The Three Moons

Every night, millions of beings over dozens of races look into the night sky at the three brightest objects hanging in the inky black. Orcs tell tales of three sisters who swore to defend the planet. Centaurs have the three plains of the afterlife where you go to after death. And gnomes believe the middle moon was meant to house life, not this planet. Whatever beliefs a person has, what remains is that due to telescoping and magic we are only just able to start scratching the surface of what our nearest planetary bodies are. Combine that with "unconventional travel" by various mages and our understanding of the three moons is vastly different than merely two generations ago!

Arah: The Barren Moon

The first and most uneventful moon is Arah. This bright green moon has an orbit every 15 days as it flies across the sky in rapid rotations. It is incredibly unremarkable all things considered. Compared to the other two, what was figured for years about the moon has proven to be true. It is a dead world lacking air (as a handful of particularly foolish teleporting mages discovered about thirty years back) with nothing but glowing green rocks. This bright green planetoid is pockmarked to incredible detail from craters over millions of years, giving the world a greater depth that the other two seem to lack.

Shielik: The Living Moon

Shielik on the other hand is far more interesting. Bright teal and a perfect smoothness with the untrained eye, it was only through telescopes that blotchy white could be determined as clouds. The moon takes 57 days to orbit one full rotation, leaving it hanging in its phases for far longer than Arah. Yet, that same batch of mages that explored Arah would try again here several years later. They would find far more luck. Shielik is actually a water world, with small islands dotting around the lands! Limestone rocks rise all over the planetoid with docile life scattered all over the planet. Slowly, the moon's tidal locking to the planet below serves as a month and a half long "day". According to expedition reports, when night arises, the gentle plantlife of the scouted islands light up in gentle bioluminesence, along with the zooplankton in the oceans around them. While not visible from the planet below, the sight apparently brought a humility even to these powerful wizards.

Perilla: Not a Moon

Perilla is far different from the other two moons. It's purple, circlular, and has an orbit of 89 days. Nothing too out of the ordinary. But, simply put, Perilla isn't a moon. People thought it was a moon since time immemorial, but a group of astronomers proved about 50 years ago that Perilla was in fact not a rocky ball the way Arah and Shielik are...Perilla is a mirror. A gigantic, circular pane of glass that sails through the sky on a slight rotation. People didn't realize it wasn't a moon because it had over the centuries built a layer of dust upon it to dull most of its reflectivity. After enough asteroids landed against the magically impervious mirror to blow around the dust, it gave the false impression of great depth through craters. Indeed, no one knows where this mirror came from or what its purpose is, but there has been a great deal of speculation on it. Those religious in Venrir claim that Orearus uses it as a way to view the planet below and admire his children. Though other theories vary wildly, with the gnomes in particular thinking that it is in fact designed to keep Shielik warm and lit all times of the day. As for the mage expedition, this group of wizards had gathered a great deal of fame from their previous two trips. Their incantation date was declared for amateur astronomers to test if they could see their arrival when the light arrived. Many scoffed at that, saying you couldn't see a simple teleportation spell from space. You could that night, even with the naked eye. No one knows what exactly happened. But the second the team teleported to near the center of the mirror, a blindingly bright flash occurred! Now, while not visible through the untrained eye, telescopes can see a crack that runs across the entire mirror, glowing brighter in the region as the dust that had settled over it had once again been kicked into the air.
The mages never returned back, presumably lost in the bright flash that cracked the mirror. Generally, mages guilds have restricted teleportation spells off planet since then. Further testing has shown that the rocks of Arah seem to cause some sort of sickness. Shielik on the other hand has been deemed too precious to despoil. Still, if you wish to see the beasts of Shielik yourself, head to the old world human nation of Wexam. There is a large museum with a massive garden ringing around it, where one can find the microscopic animals and small plants glowing every other month in blissful peace. Dedicated to the team that vanished in the pursuit of progress.

Type

Planetoid / Moon