Eternal Dusk

There are places where your heartbeat doesn’t set the rhythm; the forest does. I found the Moonwood by not looking for it. Everyone claims there are maps—no one admits to using them. Paths turned like a creature in sleep, and a silver light gathered under the leaves the way dew does. When the first trunk leaned close, I saw bark so pale it reflected starlight, and I understood why the Uriban call night an orchard.

Fenolira is not walled. It doesn’t need to be; harmony is a fortification you carry. The Lunar Matriarchs of the Silver Bough—seven, each bound to a phase—govern by listening: wind in the boughs, water in the root, dreams bowed with tide. I glimpsed the Gathering of Reflections from a respectful distance. The seven moons laid a ladder of light across a mirror pool, and voices rose like fog from water to word. Law here is unwritten; it lingers until you are ready to hold it.

I slept by a river that moved as if it remembered the sea intimately. My guide, an Uriban singer with hair like harvest smoke, showed me dwellings flowered from the ground—ceilings woven of vine and slow light. “Day is for dreamwork,” she said, “night is for making.” Her bracelets were dew-thread and glass, ornaments chosen to disappear as proof that beauty should not outlast the moment that birthed it. It felt almost cruel and entirely right.

The songs—gods, the songs. You don’t hear them so much as remember them while they’re happening, as if your bones hummed days ago and your ears are only now catching up. A traveler in our party began to weep without deciding to; when the music softened he said he felt both sorrow and serenity, the mind’s tide changing without wind. No one comforted him; the forest did.

At the Moonwood’s heart, Fenoril rises not as a city but as a revelation. Living branches twist into luminous arches that echo moon-phases; every structure carries a soft inner glow, as if lit by the same careful forgiveness. It is called the Land of the Eternal Dusk because even darkness refuses to be absolute here. I left offerings at a bridge—shell, prism, a page where I had written the name of someone I failed—and watched the silver current take them, slow as mercy.

When I departed, a Matriarch touched my forehead with two fingers and said only, “Calm is a commons.” I walked all the way to the coast with that sentence between my ribs, a lamp I could not set down.