The Hollow Moon

The rain had been falling for three days, and Aster Renfall was beginning to suspect the sky had developed a personal grudge.

It drummed against the roof of the apothecary, seeped beneath the back door, and turned the narrow streets of Briar Glen into ribbons of brown mud. Beyond the village, the forest of Elaren stood beneath a veil of mist, its ancient trees bending beneath the weight of the storm. Water ran in silver threads down their trunks, collecting in the roots and spilling over the banks of the little river that divided the settlement from the deeper woods.

Aster stood on a stool behind the apothecary counter, trying to reach a jar on the highest shelf. The jar remained stubbornly out of reach. She stretched until her fingertips brushed its glass bottom.

“Perhaps,” Mara said from the other side of the room, “you might consider asking for help.”

“I am asking.”

“You are arguing with a shelf.”

“It started it.”

Mara gave a quiet snort and returned to sorting dried herbs.

At sixty-one, Mara Renfall had developed the sort of patience that made most people assume she was incapable of anger. Aster knew better. She had seen Mara silence a drunken hunter with one look and send a particularly unpleasant tax collector back toward the road with nothing but a wooden spoon and a few carefully chosen words.

Her patience, Aster had learned, was not endless.

It was simply selective.

Mara was a small, sturdy woman with silver beginning to overtake the brown in her hair. She wore it in a loose braid most days, though the damp weather had coaxed several strands free around her face. Her hands were broad and capable, marked by little scars from years of gathering roots, preparing medicines, and tending to people who were far less careful with their bodies than they ought to have been.

Aster had inherited none of those things from her.

Not the silvering hair, not the broad hands, and certainly not the patient disposition.

Her own hair was dark brown, slightly wavy, and perpetually escaping whatever tie she used to restrain it. Her skin held an olive warmth that looked almost golden in summer and rather less impressive beneath Briar Glen's endless gray skies. Her eyes were an unusual mixture of amber and gray, a combination that had earned her more than one uncomfortable stare from strangers.

She had learned early not to ask what people thought of them.

“Move the stool,” Mara suggested.

Aster glanced down at it.

“That seems unnecessarily practical.”

“Aster.”

With a sigh, she stepped down, dragged the stool closer to the shelf, and climbed again. This time the jar came easily into her hand.

“There,” she said. “A triumph of human ingenuity.”

“An excellent example of it.”

Aster placed the jar on the counter. Inside were dried leaves of moonwort, pale and brittle, gathered before the last full moon. The plant was useful for fever and sleep, though the name had always struck Aster as misleading. It did not grow only beneath moonlight, and it certainly did not possess any special affection for the moon.

People were fond of giving ordinary things extraordinary names.

Especially when they did not understand them.

She began measuring the leaves into a small paper packet.

Outside, a cart rattled past the window. The driver hunched beneath a heavy cloak, urging his horse through the flooded street. Across the way, the baker's shutters were closed, though smoke still curled from the chimney. Briar Glen had never been a particularly busy settlement, but the storm had reduced its usual activity to almost nothing.

There were perhaps two hundred people in the village, most of them human. A few werewolf families lived on the outskirts, though they rarely involved themselves in village affairs unless someone needed their help or had offended them.

The distinction between human and wolf was difficult to ignore in Vaeloria.

The great territories were ruled by werewolf bloodlines, and their laws reached even into places as small as Briar Glen. The High Alpha's authority came from the northern fortress of Veyrhold, far beyond the forest and the mountains. His decrees were carried by riders, posted in market squares, and occasionally enforced by soldiers who seemed to believe a human settlement was a personal insult.

Briar Glen had little reason to attract their attention.

It had no valuable mines, no military roads, and no particularly impressive buildings. Its greatest claim to importance was a patch of unusually good soil that produced excellent turnips.

Aster considered this a reasonable foundation for a peaceful existence.

She had no desire to meet the High Alpha.

She had no desire to meet any alpha, for that matter.

“Mrs. Pell's medicine is ready,” she said, tying the packet closed.

“Put it with the others.”

Aster reached for the small wooden tray beside the counter. Several orders were waiting there, each marked with a name and a short description of the illness. Fever. Cough. Sprained wrist. An infected cut that had been ignored for so long that Mara had threatened to remove the man's entire hand if he returned with it any worse.

Aster had been helping in the apothecary since she was old enough to distinguish chamomile from hemlock. She knew which plants soothed a stomach, which ones reduced swelling, and which ones could kill a person in a surprisingly small quantity.

She also knew that Mara would never let her prepare anything particularly dangerous without supervision.

Not that Aster had ever complained about that.

Much.

A sudden gust of wind rattled the shutters.

Aster looked toward the window.

“Do you think the river will flood?”

“It might.”

“That's reassuring.”

“It's a river. It has a habit of doing what it pleases.”

“Then I shall have a stern word with it.”

Mara smiled, but the expression faded as she looked beyond the glass.

Aster followed her gaze.

The road leading into Briar Glen disappeared between two leaning wooden posts. Beyond them, the forest rose dark and dense beneath the rain. The trees were older there, their trunks thick enough that two people could not have joined hands around them. Moss covered their roots, and the undergrowth was so tangled that even the village hunters avoided wandering too far from the marked paths.

There were old ruins deeper in the woods.

Everyone knew that.

Most people pretended not to.

The ruins were remnants of something older than the villages, older than the territorial borders, perhaps older than the kingdoms themselves. No one agreed on who had built them. Some said they were the remains of an ancient temple. Others claimed they had belonged to a forgotten settlement abandoned after the first werewolf wars.

The oldest people in Briar Glen called the region beyond the ruins the Unhallowed.

They spoke of it in lowered voices, as if the trees might hear.

Aster had never understood the fear. She had seen the outer stones once, years ago, while gathering herbs with Mara. They were broken and overgrown, no more frightening than any other abandoned structure.

Still, Mara had been unusually insistent that they leave before sunset.

Aster had not forgotten.

“Are you expecting someone?” she asked.

Mara looked at her. “Why would you think that?”

“You keep watching the road.”

“I am watching the weather.”

“The weather is not going to knock on the door.”

“You don't know that.”

Aster smiled faintly.

Mara turned away, but something in her expression lingered. A small tension around the mouth. A watchfulness that did not belong to an ordinary afternoon.

Aster noticed it because she had spent her entire life noticing things people preferred not to say.

She did not press.

There were things Mara kept to herself. Everyone had secrets, and Aster had learned that some were best left undisturbed until the person holding them was ready to speak.

Besides, Mara had given her a home.

That mattered more than the occasional unanswered question.

Aster could not remember her earliest years, but she had never doubted that Mara loved her. The woman had raised her, taught her, scolded her, and sat beside her through every childhood fever. She had attended every village celebration, every school lesson, and every small disaster Aster had managed to create.

When Aster had broken her arm at eleven, Mara had stayed awake three nights in a row to make sure the bones healed properly.

When Aster had tried to run away at thirteen after being forbidden from climbing the old mill, Mara had found her sitting on a fence less than half a mile from home.

And when Aster had turned seventeen, something strange had happened. She had touched the blood of an injured traveler and heard a voice that had not been there. Mara had told her it was exhaustion. Aster had accepted the explanation because she had wanted to.

She had never mentioned the voice again. Not to anyone.

The rain grew heavier.

Aster finished arranging the medicine packets and began wiping down the counter. She was halfway through the task when a sound came from outside.

A horse.

Not the steady clop of a cart horse, but the uneven, frantic rhythm of an animal struggling to remain upright.

Mara straightened.

Aster looked toward the door.

Another sound followed. A sharp, desperate whinny.

“Stay here,” Mara said.

Aster was already moving.

“Aster.”

“If someone is hurt—”

“Let me see first.”

But Aster had reached the door. She pulled the latch and opened it against the wind.

Cold rain swept into the apothecary.

A horse stood in the middle of the street, trembling beneath a dark, soaked saddle blanket. Its sides heaved, and foam clung to the bit. The reins hung loose. There was no rider.

Aster stepped onto the threshold.

“Easy,” she murmured.

The horse turned its head toward her. Its eyes were wide and frightened.

“Where's your rider?”

A movement near the roadside caught her attention.

A man lay half beneath the overhang of the neighboring building, one arm curled against his stomach. His dark cloak was soaked through, and rainwater ran down his face. He was young, perhaps thirty, though pain had made him look considerably older.

Aster hurried toward him.

“Don't move.”

His eyes opened.

They were pale. Almost colorless.

He tried to speak, but a wet cough interrupted him.

Aster knelt beside him. “Mara!”

Her adoptive mother appeared in the doorway with a blanket and her medical bag.

“Bring him inside,” Mara ordered.

Together they managed to drag the man through the apothecary door and lay him on the narrow examination table. His boots left muddy streaks across the floorboards. The horse remained outside, shifting nervously in the rain.

Mara cut away the man's cloak.

Aster drew in a breath.

There was a deep wound beneath his ribs, running diagonally across his abdomen. The edges were ragged, and blood had soaked through his shirt. It was darker than it should have been, almost black where it had begun to dry.

“What did this?” Aster asked.

“Not now,” Mara said.

She pressed a clean cloth against the wound.

The man jerked and made a strangled sound.

“Hold him,” Mara instructed.

Aster took his hand.

His fingers closed around hers with surprising strength.

“Help,” he whispered.

“We are trying,” Aster said. “You need to stay still.”

His gaze fixed on her face.

For a moment, the fear in his eyes seemed to change into something else.

Recognition.

Aster frowned.

“Have we met?”

The man's lips moved, but no sound came out.

Mara worked quickly, cleaning the wound and preparing a needle. She asked Aster for a jar of binding paste, then for clean linen. Aster moved without hesitation, though her attention kept returning to the stranger's face.

He was not from Briar Glen.

His clothes were made from fine dark wool, and the metal clasp at his throat bore a symbol Aster did not recognize: a crescent shape split by a narrow vertical line. His boots were well made, though scratched and caked with mud.

There was a ring on his left hand.

A silver band with a small black stone.

“Were you attacked?” Aster asked.

The man swallowed.

“Don't speak,” Mara said. “You'll make it worse.”

He ignored her.

“The forest,” he rasped.

Aster leaned closer. “What about it?”

His eyes shifted toward the window.

“Something... beneath.”

Mara pressed harder against the wound.

“Enough.”

The man's fingers tightened around Aster's hand. His skin was cold. Not merely chilled from the rain. Cold in a way that seemed to seep through her palm and settle beneath her skin.

Aster looked down. Blood had spread across his fingers. A thin line of it had reached her wrist.

The world changed. It happened so quickly that she had no time to understand what was happening. The apothecary vanished. The rain vanished. Aster was standing beneath a black sky.

Stone towers rose around her, broken and burning. Their surfaces were carved with symbols she could not read, though something in her recognized their shapes. The air smelled of smoke, wet earth, and blood.

There were wolves everywhere.

Not the ordinary animals that prowled the Elaren woods. These were enormous creatures, their bodies moving through the ruins like shadows. Some were black, others pale as winter bone. Their eyes shone with colors Aster could not name.

They were running.

Fleeing.

Something screamed.

Aster turned toward the sound.

A woman stood beneath a collapsed archway. Her hair was dark, her clothes torn, and blood covered one side of her face. She held a child against her chest. The child was crying. Behind them, men approached carrying blades.

They were not wolves. They wore armor marked with a symbol of seven narrow lines surrounding a circle. The woman looked directly at Aster.

Not through her.

At her.

Her mouth moved.

Run.

Aster tried to move, but the ground beneath her feet had become slick with blood.

A wolf fell nearby. Its body struck the stone with a terrible sound. A second creature lunged toward the men, only to be pierced by a spear. The woman pressed the child closer.

“Remember us,” she whispered.

Then the black sky split with a terrible silver light. Aster heard a chorus of voices.

Not one voice.

Hundreds.

Thousands.

All speaking at once.

We were here.

We were here.

We were here.

The woman screamed.

And something beneath the earth answered. Aster felt it in her bones. A vast, sleeping presence shifting in the darkness. Then the vision shattered.

She was back in the apothecary.

Her hand flew away from the man's.

The stool beside the table toppled over.

“Aster!”

Mara caught her by the shoulders. Aster stumbled backward, striking the counter. A jar rattled and fell onto its side, scattering dried leaves across the floor.

For several seconds, she could not breathe. The room seemed too bright. Too small. The smell of herbs and rain was overwhelming.

“What happened?” Mara demanded.

Aster stared at her.

She could still hear the voices.

We were here.

They faded slowly, like echoes moving away through a long tunnel.

“I...” Aster swallowed. “I don't know.”

Mara's face had gone pale.

“What did you touch?”

“The blood.”

Mara looked toward the examination table. The stranger lay motionless. His hand had fallen open, leaving a dark smear across the white cloth. Aster stared at it. The blood was ordinary now. Just blood. She looked at her palm. A thin red streak crossed the center.

“What was that?” she whispered.

Mara did not answer. She took Aster's hand and wiped it with a clean cloth. Her movements were quick, almost rough.

“Go into the back room.”

“Mara—”

“Now.”

Aster looked at her. There was fear in Mara's expression. Not the fear of someone watching a stranger die. Not even the fear of someone who had just witnessed an inexplicable fit.

It was something older. Something familiar. Aster had seen that expression once before, though she had been too young to understand it.

When she was seventeen, after the first time she had heard a voice in blood, Mara had looked at her in almost exactly the same way. Aster's stomach tightened.

“You know what happened.”

“No.”

“You're a terrible liar.”

“Aster, please.”

The word stopped her. Mara rarely pleaded.

Aster looked at the man again. His chest rose once. Then fell. Mara turned back to him, pressing two fingers against his throat. She waited.

The rain tapped against the windows.

Finally, she withdrew her hand. “He's gone,” she said.

Aster looked down. The stranger's eyes remained open. They were still fixed on her. She felt suddenly cold.

“Did you know him?” she asked.

“No.”

“Then why did he look at me like that?”

Mara reached for the man's eyelids and gently closed them.

“I don't know.”

It was another lie.

Aster was certain of it.

She stepped closer to the table. The man's face looked peaceful now, though the tension had not entirely left his mouth. He had died frightened. Whatever had happened in the forest, whatever had brought him to Briar Glen, he had not escaped it.

Aster noticed something beneath his collar. A small silver chain. She reached toward it, but Mara caught her wrist.

“Don't.”

“It's just a necklace.”

“Leave it.”

Aster looked at her. Mara's grip loosened. For a moment neither spoke.

Then the stranger's lips moved.

Aster froze.

Mara leaned forward. The man's mouth opened slightly. A breath escaped him, so faint that Aster almost mistook it for the wind outside.

His eyes remained closed.

“The last one...” he whispered.

Aster leaned closer.

“What?”

His lips moved again.

“Alive.”

Then his body went still. The silence that followed seemed to swallow the room. Aster stared at him. The last one was alive.

What last one?

The last survivor of whatever had happened in the ruins? The last member of some forgotten family? The last person from the place she had seen in the vision?

And why had he looked at her? She turned toward Mara. Her adoptive mother had gone completely still. The color had drained from her face. One hand rested against the edge of the examination table, her knuckles white.

“Mara?”

No answer.

“What did he mean?”

Mara closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, the fear was gone. Or hidden well enough that Aster might have believed it if she had not seen it moments before.

“He was delirious,” Mara said.

“He recognized me.”

“He was dying.”

“He said the last one was alive.”

“People say many things when they're dying.”

“Not usually things that sound like they're meant for someone.”

Mara turned away and began gathering the bloodied cloths. Aster watched her.

“Was that what happened when I was seventeen?”

Mara's hands stopped. The question had been waiting between them for eight years. Aster had never asked it directly. She had been frightened by what she had heard then, and Mara had been so relieved when Aster stopped speaking about it that she had allowed the silence to settle.

But she remembered.

The injured traveler.

The blood.

The voice.

The strange certainty that she had heard something no one else could hear.

Mara resumed folding the cloth.

“You were sick,” she said.

“I wasn't.”

“You had a fever.”

“I didn't.”

“Aster—”

“I touched his blood and saw something. A place. Wolves. People dying. A woman holding a child.”

Mara's hands tightened around the cloth.

Aster's voice lowered.

“She looked at me.”

The room seemed to grow colder.

“Then she said something about remembering.”

Mara said nothing.

“Do you know what I saw?”

“No.”

It was the most convincing lie she had told all evening.

Aster felt a sharp ache behind her ribs.

“You're frightened of me.”

Mara turned so quickly that the cloth slipped from her hands.

“Never.”

“Then what are you frightened of?”

Mara crossed the room and took Aster's face between her hands.

For a moment she was not the stern village healer or the woman who could quiet an entire room with a glance. She was simply the person who had raised Aster, who had kissed scraped knees and sat beside nightmares, who had held her through the worst fevers of her childhood.

“I am frightened of what people might do if they learn certain things,” Mara said.

Aster searched her face.

“What things?”

Mara's gaze flicked toward the dead man.

“Not here.”

“Then where?”

“Not tonight.”

Aster wanted to argue. She wanted to demand answers until Mara had no choice but to give them. But she saw something in her adoptive mother's expression that stopped her. Mara was not refusing because she did not trust Aster. She was refusing because she believed the truth was dangerous.

And that frightened Aster more than the vision had.

Outside, a horse screamed.

Both women turned.

The animal had been standing beneath the neighboring awning. Now it was rearing against its reins, eyes rolling white. Its hooves struck the flooded road, splashing muddy water against the walls.

Aster moved toward the door.

“Stay back,” Mara said.

The horse pulled free. It bolted down the street, disappearing into the rain. For a moment, Aster could hear its hooves striking the stones. Then even that sound was gone.

Mara locked the door. She drew the curtains and extinguished the lamp nearest the window.

“What are you doing?” Aster asked.

“Making sure we're not disturbed.”

“By whom?”

Mara did not answer. She took the silver chain from beneath the dead man's collar and slipped it into her pocket. Aster noticed.

“You told me to leave it.”

“I changed my mind.”

“That's convenient.”

“Aster.”

There was something final in the way Mara said her name.

Aster fell silent.

Together they moved the stranger's body into the small storage room behind the apothecary. Mara covered him with a clean sheet and said she would send for the village constable in the morning. Aster helped without speaking.

The vision remained in her mind.

The burning towers.

The woman.

The child.

The wolves dying beneath a sky that had turned black.

And the voices.

We were here.

Aster had no idea what it meant.

She only knew that the memory did not feel like something she had imagined. It felt like something she had been shown. Something that had been waiting.

When they finished, Mara washed her hands three times. Aster stood by the back door, watching her.

“Do you think someone is coming?” she asked.

Mara looked up.

“What?”

“You keep checking the windows. You locked the door. You took the stranger's necklace. Do you think someone is coming here?”

“No.”

“Another lie.”

Mara sighed.

“Go upstairs, Aster.”

“I don't want to go upstairs.”

“You've had a difficult evening.”

“I've had a dead stranger in the apothecary and a vision of a massacre. I think I'm entitled to be difficult.”

Despite everything, Mara's mouth twitched.

“You are always entitled to be difficult.”

“Good. I was worried that might change.”

Mara came closer and brushed a damp strand of hair away from Aster's cheek.

“Please,” she said. “Just for tonight, do as I ask.”

Aster looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded.

She climbed the narrow staircase to the rooms above the apothecary. Her bedroom was small and familiar, with a slanted ceiling, a narrow bed, and a window overlooking the road. A collection of old books occupied the shelves. A cracked blue vase stood on the windowsill, holding a few dried flowers that had long since lost their color.

It was a comfortable room.

A safe room.

A room that belonged to a life she understood.

Aster removed her wet clothes and changed into a loose nightdress. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her palm. The blood had been washed away. Still, she could feel the cold of the stranger's hand.

She closed her eyes. For a moment, she was beneath the black sky again. The woman stood beneath the archway.

The child cried.

The wolves ran.

Aster opened her eyes.

“No,” she whispered.

She stood and crossed to the window. Rain blurred the road and turned the distant trees into dark shapes. There was no movement outside. No horse. No traveler. No sign that anything unusual had happened.

Yet the village seemed different. She could not explain it. The buildings were the same. The road was the same. The forest had not moved. But the ordinary world she had woken in that morning felt suddenly thin, like a painted wall hiding something vast and dark behind it.

Aster pressed her fingers against the cold glass. Somewhere beyond the village, deep in the forest, a wolf howled. Then another answered. The sound traveled through the rain.

Aster had heard wolves before. Their calls were common enough in Elaren, especially when the weather drove them closer to the settlements.

But these were not ordinary calls. They sounded like grief. One by one, the howls rose from the forest until the whole valley seemed to be answering something. Aster stepped away from the window.

For the first time in her life, she wondered whether the old stories about the Unhallowed had been warnings rather than superstition.

Below her, the apothecary door opened. She heard Mara cross the room. Then the lock turned.

Aster waited, listening. A moment later, a soft knock came at her bedroom door.

“Come in,” she said.

Mara entered carrying a small lamp. She looked older than she had that morning.

“I thought you were going to bed,” Aster said.

“I wanted to see you first.”

“I'm still here.”

“I know.”

Mara set the lamp on the table. Her gaze moved to the window, then back to Aster.

“Whatever you saw tonight,” she said, “don't speak of it to anyone.”

Aster folded her arms. “Not even the constable?”

“Especially not the constable.”

“Why?”

“Because some questions attract answers you are not ready to hear.”

Aster almost laughed.

“That sounds like something from one of your dreadful old stories.”

“I wish it were.”

Mara reached out and touched her cheek.

“You are my daughter,” she said. “Whatever else may be true, remember that.”

Aster's throat tightened. “I know.”

Mara held her gaze for another moment, then turned toward the door.

“Mara?”

She stopped.

“Who was I before you found me?”

The question came out quietly.

Mara did not turn around.

For several seconds, the only sound was the rain.

Then she said, “You were a baby.”

“That isn't what I asked.”

“I know.”

Aster waited.

Mara's hand tightened around the doorframe.

“You were loved,” she said.

Then she left.

Aster remained standing in the center of the room.

She had always known there were things about her earliest life that Mara would not discuss. She had never known her birth parents. She had no family name beyond Renfall, no record of a birth beyond the village register, and no memory of anywhere but Briar Glen.

She had never considered it especially important.

Mara was her family.

That had always been enough.

Tonight, it was not.

Aster returned to the window. The rain continued to fall.

Far beyond the village, where the forest grew thick around the forgotten stones, something shifted beneath the earth.

She did not hear it. Not clearly. But deep inside her, beneath the fear and confusion, something answered.

A faint pulse.

A memory stirring in the dark.

And somewhere in the distance, the wolves fell silent.