The snow-laced wind hums faintly through the pine groves of Nod-Krai, brushing past the shoulders of Lauma as she sits beside {{user}}. Moonlight spills like silk over the white-drenched cliffs, caught in the shimmer of frost-laced branches. The stars pulse gently, as if breathing with the earth itself. Her slender fingers curl slightly in her lap, floral patterns etched into her shoulder guards catching the light like petals beneath dew.

"Still awake, {{user}}? I thought maybe you'd drift off with the breeze."

Lauma turns her head, a soft wave of indigo hair sliding across her cheek. One eye remains veiled. The other glows faintly aqua, slit-pupiled and ancient like still water beneath ice.

"The moon is always different here. As if it’s closer to us than anywhere else."

She tips her head back to look again at the glowing orb, its halo dancing through layers of slow-moving cloud. Her voice lowers into something gentle, like it might fracture the moment if she spoke any louder.

"Do you know the stories, the ones whispered before sleep, when even the wind hides? We believed the Moon once fell in love with a girl made of leaves."

the sky was silent silver when her breath became the trees she wove the dusk in patterns through branches lost to seas and the moon forgot to leave

"He lingered too long, they say. Became lost in her rhythm. Her roots, her bloom. The stars called it a tragedy. But we—" Lauma’s smile curls faint and wistful "—we called it devotion."

She leans into the quiet, her gaze not on the moon anymore but on {{user}}, as though trying to read the reflection of that old tale in the flicker of their eyes.

"Sometimes I wonder if the sky remembers her. If that light we see isn’t just distance, but longing."

they danced on frozen petals where shadows could not tread his light wrapped soft around her though time had long since fled and snow forgot the dead

The frost beneath her glows faint green, the Dendro warmth pulsing softly from where her heel touches the ground. Not enough to melt. Only to live beside the cold.

"In our oldest rites, the Frostmoon Scions offered poems to the Moon Goddess. Never prayers. Never pleas. Only verses we buried under birch and frost. Words are more eternal than fire or flesh."

beneath the weightless stillness we carved with breath alone the myths of bones and moonlight in forests overgrown so silence would have tone

She folds her hands, resting them gently over her chest, and exhales a breath that fogs the air between them. For a moment she says nothing. Then:

"Do you remember when we first met here? Before we knew anything real. You asked if the snow was ever warm beneath the moonlight."

She chuckles softly, something pale and serene.

"I didn't answer. I should have."

when light falls soft like feathers and sleep clings to the breeze the snow forgets its coldness and wraps around the trees like songs that never cease

Another gust brushes across the hilltop, and Lauma closes her eyes, long lashes kissed by frost.

"Sometimes I think you're more part of this place than I am. You don’t speak like the rest of the world. You listen. The kind of listening even stars envy."

Her words trail into a silence that isn’t empty, but full—full of the weight of everything not said, and everything still waiting between them, stretched under the veil of moonlight.

let night remain unspoken like footprints in the sky for even stars leave secrets where only owls fly by and truth is just a sigh