The night began with light that should not have existed. It spilled across the sky in shards, thin, cold, uneven, as if someone had broken the moon and scattered its pieces through the air. Each fragment glowed on its own, pale and trembling, casting sharp slivers of brightness that cut through the dark instead of softening it.
The ground below gleamed faintly, not silver, not gray, but the color of forgotten things. Frost lay over the stones like a second skin, and the air was brittle, dry enough to crack at the edge of hearing. Out of that silence came the sound of wings. Slow, measured, each beat heavy with purpose, the raven flew low across the desolate plain, his feathers swallowing what little light remained.
Where he passed, shadows deepened, not by his will, but by instinct, as if the night itself leaned closer to him in recognition. He had seen many moons in his life, but never this one. It hung in pieces above the horizon, some large enough to show their pitted faces, others small as dust, turning slowly in a web of light too fragile to survive a breath.
The raven circled once, the reflection of the fractured moon scattering across his wings. Each feather caught a different piece of the sky, a thousand tiny mirrors flickering in motion. He landed on a rock at the center of the plane. The stone was slick with frost, its edges sharp as glass. When his claws met it, the sound rang faintly, clear, metallic, like a bell struck deep beneath water.
The raven tilted his head, one black eye fixed on the broken moon. It looked close enough to touch, yet infinitely distant. A wound in the sky that refused to close. The air trembled. A soft wind moved across the plane, stirring nothing but dust. It carried no scent, no warmth, only the memory of motion.

The raven raised his wings slightly, balancing against it. He listened. There was no sound beyond his own breath. No rustle of leaves, no whisper of life. The world was still, as if holding something between its teeth. He caught once. The note cut the air, sharp, solitary, and vanished. No echo returned. The raven blinked.
He tried again and again. The sound disappeared as though swallowed by something vast and invisible. Above him, one of the moon’s fragments shifted. It turned slowly, and for a heartbeat, its surface caught the light of another shard. The reflection fell across the plane in a beam so narrow it could have been a blade.
It touched the raven’s shadow, and for an instant the shadow quivered. The bird did not move. Neither did the wind, but his shadow rippled faintly as though it had been disturbed by something beneath it. Then the light shifted again, and the shadow stilled. The raven tilted his head the other way, eyes following the trembling fragments above.

They looked fragile, alive, as if breathing in slow, broken rhythm. He spread his wings and lifted off, the wind carrying him upward through the uneven glow. The shards of moonlight slid over his feathers like oil. Each reflection sharp enough to hurt. From above, the world was endless. An ocean of black broken by islands of white stone and cold light.
The raven circled once, twice, tracing slow spirals through the air. His shadow followed below, stretching, folding, twisting, not in time with him anymore. For a moment he looked down and saw two shapes where there should have been one. Then the clouds moved. The light fractured again. The second shadow vanished. The raven climbed higher, his wings cutting through the silence.
The air grew colder, the shards of the moon brighter. And as he flew toward them, toward the shattered heart of the sky, the night below began to shift. Not the wind, not the ground, but the dark itself, turning softly, deliberately, as though preparing to fold. The raven flew until the air grew too thin to lift him higher.
He turned, gliding down toward the gray horizon, where light no longer reached. Below him stretched a plane of dust and stone, smooth, silver gray, and empty, as if the world had been wiped clean. The moon’s broken light fell unevenly across the ground, glinting on shards of frost and frozen pools that reflected nothing.
He landed on a branch that jutted from the remains of a tree. It was nothing more than a dead shape, bleached white by years of wind and cold. The bark had peeled away long ago, leaving a smooth surface that shone faintly in the pale glow. The raven’s claws clicked softly against it as he settled, folding his wings close. The air was heavy and sharp.

He could taste metal with every breath. Nothing moved, not even the smallest trace of life. The silence was not the ordinary kind, not the piece of stillness or sleep, but something deeper, as if sound itself had been pulled out of the air and hidden away. The raven tilted his head, listening beneath the cold, quiet, he thought he could feel something faint, almost imagined, a low pulse, like the earth trying to remember how to beat.
It wasn’t rhythm exactly. It was closer to a memory of rhythm, a soft vibration that lived just below the reach of hearing. He shifted on the branch. The wood gave a slow creek, a thin sound that vanished almost as soon as it began. The raven cawed once sharply. The sound cut through the still air, echoed off nothing, and was gone.
He tried again, louder again. Nothing came back. It was as if the night refused to acknowledge his voice. He looked down at the ground beneath him. The frost shimmerred faintly, and the dust seemed to breathe, rising and falling in a rhythm too slow to belong to wind. He spread his wings slightly and felt the faintest tremor pass through the air.
It came not from above, but from below, deep under the frozen crust of the world. Something was alive under there, or not alive, not anymore, but awake. The raven hopped down from the branch, landing softly on the frozen soil. The ground shifted a little under his weight, not cracking, just adjusting. He lowered his head, pecked once at the frost, and stopped.
The sound of that small tap didn’t fade. It was absorbed, drawn inward, as though the earth itself was listening. He took a few steps, wings halfopen. The faint pulse continued beneath him, steady, slow, and impossibly far away. The sensation ran up through his claws and into his bones. He wasn’t afraid. He was curious. The air grew colder.
The broken moonlight thickened, bending as it passed through the fog that had begun to rise again. The world seemed to narrow. Even the sky looked closer now, like a ceiling lowering inch by inch. The raven turned his head toward it. One of the moon’s fragments drifted slightly, shifting its light across the plane.
For an instant, the faint pulse below the ground matched that movement. As if the broken moon and the sleeping earth still remembered each other. Then the rhythm faded, swallowed by silence once more. The raven stayed there a long time, unmoving, staring at the thin horizon where the last glow of the moon’s reflection met the dark.
He didn’t understand what he had heard, only that the sound had not belonged to him, and that the world had listened before it fell quiet again. He lifted his wings, pushed off from the ground, and rose into the air. The wind followed weakly, swirling the dust below him. It made no sound, but the ground trembled once, just enough to let him know that the heartbeat was still there, waiting.
The raven flew until the plane began to change beneath him. The endless sheet of frost and dust gave way to darker ground. Soil hardened into stone, cracked and split by time. In the center of that vast emptiness stood a single tree. It rose from the frozen earth like a bone piercing through skin, tall, smooth, and colorless.

Its branches reached upward, long and bare, twisted into shapes that looked too deliberate to be random. It wasn’t a tree anymore. Not really. It was the memory of one. The raven descended slowly, circling once before landing near the base. The ground was dry, brittle, covered in a thin film of ice. When he folded his wings, the sound seemed to echo, not outward, but inward, swallowed by the hollow space beneath the roots.
He hopped closer, tilting his head as he studied the trunk. The wood, if it was still wood, had turned to something harder. The surface was smooth and pale like marble, faintly warm to the touch. He tapped it once with his beak. The sound it made was strange, deep, resonant. Not the dull click of wood or stone, but a note that seemed to linger, vibrating softly in the air.
For the first time, there was an answer, not a voice, not an echo, just the soft hum that came from the tree itself. It felt alive, but only in memory, but only in the raven climbed higher, hopping from branch to branch until he reached one near the crown. From there, the world stretched in all directions.
The broken plane behind him, the frozen hills beyond, and above it all, the shattered moon. Its fragments drifted slowly, glowing faintly as they turned. Some were dark on one side, glimmering with reflected light on the other. Together, they formed no shape at all, a scattered constellation of what once was whole. The raven watched them without blinking.
His feathers gleamed faintly in their glow, each one catching a sliver of light. He looked like a creature made of the night itself, sharp, deliberate, alive in a dead world. He caught once, a sound soft and brief. It carried upward, struck the air above him, and stopped. No echo again, but the tree responded.
The branches quivered, not from wind, but from within. The faint hum deepened as if something beneath the bark remembered movement. The raven tilted his head and listened. Beneath the sound of silence, there was rhythm, slow and uncertain, like the pulse he had felt earlier under the ground. The two were connected somehow.
The earth had its heartbeat. The tree had its breath. He stayed still, waiting. The broken moonlight shifted again, moving over him and the tree like water through glass. Shadows bent and pulled, stretching in unnatural ways. The trunk gleamed. The hum grew softer, steadier, almost comforting. For a moment, he thought he saw something move across the horizon.
A flicker of motion, faint and distant, gone as soon as it appeared. Maybe a trick of the fractured light. Or maybe the world remembering how to move. The raven’s feathers ruffled. He leaned forward, his claws gripping the cold wood. The hum began to fade again, receding into stillness. The tree returned to silence.
He stayed there a while longer, perched in the strange quiet, eyes on the horizon where no sun rose. He wasn’t waiting for morning. He knew it wouldn’t come, but the tree waited, patient, unmoving, ancient enough to outlast the absence of dawn. And high above, the broken moon drifted on, scattering its pieces across the sky that no longer knew how to end.
The wind had died completely by the time the raven opened his wings again. Even the air seemed reluctant to move, as though the world itself had grown tired of shifting from one silence to another. He remained perched in the treere’s highest branches, staring at the horizon, where light no longer changed.
The broken moon hung above him, fractured and dim. Its scattered shards turning slowly in the void. Their glow bled unevenly through the clouds, creating lines and patterns that twisted across the ground like veins of pale fire. The light no longer behaved as it once did. It bent around him, folded in strange directions, and slid across the surface of things as if searching for something it had lost.
When the light touched his wings, it did not reflect. It vanished. His feathers swallowed it completely, erasing every trace of brightness. The raven moved one wing forward, watching the moonlight break around it like water around stone. For a long moment, he was mesmerized by the way it disappeared.

Then he saw the shadow. It stretched long across the frozen soil below him. Perfectly clear, perfectly dark. It was his. Same shape, same motion, but it was deeper than any shadow should have been, blacker than the night around it. And when the raven moved his head, the shadow did not follow immediately. It lagged just slightly, as though it were remembering what it was supposed to do.
The raven froze. He tilted his head. The shadow did not. It stayed still for a heartbeat longer, then caught up in a slow, liquid motion that made the air feel heavier. The faint hum from the treere’s trunk returned deeper this time, echoing up through the branches. It sounded like a breath being drawn in from below.
The raven hopped sideways on the branch, his claws scraping softly against the cold surface. Again, the shadow moved, but not quite right. It stretched wider, thinner, its edges trembling like smoke, caught in windless air. For the first time since the night began, the raven made no sound.
He stared downward, wings slightly open, his body tense. Something beneath him. Something inside that darkness was watching back. The moonlight changed again. One of its fragments drifted lower, its pale reflection sliding across the plane and striking the raven’s silhouette. The moment the light touched it, the shadow seemed to ripple outward, breaking apart into small, fluid motions that had no pattern, no source.
Then it began to move on its own. The raven’s chest rose and fell, his feathers lifting. The air had grown colder, and yet a strange warmth pressed against his claws from the branch. The hum inside the tree became steady, almost rhythmic, like breathing through stone. The shadow shifted again. It rose faintly, the edge of it peeling away from the ground as though it were made of smoke.
For a moment, the raven thought it might separate completely, but it didn’t. It hovered there, a second shape beneath him, trying to lift, but unable to detach. The light around him dimmed, or perhaps it was being pulled. The fragments of the moon above flickered and lost their glow one by one, as though something was drawing them inward.
The darkness grew thicker, not from the absence of light, but from its concentration, as if all of it were gathering in one place beneath him. The raven raised his wings. His shadow followed again, perfectly this time, returning to its shape. Everything appeared still, normal, but the air hadn’t forgotten what had just happened. He could feel it.
That faint vibration under his feet. That slow rhythm beneath the bark. It wasn’t just the mountain breathing anymore. The night had begun to breathe with it. The raven looked upward one last time. The largest fragment of the moon had turned, revealing a surface that glowed softly, almost like an eye reflecting the world below. He didn’t blink.
The shadow beneath him trembled once more, and the night for the first time seemed to move toward him.