“A Whisper Beneath the Crescent Moon”
The moon hung thin and sharp above Vilharrow, a silver cut in a bruised sky.
Far from the clamor of markets and chiming clocks, the Noctelle Hold sat on its cliff like a stone confession, its towers watching the black water below. Inside, where mortal eyes would never go, the air smelled of cold stone, candle smoke, and old sorrow.
Lysandra Noctelle knelt beside the Luminous Pool.
The water was still, a glass of moonlight poured into carved marble. Candles floated upon it like tiny wandering souls, their flames steady despite the draft that curled along the floor. Around her, masked figures of her House knelt in a circle, heads bowed, veils and silver threads trailing over their robes.
Tonight was only a crescent moon—no true danger, not like the full—but rites were rites, and House Noctelle did not neglect the moon.
Lysandra’s mask pressed cool against her skin. White porcelain, etched with faint silver lines, it showed no expression. That, she preferred. Her own expressions were far too honest.
She pressed a blade to her thumb and let a drop of her blood fall into the pool.
“Moon above,” she murmured, voice low, the formal words older than the Hold itself, “reflect what is hidden, reveal what must be borne.”
Ripples spread outward. The candles swayed. The other Noctelle remained silent as stone.
The curse stirred like a waking thing beneath her ribs.
Her pulse slowed; then each beat became painfully clear. The crescent moon’s influence was gentle, a tug rather than a command, but even that tug brushed against the old wound in her blood—Aelyrion’s sorrow, passed down like an heirloom no one wanted.
Images shivered through the water.
The usual first: a veil of night, a silver path upon a lake, the faint suggestion of faces long dead. Ancestor echoes. She could feel their grief like cold fingertips on the back of her neck.
Then something else cut through.
A hand. Ink-stained fingers resting on a page. Candlelight guttering over worn paper. The curve of a bowed head, hair shadowing a face she could not yet see. A human. Alone at a desk.
Lysandra’s breath hitched.
Emotion flooded her—sharp, raw, startlingly bright. Not her own. It poured through her like someone opening a door on a storm.
Loneliness.
Grief, quiet and old.
A stubborn, aching desire to understand.
The pool flared with pale light. The candles trembled; one went out with a soft hiss.
Her mask cracked.
It was a faint sound, a hairline fracture along the right side, but in the echoing Hall of the Luminous Pool it sounded like a shouted accusation. Lysandra’s hand flew to the porcelain, gloved fingertips brushing the line.
Impossible.
Bonds formed under half moons and full, in blood and shared tragedy. Not under a thin, modest crescent, during a simple omen rite. Not from a single glimpse of an unfamiliar human hand.
She shut her eyes. For a heartbeat she was no longer kneeling in her ancestral hall, but standing behind that unseen man, feeling his tiredness as if it were her own. His grief tasted like rain on cold stone.
“The Hollowmere line stirs.”
The whisper did not come from any throat in the hall. It slid along the surface of the pool, rising from the water itself in a voice that was not a voice at all—moon-echo, curse-speech, the kind her House had learned to dread.
The other Noctelle did not react. They did not hear it.
Only her.
Lysandra forced her shoulders to relax. She withdrew her hand from her face, hiding the small fracture with a tilt of her head.
“The rite is complete,” she said, voice steady.
One by one, the kneeling figures rose and departed, robes whispering over the stone. When the last candle at the pool’s edge burned down and died, Lysandra remained alone with the thin moon and its new cruelty.
Hollowmere.
The name rang in her like a struck bell.
She rose, stiff with the effort of keeping calm. Her reflection in the pool showed only the mask—smooth, anonymous, a pale moon of its own. The crack was a small dark thread along the porcelain curve.
“A bond is not forming,” she told herself. “It is merely an omen. A ripple.”
The curse in her blood did not agree.
It throbbed, just once, like a hand pressing against hers from the other side of glass.
The Hollowmere Archives smelled of dust, leather, and the peculiar stale breath of old paper that had been waiting too long to be read.
Adrian Thornewell liked it that way.
The rest of Vilharrow could be arguing, bargaining, dying in back alleys for all he knew; here in the archive’s back room, with its high arched window and its crooked shelves, time moved at the pace of his turning pages.
Tonight, time was moving a little too slowly.
He rubbed at his eyes and glanced at the stack of manuscripts the courier had wheeled in earlier. Supposedly “irrelevant fragments” from a deeper archive under the city—some noble House had paid to have them catalogued but not touched.
“Useless scraps,” his supervisor had said. “List them, sort them, and if they’re all gibberish, send them back.”
Adrian picked up the top scroll.
The wax seal had cracked long ago. The parchment crackled under his fingers, the ink faded almost to ghosts. He unrolled it carefully, holding it close to the desk lamp.
Symbols stared back at him. Not letters—sigils, curves of ink that tangled like vines around the page margins. His heart did a small, traitorous jump.
Old ritual script. The kind the University had warned him didn’t officially exist.
He leaned in.
Words surfaced between the inkwork, faint but legible in places.
noctelle
sorrowbound
moontear
His mouth went dry.
Adrian swallowed and followed the lines down the page, tracing them with one ink-smudged fingertip. The language was archaic, but he’d spent enough nights reading things nobody wanted read. He could feel meaning tugging at the edges of his understanding, like a dream he used to have and could almost remember.
…when the sorrowbound heart is sundered, the moon weeps and all bonds are cursed…
The candle on his desk flared, then guttered.
Adrian froze. No window was open. No draft touched his skin. The flame bowed low, dragged sideways as if some invisible thing had taken a slow breath beside him.
“Right,” he muttered. “That’s not ominous at all.”
The air felt heavier. His own heartbeat sounded too loud. For no reason he could name, he became aware of his own sadness—like someone had turned up the volume on it.
Memories pressed in. His father’s grave, unmarked. His mother sitting in the darkened kitchen, talking to people who weren’t there. Him, leaving Hollowmere with a suitcase and a promise that he’d send money back that never arrived in time.
It wasn’t new. It had been with him for years, a familiar dull ache.
Tonight it felt…noticed.
He shifted back in his chair, trying to shake it off. His hand brushed the edge of the scroll, smearing dust.
A name tugged at him from somewhere in the past.
Noctelle.
He’d seen that word before. Not in University texts. In something older, in—
The bell above the back door chimed softly.
Adrian exhaled and let the tension drain from his shoulders. Only one person came through that door at this hour.
“Benedict?” he called.
“Yes,” came the reply, warm and roughened by age. “Still awake, I see.”
Benedict Hollowmere stepped into the lamplight slowly, favored leg dragging just a little, robes gathered around him like shadows. His white hair was tied back at the nape of his neck. Candlelight turned his eyes into two small embers.
Adrian smiled despite himself. “You sound surprised.”
“I am,” Benedict said mildly, glancing at the scroll. “I had hoped you might obey that thing physicians call ‘a healthy schedule’ once in your life.”
“No fun in that,” Adrian said. “Look at this.”
He pushed the parchment toward him. Benedict’s expression changed—not fully, but enough for Adrian to catch the flicker of unease.
“Noctelle,” Adrian said quietly. “You’ve heard the name.”
“I am old, Adrian,” Benedict said. “I have heard many names.”
“But that one made you grimace, so.” Adrian leaned back, crossing his arms. “It’s tied to some kind of… I don’t know. Curse? Ritual? ‘Sorrowbound,’ ‘moontear’… and the writing style’s ancient, pre-Covenant, if I’m reading the hubs on the characters right.”
“You are.” Benedict rested both hands on the desk. His knuckles were knotted, skin paper-thin, veins like ink lines. “And that is precisely the problem.”
The candle between them flickered again. This time, Adrian watched closely.
The flame bent toward him, not away. For a heartbeat, it elongated, stretching thin and horizontal, as if reaching across the space between them.
Benedict’s gaze sharpened.
“Has anything… strange happened tonight?” he asked, voice low.
“Stranger than the candle trying to grab my attention?” Adrian said. “Not really.”
The old man’s eyes went to Adrian’s chest, as if he could see through ribs and bone. For a moment, his face looked much older.
“Some names,” Benedict said slowly, “were meant to be forgotten. Noctelle is one of them.”
Adrian bristled a little at the patronizing tone. “Then why send scrolls with their name on them to this archive?”
“Because,” Benedict said, and now there was an edge to his words, “some people like to play with knives they do not understand.”
The room felt colder. Adrian frowned.
“I’m just cataloguing,” he said. “It’s not like I’m—”
The candle sparked.
A faint sound, like someone taking a soft, startled breath, brushed his ears.
For a heartbeat, Adrian saw—
not the archive, not the lamplight—
Moonlight on a pool, white masks, and a woman kneeling with her hand pressed over her face, as if holding herself together.
His heart lurched.
He blinked. The vision vanished. The archive returned.
“You went pale,” Benedict said quietly. “What did you see?”
Adrian shook his head. “Nothing. Just tired.”
“Do not lie to me, child,” Benedict murmured. “Not tonight.”
Child. Adrian might’ve protested on any other evening, but there was something in the Candlekeeper’s posture that stopped him. Benedict rarely pulled rank. When he did, it meant something.
“I saw… water,” Adrian admitted. “Someone kneeling. A mask, I think. It was— It felt like I shouldn’t be looking.”
Benedict closed his eyes for a moment, as if listening to something very far away.
“The Hollowmere line stirs,” he said under his breath.
Adrian’s skin prickled. “My line?”
“Later.” Benedict straightened, the moment gone as quickly as it had come. “Close the scroll. You are done with it for tonight.”
“That’s not how cataloguing works,” Adrian said.
“Consider it a medical instruction.” Benedict turned away. “Come. The candles are misbehaving, and I do not care to be in this room when they decide to voice an opinion.”
Adrian snorted, but his hands moved on their own, rolling the parchment up and setting it aside. The flame on the desk shrank as if sulking.
He followed Benedict out into the chill corridor, thinking of masks and moonlight and a word he should never have known.
Noctelle.
The Stormgate Docks were quiet at this hour, save for the occasional creak of moored ships and the slap of black water against stone.
Lucian Hallowgrave preferred it that way.
He walked along the edge, boots scuffing against the worn cobbles, hands tucked into his coat. The half-moon’s pale light made silver ridges of the scars across his knuckles.
He had almost made it past the mouth of the canal when the surge hit.
It began as a tightness in his chest, then a pressure in his skull, like the bones of his face were trying to shift. The Moonborn part of his blood snarled awake, dragging at his nerves.
Lucian stopped and gripped the stone railing hard enough that dust crumbled beneath his fingers.
“Not now,” he growled under his breath. “You had your fun last month.”
The moon didn’t answer. It never did. It only looked down, thin and smug and distant.
Something else moved beneath the surge.
A ripple, not in his blood this time, but in something larger. The sensation he’d come to recognize over too many hunts and too many near-deaths.
Bond-flare.
Someone, somewhere in Vilharrow, had brushed against the heart of the curse. A bond sparking, a thread connecting, an emotion strong enough to make the Moon look twice.
Lucian’s lip curled.
He hated that feeling. Hated how it pulled at him, like a familiar scent dragging him toward memories he’d rather bury.
This one felt…different. Sharper. Older.
He closed his eyes and let it wash through him for a moment.
Sorrow.
Books.
Moonlight on water.
A human heartbeat.
A Noctelle echo.
“No,” he said softly. “Oh, you idiot.”
He straightened, jaw tight. The surge quieted enough for him to move.
His feet turned toward Hollowmere without needing instruction.
Lysandra stood in the Hall of Veils, surrounded by her House’s faces.
Masks stared down from the high walls—ivory, jet, silver, all painted, etched, carved by the hands of dead Noctelles. Some were smooth and serene, some twisted into stylized grief or rage. Each one had seen a lifetime of rites.
She had never felt so watched.
In the quiet, she removed her own mask.
The porcelain came away with a reluctant whisper, like it didn’t quite want to leave her skin. Cool air kissed her face. She exhaled slowly, as if she’d been holding her breath since the Luminous Pool.
Her reflection in the nearest polished obsidian panel stared back at her. High cheekbones, pale skin with a hint of dawn-grey, long dark hair braided tightly back. And her eyes…
They glowed faintly, catching the crescent moonlight in a way no human eyes ever could. Tonight they looked troubled.
A hairline crack ran down the side of the mask in her hands.
“A bond is not forming,” she said aloud, as if speaking it could make it true. “The moon is only… restless.”
None of the old masks answered. They never did. Noctelle tradition said they could, if they wished. She wondered, not for the first time, what her mask would say when she finally joined them.
She set it gently upon its stand. The crack seemed to widen as she watched.
The image from the rite rose in her mind again. Ink-stained fingers. A lowered head. The quiet weight of a grief that wasn’t hers.
A human.
Humans had strong emotions, yes. They bled sorrow easily. But for a human’s single heartbeat of misery to crack a Noctelle mask over such a distance?
That spoke of something older.
The Hollowmere line stirs.
Lysandra pressed a hand to her chest. Her heart answered, a dull ache.
“I will find you,” she murmured to the unseen man. “And I will understand why the moon cares about you.”
And if you are bait, she did not add, then I will be the one to spring the trap, not Valeria.
She picked up her mask again, fitting it back over her face. The porcelain settled into place with a soft click. The crack became invisible in the dim light.
Only she knew it was there.
The Old Candlehouse sat at the edge of Hollowmere’s square, its crooked roofline and leaning chimney as familiar to Adrian as his own reflection.
Inside, hundreds of candles burned at once.
Not extravagantly—some were stubs, some were thick pillars, some were mismatched—but their combined glow filled the small space with warm, shifting light. The air smelled of wax, herbs, and a faint metallic tang Adrian had never quite placed.
Benedict moved between the shelves with the ease of long habit, plucking a kettle off its hook, stoking the small stove.
“Sit,” he said. “You look as though a stiff breeze would topple you.”
“I’m fine,” Adrian said, sitting anyway at the little table near the window. “I just— When I read that scroll, it felt like someone else’s mood stepped into my skin.”
“Someone else’s,” Benedict repeated. “Interesting choice of words.”
“Is there a better one?”
“Many. None that would make you sleep easier.”
Benedict poured tea into two chipped cups. The candle on their table flickered, its flame stretching, then compressing again, like a heartbeat.
Adrian watched it. “You see that, right? That’s not normal.”
“Normal is a word scholars use when they are afraid of admitting ignorance,” Benedict said. He sat opposite Adrian and wrapped both hands around his own cup, not yet drinking. “Listen to me very carefully.”
Adrian tried to make a joke, failed halfway through, and nodded instead.
“Tonight,” Benedict said, “you brushed against something that remembers you.”
Adrian laughed once, softly. It sounded thin in his own ears. “You’re going to have to be a little less cryptic.”
“I am being mercifully vague, actually.” Benedict’s gaze was steady. “There are lines of blood in this city that are watched, Adrian. Old lines. Lines tied to oaths and curses older than any church or university. The word you read—Noctelle—belongs to such things.”
“And Hollowmere?” Adrian’s hand tightened on his cup. “You said my line. You’ve never talked about my family like that before.”
Benedict hesitated.
In the corner, on a high shelf, sat a simple iron box, soot-darkened and plain. Adrian had dusted around it for years, never thinking much of it. Tonight, if he listened closely, he could almost hear something from it—a faint, slow thrum, like a second heartbeat in the room.
Benedict’s eyes flicked to it, then back to Adrian. “You are not ready for the whole truth.”
“That’s not your call,” Adrian said softly.
“It is,” Benedict replied, just as soft. “Until knowing will keep you alive instead of killing you.”
The iron box pulsed again.
Adrian couldn’t look away from it now. “What’s in there?”
“A mistake,” Benedict said. “And a promise. Drink your tea.”
Adrian, because he had known Benedict long enough to recognize when the old man would not be moved, lifted his cup. His hand brushed the table’s edge as he did, knuckles grazing the iron box above his shoulder.
Metal kissed skin.
The world tilted.
The candlelight stretched into long white streaks. For a heartbeat—just one—Adrian was not in the Candlehouse. He was standing in a field beneath a full, swollen moon, holding someone’s hand.
He couldn’t see her face, only the fall of her hair, the warmth of her fingers. His chest felt like it was breaking with love and terror all at once.
Then she was gone.
He snapped back into the chair with a choked sound, tea sloshing from the cup onto his wrist. The skin there burned cold, not hot.
Benedict was watching him with a sorrow too old for one lifetime.
“You touched it,” the Candlekeeper said quietly. “Of course you did.”
“What is it?” Adrian whispered.
“The last tear of a woman whose name you are not ready to remember,” Benedict said. “And the reason the moon will not leave you alone.”
Adrian’s pulse thundered in his ears. Outside the window, the crescent moon hung above Vilharrow like a sliver of a watching eye.
He had the sudden, irrational feeling that someone miles away had just whispered his name.
On the tower balcony of Noctelle Hold, Lysandra stood alone in the cold wind, cloak whipping around her ankles.
Vilharrow lay spread below in soft pools of lamplight and shadow, the city’s heartbeat dim and distant. Somewhere in that maze of streets and roofs and restless humans, a man with ink-stained fingers was sitting at a table, staring at the same indifferent moon.
She did not know his name.
She knew his sorrow.
“Who are you, Hollowmere?” she murmured.
The crescent moon did not answer. But something else did.
A faint, invisible thread tightened in her chest, tugging her gaze toward the southern quarter—toward Hollowmere’s old stones and one small house full of too many candles.
In the Candlehouse window, Adrian lifted his head suddenly, breath catching, heart pounding for no reason he could name. For a heartbeat, he felt…seen.
Seen from far, far away.
In the depths of the city, beneath stone and bone and centuries, the iron box on Benedict’s shelf pulsed once more.
Inside it, the Tear of Serenya glowed faintly.
And in a voice that no human throat spoke, in a language made of memory and moonlight, the curse whispered through Vilharrow:
The bond begins.
This story is part of an ongoing gothic fantasy series published exclusively on The Written Wilds. New episodes will appear here first and nowhere else.
Moonblood Letters • Episode 2 — coming soon.
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