Moonbound by Animeclo

Chapter 1 - The Silver Mark

The pain erupted without warning. White-hot and sudden, it tore through her wrist, stealing the breath from her lungs. She screamed for help, for safety, for something to ground her and take this hurt away.  

At the age of thirteen, this was the first time something truly strange had happened to her. 

Before that summer, Kagome had always believed that strange things belonged safely tucked between layers of inked pages. Simple folklores passed down between generations, old myths borrowed from the dustiest library books and devoured beneath blankets and torchlight. For a long while, she had obsessed over them, dragons and monsters, gods and spirits, beings that walked between worlds. Some of these things filled her with wonder and delight. Others? They left her staring into the dark corners of her room for too long, hours after she should have been asleep, listening for those small sounds that didn’t quite belong. And as she approached her thirteenth birthday, she told herself she had grown out of it. 

Mostly. 

That specific summer day had been unforgiving. Heat clung to the forest like a living thing, thick and damp, pressing against her skin. The sky above remained clear, an endless punishing blue that now deepened, fading into a breathtaking violet. Cicadas droned on from the treetops, their song threading through the whisper of leaves shifting in the breeze. Sweat dampened the back of her long-sleeved shirt, fabric sticking uncomfortably to her skin.

But never would she dare a brief moment's reprieve from the heat and roll up her sleeves. 

Her mother had finally allowed her to explore the town by herself that day. No hovering hands or gentle warnings. Most importantly, she was free to keep walking, unburdened by polite pauses, well-meaning elders, and the expectation to wait beside her mother as they talked. It was her first unsupervised freedom, and it made her feel grown, weightless. 

Earlier that afternoon, she had spent time with some local town’s children around her age, browsing the summer markets. They’d dared one another to try fried scorpions from a dubious food stall, laughed at eccentric fortune tellers, and played carnival games until the sun began its slow descent. Kagome had won a plush orange cat, round, soft, and absurdly sleepy-looking, which she now carried under her arm, squishing its stomach every time she had to pause for breath.

When the group had dispersed earlier than planned, Kagome seized the opportunity to use the last few hours of her free time to wander alone. Not exactly allowed, but she was grown and didn’t dare wander too far from home. 

The bustling sounds of the market slowly faded behind her as she followed along a narrow pathway sandwiched between the town’s eastern edge and a large, lush forest. She looked down at her feet, sandals brushing overgrown grass, too green to be natural, and half-buried stones warmed by the sun.

As she walked further, the world subtly shifted. The sun dipped lower, spilling its last amber light through the trees, as shadows stretched and tangled at her feet. The air cooled, heavy with the scent of dampened earth and sap. One by one, the cicadas fell silent, their chorus thinning until the forest felt strangely hollow, as if something had stepped between her and their song. 

Kagome slowed, glancing into the infinite army of darkening trees, her pulse quickening as unease, slimy and cold, crept up her spine. The forest stared back, trunks standing too still, leaves now barely stirred. For a moment, she had the unsettling sense that the shadows weren’t empty, that something lingered just beyond sight, watching quietly. Shaking the thought away, she told herself it was nothing, just a trick of the mind, just her imagination.

Still, she didn’t look away until she had taken another step forward. 

A few minutes later, her unease settled, smoothing into something much quieter. The forest by her side no longer felt watchful. The path curved gently, and with it came a new sound; faint at first, then steady. 

Water.

A soft, rhythmic hush threaded through the trees, barely louder than a whisper. Kagome stopped, turning towards the forest, head tilting as she listened. The sound didn’t belong to the path or the town behind her. It pulled at her attention, gentle and insistent.

She stepped off the worn trail, brushing past low-hanging branches as the ground softened beneath her sandals. Moss crept over stones slick with moisture, and the air grew cooler with every step. The trees started to stand taller, their pale trunks rising close together, bark smooth as bone in the darkening light. The sound grew louder, closer, until she pushed past a tangle of vines and saw it.

Water spilt from a narrow cleft in the rock face ahead, catching the last threads of sunlight as it fell. The sound deepened, fuller now, as the stream cascaded into a still, glassy pool below. Mist lingered in the air, cool against her skin, and the clearing seemed untouched, hidden, as though it had been waiting to be found.

A waterfall.

For a moment, she simply stood, listening. The hush of water wrapped around her, easing the tight coil in her chest, drawing her closer without thought or reason. It felt safe. Familiar. Like she had meant to be here, in this moment. Before she could think about taking a step, she found herself already at the water’s edge. Slipping off her sandals, she set them to one side, the water too crystal in its appearance not to touch. When her feet met the cool touch of the water, she sighed softly, the chill bracing against her overheated skin. Her plush cat slumped beside her, abandoned but content. 

Her shoulders relaxed, and the forest seemed to exhale with her. Indulging in the moment of being alone, Kagome dared to roll her sleeves higher, the sticky fabric stubbornly making way so the slight breeze could cool her warmed skin. Her right arm was first, then her left, but just as the fabric met halfway across her forearm, she paused. 

Hidden beneath the cuff, on the inside of her wrist, lay a small unnatural mark: a delicate crescent, pale, even against her skin, as if the moon itself had pressed its cool lips there long ago. She had been born with it. 

Present for her birth, the nurse was one of the two who had seen it, pausing as she cleared Kagome’s newborn skin and quietly mentioned it to her mother after. No one else had laid their eyes on the mark, not then, and not in the years that followed. 

In the end, nothing came of it. The mark never changed, didn’t darken, nor fade. It didn't ache or burn. For all of its whispered significance, it remained quiet, unremarkable, almost disappointingly so. And so the mark was left unnamed, its meaning never discovered. With time, between Kagome and her mother, it was dismissed as a harmless irregularity, something curious but inconsequential. 

Yet still, she was told to keep it hidden. Long sleeves became a habit before she could fully understand the why. She learned to turn her wrist away when hands reached for hers, to tug fabric down without thinking, to defer questions before they were asked. The mark became a secret she carried alone, not because she believed it dangerous, but because everyone else would.

It made her feel different in small, persistent ways. As if, at all times, she stood just a half step out of rhythm with the world around her. Not enough to be noticed, but just enough to feel it. And beneath that difference lived something else. A presence. Not a voice, not a thought, just an awareness, faint but constant, like the sense of being watched from a great distance. It had been with her for as long as she could recall, woven so deeply into her being that she no longer questioned it. It didn’t give her fright, but it didn’t give her comfort either. 

It simply was. 

Kagome let the thought drift away as she leaned back on her hands, the smooth stone beneath her palms still warm from the day’s setting sun. The pool lapped gently around her ankles, water sliding over her skin in slow, patient strokes. Each movement cooled her, soothed her, until the tightness in her chest disappeared and her breathing evened out. The rush of the waterfall filled her ears, steady and unchanging, wrapping around her like a cocoon. 

She closed her eyes, and for a while, she let herself exist in that quiet. No questions. No pretending. Just the rhythmic caress of water and the soft press of air against her skin. The presence she’d carried all her life lingered, distant and familiar, no stronger here than it had ever been. 

Then it shifted. The sound of the waterfall dulled, the air froze abruptly, and the forest, moments ago alive with subtle movement, went unnervingly still. 

Kagome snapped her eyes open. The clearing now felt wrong, too quiet and composed, as if every living thing had gone suddenly alert. 

Breath caught in her throat, she shifted her gaze. He stood across the clearing, half-shrouded by the darkened trees. A boy. 

He was taller than her, older, his frame lean and still, as though carved rather than grown. Long silver hair spilt down his back, pale as moonlight, catching faint glimmers of dusk where it slipped free of the shadows.  His clothing was dark and unfamiliar to her, blending almost seamlessly with the forest, but untouched by it. No leaf caught in the fabric, there was nothing to suggest he had pushed his way through the undergrowth at all. 

His face was impossibly composed. Sharp lines were softened by the water's reflection. Golden eyes fixed on her with an intensity that made her skin prickle, glowing faintly beneath the canopy above. They held surprise at finding her here, confusion, but mostly, recognition. 

He didn’t move, didn’t speak. He simply watched her, gaze steady and unyielding, as though he had stood there long before she ever entered the clearing. Kagome’s heart hammered painfully in her chest. The presence she had always felt, quiet and distant, surged now, rushing forward with sudden clarity. It hadn’t been watching her from somewhere; it had been waiting.  

“Who-” her voice felt foreign, uncertain. “Who are you?” The words barely carried across the clearing, as thin as her breath. Saying those words felt wrong somehow.

The boy didn’t answer, but he did move. Not fully towards her, just a single step forward, measured and deliberate, his foot found the earth without sound. The forest did not stir to make room for him. It was as if the ground itself had been expecting his weight.

Fear surged hot and sudden. Kagome lurched to her feet, the moment of intense wonder shattering. Water streamed from her ankles as she lowered her sleeves and swiped her sandals, her plush toy also, which she now clutched instinctively to her chest like a shield she knew would do nothing to protect her. 

“Are you-” Her voice faltered, pulse roaring in her ears. “Are you lost?” The question echoed uselessly between the trees. Still, he did not answer. 

His gaze had never once wavered from her face, golden eyes steady and intent. There was curiosity there, a quiet certainty, but no hunger, no threat she could name. 

The feeling crawled along her skin, raising gooseflesh in its wake. The fine hairs along her arms lifted, her body reacting before anything else could catch up. Something deep within her recognised the weight of his attention, recognised him, and it frightened her more than his silence ever could. Because strangers did not look at her like that, and even if she knew with certainty that she didn’t know this boy, he didn’t feel like one. 

The air shifted again. Not visibly, not in a way she knew, but the clearing seemed to draw tight around them, as though the space had inhaled and now held its breath. 

Her wrist began to throb. At first faint, a dull pulse beneath the skin, easy to mistake for nerves or fear. Kagome swallowed, heart racing, her gaze still locked on the boy as the sensation sharpened, heat blooming beneath her sleeve, too precise, too aware to be imagined.

Her pulse quickened as the sensation spread, threading through bone and muscle, each beat brighter than the last, until the ache became pressure and then, fire. 

Pain tore through her suddenly, in a violent, searing rage, raw and unrelenting, as though something beneath her skin had woken screaming. Kagome cried out, the sound ripping from her chest as everything slipped from her grasp. Sandals striking stone, the squishy orange cat tumbling away, forgotten in the grass. She held onto her wrist, bright silver light slipping past the gaps between her tight fingers. The crescent blazed to life, luminous and living. 

The agony only intensified with every one of her quickened heartbeats, blinding in its insistence, dragging her down as her knees buckled. She hit the ground unforgivingly, knees scraping against jagged ground and roots, fingers digging into stone and moss as her vision fractured. The scream that tore from her never returned. It vanished into the trees, swallowed whole, without an echo.

Across her darkening vision, she saw bright stars, haunting shadows and a blackened sun, rising into a silver sky. The forest dissolved around her, stretching into darkness, trees warping until they no longer resembled trees at all. The waterfall’s rush thinned into nothing. Kagome’s body no longer felt like her own, weightless and drifting, suspended in a place where time unravelled and reformed in slow, impossible waves.

Lowering onto her side, she saw the boy no longer standing behind shadowed trees. He stood closer now, though she hadn’t seen him move. His silhouette wavered at the edge of her vision, half-formed, the world struggling to hold his shape. His hand twitched at his side, fingers curling and uncurling, like he was fighting something she couldn’t see. His jaw tightened, shoulders straining forward, barely, like invisible threads held him back. 

Even through the blur, she could see it, the conflict carved so deeply into every line of him. Grief, regret and fear. Not fear of her. Fear for her. Fear of what could happen if he touched her, if he tried to help.  

He wanted to help. She felt it as surely as she felt the fire ripping through her, an ache that wasn’t pain but something more, deeper and familiar in a way that made no sense. 

He took a step closer, hesitation trembling through him. His hand lifted an inch from his side, fingers splayed, reaching for her with a mannerism like this wasn’t something new to him. But then his hand froze midair. His brows drew together, a faint crease forming, uncertainty, not dread. His golden eyes locked on her mark, on her wrist that lay on the ground, uncovered. It wasn’t with terror but with a deep, almost analytical caution that he gazed upon her, as if he were studying something volatile whose rules he did not yet understand. 

His breath caught with the frightening possibility of the unknown. He simply had no idea as to what his touch would do. Not to her and not to him. Not to the pulsing connection that thrummed between them, and that not-knowing was enough to keep him still. 

His fingers curled slowly back towards his palm, retreating by barely a breath’s width. His shoulders tightened with the restraint of someone fighting every instinct inside him, an instinct to reach, to help, to bridge the distance, and losing. 

The uncertainty ate at him, carving itself across his features in small, subtle ways. The twitch in his jaw, the slight parting of his lips as words threatened to escape, the flicker of something softer, something almost desperate, beneath the cool gold of his eyes. 

She knew he wasn’t afraid of touching her. He was afraid of what he didn’t know. What had been awakened. What stirred between them. What possibilities lie coiled beneath the silver light.

Another wave of agony seared through Kagome, arching her spine as her vision fractured into streaks of white and shadow. Tears spilt freely now, blurring her sight until the boy became a smudge of pale hair and gold light. Not fear, nor abandonment. Just the unbearable confusion of being seen so completely in the moment she was breaking, and yet held at arm’s length by a truth neither of them understood. 

Through the blur, his expression twisted, his lips moved, but no sound followed. Kagome knew what he wanted to say, not from hearing or seeing it clearly but from the certainty pressing at her ribs, a heaviness she felt even as the world tore itself apart around her. 

I’m so sorry.  

The words never touched the air, but they echoed inside her chest all the same, an apology shaped from the silence, meant only for her. Then, a voice, soft and deep, intimate in a way that made the hairs on her neck lift, slipped into her mind.

“Come back to me.”

Darkness closed around her, and she fell.