This is an excerpt from my self-published novel Phantom Chrysalide, the first book in a dark-fantasy series originally released in Spanish. This is a translation meant to share my story beyond the Spanish-speaking market. I hope you enjoy it! (If you're interested to check out my books and speak Spanish, feel free to click on Phantom Chrysalide and Phantom Finale.)
The Moon Pagoda gleamed as if bathed directly by the Sun, its white, immaculate tiles made from some unknown stone. At the edge of the concave crater, only the marbled sphere —of the same color as the rest of the castle— peeped out. It crowned the highest pagoda.
Tymoe looked out from one of the eighth-floor windows of that very pagoda, the main one in the radiant castle. Tymoe loved climbing up there —in the deafening silence of space— to observe the stars. He also loved how the semicircle of the blue planet graced the dark, vast starry sky like a galactic window. Since it was the only and highest vantage point from which he could see more than the concave, rising walls of the crater that housed the castle, he spent endless hours in that room.
“When will they come for us?” Tymoe would ask every time Shigetu-Uba brushed his long jet-black hair in the silence of his chambers.
The grotesque-looking woman always had the same reply:
“When the Moon can shine from all its sides, my prince.”
The conversation always stopped at that question. In those last moments before she tied up his hair into a tight bun, wrapping it in a translucent, snowy ribbon embroidered with silver astral designs, the prince’s eyes would meet Shigetu-Uba’s through the water-like surface of the white dressing table's mirror. There was nothing grotesque about Shigetu-Uba’s face in terms of beauty —it was simply not from the Moon.
She did not belong there.
But the lunar prince’s eyes could never decipher what that serene, worn visage truly hid.
The prince’s chambers were bathed in the same light and hue as the castle and pagoda. The white wooden shutters were open, but no light passed through them. If it weren’t for the natural illumination emanating from the castle’s material, the darkness that swallowed the depths of the lunar crater would have consumed the mystical building too.
“Shigetu-Uba,” he called her one day while she finished wrapping his hair in the precious ribbon.
“Why do you never come up to gaze at the stars and the celestial window that cuts the darkness with me?”
Shigetu-Uba’s expression froze as she continued fixing his hairstyle.
“I’m afraid, my prince, that’s something… unthinkable for me.”
“It’s something I carry, my prince. The reason this castle stands on the Moon. The reason I cannot go onto that celestial balcony with you.”
Tymoe watched her calmly, without judgment. This woman had cared for him within the crater’s walls, under the protection of the radiant castle —yet she had never once set foot on the Moon’s surface. That was something that had never even occurred to him during all the years he’d lived in captivity with Shigetu-Uba there. It was unimaginable to him.
“Is that the same reason we’ve never left the castle?” he asked.
Shigetu-Uba’s grotesque features softened until a small, barely perceptible smile appeared at the corners of her pale lips —just like everything around them. The distant sound of a koto drifted through the halls in an antigravitational melody. There was no one playing it —just the strings, vibrating in the absence of gravity— an auditory illusion. But it filled the Moon's howling silence.
“Yes,” Shigetu-Uba answered simply. “We must never leave the castle, under any circumstance.”
“I understand,” the prince replied as she smoothed his white kimono, a stunning garment of twelve layers so pure and blinding that gazing at it for more than a second would leave one sightless; a celestial protection. The haori was equally dazzling, though its shine was slightly muted by silver astral embroidery that matched the ribbon in the prince’s hair.
With a slow bow and no words, Shigetu-Uba withdrew from the prince’s chambers. The long black tail of her haori —without a single stitch— dragged across the reflective white stone floor of the main salon; a shadow falling behind her with each step, an eternal reminder of her sins. The low-cut front of her garment revealed flesh wrapped in almost transparent white fabric that climbed her slender, elongated, increasingly twisted neck —like a deadly prelude. Her bare, pale feet stopped in the middle of the cold hall.
“It’s almost time…” she murmured to herself. “I can feel it.” Her hands moved to her neck. Each day its shape gained a new sinuous curve. The punishment was breaking, ending. But for some reason, she felt it would not be the celestials who would take the prince from the radiant Moon palace and back to where he truly belonged. It would not be the arrival of the celestials, nor the Moon shining from both sides, that would've ended her sentence and freed her cursed body after so many Earthly millennia.
It would be someone else.
Someone who would bring tears to her heavy gaze.
Her final celestial punishment.
The lunar prince's bare feet began to rise from the high pagoda window, his body crossing it as a shining silhouette etched against the crater below —under Shigetu-Uba’s serene gaze from one of the castle’s salon windows. Entering the room again and leaving the window behind, her feet moved resolutely to the pagoda’s eighth floor —the exact place Tymoe had taken flight from. She had to see him one more time because she knew it was him. She knew he had recently arrived on the Moon. He was only waiting to emerge from hiding —to torment her only last time with his presence.
Without realizing, her feet found a pace up the pagoda’s internal stairs, ascending each floor. Her breathing grew ragged; her limbs began to twist —a violent symphony. She needed him to see her before her hatred corrupted the shell of her body. She couldn't allow her punishment to end in such cruelty imposed by the celestials. She needed to leave the Moon knowing he had seen her with the beauty she once had before darkness and hatred consumed her.
Before she herself killed him with her own hands.
At the top of the pagoda, through the window frame, she saw only one figure against the silent, star-filled darkness —the figure of Tymoe.
As each layer of his garments fell away, leaving a trailing of gleaming fabric behind him, she watched the ribbon in his hair dissolve into iridescent stardust, letting his long hair fall over his pale nude form in undulating strands that caught the starlight that decorated the dark rug of the universe. And then her eyes —twisted by the hatred pouring from the depths of her guilt— fixed upon the figure walking toward the prince, across the desolate regolith landscape under Earth’s celestial window —a half and stark circle etched on the horizon.
A samurai in celestial armor, beautiful yet stern-featured, with long dark, waving hair like ocean waves. When their eyes met, Shigetu-Uba let out a deep wail, her body contorting and tearing at her robes —not because of what was happening to her own flesh, but because of what she was witnessing.
The grotesque eyes of the woman who had once been a mountain witch wept for the first time in millennia since her soul was dragged to the Moon by the Celestials. Her tears were stifled by the crushing silence, her pleas unheard —part of her punishment.
The long dark hair of both Tymoe's merged into one ebony mass —like a life and death umbilical cord. The dark cloak floating over both bodies as one.
Then, the prince’s nude body approached the samurai’s to, in one final epic verse, fuse into a single being with a kiss that made a lament tear through the stars just as Shigetu-Uba’s body writhed in pain —not from what her body was experiencing or its tattered garments, but from what she was witnessing.
As her tears scorched trails down her cheeks with the weight of lead, Shigetu-Uba's sharp nails gouged marks into the reflective white stone floor of the pagoda’s eighth floor.
Her eyes opened slowly, serene and impassive. Her face unmoved.
“This dream again…” she murmured to herself in the silence of her radiant chambers, wrapped in white silk sheets of her bed; big enough to hold twenty armored samurai. Sitting up and gazing into the darkness of the crater beyond the snowy wooden shutters, she began reciting as the koto played:
“Again, in this punishment, eternally reliving.
I’d not know whether to call it a blessing, but
it is a second budding flower.
Like the Sun reborn in Edo, my heart
still holds the light it once had on Earth
before my exile to the Moon with you.
Hearing the koto’s broken melody
in your voice, I remember when
you asked me not to go to the mountains.
Not to leave life in the palace.
But what did you know of me then?
You loved me for who you thought I was, not for who I truly was.
For you, as one in love, I found refuge in the mountains,
but not being able to forget you,
my body filled with hatred like ink
staining a white kimono.
A stain that endures forever.
And when you came looking for me in that cabin,
my appearance had changed.
And because of the hatred that dyed my soul,
I shot you like a violent archer whose arrow
whistles and weeps during flight.
In my arms I held you, and I stabbed myself
with that same arrow.
And so the celestials sentenced me to my
second spring after losing you,
to care for you throughout all eternity
and relive this same nightmare every
time the Sun sets behind my eyelids.
But I do not fall like an arrow
launched toward the sky. Nor do I wish to.
And although you remember nothing of that flower I once was,
you will always be my beloved
Tymoe, my samurai in celestial armor.
My samurai who protects me
on the Moon that cries light.”
“When will they come for us?”
“When the Moon can shine from all its sides, my prince.”
“Why do you never come up to gaze at the stars and the celestial window with me?”
“I’m afraid, my prince, that is unthinkable for me.”
“It is something I carry, my beloved Tymoe. Just the thought of seeing the planet that once was our home —and where we could have loved one another if not for my selfishness— would make me cry until I vanish like lunar dust.”
“Is that the reason we’ve never left the castle?”
“Yes,” Shigetu-Uba answered simply. “We must never leave the castle, under any circumstance. I don’t want to get lost again in a forest without trees, in silence, and for you to have to find me again.”
“I understand,” Tymoe replied. Shigetu-Uba straightened his white kimono, then grasped the lapels of his haori firmly and planted a kiss on the samurai’s chest. With a stifled sob and her hair cascading like a black waterfall down her back after the plain black silk ribbon slipped loose from the abundance of her hair tied at its center, she fell into Tymoe’s arms.
And he simply wrapped her in his embrace.
✦ Feed the ghosts and join the firmament. Support me on Ko-fi if the Moon speaks to you! ✦
