Notes: There are technically spoilers here for the whole series, so read at your own risk!

/

Chapter 1

Talaan din Gelyn had been teaching the novice class on Cloud Dancing for half an hour when she noticed Bodewhin Cauthon planting herself behind a large bush in the courtyard, apparently settling in to secretly observe the class. It wasn't that odd to find Bode in strange places, but it was odd to have an Accepted just hanging around in the background watching a novice class, especially in stealth mode. When the last novice had been dismissed and scurried away, Talaan approached the bush.

"Hello, Bode."

Bode peeked cheerily out from behind the large shrubbery. "Hi Talaan! Good class. I missed the first half – can you tell me why adding more air to a storm can make it calm down? Obviously it works, but it seems like it should be the other way around."

Talaan glanced at the sky, marking the time. "I have a little bit of free time now, but I really need to use it to clean my room, so we might have to walk and talk." She looked sidelong at Bode. "I'm honored that you're interested in my class, but to fully grasp this material you should probably do the Windfinder exchange program."

Bode's smile suddenly became a bit fixed. "I've asked. You have to be recommended for it, and Tiana Sedai said, and I quote, 'After what happened with the Aiel, I would have a diplomatic incident on my hands within a week if I unleashed you on the Sea Folk right now.'" She sniffed. "I think she's being overdramatic. I'm a delight."

Talaan did not know how to respond to this assertion.

"Anyway," Bode continued, "If cleaning's what it takes, I'll help you clean if you'll catch me up on what I missed." Rumor had it that Bode was always trying to find innovative ways to get out of chores, so she must have really wanted to learn Cloud Dancing. Or she was avoiding some even more odious task, which might present problems if Talaan ended up implicated as Bode's distraction.

Talaan considered whether to accept the offer as proposed. Bode was an infamous trouble magnet, but also generally accepted responsibility if she got caught. And this was almost the most Bode had ever spoken to her one-on-one. Talaan had been raised to Accepted as soon as she entered the Tower, which was unusual, but not unprecedented. This had made it difficult to make friends. The Accepted all knew each other already, and Talaan didn't have much in common with them besides the One Power. Bode offering to spend time with her was too good an opportunity to pass up.

"It is agreed," Talaan said. Her hand twitched up towards her lips unconsciously, but she stopped herself. Bode hadn't trained with the Aath'an Miere and wouldn't know how her people concluded contracts, and she'd noticed the shorebound tended to be skittish about formalizing contracts. She didn't want to scare Bode off.

Bode eyed her curiously but only said "Great! Where's your room?"

/

As they walked to her room and started scrubbing, Talaan explained to Bode how air had weight and temperature, just like earth or water. And like the land and the sea, there could be more or less of it in particular spots; it wasn't evenly distributed, or equally thick in all places. Subtle differences between the weight, temperature, and moisture of air led to movement in different parts of the air, which then created weather patterns.

"So, air pressure and wind speed are the key to storms," Talaan went on. "It's all about contrast and movement. There are parts of the air that have lower pressure at the center than the areas around them. Air moves towards the low pressure spot – which creates wind – because there's less air in the low pressure space than outside of it." She paused, looking for an analogy. "It's like if you tap a barrel of ale. The ale starts moving out the tap, because suddenly the tap is the one spot in the barrel that has less ale in it than all the rest!"

Bode nodded. "The ale moves from a place of higher pressure to a place of lower pressure."

Talaan was having more fun than she thought she would be; Bode was a quick student, even if she did clean rather chaotically. "Exactly. And like I said, cold air is thicker and drier than warm air. So when cold air and warm air meet, the warm air rises over the cold air, because the cold air is heavier."

"Oh, kind of like oil and vinegar?" asked Bode. "The oil is naturally lighter or less dense than the vinegar, so it floats when you mix the two."

"Yes!" Talaan put down the sponge and gestured with her hands. "The hot air going up leaves a space that cold air rushes into, which pushes more hot air up, which draws in more cold air, and so on. Now, hot air is wetter than dry air. With enough water up in the air, the tiny bits of water kind of clump together enough for you to get raindrops. At that point the rain creates a downdraft, which moves cool air back down closer to the ground where it belongs."

"So… if you wanted to try and stop a storm, you'd want to make the cold and the warm air stop moving over each other, so that there's not a huge difference between the pressure of air in different spots." Bode giggled. "You'd want to plug up the ale tap."

"Exactly! Of course it gets really complicated, but that's how adding more air in the right place can sometimes calm down a storm. If you can stop the updrafts of warm, moist air by strengthening the downdraft, you've cut off the storm's source of growth."

Bode grinned and flung her hands out in excitement. Unlike Talaan, she had not put down the sponge, and she ended up hitting Talaan with a wave of soapy water. "Oh! Sorry!" she said, dabbing at Talaan's skirt with a clean rag. "This is great. I'm so glad I asked you! How old were you when you started learning all of this?"

/

"Wait, okay, this is ridiculous! Not the bit about my brother, sadly – my brother finding one of your legendary artifacts in an abandoned storeroom and fighting a terrifying boneless monster for it, that's apparently completely normal for him. He's probably run into multiple terrifying boneless monsters, all guarding priceless treasures. I've heard rumors," Bode said, sounding a little grumpy. "But your ma had really been researching it practically her whole life?"

"Yes. She knows so much about Atha'an Miere history- not just the Bowl of the Winds, but lots of stories about our people. Even from before the Breaking." Talaan paused and looked out her small window. She and Bode were back in her room after talking all through dinner, and the moon had risen. It was waxing gibbous, almost entirely full, and it shone brightly.

"She used to tell me that once we had such mastery of the winds and the waves that we could fly to and from the moon! She even said that our people lived on the moon once," added Talaan.

Bode stared at her, eyes wide. "You mean like Lenn and Salya?"

"Who are they?" asked Talaan.

"Lenn flew to the moon in the belly of an eagle, and his daughter Salya walked among the stars- they're old gleeman's tales. I used to love them. Egwene did too." Bode looked very sad for a moment, a strange emotion on the normally cheerful woman.

Talaan remembered that Bode and the late Amyrlin Seat had grown up together. She wondered how the difference in power had affected their friendship. Had they been close, still, when she died? Although you could no longer be close to someone and still care deeply for them. And simultaneously resent them for abandoning you. Talaan steered her thoughts away from those shoals; these were her problems, not Bode's.

"I never knew the Amyrlin —Egwene— personally, but she was clearly an amazing woman. I'm sorry for your loss," Talaan said, feeling a bit awkward.

"Thanks. She was two years older than me, and I barely saw her after she left the Two Rivers, but we were friends before that." Bode looked out at the moon. "I still can't believe she's dead, sometimes. Sometimes I even dream about seeing her and telling her about what's going on, just like old times. The dreams are so vivid, it feels like she's right there, same as ever. She doesn't ever speak, but I feel like she's listening."

"I understand that. I still dream about my family. They aren't dead," Talaan winced but went on, "well, as far as I know they aren't dead, but I genuinely don't know if I'll ever see them again. I couldn't let them know I was planning to go to the White Tower. They would never have let me, and I had to go, so I left without saying goodbye." She was looking at the ground, so was surprised by Bode's sudden hug.

"Oh, that's so hard! My family wasn't precisely thrilled about having two of us go off with Aes Sedai, but they understood it was for our safety," said Bode, releasing the hug and looking at her, big brown eyes concerned. "I'm sorry you had to leave without saying goodbye."

"It was the only way." Talaan explained about her family's position in Aath'an Miere society and politics, and how she knew her own efforts would not be judged fairly for fear of nepotism. "But what hurt most was that my mother stopped treating me as her daughter after I became an apprentice Windfinder, just because she was afraid any affection would be seen as favoring a member of her family. Not just in public —that's normal, though she took it rather far— but in private, too! I had all of the terrible things about having my family, and none of the good things. It was easier to cut ties altogether and start over. And Accepted training is hard, but at least it's fair, and no one treats me differently because I'm a din Gelyn. Well, they treat me differently because I'm Atha'an Miere, and we have a complicated relationship with the Tower, but that's a different kettle of fish."

Bode nodded thoughtfully. "Thank you for trusting me with all this. I promise I won't tell anyone if you don't want me to."

Talaan was relieved that Bode had brought this up first. "Yes, please don't tell anyone else just yet. The Aes Sedai know about a lot of it; I'm sure I've personally created a 'diplomatic incident'. But I would rather not have all the details known to the other Accepted."

"Understood, your secrets are safe with me." Bode suddenly smiled, eyes merry again. "However, now I really want to know more about this whole thing about the Aath'an Miere living on the moon, since it's not the Lenn and Salya story I thought it was."

"Yes, I guess not…" Talaan looked out at the moon again. "My mother was so precise about it. She always sounded like she was telling history, not stories. She'd point to a specific spot on the moon and tell me 'right there'! Look, you can see it tonight. You know the face in the moon? It's a little way out from the left side of the lip, in that dark patch. Right there," Talaan said, gesturing to the spot, near the left middle edge of the moon's rim.

Bode followed her motion and squinted intently at the moon, looking as if she would make the legendary moon city visible to the naked eye by sheer force of will.

"And I guess if the Bowl of the Winds was real after all, I can almost believe there's really a city on the moon," Talaan said.

Bode straightened and turned to Talaan, grinning and practically bouncing with excitement. "Let's go see!"

Talaan shook her head, sure she had misheard. "What?"

"You know how to make gateways, right? Open a gateway to the moon," Bode suggested.

"Stormbringer's sandy beard, Bode." Talaan felt herself blushing as she realized she'd said that aloud. It was the strongest swear she knew, though Bode just looked confused, and then thoughtful.

"It can be a small one! We don't even have to go through, at least not right away. I just want to look." Talaan stared at Bode as she continued. Was she actually serious? "Actually, my brother used gateways opening high above the ground to look at the Last Battle. That's probably best, we can see a lot more that way and it's probably safer." Bode's big brown eyes were thoughtful again now. She was serious!

"Hold on, you know the weave too!" Talaan said. "If you're so eager to see the moon up close, why do you need me to do it?"

Bode pouted. "Oh come on, it's your story and your ancestors! I'm not going to cut you out of it. What kind of a friend do you take me for?"

Talaan felt a warm glow at hearing Bode say "friend", though it might not mean to Bode what it meant to Talaan. Bode was popular and likely made friends easily. Talaan wasn't, and didn't. But by that token, she couldn't afford not to follow up on the overture.

"Also, I'm being practical," Bode continued, ticking points off on her fingers. "You're a lot stronger than me, you've had more practice with the weave, you're the one with the hereditary 'mastery of wind and waves' that's apparently so crucial for moon jaunts, and you have a better idea of where it might be. This is your adventure. I'm just the ideas girl."

Talaan found herself drinking up the compliments, despite herself. If she did this with Bode, they'd have a secret that just the two of them knew, until and unless they decided to share it. And not just that – she, Talaan din Gelyn, would do something extraordinary. Well, using the Bowl of the Winds had been extraordinary, but she had just been a single part of the whole, lending power but not direction. This was an adventure she could lead. But the risk!

"We would get in so much trouble for using the weave outside the travelling grounds." Talaan paused and laughed softly. "Or the world!"

Bode scoffed. "Only if we got found out. Who's going to find out?"

Talaan looked at her, suddenly serious. "You must swear that if we do this, you won't tell anyone until we can't get in trouble for it anymore. I cannot give the Aes Sedai any excuse to put me out of the Tower." She hesitated, then added, "Unless our lives or other people's lives are in danger somehow, and the only way to save ourselves or them is to tell someone." You didn't keep secrets about immediate dangers to the ship or crew.

Bode nodded thoughtfully. "I promise."

"It is agreed."

Gathering her courage, she swiftly kissed her own fingertips and laid them on Bode's lips, to seal the bargain properly. Bode's eyes widened in surprise. Talaan blushed again, though luckily it wasn't very visible on her dark skin. "That's how we seal a bargain or contract," she explained. "The words and the kiss."

Bode smiled. "I understand." She kissed her own fingertips and tapped Talaan's lips lightly. "It is agreed." They looked at each other for a moment. Suddenly, eyes lighting up, Bode spat on her palm and held her hand out to Talaan. Talaan looked at it uncertainly. "This is how we do it in the Two Rivers- you spit on your palm and shake hands with the other person."

Bode looked mischievous, but then she almost always looked like that, so Talaan didn't have any real reason to think she was being misled. And Bode had completed the bargain Sea Folk style. In the spirit of cultural exchange, Talaan copied her, spitting on her own palm and reaching for the outstretched hand. Bode had a very firm grip. When they let go, Bode giggled. "Technically, that's just how men in the Two Rivers do it. My da always does it when trading horses, but I've always wanted to try it."

/

After checking that the door was locked, Talaan stood facing the window and took a deep breath. "Ok, one horizontal gateway over the moon, as you requested." Bode stood next to her and turned to meet her eyes, looking absolutely delighted.

Talaan opened herself to saidar and concentrated on making the spot in front of her identical to where she wanted to go- which was going to be rather far above the surface, and hardly any bigger than a peephole in a door. With all Bode's talk of 'spy-holes', Talaan figured discretion was in order. The gateway appeared as a thin horizontal line and rotated to reveal a barely coin-sized hole in the room. Talaan saw the tiniest glimpse of grayish-white dust pockmarked with shadowed craters and ridges in impossibly sharp definition, and a flash of perfectly spherical white structures that looked almost like puffball mushrooms, though they had to be the size of large buildings.

But she couldn't focus on the scene opening in front of her, because a terrible, bone-chilling cold was leeching out of the tiny gateway at the same time the air in the room was rushing out with it, whipping her hair and picking up speed and loose objects and rattling the door and window in their frames. It was moving so fast! She felt her ears pop and as she strained to take a deep enough breath all she could think of was 'storm protocol' and she automatically split off a flow to try and equalize the air pressure-

"CLOSE IT!" yelled Bode beside her, her voice sounding strangely attenuated in the thinning air. "TALAAN! CLOSE IT!" She dashed past Talaan and started fumbling with the catch on the window. Talaan snapped the gateway shut, and their ragged gasps and the 'pop' of the window catchment finally opening sounded very loud in the sudden silence.

They stared at each other, wide-eyed and shivering. Bode was the first to speak. "Blood and bloody ashes," she said, almost reverently. "I can't believe you tried to stop it like it was a storm. No, you know what, I can. But it's so funny it never occurred to you to just close the gateway!"

Talaan laughed weakly. "Now I'm very glad we had that whole conversation about closing the tap in the ale cask."

Bode started laughing too, and if there was an edge of hysteria to it, Talaan wasn't going to judge.