Once upon a time— No. Cross that out. That opening was too tired, too neat, and far too polite for Neon. Instead, our tale begins in the gentle murmur of twilight, beneath the pale light of Neon’s two moons, Lucette and Mauve, who whispered the lost tales of old gods and stranger machines. And long before those machines learned to dream, there was a poor village under the winter sky.

At the very end of the forest, where the trees stood so close together that even moonlight had to plead for passage, there was a little cottage which the snow had nearly forgotten how to spare. It leaned under the winter like an old beggar under a sack of stones. The roof had bowed in the middle. Frost had grown thick in the corners of the windowpanes, not in pretty silver feathers, but in hard white crusts, as if the cold itself had bitten the glass and stayed there.

In one corner of the pane, the frost had drawn a strange little circle around another circle, with tiny white teeth between them, like the ghost of a wheel no carpenter had made. It had appeared in the night. By morning it would be gone.

Lucette had risen.

On Neon, the poor and the rich alike knew her. She was the milk moon, round and pale and tender-eyed, though poor cats often said she looked tender only because she watched them from too great a distance to hear what winter said indoors.

Her light spread over the drifts outside the cottage and turned them to silver fleece. The black line of the forest softened. Somewhere beyond the trees the frozen stream shone like a knife laid down in prayer.

Then, a little later, as if she disliked arriving unannounced, came Mauve.

Not so bright as Lucette. Not so wide.

Not so gentle.

Mauve was the ink moon, darkened as though some giant paw had brushed her with the end of a writing quill. Even when full, she always seemed marked by thought.

Old village cats said that Lucette looked down to pity the world, but Mauve looked down to remember it.

Under the two moons, the snow was no longer merely white. It had taken on both lights at once, pale and shadowed, as if the world could not decide whether to sleep or confess.

Saint Virel’s chapel stood beyond that, where three roads met.

It was a small place, built long ago of dark wood and rough fieldstone, with a bell no larger than a soup pot and a little porch under whose eaves hung four beetle-lamps.

Even by day they glowed with soft, living pulses of green-gold light, their folded shells shining like polished beads.

Richer churches had stained glass, silver chalices, and polished saints with calm painted eyes.

Saint Virel had beetles, weather, and devotion worn thin by many poor paws.

Yet under the lamps the little porch looked almost holy enough to warm itself.

The beetle-lamps were old—older than Father Elric, older than his predecessor, older perhaps than the chapel register with its worm-bitten cover and badly spelled baptisms.

Village kittens were told that Saint Virel himself had carried the first beetle through a snowstorm in his mouth, because his paws were full of orphans and his tail was busy keeping wolves away.

This was almost certainly false.