Selene Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 1 of 6

Selene Nightshade had been dead for sixty years, and tonight she meant to kill the moon. She walked the edge of the family's orchard between moonrise and dawn, the only hours she could hold a shape at all. Above her hung the last silver moon over Copsefire. Three more had already gone dark this season. When the last one drained, night would stay, and the house that stole her land would lose the light it depended on to guard its locked room. Inside that room sat a deed with her signature, kept behind a door her fingers slid through like smoke. She had the ritual. She did not have the place. The draining needed a pool of moonlight thick enough to sink a hand into, and she had walked the grounds four nights running without finding it. Pale apples hung in the orchard, each one glowing faintly, but the light on the grass beneath them was thin as paper. Dawn was six hours off. After that, another month of waiting, and she was not sure she had another month left in her. She crossed to the small graveyard behind the orchard. Wilted bell-flowers leaned over cracked headstones. Her own marker stood among them, the name ground off by paid hands, the stonecutters who had sworn it was weather. She pressed her palm to the blank stone. It went through. "You are looking in the wrong yard." The voice came from the row of ghost carrots at the graveyard's edge. A shadow stood over the greens, tall, long-eared, shaped almost like a man. Selene had seen the bunnyman before, always at a distance, never speaking. He pointed one dark arm past the orchard toward a stone basin she had taken for a birdbath. "The light gathers where something already drinks it. Look in the water, not on the ground." She went to the basin. The rim was carved with worn marks. Inside, the water held the moon whole, not a reflection but the moon itself, pressed flat and shining, silver piled on silver. Light thick enough to cup. She had walked past it four nights running because she had been searching the grass. Her hand hovered over the surface and felt cold rise into her wrist. This was the pool. This was where the ritual began. Across the water, a second figure formed in the shine, a woman in a pale gown with the moon behind her head like a second face. Lady Moon met Selene's eyes through the basin. She did not speak. She smiled once, thin, and the moon in the water dimmed by a hair, as if something in it had already begun to leak. Selene stepped back. The draining had started the moment she found the place. She had five nights, maybe six, before the sky above Copsefire went black and the family inside the house woke to a dark they could not lock a door against. She turned toward the house and the room she still could not enter, and began to count what she would need before dawn.