, once grasped, renders the question of motion not just answered but irrelevant.