Amara and the Lullaby Lantern

In Willowmere the night folded itself like a blanket, soft at the edges and warm at the center. Amara knew every hush and seam of that blanket. She could tell, by the way the dew caught on a petal, whether the sky had remembered its songs. Her garden lived in a hollow behind the house, a small patch of earth where moonlight pooled like water and the plants opened only when everyone else had already dreamed. People called it the Night Garden because its blossoms were for sleeping: pale bells that caught lullabies, leaves that smelled faintly of thyme and old paper, vines that hummed when the wind passed through them.

Amara's hands were small and still rough with soil, but they moved with a patience that seemed too large for her years. She would creep out after supper, slipping between stacked netting and coiled ropes, and kneel among the low beds. Her fingers learned the language of each stem: the curl of a sleep-melon, the soft thrum of a dream-rose. She listened to the petals like a reader listens to a page. Sometimes she would pluck a silver hair of glow from the center of a blossom and braid it into her hair. It made her forehead warm and kept the night close.

'Careful with the moon-thorn,' her grandmother said that evening, folding apron strings and shading her face with a practiced hand. 'Those will sting when they are startled. But if you soothe them they will sing for you.'

Grandmother Leda moved at the speed of stories; she spoke as if each sentence could be pressed flat into a child's palm and saved. Amara listened and did as she was told. The garden answered to both of them. At dusk the braids of steam that rose from the soil caught the first silver note of the stars and turned it into scent. Neighbors would come by as they returned from their work, carrying jars of bread or bundles of linen, and they would rest with their heads tipped back on the garden wall and sleep until the sun crept up and reminded them of their chores.

That night the humming felt faint. Amara felt it first as a space, the same way you might notice a missing pebble from a path. She pressed her palm to a dark petal and frowned. There was the shape of a song the way a footprint holds the outline of a foot, but the inside was hollow. A single moth brushed her cheek and left nothing but cool dust. She lifted her head and watched the sky. For the first time since she could remember, one small star blinked and then kept its light folded tight, as if it had swallowed a secret and chosen silence.