Night pressed close, gentle as velvet. Beyond the wind-bent reeds, a basin of shadow breathed—a bog the maps named Nightmire, but the old songs called the Moon's Mirror. Lady Moonbeam stood at its hem, robe loosened to the cool, and let the hush settle on her shoulders. Fireflies ghosted like distant bells.
"Steady," she whispered to herself, to the water, to the whispering constellations. "I have come to listen."
A faint current curled toward her toes, as though the mire recognized an old friend. The lunar sigils stitched along her sleeves shimmered, answering the spill of sky-silver poured down from the full moon. She stepped forward. The peat gave and accepted—no jolt, no shock, only a yielding pressure like a promise.
The reeds leaned in. A ribbon of black water traced past her ankles, glossy as onyx. She breathed with it, slow and calm. "Mother Night," she said, eyes half-closed, "be kind."
The mire's surface released three small bulges—dark pearls rising, swelling, and sighing back down. The bog was not inert; it drew breath. It had a heartbeat. It had a memory of her.
"You keep secrets," she said, smiling. "So do I."
Another step. Another. The world tightened to the circle of light around her and the cool hush of the muck. The first touch at her shins was not shocking; it was patient, persuasive, a soft insistence that asked nothing more than surrender to gravity and trust. Her thoughts loosened. The day's edicts, petitions, and spear-bright worries broke apart like foam.
"Tell me," she murmured to the waterline, "what must I shed to hear you clearly?"
A voice answered—not a voice with syllables, but a pressure in her ribs, a deepening quiet that made each breath feel like moonlight poured through a flute. The mire seemed to say: Begin with your crown. Begin with your name. Begin with the weight you tilt against the earth to keep the world impressed by your height.
The suggestion startled her into a small laugh. "Bold," she said. "Even for you."
She tilted her head back to the moon's wide eye. Pale light silvered her cheeks; her green eyes caught it and returned it as a second, smaller moon. "Then I will be smaller," she told the night. "I will be no one for a while."
She bent, cupped the cool black gloss, and lifted it to her face. It slid like silk across her skin, earthy and clean, leaving a sheen that drank the starlight. She traced a crescent on her brow with one wet finger. The mire brightened at the edges, or perhaps her sight changed; the world felt newly tuned, the reeds a choir of thin flutes.
She eased deeper. The mire held her waist now, a firm cradle; the surface made a second horizon right across her middle, and the galaxy above doubled—a sky above and a sky beneath. "Look at me," she teased the moon, "I've stolen your trick." The joke steadied her. She let her arms float so the mud could close around them like a shawl.
From the hummocks beyond, a night heron clicked. In the distance, water plopped: perhaps a turtle, perhaps a star falling into the world by mistake. Lady Moonbeam closed her eyes. She counted her heartbeats until the rest of her counted with them: the reeds, the heron, the distant road she'd left an hour behind, and the one secret light in a farmhouse window half a mile away. Everything agreed on a single pace.
The mire rose to her ribs; she inhaled and felt the cool pressure change, the way a companion shifts closer without touching. Do you trust me? the pressure asked.
"Yes," she breathed. "Guide me."
Another slow settle. The surface kissed her collar and paused, respectful. She dipped her chin so that only her mouth, her nose, and then her eyes remained, bright and steady. From above, she must have looked like a moonlit seed floating in a dark field.
"I am listening," she said, voice soft as the reed tips. "Speak plainly."
The message arrived as texture. The mud against her skin was not uniform; it carried swirls, ridges, the memory of storms written in fine lines. A path unfurled in those lines: not a road but a rhythm. It showed her the coming month as a sequence of tides—councils cresting, rumors ebbing, a storm of iron in the east dissolved not by force, but by patience and the small stones of truth dropped into the right pools at the right time.
"I see," she said. "Not thunder, then. Drizzle that unmakes the fire."
She let herself sink a finger's width more. The mire answered with a faint pull at her shoulders, a suggestion rather than a command. The world above narrowed to the fringe of reeds and the full round moon. Her eyes shone brighter for the shadow around them.
"Lady of Lunna," the night seemed to say through cricket-strings, "remember your gentlest name."
She did. It was a childhood name, a secret tucked behind ceremony. She spoke it, and the reeds shivered like listeners who'd waited years to hear it said aloud. Her face went soft with the memory of simpler roofs, simpler skies, and a woman's hand—her mother's—cupping her cheek with peat-dark fingers after the first rite she'd ever braved. You were brave because you trusted, that hand had said without words. Not because you resisted.
The mire took her to the collarbones again, then eased back, then rose—an embrace with breathing in it. She heard herself whisper, "All right," the way someone says it at the end of a long argument when love has won. "All right."
She floated there, held, until a hush fell so complete it had weight. Her skin cooled; her thoughts cooled with it; the day slipped down past her knees and vanished. When she opened her eyes again, the moon had climbed a thumb's width higher and the world felt rinsed.
"You are finished with me?" she asked.
Not finished, the pressure replied, amused. You are ready to rise.
She set her palms against the unseen firmness beneath and pushed. The mire gave first—always gentle—but then supported her, as if a hidden shelf were lowering her upward. Her shoulders cleared. Her hair, now lacquered with night, gleamed like wet onyx. She took her first deeper breath and tasted peat, mint from crushed reed, a mineral brightness like the inside of a new coin.
"Thank you," she said, and meant the word for the bog, the moon, the quiet, and herself.
She stood in increments, easing free until the cool air kissed her throat, her cheeks, her brow. The mud clung in delicate reliefs—whorls at the wrists, rings at the throat like jewelry forged by rain. She smoothed one line with a thumb and found beneath it a steadiness she'd needed. "Not thunder," she repeated softly. "Drizzle. Stone by stone."
The reeds parted with a single sigh when she stepped toward them. Her robe waited on a bent willow branch. She drew it around her shoulders, heavy and comforting, and tied the sash with hands that did not tremble.
From the path's dark edge, the night heron spoke once more, as if offering a benediction. She answered with a nod and a small grin. "Keep my secret, priest," she told the bird. "Tell the stars I remembered my gentlest name."
On the last rise before the road, she looked back. The Nightmire had erased her footprints. A faint shine lingered where she had stood, a double moon trembling on its face. She bowed to it, then to the sky, and turned for home with a gait that matched the rhythm the mire had taught: unhurried, exact, tidal.
In the councils to come, they would ask for decree and spectacle. She would bring patience and rain. And when doubt tried its old tricks, she would feel again that quiet pressure at her ribs—the memory of being held by something that asked only trust—and she would answer, as she had tonight, "All right."
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