Moonlight is a curious thing.

Color didn’t seem to exist under a full moon. It bleached everything, drawing the color to the fathomless skies.

Shining gently, inexorably, it coaxed out details hidden in daylight’s harsh glare, turning the familiar world into a strange painting of sharp contrasts.

Drifting petals, bone white.

The gleam of a fox’s eye between the thick trunks of the forest that ran up to the shoreline, and the flick of its tail as it moved on.

The blades of faii-grass rippling like a current of silver knife-blades in the soft night breeze. Flaws and small crevices in the white marble of the bridge beneath Soa Ling’s embroidered red slippers.

Soa Ling had always loved the nighttime. Loved the stillness, and the solitude.

When she could sit undisturbed while a hushed symphony of night creatures washed over her.

She had come here at first to be alone.

Now she came to find company.

She hung the lantern from the bridge, feeling flakes of rust break away from the handle and dig into her cold fingers. A yellow glow streaked across the water for several minutes marked by painful heartbeats before she reached down and snuffed the flame.

The signal to call him fom the deeps.

With a burst of white and crimson, a crane took to the air, the spread of its massive wings ruffling her silk kimono as it flew over her and skimmed over the vast lake. Dark ripples on the water followed its gliding path to the opposite black shores.

Soa Ling’s silver eyes caught the light behind the curtain of her black hair as they flicked up to track the beautiful creature’s flight.

The initial crack of its wings had broken the stillness of the night, the cricket song dying away abruptly. The only sound was the breeze whispering along the shore, ruffling the cherry blossoms in white cascades from their branches, and caressing her face as if trying to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.

Something had startled the crane.

The silence remained.

Something below the surface of the night- blackened water caught the moonlight, glowing a pearlescent silver white as it rose towards the surface, growing larger and larger as it moved sinuously through the water and passed below the bridge.

A gleam of scales broke the surface of the water on the other side before sliding under again.

Soa Ling grinned.

The nighttime held her secrets, the companion found by a lonely girl all those years ago. No one would suspect such a strange friendship.

But he always came for her.