The Quickening Tide

The Quickening Tide

I first noticed the pattern the dull way, the way I notice most things... by accident, while looking for something else entirely. I was cross-referencing harvest ledgers out of the Tilliman Highlands against livestock births, trying to prove a completely unrelated theory about grain tariffs, when I found the same three-night window circled in red ink across forty years of records. Not by farmers. By midwives.
  Every year, the Iskari Moon draws closest to Elämä. Any Iskari scholar will tell you this without blinking... the orbit is old news to them, filed under "obvious astronomy" right next to the tides. What the Iskari never bothered mentioning, likely because they consider it beneath serious study, is what that closeness does to everything living underneath it.
  For three nights, call it the Quickening Tide if you want the folk name, the moonlight thickens. That is the only word I have for it. Crops that were a week from ready burst early. Livestock that hadn't shown a sign of it suddenly do. And yes, before you ask, the pattern holds for the mortal races too. Kätulu midwives have tracked it for generations and built half their calendar around it. Rural Humär farmers plant their late fields to catch it on purpose. Nobody in either camp calls it magic. They call it Tuesday.
  I went looking for a mechanism, because that is what I do, and found less than I wanted. The Iskari Council, when I finally got someone to answer past their usual formality, allowed that the Prime Gates run warmer during close approach, and that "ambient resonance" bleeds through in ways they've never bothered measuring because it doesn't affect them directly. Convenient, that. The people it affects most are the ones least equipped to study it, and the people equipped to study it have never needed to care.
  I have my own theory, and I'll state it as fact because that's how I operate: the Gates aren't just doors. They leak. Three nights a year, they leak more than usual, and Elämä drinks it up without asking questions. Every growing thing down here says yes before it's finished deciding.
  What I can tell you without theory is what people do with it. In Kätulu, children conceived under the Tide are marked lucky from birth, no ceremony required, everyone just knows. Weddings get timed around it deliberately, not because anyone expects magic, but because nobody wants to be the couple who missed the good years. Farmers who ignore it lose a season's edge to the neighbor who didn't.
  Poppycock, some of you are thinking. Fine. Come count the ledgers yourself. Forty years of red ink doesn't lie, even when the people writing it never once asked why.
  The Iskari looked up and saw an orbit. Everyone standing under it looked down and built a life around what falls.