The Moon Sickle

The Moon Sickle is a harvesting sickle of exceptionally fine, old craftsmanship that hung for generations on the wall of Bracken's hut in the Saltwood, looking ordinary and hanging cold. It is the circle's own keepsake, entrusted to Flint after he helped calm the blighted elk and spare the camp.

By the circle's telling, the sickle came home long ago with a moon-marked woman of the Saltwood — the one their oldest story says walked north the last time the blue moon rose full, and quieted the machine-place that was poisoning the coast. When she returned it went cold and ordinary, and it has hung on the wall through every hand that has held the circle since, "waiting for the moon to turn."

Now that the blue moon is brightening again, the sickle has begun to stir. Bracken received Flint as a fellow moon-circle druid and entrusted it to him — and that first night, as Flint drifted off to sleep with it beside him, its blade woke with the faintest glimmer of light, the first anyone of the circle has seen it glow in living memory. Its old power seems to be waking with the moon, just as the story says. In Flint's hands it sharpens his magic and lends extra strength to his healing.

What it did at the Works

Carried north to the machine-place, the sickle proved out the old story. Its blade glowed brighter the closer the party came to the Works, and brightest of all in the presence of the larger overseer-constructs — as if it knew them for what it was made to answer. When the party had beaten one such overseer down, Flint drove the sickle's blade into the hot glowing core in its chest, and the thing died on the spot. The sickle is doing exactly what the moon-marked woman's story promised: it is a weapon made to quiet the Works, and it is waking as the blue moon rises.

Deeper down, and what it actually is

Carried down through the factory's lower levels the sickle went on brightening — it pulsed the moment an overseer-construct came into view in the assembly hall, and glowed steadily stronger the further down the party descended, brightest of all in the hall where the poison is mixed.

It was Riml, the artificer living in the Works, who finally settled what it is. Asked to look it over, he said flatly that there was nothing mechanical about it — he would be about as much use as a brick wall — but that it was plainly infused with magic, and not the run-of-the-mill sort. He told Flint to stop guessing and attune to it, which takes nothing more than an hour or two of uninterrupted attention.

Flint did so during the party's rest, and the blade opened up to him at last. It is a silver-bladed sickle of rare make. In the hand it strikes truer and harder than any ordinary weapon, and it sharpens the wielder's druidic magic — spells cast through it land more surely and are harder to resist. It serves as a spellcasting focus in its own right, and any healing worked while holding it knits a little more flesh than it otherwise would.

On the wall, and at the door

At the very bottom of the Works the party found the sickle carved into a rock wall (public/lore.md). One panel — the only one where the paint held, and it is still blue — shows a field of flowers under an enormous moon, and a figure on a hilltop holding a curved blade gleaming a brilliant blue, turning to hand it to the woman climbing up to meet her. The panels that follow show that woman carrying the blade back into the factory and cutting down a crested construct, and six others falling around it. Neither figure is named anywhere on the wall.

Against the Conductor's guardian, the sickle did more than it should have. The machine's lenses fixed on the blade the moment the party walked in, and it cocked its head and said "I have no recollection of these things" — and when Flint struck it in the chest, the wound was plainly worse than the blow deserved. The machine looked down at its own chest, and with nothing but lenses for a face it somehow managed to look afraid.

The light going out

In the Conductor's room, Flint held the sickle up and asked whether it had ever seen such a thing. The Conductor stared at the blade for a long moment — and as it did, the blue glow in the sickle began to fade. Then it said: "Memory banks wiped. I do not know this apparatus. There is a gap in my memory."

Whether the light will come back, and whether it has anything left to do now that the Works has stopped, nobody can say.