Mothlight Kindle

Posting here for fun. --- After eighteen years learning to seem normal, Aspen had almost convinced herself she could stay that way. But then again, normal girls usually don’t journal in treehouses and wait for the fairies to answer back. The day had almost kept its routine promise. Mother would work late, Jamie would text stupid things that he would deny were check-ins, and the treehouse would wait with blue mushroom light under the boards. Then one of the mushrooms bled. A single bead of blue sap swelled beneath the floorboards, brightened once, and dropped onto her pen. The pen that had found the only crack in her floor. The work of the fair. The next time she woke, it was in Lyra's corpse, coughing up ash in what should've been a bed. There was no bed. Just a cocoon, in a village carved into a dying god-tree. The inside of the tree was larger than weather, its upended gray trunk full of blue-lit corridors, sap channels, winged villagers, and scents that told her which strangers had mothers, work-sore hands, old griefs, and doors they expected to return through. Aspen has no scent. Not yet. The Hinterfolk know, instantly, that she should not exist. But nobody asks where she came from. Instead, they call her Hermit, and every time she answers, the borrowed body makes it easier. The village needs seven days from her. Seven days of ritual, silence, and pretending, before the thing that emptied Lyra comes back to look inside what hatched. The protractor on Aspen’s desk has started losing its numbers. She can still put it at the top right corner of her desk, orange plastic barely visible in her peripheral, but the white degree marks come back blank. Meanwhile, Lyra's wings know exactly how far to lift before a chair catches them. Lyra’s hands know the scars where the blue sap runs better. Lyra’s body keeps remembering what Aspen can’t. The human in her flinches from the flame. The sinner in her kneels close enough to catch. The moth in her mistakes the heat for home. In Hinter, these moths don't burn. They follow the Fayya.