I stared at Celistar, her eyes spilling tears down her cheeks and onto the ground. She was the very picture of heartbreak, holding what was evidently her parents close to her.

"I'm sorry, but I can't help you," I said.

The look she gave me made my heart shatter into pieces. It was one of ultimate betrayal, something I never wanted to see on another person. It was the kind of thing that leaves a permanent mark on your soul. That another person had complete faith in you and you broke it. I knew I'd be seeing it in my dreams, maybe for the rest of my life.

"I can't," I reiterated, my throat tight. I struggled for the words, on how not to make things worse. "They aren't real."

The look vanished, blown away into thin air, replaced by one of confusion. "What?"

I walked up and placed my hands on the pair. They felt warm, but the warmth was fading even as I had my hands on them. It was a very convincing portrait of two, mortally wounded.

There was no doubt I would have fallen for it if I hadn't had my aura vision almost constantly active. Coming up on them, I could see that they had not the slightest hint of Nebula to them.

As my sight had grown better, I'd taken note that virtually everything had at least a little Nebula in it. It seemed to kind of 'stitch' the world together in a way. This was doubly true for living beings like people and animals. Well, animals excluding Steeve. She had whatever Nebula she wanted, and had once made herself look like a piece of pie in my aura vision to let me know she wanted dessert.

Excluding the odd magical vulpine, people should have some measure of Nebula in them. This would be doubly true for the parents of something like Celistar, even if I was a bit confused about the providence. I hadn't thought she'd had parents. I just assumed she was some sort of natural spirit that came out of nowhere.

Either way, these two did not. If one considered that and combined that knowledge with Celistar mentioning that the area we were exploring supposedly met its end years ago, it was pretty easy for me to deduce that her 'parents' were an illusion or apparition of some sort.

That didn't explain why she was so convinced. It was as though her mental age had regressed with the rest of her.

"I don't sense any Nebula from them - I think they might be an illusion." I explained, summarizing that entire train of thought into something more palatable for someone who was a… tween? Celistar was pretty ageless, and this new form was no exception. It could have fallen anywhere between around eight to around fourteen.

Celistar still held on to them. I could see her fighting herself in her thoughts, written across her face with a transparency rivaled only by the waters in the ponds surrounding us. She kept looking back and forth between them.

"You don't have to take my word for it," I said, and beside me István nodded in affirmation. I was grateful for the reinforcement because I knew I wasn't all that great at sounding compelling even in a normal situation.

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She looked at me again, before releasing the two bodies, their heads coming to rest in her lap. "I just don't want to let them… their memories… go," she said, sounding more grown up as she did so and less as her form would imply, "I miss them so much."

I sat down close to her, taking her hand in mine, paying the bodies of the deceased respect while also trying to keep myself from staring. "What happened here?"

"They were after me," she said, choking back a sob. It was clear she felt great responsibility for the scene we were all seeing. "The Umbral Covenant, that is." She held out a hand and the spitting image of the moon swirled to life in front of it.

"I am the only natural spirit ever to be Aligned this way." She explained. "That gives me extraordinary power, since no others are competing for it." She sighed, the depth of the pain at complete odds with the innocence her form represented. "At least it does now. At the time though…" she gestured wistfully at the bodies and the destruction, "I was only as old as this." Her hand returned to brush at her chest.

"They wanted that power, and they didn't care what they destroyed to get it. They killed thousands to get their way in the past, what were two more?" Her eyes hardened at the thought.

"It cost them dearly to get here, though. My parents were not weak. They fought them dozens of times throughout my childhood, keeping it a secret from me the entire time. They would just go away, leaving me in the care of family, and come back with injuries. Or not. Their smiles never once faltered in my presence. They insulated me from everything that sought to harm me at great personal cost."

She paused, taking another long look at the gardens before laughing at herself in a way that didn't seem to have the slightest hint of humor in it. "I don't know whether to hate or love this bizarre place for what it's done. I never thought I'd see them again. To thank them for what I now know."

"So they weren't your parents?" I asked, earning me a bit of a glare. Foot, meet mouth.

"Parents aren't made by blood," she said sternly. "They become such when they fulfill the role."

I kept my mouth shut, figuring the foot would stay put and not cause any more problems. It wasn't as though I wasn't used to the taste. You'd think I of all people would know better. Gran was as much my parent, if not mores than my mother had been.

Her gaze softened again, likely tempered by my obvious chagrin. "No, I was born of the Will of the World and exist by its leisure. They simply took me in out of kindness. They said I was the child the Moon gifted when they could not have one of their own." She shifted her gaze at the water, where I noticed that there were even stepping stones in the water to traverse to the different paths. It really was ornate.

"This," she said, holding out her arms, "Was all built for me. So I'd 'have a place where the moon reflected as many times as the ways we love you'."

As if on cue, the atmosphere shifted, with the warmth of the sun vanishing shortly to be replaced by the cool tones of the night. A startling shift forward in time, the moon ascendent in mere minutes as we all watched entranced.

The rising moon gradually reflected on more and more places, and the water itself seemed to produce a lunar hue, reflecting on the stonework and columns, lighting around the lily pads, twirled and swirled like a fog by the fish. Everything alive with reflections of the moon, fragments or in whole. It was utterly mesmerizing. I took it all in, looking as intently as István would at a new piece of technology, trying to fix the scene in my head before it faded.

Eventually, the celestial body reached it peak. There wasn't a single direction from which a facet of its face could not be seen in some way. Even the areas behind us reflected it in the smooth face of a quiet waterfall expertly drawn over a precise edge. The craftsmanship was beyond compare.

"They must have really loved you." I said at last.

Celistar looked down at the pair now laying in her lap. The faces of the pair seemed serene, somehow, as though they had been put at ease by the moonlight.

"More than their last breath."

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