Work Text:
1.
The moon is always watching you.
It lingers in the corner of your vision, always drawing your attention back to the sky, vast and unknowable yet always knowing you.
You know others do not see the moon like this. They speak of it as a constant, yes, but only in the way anything in the sky is a constant. The suns. The clouds. The vast wall of Concentus rising from the heat haze.
Those things are always present, you know, but they are not always visible.
Not the way the moon is.
It is your closest—perhaps your only—friend.
2.
When you slip into dreams, you wake to the forest.
Moon-silver birch trees stretch upwards, supporting the moon’s weight as it rests in their boughs.
The moon is so close here.
You climb the birch trees, convinced that you can reach the moon, believing that if you could just touch it, then everything would make more sense. The world would resolve and the moon would no longer need to haunt you, for you would have done what it wishes.
Yet, for how close the moon looks resting in its forest’s embrace, it never feels like you can climb any closer.
3.
You used to go fishing on the lake.
When you were a child, your parents would take you out to toss bait into the water and help them lure in trout and tuna and tiny bonefish to be dried and sold as meal.
Ever since the moon started watching you, the lake is too vast, too terrifying. The moon’s reflection upon its surface is too real, and you know that if the moon closes around you in that way it will consume you.
Sometimes, when you struggle to think of anything but the moon, you think that might be okay.
4.
When the Creature comes, the moon’s attention changes.
You don’t know what the Creature is. It has limbs, you’re pretty sure, and at least one face, and you think you saw claws or swords or something which is both. You know its name, though.
Its name is Quince Terryman and the sheer ordinariness of its name makes the Creature even more terrifying. It doesn’t do it justice.
It smiles at you in your sleep.
It creeps around the corners of your vision when you’re awake.
It is, you know with heavy certainty, what the moon wishes for you to become.
5.
You say, “I’m ready.”
Quince Terryman laughs at you, because it already knew that, and uses its wide hammertail to send you flying from the birch branches and into the invisible stars.
It hurts until the moon catches you. Its embrace is soothing and mist-soft despite the barren chill of its empty horizon.
As you walk across the moon’s surface, you change. Your limbs lengthen, multiply, divide; you swim through the lacking wind with your many legs. Your myriad eyes can now see all the beautiful swirling colors of the moon.
You exult.
The moon smiles and welcomes you home.