1. Prologue — The Whispered Tale.
Long before fire learned to climb the sky,
the moon was not a stone,
but a soul.
She watched the world with longing,
round and full and always apart.
The elders say
the moon once touched the earth,
and it burned her,
so she learned to visit in softer form.
They say she chose
the shape of a fox—
quiet, clever, unseen,
but never unnoticed.
#2. The Descent.
They do not know
she fell,
not by choice
but by ache.
She fell as light through cracks in still water,
her body forming from breath and memory.
She became girl—
but the moonlight never left her bones.
Sometimes
you’ll see her in the forests of thought,
tail flicking between lines of poetry,
never quite touchable,
never quite gone.
#3. The Watcher.
I saw her
before I knew her.
A mouth—
shaped like mine
when I forget I’m being seen.
Eyes that held a creature
in each iris:
one pacing,
one chained.
She smiled like she was mouthing a warning.
And I did not run.
#4. The Dialogue.
“You see me,” she said.
“I see you,” I replied.
“No,” she whispered,
“you look, even when it hurts.”
I asked her what it felt like
to carry the moon inside your chest.
“Like humming with no mouth,”
she said,
“like singing to someone
who can’t hear spirit-speech.”
She asked me if I feared her.
I said,
“No. But I fear what you awaken.”
#5. The Revelation.
She showed me:
Her fur at dusk, silvered and soft.
The way her form flickered—
fox, woman, silence, flame.
“I was given to the world to heal it,”
she said,
“but the world wants its wounds.”
“I was married to a sky that forgot me.
I became a symbol
when I wanted to be a soul.”
I touched her face
and it rippled
like moonlight on a lake
tricked into thinking it was still.
#6. The Linger.
Now she walks still.
Sometimes woman.
Sometimes fox.
Sometimes breath on my neck
when I doubt myself.
She does not howl.
She does not sleep.
She watches.
Not to haunt,
but to hope.
They say
if you see the fox and don’t flinch,
she will give you her name.
She gave me mine instead.
A traveler glimpses a creature of light wearing fur like grief and eyes like cages.
They do not speak the same language,
but they mouth the same silence.
By firelight and moon-pulse,
they trade names neither one remembers giving.
One of them never existed.
The other never belonged.
Only the forest remembers what was promised.
Only the tide knows if she stayed.
This is not a story.
This is a reflection in moving water,
and every reader is the stone that distorts it.
I did not write this—
I was visited.
She asked me to remember her,
though I never met her before the dream.
Every line is a pawprint that refuses to be followed.
Every truth is hiding in a synonym.
If you think you understand it,
read it again at night.
Once on a full moon, then on a new moon and then every phase in between, forever.
