Page Section Written 11/05/2025

NYRRATHI

The Moonshadow Hymn

Darkness is kind here. It arrives flavored, not blank: silver mint and rain-stone, owl-feather and the hush under leaves when predators pass and choose not to see you.

You surface through coolness into the Moonshadow Expanse, where the sky hangs low to hear the forest breathe. Twin moons float in the canopy’s open palms, their light shaking loose in motes that drift like soft snow. Pools under the roots keep perfect circles; ripples travel them like measured prayers. The trees bear wounds that glimmer, sutured by silver lichen and time.

You stand. Low brush strokes your calves like the hands of relatives. On your forearms crescents pulse, birthmarks waking, thin as wire, bright as tears by candlelight. Each pulse syncs to a separate moon. For a breath, your vision separates too: left eye takes the hem of a future; right eye takes the lint at the edge of a past. When the views braid, nausea pricks your tongue and vanishes. Your balance is truer after.

From between two boles steps a stag the color of polished stormwood. Antlers like filigreed mirrors nest the night. In their facets, scenes swim: you as hunter; you as prey; you as priest naming and un-naming; you refusing a ritual; you inventing a new one. The stag dips its head. From a tine dangles a ring of woven hair the shade of your own. You reach; it scents your breath and dissolves to dew.

Song rises without throat: the Vaelune Circle’s slow canon, voices entering one by one until the mind cannot separate first from last. The forest leans to listen. A shadow crosses the moons; the temperature falls. Along the pool’s far edge a second you approaches, expression a cousin to sorrow. They put a finger to their lips and gesture to the water. In its surface, a third you waits, the only one smiling with all their teeth.

Wind shakes the leaves; light breaks into a thousand quiet knives. Somewhere far beyond the Expanse, a bell made of living crystal strikes the hour of an event that has not yet happened. Both crescents on your arms flare and fade to steady. You know two paths will ask for you and you will be kinder than either deserves.

When everything remembers you, will you remember yourself?

The stag’s hoof prints fill with moonwater, and the first choice gathers in the hush between eclipses.