A Whisper in the Dark

They say the wind speaks differently in Veirdra.

In warnings and in silence.

And tonight, the silence was screaming.

She stood in the ruins of a shrine,

cloak snapping at her ankles like a reprimand.

She wasn’t supposed to be there.

Then again, most ghosts weren’t.

Below, the bones of a city slept.

Buried in ivy, draped in moonlight.

Once sacred and feared.

Now forgotten.

She crouched and ran her fingers across the stone,

tracing a mark carved deeper than weather could erase”

a crescent wrapped in thorns.

Her voice, when it came, was more breath than sound.

More memory than speech.

“Luna Baudelaire.”

The name wasn’t hers to say or answer.

But something had stirred underneath the Veirdran soil”

ancient, and it was listening.

And in the stillness left by a fallen river,

a new darkness had begun to whisper.