Luna Lost

Young Luna

Luna had grown up believing the scar on her hand came from a dog. At least, that was what her parents told her. She didn’t remember the bite anymore.

Not really.

She remembered the woods, and the cold ground beneath her bare feet. She also couldn’t forget the pair of enormous golden eyes staring at her from between the bushes.

She remembered the cute puppy, but then she remembered being frightened. She remembered crying.

And she remembered her father scooping her into his arms so quickly she’d barely had time to breathe. After that, everything became a blur, and only a faint scar remained.

A small crescent-shaped mark just beneath her wrist etched into her palm, pale against her skin. Luna had asked about it once. “Dog,” her mother had said simply, and that had been enough, for a while.

Now, years later, Luna stood in the middle of the forest with a wooden practice staff in her hands, glaring at her father. “Again?”

Her father nodded. “Again.”

Luna groaned. Her mother stood several feet away, arms folded, watching. “You’re getting tired,” she said.

“I’ve been doing this forever.”

“You’ve been doing it for twenty minutes.”

“Exactly.”

Her father smiled. “Twenty minutes isn’t forever.”

Luna swung the staff again. Her father blocked it effortlessly, so she lunged, rolled and tried from the other side.

Blocked.

Again.

Blocked.

She stomped her foot. “This is stupid.”

Her father’s expression softened. “No. It’s important.”

Luna didn’t understand why everything was always important. Running, climbing, learning how to track footprints and which plants could make her sick, learning how to defend herself and how to disappear into the trees without making a sound.

Her parents called it preparation but they could never tell her what they were preparing her for. Sometimes Luna wondered if they even knew. Her mother walked over and crouched beside her. “Enough for today.”

Luna immediately dropped the staff. “Finally.”

Her mother laughed as they turned and began walking back toward camp. Luna loved the forest, She always had. There was something about it that made her feel like she belonged there. Sometimes she would wander farther than she was supposed to, listening to birds or watching sunlight move through the trees.

And sometimes—

She felt it. That strange feeling, like a tug somewhere deep inside her chest. It wasn’t painful.. not exactly. It was more like the sensation of hearing someone call your name from very far away, only nobody was there.

Luna would stop walking, look around, listen.. and nothing. The feeling would disappear and then like clockwork, weeks or months later it would return. Always from somewhere beyond her reach.

She had never told her parents. She wasn’t sure why, maybe because it felt silly, or maybe because it felt like something that belonged only to her.

That night, Luna sat beside the fire while her father sharpened one of the hunting knives he carried. She watched the blade catch the firelight.

“Why do you know how to use that?”

Her father’s hand paused. He glanced at her mother, just for a second, then he smiled.

“Your father has had a lot of practice.”

“Doing what?”

“Hunting.”

Seren frowned.

“We don’t hunt.”

Her mother looked at her.

“We do.”

“Animals?”

A silence settled over the fire.

Her mother answered carefully.

“Sometimes.”

Luna accepted that, at least for the moment. She didn’t know that her parents had spent their entire lives hunting things most people believed didn’t exist, or about the countless stories whispered in old villages.

The warnings carved into ancient stones, and the families who had passed knowledge from generation to generation. She didn’t know that the night she’d been bitten had changed the course of her life, and she certainly didn’t know that her parents had been terrified ever since.

Because the bite hadn’t behaved like an ordinary bite. The scar hadn’t healed normally, and when they’d taken Luna to the old shaman, the woman had gone completely silent when she saw it. Luna had been too young to remember that night, but her parents remembered every word.

The shaman had touched the mark gently, then she had looked at each of them. “Do not fear what has begun,” she had whispered. Her father had demanded answers. The shaman had only shaken her head. “Not yet.”

That was all she’d said.

Not yet.

So they waited, and trained; they trained Luna harder as she grew. Not because they wanted her to become a hunter, but because they believed she might one day need to survive the thing hunting her.

Luna didn’t know any of that, she only knew that her parents worried too much, and that they sometimes watched her when they thought she wasn’t looking. That her mother occasionally stared at the scar on her hand with an expression Luna couldn’t understand, and that sometimes, when the moon was bright, that strange pull inside her became stronger.

Tonight was one of those nights.

Luna looked up. The moon hung between the branches, bright and enormous. Her heart gave a strange little flutter, and instinctively she pressed a hand against her chest.

There it was again, that feeling. That invisible thread pulling somewhere beyond the trees. Somewhere far away. She didn’t know what it was, didn’t know who was connected to the other end. She only knew that, for one strange moment, she desperately wanted to follow it.

Her father noticed her staring. “Luna?”

She looked back. “Yeah?”

“Stay close.”

She nodded.

But as she lowered her eyes, the scar on her palm just below her wrist tingled, and an all too familiar feeling crept in. But it wasn’t just a feeling, it was more like a memory that wasn’t hers.

Golden eyes.

Warm breath.

A small growl.

And the overwhelming certainty that somewhere in the vast darkness beyond the trees, something was waiting.

Luna shivered, the moon hiding once again as the breeze gently pushed the clouds in front of it, as if wrapping it in a warm comforter. The feeling vanished, then. She pulled her blanket tighter around herself and told herself it had been nothing.

Just the forest.

Just the moon.

Just a dream she couldn’t quite remember.