The Witch Who Stole the Moon

The Witch Who Stole the Moon The first time I stole the moon, I was seventeen and in love. The second time, I was trying to save a village. The third time, I was dead. You see, people misunderstand witches. They imagine crooked noses, black cats, and bubbling cauldrons. They imagine evil women whispering curses beneath a blood-red sky. But I was once a girl who braided flowers into her hair and believed that love could survive anything—even a little magic. His name was Elias. He was a baker’s son, warm-handed and foolish, with flour perpetually dusting his cheeks. Every evening, he would meet me beneath the old willow tree and tell me stories about the world beyond our village. He promised that one day, he would take me there. Then his mother discovered what I was. By sunrise, the villagers had gathered with torches and ropes. They dragged me to the square, where Elias stood among them, his face pale as candle wax. “Tell them,” I begged him. “Tell them you know me.” He lowered his eyes. The fire swallowed my dress first, then my skin. I remember the smell of burning hair. I remember the villagers cheering. Most of all, I remember the moon watching from above, bright and indifferent. As my heart stopped, I made a promise. If the moon could witness my death without blinking, I would make it witness theirs. I woke three nights later in my own grave. The earth tasted of worms. My fingers were blackened bone beneath scraps of flesh, and my heart beat only when someone nearby spoke my name. I had become something between a witch and a corpse. Death, I discovered, was a remarkably quiet place to begin again. For fifty years, I lived in the forest, learning the language of roots, the secrets of ravens, and the ancient spells that even the oldest witches feared to speak. I learned that the moon was not merely a stone in the sky. It was a living thing, a silver eye that watched the dead and remembered every soul that had ever suffered beneath its light. And like every living thing, it could be wounded. On the fiftieth anniversary of my burning, I climbed the highest hill and opened my palm. A single drop of black blood fell into the grass. “Come down,” I whispered. The moon trembled. Then it fell. Not all the way to earth, of course. It descended until its silver face hung just above the treetops, enormous and shivering, illuminating every hidden sin in the village below. Doors flew open. Children screamed. Men fell to their knees. And there, standing in the square where I had died, was Elias. He was old now, his shoulders bent, his face carved with wrinkles. He had a silver ring on his finger—the ring I had given him the summer before my death. “I knew you would return,” he said. For the first time in fifty years, my dead heart moved. “You knew?” I rasped. He nodded, tears shining in his eyes. “I have waited every day.” I wanted to hate him. I had carried that hatred like a coal in my chest, keeping myself warm through decades of winter. I had imagined a thousand ways to make him suffer. Yet as I looked at him, I saw something worse than guilt. I saw the truth. He had not betrayed me because he stopped loving me. He had betrayed me because he was afraid. And he had spent his entire life being afraid of the memory of a girl he could have saved. “I can make you young again,” I told him. “I can give you another fifty years. All you have to do is ask.” He looked at the moon hanging over the village, then back at me. “No,” he whispered. “I've lived long enough.” The spell trembled on my tongue. “You could have saved me.” “I know.” “You could have spoken.” “I know.” “Why?” He reached for my hand. His fingers passed through the cold spaces between my bones. “Because I was a coward,” he said. “And no punishment you give me will be worse than knowing that.” For fifty years, I had imagined revenge as a magnificent thing: flames, screams, the whole world kneeling beneath my power. Instead, I stood in the moonlight with an old man who had already been punished by time. And I understood something terrible. I could destroy the village. I could curse every child born beneath its roofs. I could keep the moon chained to the earth until the oceans dried up and the stars forgot their names. But none of it would give me back the girl who had loved a baker’s son. So I released the moon. It rose slowly, trailing silver light across the rooftops. The villagers watched in silence as the night returned to its proper shape. Elias smiled at me once before he died. I buried him beneath the willow tree. Then I lay down beside him, my bones sinking into the soft earth, and waited for the darkness to take me. It did not. At dawn, I opened my eyes to find flowers growing between my ribs. My skin was warm. My heart was beating. And somewhere above me, the moon was watching. Only now, when I looked up, it blinked. For the first time in my life, I smiled at it. “Don't worry,” I whispered. “Your secret is safe with me.” After all, I was still a witch. And some promises are too powerful to die. ChatGPT is AI and can make mistakes.