Beneath the Drowning Moon

Copyright © 2025 Jayme Whitfield

All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations used in critical reviews or articles.

The world tilts, surrendering to water. The first rush is soundless. She opens her mouth to breathe and the river answers, spilling into her with a cold so complete it feels like possession. It climbs her throat, fills her lungs, presses against her eyes until everything burns white. The weight of the current folds her downward, steady and deliberate, the river claiming what the storm began.

Light fractures above her, a wavering seam that shrinks as she sinks. The moon stares through it, pale and pitiless, a single unblinking eye that watches her fall. Its reflection trembles once and shatters. The taste of iron floods her mouth. Hair wraps her face in dark ribbons. Her hand rises without thought, reaching toward the memory of air. Leather wraps a wrist and fills a hand. The storm shouts above the water, its voice sharp and certain, and she almost believes it is calling her by name.

Then the noise softens. The shore is gone. The world has narrowed to the pulse in her ears and the press of the river against her chest. The ache beneath her ribs blooms like bruised fruit, the weight of betrayal sinking deeper than breath ever did.

Cold lives in her before she finds the surface. It is patient and thorough, settling into the bones that no longer feel like her own. The fight drains from her. Cold settles deeper. She closes her eyes and lets the water cradle her. When she wakes, the world is quiet and strange.

She tries to place herself and finds only water. The river moves under her, lifting, lowering, as if the land itself is breathing. She allows the current to decide. The shadow of a high bank passes over her face. A heron stands with one knee bent, the patience of a priest. On a low branch, a crow tips its head and names her in a voice that is not human and entirely sure.

She remembers children laughing. She remembers a wooden floor that smelled of flour and damp boots. She remembers the slip of a ring on her finger and wind at a window. She does not remember her own name.

Mira, the current whispers, or maybe it is nothing at all. She tries it and finds it fits the shape of her mouth. Mira. The syllables are round and small. She keeps them.

The water carries her around a bend where the trees lean closer, conferring. She touches the surface with her fingertips and feels the nerve of the river, a thread that runs on and on underneath everything. It pricks at her as if asking a question. She does not know the language to answer.

On the far bank a deer steps out and lifts its head. The deer smells her and does not run. They watch each other for a long breath. She remembers watching like this before. She was warmer then, waiting at a window for boots to turn up the path. Listening for a cart wheel and a voice that would say her name as if it had always been a blessing. The memory cuts, then dissolves.

She lets go of it and drifts. The river carries her past a stony shoal, past a braid of reeds, past a place where the bottom falls away and the water deepens to the color of old wine. In that throat of the river, time falls with her. For a moment there is no morning and no self, only the dark comfort of being held. She didn’t even realize there was pain before. When the depth eases it, she rises again into light.

On the bank, a small bottle lies caught in the roots of a willow. Its bright label speaks a language that wants to be read. She knows none of the shapes. She knows what willow means. She knows what bottle means, too. She wonders what this bottle is made of. Not glass—it doesn’t sparkle in the light.

She could sink. She could let the old cold pull her down and close her eyes against what waits in the world above. The thought is simple and tempting. She watches a dragonfly land on her knuckle. Its small body hums. Life insists. She turns her face toward the seam where the sky meets the water and lets the current carry her on.

A strange sound pulled Mira from her memories. It rolled through the water like distant thunder, mechanical and steady, nothing the river could have made. She blinked, disoriented, the last shards of her drowning scattering into the current. The air above was brighter now, thick with smoke and something sweet that was not wood.

The noise came again, wrong and fascinating at once. It moved through the water as vibration rather than sound, a low thrum that shivered against her ribs, each pulse announcing something heavy and deliberate drawing near. Even the river hushed to listen.

She turned toward the far bank. Canvas shifted and men’s voices wove through the trees. The sight of them startled her, so vivid and solid. Their camp looked built from another language entirely: a box that glowed faintly, a sagging tent the color of wet moss, a chair with a metal skeleton, a tin kettle smiling with soot.

Two men moved in that clearing. One was tall and broad through the shoulders, the other compact and restless. They wore second skins of cloth that fit close to their legs and shone at the seams. Their voices came in bursts, sharp and quick. She could not follow the meaning, only the rhythm and the calm assurance of people whose lives belonged to daylight. Then one of them laughed, deep and human, and the sound tugged at something inside her chest that had not answered to the river in a century.

The tall one lifted a length of fabric and shook it. Dew lifted like dust. He folded it with the care of habit. The smaller one collapsed the metal chair, and it shrieked a little. Crows answered. Someone laughed. It occurred to her that the laugh was her own. It left her mouth without permission, thin as a reed whistle. She clapped a hand over her lips, shocked. The sound startled the men. They turned together to the river.

She went still. The river reacted first, lifting to her shoulders as if to shield her. She sank a little deeper, the surface closing over her chest and throat until only her eyes broke the light, bright as a dragonfly’s. Her pulse hammered in the quiet. The men searched the water, trying to find the source of the sound. She stayed motionless, trusting the river to keep her secret.

They studied the river for a long moment. The tall one shaded his eyes but saw only reflection. The smaller one picked up a stone and tossed it. It plunked and slid, sending a dozen thin rings drifting across the surface. The men spoke again, their voices lower now, cautious.

No heat rose in her. No urge to pull. No impulse to pin a throat and feel the panic like a bell. She waited for the hunger to wake and found only emptiness. Not the hungry emptiness she was expecting, but a clean hollowness, the way a room feels after someone opens a window.

The men finished their packing. The tall one lifted the glowing box and tucked it against his hip. The small one slung the folded chair and a roll of cloth. They moved toward a strip of hard ground that cut the clearing in a straight gray line. When their feet reached that road they became part of a world she could not enter and vanished with a purr that was not hooves, not wheels, not any machine she had known. Sound stretched and thinned until it was gone.

The river sighed in relief or disappointment; she could not say which. She waited for regret to set its teeth in her. Nothing came. There was only the ache of confusion, the lightness in her chest where a dark want should have lived.

She thought of the hand that had been a blessing once, and of children’s footsteps running toward a door. The ache deepened until her ribs felt like wet reeds about to fold.

She closed her eyes and let the water carry her back into shade. Above, a hawk turned, and the sun lifted a shoulder over the trees.

They came with the smell of wet hair and green things. First the giggling ones, the young who adored their own cruelty. They slid through the reeds like ribbons and circled her, eyes bright, the air tasting of rain and the copper tang of death. Their laughter was silver and mean. They touched her shoulders, her hair, the place on her wrist where a mark had once lived. They called her the names they used when they were feeling brave, horrid names with teeth inside them.

Mira, they chanted. Sister. Drifter. Forgetter. The last name clung and would not let go.

One of them drifted upward until their faces were nearly level. Her throat gleamed pale beneath the dim light as she pointed toward the empty bank where the men had been. Her small teeth flashed, the smile sharp with hunger and disappointment.

“Why did you let the meat walk away?” the girl asked. “We are empty. We are always empty. The river begs. You did not answer.”

Mira opened her mouth and closed it again. The words caught in her throat, heavy and rounded by years of silence, still too hard to swallow. The young waited. They had time, but never patience.

The giggling stopped. The young froze, feeling the weight that settled over them, a pressure that turned predators into prey.

A woman rose from below. Her hair streamed behind her, dark and long, streaked with green where the light caught it. Among the strands something pale glimmered, a crown shaped from bone and small shells gathered from the bends. She moved slowly, the flow parting for her and closing again once she passed.

Where she went, the surface cleared to glass. The world beneath held still, the silt lying heavy and undisturbed. Mira knew her at once. The others called her Mother. She was Keeper and Queen, eldest of their kind. She was beautiful in the way of very old and powerful things, the kind that inspire awe rather than comfort.

“Daughters,” the queen said without raising her voice. “Leave us.”

The young pouted as if they were truly children. The queen’s gaze shifted, and they vanished so quickly the water barely remembered they had been there.

Mira looked at the queen and felt the pull of obedience, the memory of the voice that had called her back from death.

“You felt nothing,” the queen said, her words more question than accusation. Mira had no answer, only the ache of knowing she should have felt something.

“I did not want to drown them,” she said. The sound of her own voice surprised her again. It was deeper than the laughter of the young, gentler, almost human.

The queen watched the place where the men had stood. Her gaze was a long net cast over the bank and the clearing, gathering its small brightnesses, its discarded reliefs. She made no sign that she had found what she hoped for.

“Mira,” the queen said, “you have been with me a century. You know what you are. You simply have not faced why.

“We were all human before the water. Women broken by men. Some were beaten, some betrayed, some left with nothing but the echo of a promise that never came true. When the pain grew too heavy, we went to the river. We stepped in because it was the only thing that would take away our sorrow. It covered us, quieted us, and gave us the one thing we never had in life: power. That is why we remain.

“The living call us rusalki. To them we are stories told to frighten their sons and daughters, but the truth is simpler. We are vengeance. The river took our breath and gave us its own. It turned our grief into its current, our silence into its song, our pain into its power. That pain is the price of what we are, the memory that keeps our hunger alive.

“We keep to the water because it belongs to us as much as we belong to it. And sometimes, when memory stirs, it lets us feel the cost again so that the hunger will not fade.

“But you, Mira, you have no hunger. You sit in the pain and feed on the ache.”

Mira didn’t understand. She knew what the queen meant, that danger lay in the stillness inside her, but the hunger never came. The men on the bank had stirred nothing. She felt hollow, numb where her sisters burned.

“What am I supposed to do?” she asked, hating how small her voice sounded. “I didn’t choose this life. The hunger doesn’t choose me.”

She was something the depths had made, and wanting should have been simple, like teeth closing. Instead there was only the cold and the memories, fragments of a past that would not let her go.

The queen studied her for a long time. “All you can do is listen,” she said. “If hunger will not claim you, perhaps memory will. The river keeps all it has taken, every life, every sorrow. It will share that with you if you are willing to hear it. But listening comes with a price. What you remember will change you, and you will never be able to forget it again.”

Mira looked down at her hands, pale and strange in the dim light. “If I listen, will I know my name?”

“Names are small,” the queen said. “You may find what the name belonged to. You may understand why you are here. But once you remember, you will never be what you are now.”

Mira hesitated. “And if I don’t listen?”

“Then you will fade,” the queen said simply. “The water will keep you, but you will be nothing inside it.”

The weight of that truth settled between them. At last Mira nodded. “Then I will listen.”

The queen’s eyes softened. “Go, then. Follow the smaller stream. Its voice is quiet enough for what you seek.”

She reached out, brushing Mira’s wrist, the touch both blessing and warning. “Remember, the river loves fiercely and keeps a jealous ledger.”

Mira turned away. Behind her, the queen sank beneath the surface. The current smoothed, the leaves stilled, and the world narrowed to moss, root, and the faint murmur of smaller water ahead. The sound of the great channel faded. As she swam, fear crept in, not of what she might hear, but of hearing nothing at all. .