The moon hung heavy and bright over the quiet village, its silver glow spilling through Lior's bedroom window. He lay awake, heart restless and mind swirling with questions he couldn't yet voice.
Sleep evaded him more often these nights. Not from fear but from something quieter, deeper. A hum beneath his skin. A call he couldn't name.
He had no memories of his real mother only stories told in whispers. Miriam, his foster mother, never spoke much about the night she found him. She said it was a cold autumn evening when she came upon the small bundle, swaddled and silent, lying beside a woman who would never wake.
"She died giving you life," Miriam told him once, her voice thick with something like sorrow, but guarded. "I don't know much more than that."
No letters. No last words. No trace of the father who vanished before Lior's first breath.
He had grown up surrounded by love, yes but also by silence. Unanswered questions clung to him like frost, present in every glance that lingered too long, every townsperson who muttered "blessed moonborn" beneath their breath and crossed themselves like he was a ghost.
Why had no one come looking for him?
Why was he so different, his eyes seemed to catch the moonlight in a way others' did not?
Why did his dreams feel like memories of a life he never lived?
Tonight, the moon seemed to whisper to him. It floated above the village like an eye that refused to blink, and its glow pulsed softly, as if it recognized him. As if it remembered something he'd forgotten.
Lior sat by the window, fingertips tracing the frost on the glass. Outside, the trees swayed without wind. The night felt thin, stretched tight like a drum waiting to break.
A sudden flicker, golden, barely there caught in the corner of his eye. He turned, but nothing moved. Only the fields and the stars. Only silence. But his heartbeat thudded louder in his ears.
He had never spoken of the dreams, the shadowy forest, the distant cries, the golden eyes watching him from the dark. Sometimes he saw a woman with hair like flame, reaching out with bloodstained hands. Other times, he heard his own name carried on windless air, spoken not in voice but in thought.
He didn't tell Miriam. How could he? What words could explain what felt more like a memory than a dream?
Her footsteps creaked on the stairs behind him.
"You should rest, Lior." Her voice was warm but weary. "The night is no friend to a restless soul."
He smiled faintly, not turning from the window.
"I'm not tired," he murmured.
Miriam hesitated in the doorway. "Even so, the moon listens more kindly to dreams than to questions." She came over, brushing her fingers lightly through his hair. "Don't go chasing shadows, child."
But what if the shadows are chasing me? he nearly asked.
Instead, he whispered, "Goodnight."
She kissed his head and left.
Lior sat still for a long time after. Long after her footsteps faded. Long after the hearth's embers died down and the village slipped into sleep.
The moon continued its silent vigil. And something inside him shifted.
There was an ache in his chest he couldn't name. Not grief. Not fear. Not yet. But a kind of yearning like something missing was beginning to wake.
He leaned his forehead against the cold glass, closed his eyes, and let the night fold around him.
Because though he didn't yet know it, the world was changing.
Something ancient had stirred.
And it had begun with him.