Notes1: Beep-boop, here's a surprise update - and the true epilogue. Change of plans, so to say. Needn't worry; it's simply a turning of the mind.
Notes2: This is indeed the last chapter of this particular installment, but the story is far from over. We are only just beginning, and eventually I plan to get back to A Passing Glance sooner rather than later.
Notes3: And, as a final side note, I keep forgetting to mention (the majority of) my references where they're due. The story's title comes from a generic response you get from worgen NPCs from World of Warcraft, "Let the light of the new moon guide you."

- inheritors: ein von null -

Nozomi gasps awake, panting. Her heart's galloping in her chest, beating hooves against the wall of the mattress. Eyes roam left and right, taking in the surroundings: the television set, the walk-in closet, the island separating kitchenette and living room, the glass sliding door leading out onto the balcony. Nighttime. Azuba-Juuban. Tokyo Tower blooming like a Christmas tree on the horizon.

Life.

Safety.

Reality.

She is slick with sweat, hair plastered to her forehead, body drowning in the heat beneath the sheets. There is warmth at her back, solidity, comfort, and its shape rises and falls in the rhythm of deep sleep.

Mikami.

Nozomi squeezes her eyes shut, berates herself for almost forgetting her friend. She bites the inside of her cheek, relishes the elicited pain, and opens her eyes again. She quashes the urge to throw the sheet off her and onto Mikami, instead forcing herself to kick them to the foot of the bed. She sits up, swings her legs over the side, shakes her head to ward off the lingering drowsiness. When she achieves a sort of bastardized wakefulness, she ushers over to the writing desk by the glass door. Pulls out the chair as quiet as can be and opens the drawer all the way until she has it in both hands. She sets it down on the floor, leans forward to reach inside and undo the lock at the very back and slowly, slowly, extracts the smaller drawer into focus. She sits in the chair, retrieves the journal from within and sets it on the desk. Pulls out the pen, uncaps it, undoes the clasp, and opens it. Turns the pages, skims the dates—from the time they were adopted by Miss Iris and left the orphanage to settling into the apartment and starting freshman year at high school the next day to job hunting and finding employment two years later—and finds a blank page.

Nozomi sets the tip of the pen to the paper and stops. Hesitates.

She glances at the last entry on the previous page—March 8, 2017. A week ago today. It reminds her of a passage in Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, of how Caesar joked that the ides of March had come, and how the seer replied that, though it may be so, they were not gone. The memory brings a chill to her, deeper, darker, and older than the current coolness of the recent weather.

She bites her nails into the flesh of her palm, loosens, and writes the date, the time. Below it, the entry—her strokes messy and hurried, the memory eluding by the second:

March 15, 2016
1:50 A.M.

Dreamed again. This one different, just like all the others, but no less interconnected.

I—she pauses, wracks her brain for details—I dreamed of machines. Machines on the moon. Huge, boxy, like those supercomputers I see in science books. They looked old—really old, by today's standards, maybe older—but…they looked powerful. More…advanced. I don't know how, but they were. They were very powerful.

I saw the computers. They were under a dilapidated building without a roof. There were Corinthian pillars, water pipes, the top half of a tall water fountain lying in a crater. They hid the computers. They still ran. I got the feeling they don't do so as often as they used to, but they do. When was the last time they did? If it was recent, I can't tell; the dust was everywhere.

The light blinked on across the boards: green, yellow, red and blue. They blinked and flashed. The processors booted up. The fans hummed. The screens lightened and lines scrawled across it, down it, scrolling upward. They felt…familiar, like I've seen them before in all those science fiction/fantasy novels Mikami likes to read, all simple and ancient but in hindsight meaningfully complex…but I haven't. And even if I did, I couldn't read them. I didn't bother to.

But then I did understood, because they started showing up in English, the last line at the bottom of the screen:

ETERNITY MAIN ONLINE

Then, below that, more words:

TRANSMUNDANE CORRUPTION LOCATED AT COORDINATES 92-01-57-00009, 83-05-77-005561

UPLINK ALPHA CODE: WHITE SENT

EMERGENCY PROTOCOL INITIATED

UPLOADING….

Then I found myself outside the room, bunker, chamber, whatever it was. I was outside the building, on a marbled path leading to the fractured steps climbing upwards. There was a design on the ground—something round and multilayered. It looked as though it could be retracted? Like those antique telescopes pirates used a dinosaur's age ago. I expected it to…to change form somehow. Slide up, slide down, revealing something that was otherwise hidden. Maybe another of those underground rooms. Maybe a nuke.

Instead, there was a click—very small, very minute. I had barely caught it when the hologram materialized and took on the shape of a person.

"Nozomi?" She jumps, almost scratching a black comet across the page. Glances over her shoulder and sees Mikami looking at her, bleary-eyed and out of it. "What's wrong? What time is it?"

"Just a bad dream, is all," she tells her. "Go back to sleep. I'll be right there."

"'Kay," she mumbles. Nozomi thinks she hears Mikami say "Don't stay up too late" or something of that nature, but she doesn't. She's fast asleep, and for a few minutes Nozomi sits and watches her breathe. Finally, she turns back around, takes up the pen, and continues:

I didn't get a good look, but again…there was that sense of familiarity, not a sense of closeness that I have with Mikami. It felt more than just a passing glance. I felt that I should know this person.

Nozomi stops, again hesitating. Replays the dream in her head. A stone fist seizes her intestines. That I should hate this person. But what reason do I have to hate someone I've never even met?

She stares at the page, wondering if she should put those thoughts into words. Minutes tick by, and she adjusts her grip on the pen. This shouldn't feel real, she dictates in brackets, several lines down. I should be in bed, dreaming, maybe lying wide awake and staring at the ceiling, wondering how I'm going to make the most of my day—not trying to capture recollections of space opera crock my mind is surely making up.

"I shouldn't be doing this," she says, but that's a lie. It has always been a lie. She will write again the next time there is a dream, one that is as vivid and surreal as the rest that came before, and she will keep writing afterwards. To what ends and for what purpose, even she does not know.

Nozomi adds that instead and resigns herself to tapping the pen's tip against the paper. Then: But I do know one thing: Mikami can't find out. It sounds stupid now as I'm writing and it's going to keep sounding stupid later today when I wake up and read it, but it's true. She doesn't know about the compartment, so all I have to do is keep my mouth shut. They're just dreams. How many times do dreams come true, anyway? Déjà vu is one thing, precognition another. This, however? I don't know what it is, but it's neither of those two. There's nothing to them, no rhyme or reason. When I wake up again, Mika and I will go about our day as usual and I'll forget this ever happened. I'll even bet this will wind up being a part of the dream, too.

"As it should be." She closes the book and leans back against the chair, blows out a breath between her cheeks. The moon is out today, round and full and snow-white as a cue ball on a global black velvet pool table. It speaks to her in a way she can't quite describe, as a muse is often wont to nudge the grey ball in its resident writer's head to conjure new ideas and expanded universes for whatever legendarium or cosmology he or she is struggling with. It tells her, Go search for these answers. It tells her, There's a lot more to this than you think there is. What have you got to lose?

Other than some much needed rest? I can't say I'll miss out on much of anything. Nozomi sighs again, runs a hand up past her dangling forelocks and through her hair. It's nothing. It's absolutely nothing. You're worrying too much over this, girl. Go on. Go back to sleep.

She returns the journal to its drawer, closes the compartment, and crawls back into bed. She covers herself in the sheet and rolls over on her side, facing away from the glass door. Mikami is as well, her breathing quiet and imperceptible.

Nozomi stares at her back, wondering what kind of dreams, if any, she's having. Then, so as not to wake her, she wraps an arm around her waist and molds herself to her. By now the sweat has cooled and evaporated, and the warmth of skin against skin is a welcoming, reassuring balm. She presses her face to her hair, breathes in the scent of berries mixed with fresh linen, and drifts away.