The Moon’s Memory - Part 2
651 Words
The journal woke me again before dawn. It lay on the desk where I’d left it, closed and harmless, but the air around it shimmered faintly with moonlight. I should have ignored it. Instead, I opened the cover.
The ink on the first page bled outward, lines curling into new shapes until the words re-formed:
The oath was written in blood so it could never fade:
The room tilted. The cold candle flame stretched and thinned, and the world fell away.
I was standing in the temple again. The First Luna knelt before the alter, her hands steady now. The dagger gleamed in her grasp, the same one that waited on my desk in the waking world. Around her, twelve wolves formed a circle, their eyes bright with reverence and fear.
“The Moon fades,” one of them said.
“Without your vow, her light will die.”
She raised the dagger. “Then my blood will feed her.”
She drew the blade across her palm. Silver light spilled, bright enough to blind. It poured into the alter, racing along the carvings, flooding the cracks in the stone. The wolves howled, voice’s blending into one long, mournful note.
The Luna’s voice joined them, her words older than language:
By my heart and by my line, I bind the Moon to my blood and my blood to the Moon.
Until balance returns, we shall rise and fall as one.
When the final word left her lips, the light turned crimson. The temple trembled. One by one, the wolves collapsed, their eyes fading to white. The Luna looked down at her bleeding hand and understood what she had done.
“I saved her,” she whispered. “And cursed us all.”
The scene shattered. I gasped and fell forward onto the desk. The journal slammed shut. My palm was slick with sweat-but when I looked closer, a thin silver line ran across it, glowing faintly where the Luna had cut her own.
Lilly burst through the door. “Jennie! We felt it. The whole house did-what happened?”
“She made an oath,” I said, voice shaking.
“She tied the Moon to her blood. To our blood.”
James appeared behind her, face pale.
“That’s why we keep coming back-every generation, the same power, the same curse.”
Lilly’s eyes filled with tears. “How do we stop it?”
I looked down at my hand. The glow had dimmed, but the mark pulsed in time with my heartbeat. “She left something else. A message.”
I opened the journal again. Across the final page, in writing that hadn’t been there before, new words burned like starlight:
Only love freely given can break what power has bound.
The letters flickered once, then went dark.
We sat in silence, the weight of the words pressing on all of us. The wind outside had changed; it carried the faintest scent of winter and storm.
James finally spoke. “Lone? That’s the cure?”
Lilly looked at me. “Or the weapon.”
I traced the edge of my mark, thinking of Dominic-his steady hands, the fear in his eyes when he warned me about the journal. The bond between us pulsed faintly, answering the thought.
“I don’t know what the Goddess expects of us,” I said. “But I think she’s given us the only thing she can-a choice.”
That night I stood on the balcony, the dagger cold and bright in my hand. The Moon hung high, perfect and pitiless. For the first time I didn’t bow my head.
“If love is the key,” I whispered to her light,
“then I’ll find it. Even if it kills me.”
The wind rose, and somewhere deep in the forest a single wolf answered, it’s howl threading through the night like a promise.
- Writer
