Once Upon a Silent Moon

De: Darlene Zagata

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The moon knows how to keep secrets.

It has watched over Silent Moon Isle for centuries, casting silver light across the cliffs and gardens of Moonfell Manor, illuminating the faces of those who believed themselves safe behind its walls. But the moon also knows how to forget—and there is nothing more dangerous than something the moon has chosen to erase.

Eveline Arlen stood at the mirror in her chambers, her reflection fractured across the spider-webbed glass. She had broken it herself three days prior, in a fit of what the doctor had called "nervous exhaustion." But Eveline knew better. She had broken it because the face looking back at her was no longer her own.

"Forgive me," she whispered to the shattered pieces. "Forgive me, sister."

Outside, the moon began to dim—not with clouds, but with an absence that felt deliberate, as though the light itself had been swallowed. The Silent Moon was coming again. It came once every generation, when the pact demanded payment, when memory and blood tangled in the roots of the family tree.

Eveline pressed her palm against the cold glass. Somewhere beneath the manor, beneath the moon garden where white roses grew in impossible spirals, her sister's name had been buried with her bones. Elara. Beautiful, bright Elara, who had loved horses and starlight and her twin sister more than anything in this world.

One of them had to be forgotten so the other could inherit. That was the bargain their great-grandmother had made with something older than moonlight, older than stone. One reflection had to be erased so the bloodline could continue.

Eveline had chosen survival. She had chosen Moonfell. She had chosen wrong.

Now, in the growing darkness, she heard it again—the lullaby her sister used to sing, floating up through the floorboards like smoke. Elara was calling. Elara was remembering. And when the moon finally fell silent tonight, Eveline knew that all her careful forgetting would come undone.

She turned from the mirror and walked to her writing desk, where two journals lay side by side—one filled with the memories she'd tried to preserve, the other with the madness that had taken their place. She had one last letter to write, one final inheritance to pass down to the granddaughter she'd never met.

Lydia, she began, if you are reading this, then I am gone. Come to Moonfell. Come before the Silent Moon rises again. You are the only one left who can speak her name—the only one who can make the moon remember what I tried so desperately to forget.

Your grandmother,
Eveline Arlen

Outside, the moon's light failed completely. In the sudden darkness, Eveline heard footsteps in the hall—the soft, familiar tread of someone who had been walking these corridors for sixty years, unseen and unacknowledged.

The moon knows how to keep secrets.

But it also knows when it's time to tell them.