Because there’s so much of it.

Everywhere.

“Go find Jules,” Soo insists, her glittering purple lips turning up in a playful, suggestive smile. “Embrace the moon and go claim your mate.”

“It’s the night of the Xishlon moon,” Lucretia says as she enters Jules’s cramped First Tier apartment. This crowded, port-level section of Voloi is home to many of the Realm’s recent immigrants. She glances toward the window beside him that looks over the river, its curtains shut, as always.

Jules doesn’t look up from where he’s carefully forging residency documents, calligraphy pen to parchment, but his lip quirks. “Ah, yes. Their lavender love moon. Its thrall is...interesting.”

“It’s truly lavender.”

Jules glances up and gives her another reserved smile, his gaze not once straying to her gleaming, formfitting lavender-lace dress Soo gifted Lucretia, with purple Xishlon roses embroidered all over it. Lucretia’s resolve wavers. She knows that she looks like a resplendent garden, come to offer herself to Jules in a dazzling bouquet, ripe for the taking, her black hair streaked with purple glitter, her lips gleaming with Soo’s purple-glimmer lipstick.

“I hear it’s quite lovely,” Jules says warmly, still not noticing.

“Have you seen it, though?” Lucretia presses.

“No. I’m trying to finish these...” His tiny apartment is littered with maps. Maps tacked to the walls and spread out on the table. Official maps of the Eastern Realm as well as secret maps of the sublands. And stacks of forged identity papers to send back to the Western Realm. To help desperate refugees get to Noi lands.

Away from Vogel’s reach.

“Come see the moon,” Lucretia insists.

Jules tilts his head and views her searchingly. “Lucretia, we’ll be advocating for the Black Witch this time tomorrow. These need to be done—”

“And they will be,” she insists, emotion rising in her tone. “I’ll help you finish them. But we need to stop every now and then and remember why we’re doing any of this. It’s...because of Lavender Moon festivals and children dressed in lilac running around trailing strings of runic orbs...young people searching for someone to kiss. This is what we’re doing all this for. So that everyone can have lovely things like this. Everyone. No exceptions.”

Jules stills and looks closely at her. “All right, Lucretia,” he says. “Show me the moon.”

Lucretia strides to the window and pulls the curtains open, the riverside room instantly suffused with purple light, the Vo River shimmering violet below, mountains just beyond.

The Xishlon moon suspended above it all.

Jules sets down his pen and silently takes in the moon, then meets Lucretia’s gaze, serious. “It’s beautiful. What’s troubling you, Lucretia?”