Rhea started her morning with a curse, a stumble, and a threat. The curse was for the grimoire that had deliberately slid under her feet—again. The stumble was over a set of enchanted robes, practising advanced structural engineering with her cauldron. The threat was for her crystal ball, which was flickering to life with a shrill, far-too-chipper voice.
‘Rhea, dear! It’s me!’ the voice crackled with the kind of excitement that usually preceded a small explosion.
Rhea rolled her eyes so hard she nearly sprained them. A call from Grandma Iris was a formal invitation to chaos. She leaned closer to the crystal, which shuddered slightly on its stand.
‘RHEA! CAN YOU HEAR ME?’ Iris’s voice boomed, rattling a nearby jar of pickled newt eyes.
‘Yes, Grandma, I can hear you!’ Rhea shouted back. ‘And so can the mice in the next county!’
‘WHAT? YOUR NICE AUNT IS GRUMPY?’
‘I said, I HEAR YOU!’
‘FEAR GOO? WHY ON EARTH WOULD I FEAR GOO? It’s perfectly harmless unless you’re wearing silk.’
Rhea let out a long, practised sigh that seemed to wilt a nearby fern. ‘What do you need, Grandma?’
‘IT’S THE FULL MOON! TIME FOR THE BRAID!’
‘Wasn’t that tomorrow? Are you sure?’
‘WHAT? BORROW A GIRAFFE? WHY? JUST COME HERE! The moon is high already!’
Rhea surveyed her hut, a battlefield of good intentions. Half-brewed potions gurgled indignantly in their cauldrons, a proud but wobbly stack of spellbooks threatened to unionise, and the faint, sulky smell of burnt toast lingered from a breakfast spell that had gotten ideas above its station. After a brief search, she found the lunar calendar hiding behind a potted mandrake. She shook her head and tried not to laugh. ‘Got it, Grandma. I’ll be right there.’
Rhea finally wrestled the door open, but not before triggering a wayward spell that summoned a swarm of butterflies with a particularly aggressive sense of interior design. As they began trying to re-braid her hair, her eyes fell on her broom, sulking in a wrought-iron cage. She sighed again.
‘It’s not my fault,’ she told the broom, which was rattling its bars in protest. ‘Okay, I agree, I’m still not perfect at parking. But it was our word against the Weeping Willow’s, and of course, they gave the right-of-way to it. Just because it’s a protected landmark.’
The broom bent its handle, as if nodding in bitter agreement.
‘We only tickled him! But we’re banned from flying for three million full moons. A gross miscarriage of justice. Anyway, my dear friend,’ Rhea got closer to the cage, ‘I will find a way to amend this. For now, I have to go before Grandma falls asleep while I’m… walking.’
The moon hung fat and silver overhead, casting a peculiar light that made the shadows dance, and ordinary trees look like they were gossiping.
‘You were going too fast,’ she panted, scolding the absent broom as a particularly smug-looking root snagged her ankle. ‘Next time, use the brakes… Honestly.’ From a high branch, a squirrel chittered what sounded suspiciously like, ‘Should have taken the path, genius.’ Her pointed hat clinked, full of hastily-gathered spell components—most of them probably the wrong ones, knowing her luck.
When she finally climbed the last hill, she saw it — the library.
It wasn’t a building so much as something that had bloomed out of the earth by accident and decided to stay. Its base was shaped like the heart of an enormous flower, each petal carved from pale stone and half-open as if waiting for sunlight. From that base rose three towers of woven glass and ivy, spiralling upward like stems caught mid-dance. The towers swayed — not from the wind, but with a slow, steady rhythm, as if the whole place were breathing. Threads of silver light ran through the vines, pulsing gently under the surface, and round windows opened and closed like blinking eyes. In front of it all stood an old woman with a slightly crooked hat, conducting a small cloud of night moths. Her vest shimmered as if someone had stitched starlight into the fabric.
‘Hi, Grandma,’ Rhea called out, a bit too loud.
The moths vanished in a puff of silver dust.
‘Ah. Not a moment too soon,’ Grandma Iris said, adjusting her rounded glasses. ‘I was only one or two… hundred away from my record. You look exhausted.’
‘I walked up here.’
‘A frog’s got a spear? Oh, that explains the noises by the pond last night.’
‘I. WALKED. UP. HERE.’
‘You want a cup of beer? At your age? Bold.’ Grandma Iris shook her head with a wry smile. ‘Anyway, come to the log. We need to start the ritual. The moon is getting impatient.’
Rhea nodded and, after a quick hug, instinctively headed toward the library door. But before she could touch it, a thicket of brambles shot out from the ground, weaving themselves into a thorny, disapproving wall.
A dry, rustling whisper seemed to emanate from the vines themselves. ‘You are not witch enough.’
‘Really?’ Rhea’s voice cracked with indignation. Her pointed hat flopped over her eyes. ‘First the broom, then the wand, and now I’m barred from the library? What’s next? Is my cauldron going to demand better working hours?’ She kicked a loose stone. ‘I’ll chop that whole tree down! We’ll see how it likes being a bookshelf!’
‘Next time, you’ll stop for tea? Good.’ Grandma Iris took her by the arm. ‘Bring biscuits. Mine taste of bark.’
The two moved behind the hut. Rhea sat on a log at the very edge of a ravine, her legs dangling over the open air. The sheer drop breathed a cool sigh of pine and night-blooming jasmine from the valley below.
Rhea took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She felt the familiar, grounding weight of her grandmother’s hands in her lengthy hair, the gentle tug of the comb as it began its work. It was a ritual older than both, a warmth of magic that smelled of ozone and chamomile.
‘Dear Rhea,’ Grandma Iris whispered, ‘you will have access to the Midnight Moon’s Library again. Fear not. For now, I brought a book to tell you a folktale…’
‘I’m sixteen…’
‘A folktale called Little Red Riding Hood…’
Rhea opened her eyes and rolled them.
‘…and the Last Wolf.’
‘Red Riding Hood and the Last Wolf?’ Rhea repeated, her curiosity piqued despite herself. ‘That’s not how it goes.’
‘It has always been like this,’ Grandma Iris said, and in the silver moonlight, Rhea could see a mischievous grin that promised trouble and wisdom in equal measure. ‘Now listen close…’
Midnight Moon's Library 