The Dark Moon’s Shine
The night the dark moon rose, it did not steal the light from the sky—it bent it.
Villagers of Greythorn had long whispered of that moon, the second one that appeared only once every generation, bloated and ink-black, ringed by a dull silver halo like a blade’s edge. Children were brought indoors. Fires were shuttered. Names were not spoken aloud. For when the dark moon shone, it was said the world remembered old debts.
Elowen stood alone at the edge of the moor, cloak snapping in the wind, eyes fixed on the sky. The marsh grass bowed around her boots as if the land itself recoiled. Above, the familiar pale moon waned, and beside it—impossibly close—hung the other.
The dark moon.
Its surface was not smooth like stone, but veined, cracked, almost alive. The silver light that bled from it did not illuminate; it revealed. Shadows sharpened. Ruins long buried under peat emerged as skeletal outlines. Even Elowen’s breath shimmered with faint, ghostly afterimages, as though her past exhales still lingered.
She had waited her whole life for this night.
Greythorn had taught her fear before it taught her words. Fear of the forest where trees grew too straight. Fear of the old tower half-sunk in the bog. Fear of the name her mother never spoke—the name of the god bound beneath the world.
But fear, Elowen had learned, was a kind of inheritance. And inheritances could be claimed.
The tower rose ahead of her now, revealed fully by the moon’s unholy glow. Its stones were blackened, fused as if melted and reshaped by something older than fire. Runes crawled across its surface like scars that refused to fade.
As she crossed the threshold, the air thickened. Time slowed. Each step echoed twice.
Inside, the tower was hollow—and waiting.
At its center yawned a circular pit, rimmed with chains as thick as tree trunks. They descended into darkness so complete it swallowed the moonlight itself. And yet something down there saw her.
“You came,” said a voice that was not sound but pressure, a thought forced gently—and relentlessly—into her mind.
Elowen did not kneel. “You called.”
A low, amused rumble vibrated through the stones. “So they still remember that word.”
She approached the pit’s edge. The chains shuddered, tightening, groaning in protest.
“Your shine grows weaker,” she said. “The dark moon fades faster each cycle.”
“Because the world forgets,” the voice replied. “And because I am bound.”
Elowen removed the glove from her left hand. On her palm, etched in silver-white scars, was the same sigil carved into the tower walls.
A binding mark.
“My blood was taken to seal you,” she said quietly. “My mother’s before me. Her mother’s before her. Greythorn thrives while you rot beneath it.”
The silence that followed was vast, ancient—and wounded.
“Do you know,” the voice asked, “what was promised in return?”
Elowen closed her eyes. Images flooded her mind unbidden: a green land untouched by rot, a people protected from plague and war, a moon that watched over them like a guardian eye.
Prosperity, bought with a god’s imprisonment.
“I know the bargain is breaking,” she said. “And when it does, the shine won’t just reveal ruins. It will make them.”
The chains rattled harder now. Cracks spidered across the pit’s rim.
“Then free me,” the god whispered. “And let the world remember what it owes.”
Elowen looked up through the broken roof of the tower. The dark moon was already dimming, its silver halo thinning like breath on glass. Soon it would vanish, and the chance with it.
Freedom would mean fire. Flood. Reckoning.
But bondage meant decay—slow, cowardly, and endless.
She pressed her marked palm to the central rune.
Pain lanced through her, white-hot and singing. The sigil burned brighter than the moon itself, and for a heartbeat, Elowen understood—the god’s rage, its grief, its terrible, merciless love for a world that had chained it.
The first link snapped.
The sound rolled across the moor like thunder.
Above, the dark moon flared—not silver now, but deep violet, radiant and terrible. Its shine poured into the tower, into Elowen, into the pit.
The world shuddered.
When the villagers of Greythorn looked out their windows that night, they did not see destruction.
They saw the old tower standing whole again.
They saw the moor blooming with black flowers that shimmered like stars.
And far away, in places forgotten by maps, ancient things opened their eyes and smiled.
For the dark moon had shone fully at last—
and the debt was about to be paid.
Some light doesn’t guide — it collects what is owed.
Note:
Thank you for reading “The Dark Moon’s Shine”! This is a story in a series created for avid readers and English learners who want to enjoy captivating tales while practicing their language skills. Stay tuned for more stories and language tips to enhance your journey!
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Short Stories / Cuentos Cortos
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