Her orders are clear. "Find the heretic. Protect the faith." She enters the cave. Its darkness soon envelops her, and she calls upon the sun for a little light. Her shield begins to glow. She sees that the cold walls are painted with crescents and blasphemies. She goes deeper.
Further in, she begins to hear a high, clear voice, chanting in worship:
Ask not the sun why she sets,
Why she shrouds her light away,
Or why she hides her glowing gaze
When night turns crimson gold to grey.
She creeps slowly toward the voice, entranced by the beauty of the song, repelled by the hatred infusing it.
For silent falls the guilty sun
As day to dark doth turn;
One simple truth she dare not speak:
Her light can only blind and burn.
She comes to a larger room within the cave. A hole in the rock above bathes an erect crescent blade in moonlight, or perhaps the blade bathes the skylight. The singer, a Solari sword-maiden, kneels towards it with her back to the listening intruder. She turns and looks up, unsurprised. "Well?"
Leona shifts uncomfortably. "Light and heat are necessary for life. The sun nourishes with her light, but hides herself before she can burn anything."
"Tell that to the Bird Caliph of Shurima. And the sun burns a great deal. The weak soon perish in her heat. The elders would have you believe that this is good, but I know that you would rather protect the weak than destroy them." The same hatred as in the song drips in Diana's words, but it is not directed at Leona so much as all the Solari together.
"The moon is ill nourishment to growing things. Only the sun can make them grow."
"And yet the sun also sets—you say to protect the weak. But to the elders, the moon is a weak reflection, and those who delight in her are weak. You do their bidding. Are you here to destroy the weak, or to help them?" She smiles wickedly.
Leona falters. She knows the kernel of truth hiding in the dark words. She knows the elders will never receive it, but she knows also the truth in their teachings. "Why must sun and moon fight?" she finally asks. "Do they not share the sky of a morning or evening?"
"Yes, and then one of them goes away. They cannot live together, or they would. Are you here to embrace the heresy? Or do you protect the faith?" Diana spits out the last word in disgust.
Before Leona can give an answer (as if they don't both know it already), Diana fluidly snatches her blade and hurls the strength of dark moonlight at her. Leona barely raises her shield in time. It begins to glow with fervent intensity, bathing the little chapel in the sun.
Diana cackles. "The moon reflects the sun's light, little fool!" The strength of her blade intensifies, and Leona is hard put to resist it. Even so, the sun burns with brighter intensity than the moon, and for each magnitude of power the moonblade reflects, the sun-shield burns even brighter, until at last the energy crackling around and through them erupts in the bright light of a hundred suns and the darkness of a thousand new moons, an explosion of darkness and light canceling to nothing, and everything.
———
Leona is the first to gain consciousness. She rises, picks up her shield and sword, and trudges toward Diana. Diana, meanwhile, awakes and drags herself towards the moonblade. A foot steps down on it. Diana looks up at Leona, baring her sword in the faint moonlight. "Well?"
Leona says nothing. Her face is grim.
"Finish it!" she screams in weariness and frustration.
Leona throws her sword on the ground with a quiet, "No." She looks down at her sadly, and turns, and trudges away.
"Wait," Diana calls after her. "What will you tell them? What will you tell the elders?"
Leona stops a moment and looks back. "I will tell them, 'The moon does not take the sun's place at night, but the sun gives her place to the moon.'"
Diana thinks a moment. "And what of the heresy?"
"The sun does this. I do not understand it, but I do not question her judgment."
Diana thinks again, and nods in appreciation. Leona turns and disappears into the cave.
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