The three sisters peered through the crack of the door, cringing when the old wood creaked. Breath held, they squinted to better see into the darkened room. Moonlight spread from a tiny window, casting its blue glow over a motionless silhouette.

   “She’s getting worse,” Morganne said, watching their mother lay motionless, her breathing so light she hardly made a sound. Morganne closed the door, and her eyes, to stop her younger sisters seeing her tears.

   “Maybe the doctor was wrong, maybe there is something we can do?” Fae asked in a whisper of a voice like soft wind parting grass. Fae—youngest sister, though only by several hours. But triplets always cling to the important fact of who was born first.

   Morganne, Amara, and Fae. That’s the order they were born and the order in which their mother addressed them, though she hadn’t for weeks. And the girls began to wonder if she ever would again. The peculiar malady had rendered her still and silent, and all the more unnerving considering their mother had been as strong as a carthorse.

   Amara, middle sister and thus the quietest, stared out the cabin’s window searching for answers within the darkness. Dawn lined the horizon, but the sky was still inky blue, and the full moon hovered low and wide. It cast shadows and blue light across their small garden and the woods beyond. The dark soothed Amara, perhaps because the midnight sky matched her ebony hair and cobalt eyes as dark as the universe itself. But it was the moon she gazed at now, the low and heavy full moon that always seemed to speak to her, whisper secrets, grant her ideas—though she would never admit it, especially knowing what village girls whispered about the three sisters between cupped hands and narrowing eyes.

   People thought sisters of three were strange—and strange often equated to unusual, and unusual was open to gossip, and tales, and untruths; which was to say, rumors.

   “Quiet One,” Morganne said, wrapping an arm around Amara’s shoulder. “What are you thinking? Your thoughts are always so deep and brooding.”

   Amara’s lips formed a tight line, a half attempt at a false smile. “Our mother is dying, sister. Deep and brooding seems the correct way to think.”

   Fae moved toward her older sisters, her footsteps light like a spring cloud, her voice lighter still. “But you always come up with the best ideas when you stare at the full moon.”
Yes, that she did. But it was yet another reason to let her thoughts remain silent, like a river running under a vast mountain. Flowing, always flowing, but secret and unseen, certainly unheard. A secret she kept for herself.

   A loud mewl sounded in the stillness of their thoughts and grabbed the girls’ attention. Shadow, their cat—as black as coal and bad dreams—stared in through the window from his usual spot on the flower box.

   “Oh Shadow, Mother would kill you if she saw you sitting there squashing the Chrysanthemums,” Morganne said as she opened the window to let him in. But he rose and stared at her in the way only a cat can, refusing to enter and instead, Shadow turned away. He flicked his tail high over his back like a royal command, and graciously descended from the window box to the garden below. He trotted along the garden path like a king, stopping twice to look over his shoulder as the girls watched.

   “We had better get our cloaks,” Amara said, smoothing her thick black curls in preparation for a journey. She turned to her eldest sister, wiping away a remaining tear she spied stuck on Morganne’s lower lashes. Amara, as dark as night, attempted a smile. “We need to follow Shadow.”

   “I thought you’d say that,” Fae said like a rainbow in a summer shower—slightly hopeful, slightly sad.

   “But the sun shan’t rise for hours,” Morganne began, the voice of reason that often comes with being the eldest. “We’ve not tended a fire for Mother, or prepared the broth…” She stopped when she noticed Amara gazing at the full moon again.

   “I have a feeling, dear sisters,” Amara began, as grave as a forgotten cemetery. “That if we do not follow Shadow into the woods, we shall soon have no mother to tend.”

   Yes, Amara always had her best ideas under the full moon, and neither Morganne nor Fae would ignore her. Fae had already donned her grey cloak, the hood all but covering her long, flowing locks of winter sunshine. She held her sisters’ belongings aloft.

   “Onwards,” Fae said, with a lightness of a hopeful springtime breeze, and the three sisters stepped into the night.