Midnight Muscadines #4: Traveling Through Temples
Midnight Muscadines is a lovingly crafted, cozy dark world where magic is waning and making jam is essential. The more I explore the world, the more I yearn to spend time in it.
After a sprawling misadventure through a forest of illusions, Fresco firmly departed Ember and headed Southwest into the depths of the Wildernight. The trek was a tangle of anxiety and potential misdirection, and the fear creeping up Fresco’s compact Twilit body came to a head when he realized he was far from alone. An ambush of Night Cats blocked Fresco’s path and left him feeling a terror he was almost ready to voice without being spoken to first.
The leader of the Night Cat pack stepped forward and sized up ol’ Fresco. The Night Cat had glowing eyes and its fur absorbed all the light within a few feet around its pack. Fresco felt an odd comfort in the dark, knowing it was brought on by wildlife and not a brush with the Shadows of Tume. He remembered reading an old story about Night Cats being lucky creatures, just as long as you don’t pet them. Well, no matter, Fresco’s not much for engaging the wildlife. He’s never even had a pet of his own.
In the dark, with the creature as the only source of light, Fresco felt a tug to follow the Night Cat as it started off in the same direction he was already heading. The Night Cat led Fresco to the rotted wooden doors of a deserted temple. These temples are common across the Wildernight—old structures once thrown together by followers of deep conspiracy theories about the sun shards—and their abandonment even more common.
Without a second thought, Fresco followed the Night Cat into the temple and watched as it nudged a relic to his worn feet: an engraved silver key with disruptive properties presented itself at the behest of the Night Cat. This key could, perhaps, open similar temple doors? It would be a boon for Fresco, who is searching for the truth about the sun shards as he heads to Nimm on the strength of a curious rumor and nothing more.
Fresco’s next few steps had gentle brushes with danger. He wove through the seedy village of Borehail, where each quarter belonged to an infestation of Wildernight creatures with bad intentions. Miraculously, Fresco avoided being caught in the fate web of a Whisper Weft. His prize for dodging through the web was leaving it all behind him. On the outskirts of Borehail, a kind dryad cleared a boreal forest path for Fresco, and just beyond the clearing, a crystalline lake appeared with another derelict temple at its center. The engraved key grew warm in his pocket.
Exhausted, Fresco made camp on the shores of the lake. A gentle will-o-wisp sidled up to the old Twilit and began to spin knotty, ancient truths about the sun as they once knew it, at Fresco’s calm urging. The thing to do, Fresco thought, is to venture into that lake temple and see if the Night Cat key is as good as he hoped it might be.
Even with a potential temple detour in the coming day, Fresco remained just one full day’s travel from Nimm, from the University, and from unspooling the rumors he heard at the festival at the start of his adventure. He struggled to sleep, thinking of all he’d be able to document once the truth about the sun shards came into a brilliant light.