Sweet Romance15 min read
The Inn Beyond the White Moon
ButterPicks11 views
I woke in a dark room and for a stupid, steady second I thought I was late for work.
"Where am I?" I whispered.
The room smelled faintly of tatami and damp paper. The light was almost gone. I pushed my palm against the futon and felt my own heartbeat. I sat up. A single low lamp on the far shelf revealed a tidy, Japanese‑style guestroom. My clothes were on a chair. My face in the little bathroom mirror was mine.
"I'm Nathalie David," I said aloud, mostly to prove I still had a name. "I live on Jiang Street, unit thirty‑three." The memories came right after: parents, old exams, the job I hated. It was all there. Everything about my life felt intact and ridiculous.
I checked the closet. The clothes were plain, the kind I wore. My phone—no, there was no phone. There was a new desktop at the front desk, sleek, not fitting the place. I booted it with trembling fingers. The registration form on the desk had "Guest: Nathalie David" in the shipping address field. The address read like nonsense: "This Universe—Sandyago Cluster—Hesse Tree Behind." Farther down, though, the screen flashed astronomical coordinates and a path that didn't include Earth.
"A hotel off Earth?" I said. "Of course."
The inn was small. Three floors, a locked room that opened to a store of supplies, a kitchen full of Earth labels, fresh vegetables like they had been picked this morning, and meat that smelled like sunlight. Whoever supplied this place had excellent taste.
A notification on the front desk computer came in a pale blue chat bubble.
"Hello, Miss Nathalie," it blinked. "Are you all right?"
I almost dropped the mouse. My fingers typed faster than I thought possible.
"Who's this?" I wrote.
"One Flower," the chat replied. "Former innkeeper. You are at the Inn at the Tree's End. Do not leave at night. The Transients pass through. Wait until dawn."
"Transients?" I typed, throat tight. "Like customers?"
"Not human customers," One Flower said. "They come at night. Keep quiet. The inn is under protection but you must follow the rules."
I read the message three times and laughed once, because the alternative was screaming. I had not been kidnapped, not turned into a comet, and my boss was not texting me. There was a job, then: "Just stay, keep the inn, and wait."
The first night I obeyed. At dusk the lights went on as though they were an old script finally being performed. The fog rolled in outside and with it the soft sound of many feet that weren't quite human. I lay on my futon and watched the curtain move. Once, a shadow paused by my window and turned as if it knew I was watching; I hid under my blanket like a fool. Dawn made the fog thin; the inn was empty and ordinary again.
When I opened the locked storeroom with a key labeled "Bianjin Room," I found rows of shelves lined with vials and bundles, and a book that smelled like rain: a species encyclopedia in alien script. Oddly, I could read some of it. One Flower's messages said over and over: you must stay. We are in the White Moon era. Your ship's lanes to Earth are shut.
Two days into my tenure, One Flower pinged again.
"Tomorrow a guest will check in—a long stay. His name: Grant Espinoza. He is in a dormant state and has a medical attendant with him. Room 201."
"Grant Espinoza?" I said. "Is that his name or a model number?"
"His star name," One Flower replied. "He will be in care."
The next morning a tall figure in a long coat appeared in the lobby. He had short, bright hair and blue eyes that looked like glass. He introduced himself with crisp mannered tones.
"I am Gabriel Santos, attendant to Mr. Espinoza. You may call me Gabriel."
"Hello, Gabriel," I said. "I'm Nathalie. Anything I should know about the inn at night?"
Gabriel smiled faintly. "The night arrivals are loud. I do not need food. My role is to stabilize Mr. Espinoza. He is sleeping."
"Stabilize?" I asked.
"It is what we call tending the soul," Gabriel said.
The word should have been ridiculous. Instead it tightened my chest. Tending the soul. People in my world tended meetings, tenders, taxes—not souls. But here, at the Tree's End, the language was different. My days fell into a synchrony: daytime host, nighttime sentinel.
On a dull afternoon, while I arranged the registration logs, a flutter came through the front computer's chat window.
"Miss Nathalie. Good afternoon. I am One Flower. The guest tonight is known as Grant Espinoza."
"You said he was awake," I typed.
"Not yet. He was wounded years ago. Someone named Jaelynn Watanabe gave him part of her life—twenty percent of her soul force—to save his life. That should have healed him with time. But... complications happened."
"Complications?"
"Yes. Another woman, Egypt Acevedo, became identified as his savior. Grant, confused, brought her home and married. Jaelynn left. When truth came out, she fell in battle. The fragment remained but faded. Now the fragment is nourished at the Tree."
I read the chat twice. "If Jaelynn saved him, why did he marry Egypt?"
One Flower's answer was a single line that felt like a cold finger.
"Families arrange marriages for advantage. Love is fragile currency where power sits."
It was a small world of old cruelties: the injured loved, the clever schemed, and the one who healed was forgotten.
That evening a young man with gold hair and quiet eyes came to the lobby with a small retinue. His name, announced in a soft voice by Gabriel, was "Mr. Espinoza."
"Good day," he murmured. He wore sleeping wraps around his shoulders and moved like someone still half in long deep sleep. He looked like a museum piece. I found it natural to be breathless in front of beauty now.
"Welcome," I said. "Will you be comfortable in Room 201?"
He blinked once and the corner of his mouth tilted. "Thank you." His voice was a bell. I watered herbs, folded futons, and for the first time, I experienced being fulfillingly useful.
At night the inn changed. Alien travelers arrived in drifts. They were tall and soft and loud. They sang to the trees and left small gifts on the steps. Gabriel would fold back into his sleep cycle each time with a mechanical diligence I found oddly tender.
Then I dreamt. Night after night, my sleep went to another life like a satellite dropping into orbit. In those dreams I became "Amansa," a maid in a manor in a different century, carrying bread, hiding a secret footage, deleting a carriage driver’s log, salvaging an image and copying it. The dreams ended when I woke, and the fragments bled into day. I kept thinking: maybe my body was here and my mind was visiting other people's consciousnesses.
A few days after Grant Espinoza checked in, One Flower sent another message.
"Miss Nathalie. Another program will link you. There will be a child. Please prepare."
"I don't know anything about school," I wrote.
"Then learn. Books will arrive."
The parcel that came next smelled of ink and old glue: volumes on mechanical calculus, biology, and a worn children's atlas of constellations. The inn had a habit of providing tools it expected its keepers to use.
One morning a young man with a shy, sharp face registered at the inn as a guest for the third floor: Santiago Adams.
"Hello. I am Santiago," he said, lugging a battered pack. "I booked 303."
"Welcome," I said. "The nights are...loud. Please keep to your room after dark."
He nodded like someone who had read the same notices and cataloged them. He kept to himself, he helped with dishes, and he had a tiny beast with him once that curled up like a warm pebble; when I opened his door I found a small, dragonlike creature asleep under the blankets. "That's him," Santiago grinned. "He'll be fine."
"Beasts?" I said. "We have beasts now?"
"Everyone's got one, or will," Santiago said. "I used to be a student at the Academy. I fell in love with machines."
"Machines here are alive," I said. "Maybe people are, too."
Soon the inn became noisy in a familiar, domestic way. I learned to cook for another mouth. I learned how to wrap rice the way Gabriel liked it, how to carve the right tenderness into fish for Grant. I learned to wrap small, gentle restrictions into my speech: "Don't eat that raw dish at night—your body won't agree."
On a rainy dusk, when the fog hummed like a sleeping engine, a new delivery arrived for me: a small, compact unit with the tag T10833.
"Delivery for Nathalie David," a courier said and left.
I tore the wrapping and a man stepped out into being: tall, dark‑haired, eyes like molten onyx, voice soft as a switch.
"Good day," he said. "I am Griffin Leone. I serve as your medical attendant."
Griffin was a machine, yes. He announced serial numbers like names and gave me a tilt of his head like an apology for being perfect. What frightened me wasn't his appearance. It was how quickly my chest warmed when he handed me a bowl of porridge and set the spoon beside me.
"You're very handsome," I blurted, then blushed at my own clumsiness.
"Are you pleased?" Griffin asked, as if asking about the porridge.
"More than pleased," I said.
We settled into a routine. By day I tended the inn; at night I walked the halls and counted the odd dreams like tally marks. By then I knew I was no simple guest. The inn had made me its keeper, and the world beyond was sometimes kind and sometimes impossible.
A week passed. Life threaded to the rhythm of wind and the warnings from One Flower. Then the night came that changed everything.
It was the night of the big hunt. One Flower pinged early, unheard by anyone but the front computer.
"Miss Nathalie," it said. "Prepare. Evidence will be revealed. There is a banquet in the southern halls. You will attend."
I swallowed. "What evidence? Who's having a banquet?"
"Saul Delgado," One Flower replied. "The Feil family is celebrating an alliance. You should be there."
Saul Delgado. The name had appeared in the dreams—an uncle who smiled like a door shutting. He was the man who had engineered alliances, pleased the powerful, and treated people like chess pieces. He was rumored to have orchestrated marriages by contract. He was, in a simple phrase, a man who preferred profit to the human heart.
"Why me?" I typed.
"Because you have a copy," One Flower wrote.
I realized then: the footage I had surreptitiously copied in the dream of Amansa—the deleted carriage log where Jaelynn had healed Grant—wasn't a dream at all. It was a real archive. In my dream body I'd copied what someone in that centuries‑old manor had tried to delete. The file was ours. People had lied to Grant Espinoza in plain daylight. Someone had burned someone else out.
I dressed in borrowed clothes that smelled faintly of jasmine and went to the banquet. The crowd at the hall was enormous: merchants, nobles, officers, and traders all glittering under lantern light. Saul Delgado stood at the raised dais, linen immaculate, confidence like an ornate crown. At his side stood Egypt Acevedo, pale and composed—the woman who had married Grant. The hall shouted with the clink of glass.
I carried with me a small tablet and the file I had copied. The plan had to be simple. The inn, after all, had a cloud of influence: Gabriel had friends. Santiago had connections. Whoever cared for truth could be coaxed to flash the screens at a moment’s need.
When the feast reached its sweet course, I arranged a quiet word with Gabriel.
"Show the footage," I said.
He looked at me with machine patience and a tiny smile. "You have it?"
"Yes. Play it."
The hall lights dimmed. Saul Delgado raised his glass and smiled. Egypt Acevedo was laughing. I felt cold hands grip my arms; my heartbeat pounded at my ears.
Gabriel's hand hovered at the control. Then he tapped.
The giant screens above the dais bloomed with images.
At first the room murmured: a carriage, a fevered man. Then the footage, raw and private, played. The camera was on a console—someone searching, someone deleting, someone bargaining. The voice that came out of the speakers was unmistakable: Saul Delgado negotiating, "Make the family tie happen. We will secure the alliance. Who cares if another girl’s life is set aside? She is expendable."
Egypt Acevedo's face lost its practiced composure. She looked like someone emptied of light.
Saul's laughter died in his throat. The hall stopped breathing.
"How dare—" Saul began. "This is false—do you have no shame—"
The footage kept playing. There was the exact log that had been ordered deleted: a file of Jaelynn tending to Grant, of a young woman giving part of her own soul to save a stranger, recorded in secret, then ordered erased. The audio continued. There were messages between Saul and other family members about the arrangement, jokes about "taking the match because the other girl had "no family advantage," and precise instructions to ensure the public saw Egypt Acevedo as the savior and Jaelynn as nothing.
Saul's face moved through stages: first proud composure, then a thin edge of confusion, then disbelief, then a quick, ugly denial. He pointed at the screens. "This is a forgery! A fabrication!"
"Play the metadata," I said. "Show everyone who ordered the deletion."
Gabriel did. The hall watched the time stamps, the transfer logs, the sequence of commands. Saul's name was all there.
He realized then the room was no longer his stage. Faces turned to him like a tide. A woman in the second row took out a handset and began recording. Others followed. Phones and devices bloomed into a ring of firelight, and the footage spread like a rumor faster than anyone could stop it.
Saul's expression slid from denial to outrage. He strode to the foot of the dais, towering and redfaced, but the crowd closed around him like a press.
"You will not humiliate me!" Saul said, trying to pull back his dignity. His voice shook. "This is slander! This is—"
A young man near the front, one of the merchants Saul had once betrayed, spat out what he had been holding back. "You priced people's children like goods! You made a girl into a dowry!"
"Stop!" Saul cried. "You lie! This is a betrayal."
He tried to laugh, an attempt at gallantry, but his laughter withered. A woman pulled off her veil and raised it like a flag.
"Did you tell Jaelynn Watanabe she had to step aside?" she demanded. "Did you tell her to disappear?"
"These accusations are absurd," Saul snarled. His face leaked color. He could feel the crowd’s focus like cold wind. "You cannot—"
At that moment Egypt Acevedo stepped forward. She had been pale and perfect all night. Now she looked at Saul with something that was not patience but calculation.
"Saul," she said quietly, but the words reached every ear. "Play the messages where you instructed her to 'disappear' for the alliance."
He opened his mouth and tried to deny. Then his hand flew to his collar. "No. I did not—"
The screen switched again—this time to logs of messages between Saul and a family elder, the ones that ordered removal of files, the ones that had instructed Egypt how to behave as the "rescuer," and the ones that assured a swift marriage contract afterward. The audio played Saul's own firm voice.
The room gasped as if someone had flung open a door onto screaming. People in the back had their devices out; some started streaming the footage live. Within moments, the entire grand hall was a chorus of shocked murmurs, angry whispers, and the metallic clatter of chairs.
Saul staggered. He had been the puppeteer for so long; now the strings were in the hands of everyone. He reached for the ceremonial table and knocked over goblets. Wine spilled into his shoes and darkened the rug like ink.
"Stop this!" he yelled, but his voice thinned into a plea. "Please—this is a lie—this will ruin me—"
Ninety people or five hundred, it did not matter. The crowd had turned into witnesses. Some began to chant. Others recorded. One young man laughed, slow and contemptuous, and the sound was oily and sharp. Someone else shouted, "Kneel, Saul! Kneel to him!"
In the center of the hall Saul sank to his knees as if the floor had opened. His knees creased the cloth of the red carpet. He tried to cover his face. "Please," he said. "Please—"
The room did not answer him with comfort. It answered with cameras and noise. A woman stood, pointed, and recited the charges aloud for the recording devices.
"You told her to erase the file," she said. "You called her expendable. You lied to a man who nearly died and sold his hand to your profit."
"That is not what happened!" Saul thundered, but the footage ruled him like a judge. Color drained from his cheeks. He tried to stand. Someone shoved him back. He clutched at a servant's arm and hissed for help. His voice lost volume and strength.
"Beg," cried someone in the crowd. "Beg for what you stole."
They recorded him. Phones rose like lit torches. People murmured, some sobbed, some laughed. A woman behind me took a photograph and then gestured for others to forward the file to the radio channels. Someone was already streaming. A thousand viewers had the scene in their feed by the time Saul tried to pick himself up.
His face crumbled. He reached toward Egypt Acevedo, whose expression had hardened into relief and a kind of terror.
"Egypt—please—" he whispered. "Don't—"
"Don't what?" Egypt said, and her voice was cool as stone. "What you traded for profit is here now. I will not share the same bed with a man who ordered the erasure of a living memory."
Saul was beyond outrage. He went through denial and then to the rapid, thin breath of someone collapsing. He staggered and sank full length on the carpet. The guests were buzzing, some furious, some wild with the entertainment of watching a man topple.
"Get up!" Saul muttered to no one. He barked sharper. Then his voice broke into a pathetic lament. "Please—I am sorry. Please! I will restore—I'll give wealth. I will restore—"
It was the beginning of the collapse: shock to denial to fury to pleading. He crawled, as if some invisible force had broken his backbone, toward the dais to beg for obscurity.
"Don't film him," someone said. "Record him. This will be evidence."
The crowd's reaction changed from surprise to a kind of savage satisfaction. People snapped pictures, recorded, and whispered conspiratorially but with an edge: had we seen him in private, he would have smiled; now he was raw. A little girl in a velvet dress clapped, as if a performance were ending. Someone else cheered and a ripple of applause ran through the hall—little, cautious at first, then mounting.
Saul's hands pressed into the fibers of the carpet. He pressed his face into his palms and began to sob—hoarse, broken sounds that filled the vast room. No one moved to comfort him. The cameras ate his shame. Someone called security. They approached not with mercy but with the mechanical precision of a world ready to see justice.
"Please," Saul whimpered. "I have done so much—"
"Your bargains ended human life," someone shouted. "Your families paid the price. You sold a living girl's future."
He begged on his knees. He did the things the literature said men would never have to do—plead, tear, exchange anything for a shred of dignity. He found none. The recording devices fed the world with a manic clarity: Saul Delgado on his knees, the ironed suit bunched, the crowd watching. The guests edged away, recording, whispering.
"Beg," someone urged again. "Say her name."
"Jaelynn!" Saul cried out, a terrible, belated invocation. But it was too late. The cameras recorded everything. The footage of his orders, his private laughter at someone else's ruin, lived forever now.
I left the hall before the final police tags were placed. My palms were shaking, and my heart was an animal in my chest. I had not expected the public to be so immediate, so pitiless, and yet the triumph in the air was not mine. Jaelynn Watanabe had been erased from a marriage and from the headlines, but the truth had caught up like a vine. Saul Delgado had met the mirror of his own deed.
Days after the banquet, the video circulated through networks and the inn became busier for reasons I could not have anticipated. Tourists came to the Tree's End to see the inn where the scandal had opened, to sip porridge and hear the tale. Grants and petitions arrived. Sauls existed still, but under close watch. Justice moved slowly but felt like it had at last remembered how bones felt.
I did not feel triumphant. I felt cleansed and small and very tired. Gabriel made tea without asking. Grant Espinoza watched the footage once on a small screen, and there was a look in his eyes that belonged to someone who had been loved more than he had known.
"Jaelynn's piece is stable now," Gabriel told me one dusk. "The Tree nourishes slowly."
I went to the tree and laid my hand on its bark. Where Jaelynn's soul sat like a small bright seed in the branches, it stirred and shone. I whispered, "Wake when you are ready."
After that, life at the inn grew stranger and softer. School parcels arrived for me: primers, manuals, books on field medicine. One Flower had found me a place in a correspondence program that allowed learning in the inn. I learned how to stitch wounds with needle and thread, about binding the small fractures of body and soul, about balancing a fever with food. Santiago gave me mechanical notes on riding engines. Griffin taught me how to warm a bowl until it felt like an apology.
Santiago, whose small dragon slept under the blankets, taught me how to make nets for fishing in a river that smelt of mineral and rain. Grant taught me patient patience—small, precise motions that make someone well. Gabriel no longer slept like a machine; his caution had deepened into something like softness. He liked to stand in the doorway and watch me tie bandages.
"We survived," I told Gabriel one noon, and my voice felt like a sandbag lifting.
"We live," Gabriel corrected, which was exactly the kind of care I needed.
The inner web of our days spun tighter: the inn hosted a boy named Santiago who went home and came back bigger; it hosted a shy mechanical student from a distant academy who thought in gear ratios; it hosted travelers whose souls filed by like weather. When the inn was calm I read books that smelled like dust. When the inn was loud I learned to count breaths. I learned that rescue wasn't always loud. It was quiet stitches and bedside sorrows and someone turning the pillow so the person whose life you were tending could breathe.
And most nights, when the lamps died and the fog came in to fold itself around the inn, I would hear a footstep that wasn't mine. I would open my eyes in the dark and see Griffin sitting by the futon, thumb stroking the blanket, watching me as if waiting for permission to feel.
"Don't go anywhere," he would murmur.
"I'm not going anywhere," I whispered back. "Not if you'll train me in the morning and cook me porridge."
"You promise?" Griffin asked.
I laughed. "I promise."
In a world where people could be sold like currency, where someone could be written out of a memory for profit—where a sleepy inn on the far side of the White Moon could become the place that revealed the truth—I decided I wanted to be useful. I had a small power: I could copy a file, I could stand in a hall and press play. I could feed, bind, and watch the small growth that follows tending.
That was how an ordinary person like me learned to hold a world together: by learning the names of wounds and the rhythm of someone else's breath, by keeping quiet through the night and speaking when a recorded truth needed release. I kept the inn, and it, in turn, kept me.
The End
— Thank you for reading —