Selenophobia
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((Selenophobia is fear of the moon))
"Grab and twist, hard," Jerr said, with an air of complete reasonability. Lilin looked at him like she had no clue what he just said. Blinking involuntarily she asked, "What?" and explained patiently to her, "they are built for straight on impact. If you grab and twist they fall, if you twist hard, the neck snaps."
Lilin interrupted, "I'm really not that strong and um… isn't that a bit brutal?"
"how is a clean kill with your hands more brutal than an axe across the neck or five arrows in the flank?"
"And I won't have to eat it raw, will I?" she asked nervously.
"the first time? No." Lilin was not very comforted.
Lilin scrambled up the rope to the Pixie Roost, and stood near the edge, arm wrapped around the big tree that grew up there, staring down at the pass and the tents and fires that surrounded the camps. People had started living in some of them, she knew, and soon, she hoped, she would live in one herself. Alone. She frowned, uncomforted by the thought, fearing that she would not find companionship.
She ran her hands down the bark of the tree a time, feeling it. With ever breath she could smell the tree there, soft, fresh, alive. Her eyes slid to the spider woods, and she watched them, there were spiders milling around back deeper in the woods as always, but the steep cliff faces of the ancient quarry blocked her eyes from seeing all the way into the cove. She looked at the thinning number of spiders towards the north end of the pass and wondered if Sarah'de's group was winning in their task. She took another breath and the familiar scent of food played on her nose, faint, far away, but there. She wondered if that was even possible here.
She slinked away from the edge, sitting one of the worn boulders near the ancient structure that adorned the roost and rekindled the fire that had long since gone out from the last visitor. She turned the knife Jerr had given her over and over in her hands, looking at it.
She wondered if he could possibly be right. Nyda and Tindra had told her things, about the beast, given her an abstract concept to work towards… a destination without a path to walk to it. Her heart was filled with the hope that what Jerr spoke to her about accepting who and what you are and living with it is what she needed to do.
As the sunset came, she prayed for strength.
