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There had been a time, when she was very young, that she did not know the moon. Then, Kuutar closed her eyes to the world. She turned her gaze away from the Frostmoon Scions, who lavished her with praise. She turned her gaze away from the skies, which seemed so empty. And then, with nothing else to bear witness, she turned her gaze away from herself, too, such that none again would see Kuutar, goddess of the moon.
She kept largely to herself, these days. Silvermoon Hall was just beyond the usual bounds of the Frostmoon Scions and none thought to peek beneath the stone. The kuuhenki were lovely, gentle guests, but they, like all the others, wanted something of her. Their requests, at least, she understood, a give-and-take easier to meet than the others had been: company for company, small shards for fixed strings or a song.
She liked singing for them. They were a kind audience, their limbs swaying gently in time with her verse. They did not speak human language like she did, but they would hum alongside her from time to time, and she found it... pleasant, in that they too did not know the words and sung from memory, as she did.
The kuuhenki were not always her audience. They followed their own whims, flitting in and out of her quiet hall. Sometimes they chased one another in circles, and sometimes they curled up to sleep beside her. As it was, she spent more time alone than in their company.
...She was not often glad for it.
Her days were largely monotonous. She sang, or she wandered between the flowers, or she placed herself on her plinth and slept. While pacing, she would muse on the state of the world, or her old family, or her ‘old home’ before that.
She thought often of her old family, and she was caught in a memory of the old Knave’s clicking heels when it hit her: a distant, splintering, breaking sound. It cracked through her whole being, split her down the middle. For a moment she did not know who she was. Her blood spilt out of her body and soaked into the earth and she knew that it would not return to her. There was some gaping absence in her, a cracked-open maw, a sharp tooth stuck inside her.
She gasped. Her legs no longer supported her. Her oldest family used to weep of broken bones and failing bodies and she wondered if this was the feeling that they had described. This helplessness, this wanting to move and being unable to. Her vision blistered. Around her the flowers shrieked angrily. She could not think of the kuuhenki; she could not think of the Fatui; she thought of nothing.
Then the moon returned.
Her body reknitted itself. Her blood returned to her veins. The flowers softened. She tilted her face to the firmament and the moon beyond. She knew that it hurt. She was not sure why.