The Girl Who Wore the Moon

They called her strange from the beginning.

Not for anything she did — but for what followed her. The way candles flickered when she entered a room. The way animals paused, mid-step, as if listening to something only she could hear. And the moon. Oh, how the moon clung to her. Like a mother. Like a wound.

She was quiet, but never empty.

The villagers whispered. They said she was born under a cursed sky, when the moon was split and silver bled across the stars. They said her mother had screamed her name once and then vanished, as if naming the child had broken some ancient pact.

She never spoke of her mother.

She hardly spoke at all.

Instead, she wandered the hills at dusk, hands trailing the tall grass, eyes tilted to the sky as if decoding messages no one else could see. The moon followed her like a loyal dog — or a jealous god. Waxing, waning, watching.

They didn’t understand her hunger.

Because she wasn’t hungry for food, or praise, or love.

She was hungry for answers.

For the reason she always felt half-formed, like a question mark in a world full of periods. She felt it in her ribs — a hollow note. A missing chord.

She asked the trees. The rivers. The wind. They told her fragments. They spoke in riddles. One night, under a moon full and fierce, she climbed to the highest cliff and screamed her question into the dark.

“Who am I really?”

The moon answered.

Not in words, but in ache. A cold light that pierced her chest like a blade dipped in memory. She fell to her knees. She wept—not from pain, but recognition.

The truth unraveled inside her like a spool of silver thread.

She was not just a girl.

She was the daughter of night. The last breath of a forgotten goddess. Born when the sky cracked open and spilled its secrets into the sea. Her mother had not abandoned her — she had given her away. Hidden her in the skin of a girl, hoping the world would never notice the storm she carried.

But storms can’t stay quiet forever.

That night, she didn’t go home.

She stayed on the cliff and listened as the moon sang her name again and again until she remembered how to wear it properly. Until she remembered who she was before she was flesh.

The next morning, the villagers found her door open, her room empty. No note. No footprints. Only a circle of salt around her bed, and a single white feather on her pillow.

They say she walked into the sea and became mist.

Others say she rose into the sky and took the moon with her.

But I know the truth.

She became story.

She became myth.

She lives now in the hearts of those who don’t belong. In the girls who talk to stars and the boys who dream in colors they can’t name. In anyone who’s ever looked in the mirror and felt like a secret waiting to be found.

The girl who wore the moon is not gone.

She’s just hidden in the pages.

Waiting for someone brave enough to read her all the way through.