The Seven Moons of Orb#

The second largest moon but the closest — and by far the most dominant presence in Orb's night sky. Lustre's looming position means it is almost always visible, its silver light casting the famous Lustre-light that silvers coastlines, reflects off harbor water, and gives certain nights in Bridgeport a quality that painters and poets have been attempting to capture for generations without quite managing it.

Lustre waxes and wanes visibly with its phases — its cycle is the most familiar astronomical rhythm in daily life. The calendar itself was built around it: Lustre completes exactly one full cycle per month, every month, without exception. It is full on Day 14 of every month.

Lustre exerts a powerful influence on lunar sorcery — magic that draws on moonlight, tidal forces, or the liminal spaces between day and dark is notably stronger when Lustre is prominent. Its proximity also makes it the primary driver of Orb's ordinary tides, and its conjunction with other moons — particularly Strianus — is the combination most associated with supertide events.

Lustre also produces the most frequent eclipses of any of the seven moons, including the rare total solar eclipse when the geometry aligns perfectly. Eclipse predictions involving Lustre are published by the Circle of Seven Moons and kept by harbor authorities across Algar.

A quiet copper-hued moon that produces the strongest magical tides of any of the seven. When Myonis is prominent in the sky, practitioners of magic note a tangible difference in how power moves and responds — heightened resonance, increased sensitivity, spells that reach slightly further than expected. Myonis full is considered auspicious by spellcasters across Algar.

The Circle of Seven Moons tracks Myonis's position with particular obsession. Its alignment with Strianus is the primary driver of the annual supersea — the event that makes open-sea travel impossible for a period each year. The Circle maintains the most precise records of this cycle in the known world.

A stony, crater-scarred moon with a noticeably strong gravitational influence. Strianus is the physical tide engine of Orb — its alignment with Lustre produces supertides roughly every 88 days, approximately quarterly. Coastal communities and sailors watch its position carefully as a supertide warning sign.

Experienced sailors can recognize the signs of an approaching Strianus supertide 2–3 days in advance. Coastal flooding is possible during major alignments. Its surface is heavily marked by impacts, visible through glass lenses on clear nights.

A mottled grey moon with mineral deposits visible from Orb's surface through glass lenses — dark veins and pale striations across its face that have fascinated miners and scholars alike for generations. Balina is known to have been visited, at least in legend, by dwarven expeditions who found those deposits worth the journey. Whether any such operations are currently active is difficult to verify from Orb's surface.

Baliday — the fourth day of the week — is named for it, and is associated with trade and mineral wealth in many communities.

Pale and ice-lined, Heronnia moves with a slow and stately rhythm across the night sky. Rumors persist among scholars and deep-sea sailors that it harbors subsurface oceans beneath its frozen exterior — liquid water hidden under miles of ice, kept warm by some internal process no surface observer has been able to confirm.

Heronnia's pale light is considered an ill omen by many coastal peoples. Fishermen check the sky when Heronsday falls during storm season. Whether this reputation is deserved or simply old habit is a matter of ongoing debate among scholars.

The largest of the seven moons and the most consequential for those who look upward and wonder. Tellen holds a thin but breathable atmosphere and slow-growing forests of palewood — a moon with something resembling life on its surface, visible in the faint greenish tinge that distinguishes its light from the others.

Tellen is inhabited. Its people call themselves the Silver Elves — pale, striking, and ancient. They performed an isolation ritual long ago that severed their ties to Orb and to Haelo. They do not travel to the surface. They do not communicate with its peoples. Whether that isolation was chosen out of wisdom, fear, or something else entirely is not recorded in any source currently accessible in Bridgeport's archives.

They are described as neutral in disposition and ambitious in temperament. Most accounts suggest they worship a being referred to only as the Fallen Eternal.

The smallest and most distant of the seven — an irregular, pitted rock barely held in Orb's orbit. Wat is visible to the naked eye but unremarkable in the sky, a dim and unsteady point of light that astronomers study more than sailors do. Its influence on tides and magic is considered minimal.

What concerns astronomers of the Circle of Seven Moons is Wat's orbital instability — its path is irregular in ways the other six moons are not, and this instability is a subject of quiet professional concern. Whether this represents a long-term threat, a natural variation, or something else entirely has not been publicly resolved.