When the moon stopped rising

When the Moon Stopped Rising

No one noticed it the first night. The sky was clouded, and most people were tucked into their glowing rectangles of distraction—phones, tablets, televisions. But the astronomers noticed. They watched the lunar feed glitch, then go black.

The moon had vanished.

By the second night, headlines screamed “Where Is the Moon?” Panic settled in like a low fog. Tides swelled unpredictably, swallowing shorelines and vomiting up forgotten shipwrecks. Animals grew restless—wolves howled in disoriented confusion, and migratory birds flew in circles. Children stopped sleeping. Grown men forgot how to cry and simply stared at blank skies with red, twitching eyes.

Governments issued statements. "An optical illusion," some said. "An atmospheric anomaly." But no satellites could find it. It wasn’t hiding.

It was gone.

And slowly, the world began to break.


---

Dreamwalker.

That’s what they called her.

Her real name was Mera, and she had never been like everyone else. Since childhood, her dreams weren’t just dreams—they were places. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrifying, but always real. She could walk in others' dreams too, though most locked her out with walls of noise and trauma. But now, in this moonless world, people began to dream of the same thing.

The same place.

Mera saw it first: a scorched desert of gray, dust-filled air, a sky of endless black, and above her—a massive, chained orb screaming in silence.

The moon wasn’t gone.

It was trapped.


---

News of Mera spread fast. Her drawings of the chained moon matched what hundreds began to see in their dreams. Governments scoffed. Scientists dismissed it. But ordinary people… they started to believe.

A quiet movement formed—those who followed Mera called themselves The Nightbound. They believed the moon was crying for help, and only dreamwalkers like Mera could reach it.

Each night, Mera returned. The dream was always the same. A ruined temple of bone and dust stood beneath the suspended moon. Blackened chains anchored it to invisible corners of the dreamworld. And always, a figure waited at the temple’s steps: a child made of stars.

“You remember us,” the child said one night.

“Who are you?” Mera asked.

“We are the parts of the mind left behind when the world stopped dreaming,” the child said. “The moon is not just a rock. It is memory. It is balance. The world needed rest, needed darkness. Now… now it is unraveling.”

Mera began to understand. The moon was more than light. It was a boundary, a rhythm, a mother of dreams. Its absence was turning people mad not just from lack of sleep, but from the collapse of something far deeper: the unconscious connection between the earth and the mind.


---

Outside the dream, chaos brewed.

Sleep-deprived drivers turned highways into death strips. Oceans surged with a madness of their own. A second sun appeared in the sky for one terrible hour—then blinked out. People stopped dreaming altogether. And those who could still sleep? They screamed in their sleep.

Mera knew time was short. She gathered the Nightbound and taught them to enter the shared dream. It required focus, stillness, and a willingness to let go.

On the seventh night of no moon, Mera walked into the dream temple with twelve others. The star-child greeted them, face flickering with old light.

“Why is it chained?” Mera asked.

“Because you forgot what it means to be still. To rest. To feel the cold and know you are alive. The moon begged to be remembered, but you lit your cities and drowned its song.”

“So how do we free it?” someone whispered.

The child extended his hand, and twelve dreamers stepped forward. One by one, they disappeared into the dust—offering a piece of their waking selves. Each chain groaned, cracked, and broke.

Mera was the last.


---

Back in the waking world, her body never moved again.

But that night, the clouds parted.

And the moon rose.

Not as it once was, but larger—deep silver and etched with dark scars that hadn’t been there before. It glowed with a kind of sorrow. The tides settled. Sleep returned to people like rain to parched soil.

But Mera never woke.

Some say you can still see her—if you stare too long at the moon. A shimmer. A figure. Walking slowly across its surface, barefoot in dust.

They call her the Keeper now.

And every month, when the moon waxes full, dreamers gather in silence.

Not to pray.

But to remember.

That even the sky can go mad…

When the world forgets how to sleep.