Yesteryear Fiction

Outcast of the Moon
By Kayla Bashe


Sitting on a sand dune, Reviya watched the stars. Although she hated to admit it, she had never become accustomed to the moon: shivering in the wing-numbing cold beneath a silver-sequined, yet bleak sky, the cool silver sand sifting between her fingers like a travesty of the beaches she’d once loved to luxuriate on.

She’d chosen this fate.

Better to feel loneliness’s ache on Luna’s alien shores than to face the pity of her faerie tribe. She hadn’t chosen her misshapen left hand; her fellow faeries, yellow-rose-clad, tittered at her behind perfect fingers.

They called her ogre-cursed. Sharp stones whispered her name. Their secret voices called her like the moon pulling the tides.

Because of her ugliness and their perfection and her misery and laughter and she had not requested the rockslide that rolled over her, crushing her hand, and because the obsidian’s glossy edge bore jagged perfection, such a clean line, she picked it up.

Agony and rage ripped a newborn scream from Reviya’s throat. She hacked at her arm, her wrist, until blood covered her pale skin.

From then on, the white-winged faerie moved through a susurrus of pity. Even the wind murmured: poor thing, poor girl, did you hear?- not knowing that each whisper only drove her closer to the obsidian’s silence, its efficient distractions.

The moon lacked wind.

Footsteps in the sand behind her. Reviya’s brown-blonde braids whipped around. She turned her merciless gaze to the intruder, blue eyes narrowing above a strong snub nose.

Kylan marveled at the endless stars stretching above an undulating horizon. In the low gravity, one pigeon-wing flap, one woo-hoo bound, and he traveled for several feet. The landscape appeared simultaneously desolate and magnificent. No wonder Revy had fled here.

Revy. Reviya.

Once, they sat side-by-side on the same toadstool, playing cat’s cradle with scraps of dandelion thread; after the rockslide, he’d sought to comfort her. She left like the night. Aching for her presence, he’d spent years searching for her.

Kylan’s chest felt tight. Panicked, he glanced towards his wrist, but the moonbreathing charm, a string of polished, enchanted meteorites, remained intact.

Just nerves.

He exhaled slowly, deliberately. Still, his heartbeat fluttered like a hummingbird’s wings.

Would she return with him?


“I won’t go back.” Reviya sat on a sand dune, knees hugged to her chest.

Wounded-puppy eyes regarded her.

“Not for you,” she lied. Frankly, she felt tired and cold, moon-surface lifeless. The dark-haired faerie had never pitied her; she missed their friendship.

The other faeries had not missed her.

They would greet her with perfect smiles and untangled hair, flawless hands and arms splayed in a falsely cooing embrace. Only the obsidian would never lie to her, its dried-blood-spattered edges reminded. Unconsciously, Reviya reached into the pocket of her sleek, ankle-length silver gown. She gripped the stone, hard; her fingers whitened. The other faeries would take her obsidian away, tell her “it’s for your own good,” but she needed its calming pain, the raised scars it left- she had to do something so that no one could ever return her to the too-bright blue world below-

Reviya raised the stone high and slashed through the moonbreathing charm’s golden thread.


“Oh, Goddess,” Kylan murmured, holding his friend. Blue tinged her lips. she’d breathed space’s vacuum for only a second, only long enough to make her eyes bulge out and her crippled hand fly to her slender throat, only long enough to crumple her to the ashen ground. Now air moved through her chilled lungs in shallow gasps.

The obsidian chunk lay on the sand.

Kylan glared at it; it seemed to glare back. They would never return home safely; unlike Reviya, who prepared for peril, he’d cavalierly enchanted the charm for a scant handful of hours. Carrying cargo slowed his flight speed, turning their chances into a dangerous gamble. He shoved thought-waves of rage towards his cheerful , careless past self.

Starlight moved over the rock’s contours. You don’t have to watch her die, it whispered. End this.

Now.

Kylan summoned a fragment of his magical essence. Purple energy blasted the hated rock to smithereens.

Harmless black shards twinkled against the sand. Reviya stirred in her almost-sleep, and a smile’s ghost flickered across her lips.

He marveled at her strength: he had almost heeded the obsidian’s first fatalistic stirrings, but she’d resisted it for years. Like the stone, Revy had shattered; unlike the stone, she would have Kylan to pierce her back together. They would sit on sun-dappled, red-capped toadstools, listen to the bluebirds’ song, lie in a beach’s warm sand, sail down creeks in oak-tree rafts.

Cradling Reviya, Kylan flapped his wings, rising into the air, and turned towards the Earth.


- - -
I'm a homeschooled high schooler from a little town on the East Coast. My work has previously appeared in Raphael's Village and YARN; in addition to writing, I enjoy musical theater and yoga.