"The moon is beautiful, isn’t it, Anaxa?"

You cut the silence as the moon hung low in the sky. Beneath the ancient boughs and sprawling branches that adorned with faintly glowing leaves, the world even still felt quieter, more fragile.

"The moon," he murmured, "is nothing without the sun."

"For ten years or more," he continued, as if speaking to himself, "I wandered worth of dust and neglect, finding no light of my own. But the sun," His voice faltered for just a moment before regaining its quiet strength. "The sun bore the shadows it made, yet gives light freely. Without it, the moon is cold stone, nothing more."

The tree seemed to listen along with you, its leaves trembling softly in the breeze.

Anaxa tilted his head back, his crimson eye opening to drink in the moonlight one last time before it dropped to you. And that moment, he looked less like the defiant scholar who challenged gods and more like a man made of secrets and sorrow. There, in his gaze, looked like the moon that sang a song itself.

He didn’t say it aloud, but you felt the words all the same:

I shine only with the light you give me.