With Gula and Dawdlepot, R Land had begun to truly feel like home. And it breathed now in its own small way. A hum beneath stones, a pulse beneath the roots. When Flare moved through the garden at night, the flowers tilted toward the light instinctively, like children turning their faces toward a bedtime story.

And when Flare, Gula, and Dawdlepot returned home one night, weary from a long day of creating life and other shenanigans, they expected the hush of peace. The still air, the glimmering petals, the soft rustle of leaves.

Instead, the silence was wrong. It was too heavy. Too deliberate. A silence that had witnessed something.

Flare stopped. The first thing it noticed was the smell. The scent of wrongness. The next was the shape of the shadows. The garden lay in ruin.

A patch near the heart of R Land had been torn apart: petals shredded, stems snapped, roots yanked violently from the soil. The ground, usually smooth from Dawdlepot’s slow tread, was gouged with strange prints, sharp, uneven, shaped like feet that had never learned kindness.

Some flowers still flickered faintly, their lights dimming as Flare knelt beside them. One by one, the tiny glows went out.

“No,” Flare whispered. “No, no, no.”

Gula gasped, voice rising into panic. “They’re gone! Flare, they’re gone! Look what’s happened to them! Look at their heads, their poor heads—!”

Dawdlepot blinked heavily, staring at the devastation as though it were a bad dream. “Ohhh…noooo…” it groaned, voice thick with disbelief. “That’s…not nice.”

Flare’s chest burned cold. “Who did this?”

No answer came. Only the faint creak of petals settling, the slow sigh of dust. The universe, which had been so small and safe, suddenly felt wide again. And not friendly.

Flare brushed its fingers across the soil. Something glittered. It wasn’t the shimmer of starlight, but a foreign gleam, cold and metallic.

Footprints.

Small, deep, and deliberate, pressed into the soft ground. They shone faintly with a silvery sheen that was not of R Land.

Flare traced one with a fingertip. It was perfect, precise. Not the random mark of falling debris or a tumbling stone. It was intention.

Someone had been here. Someone who did not belong.

Gula’s petals trembled. “Flare…what are those?”

“Signs,” Flare said, voice quiet but serious. “Someone was here.”

“But where could they be from? The Moon?” Gula whispered, shrinking. “But no one lives there. You said it was silent.”

“I thought it was,” Flare murmured. “Maybe I was wrong.”

The silence pressed closer, listening.

Flare tried to replant what could be saved. It pressed broken stems back into the soil, whispered warmth into their roots, poured every ounce of patience into the work. But the flowers would not rise. Their lights had gone somewhere Flare couldn’t reach.

“I made them,” Flare said softly. “I promised them they’d grow safe here.”

Gula said nothing. Dawdlepot only drooped, as though mourning required less movement.

Flare’s hands shook. Tiny sparks leapt from its fingertips, uncontrolled. Not the kind that built, but the kind that burned.

“I gave them fire,” Flare whispered. “Water. Earth. I gave them life.”

“And someone took it,” Gula said bitterly. “Whoever they are, I want them gone.”

Flare’s voice turned sharp. “So do I.”

The ground beneath their feet quivered in answer, the whole of R Land flinching under the weight of its creator’s rage. Stones rattled, dust stirred, petals shivered.

Gula shrank back, wide-eyed. “Flare, stop! You’ll scare the rest!”

Flare forced itself still. The glow dimmed. Not gone, but leashed. “I’m sorry,” it said. “I just can’t stand this emptiness.”

“Maybe they’ll grow back,” Dawdlepot murmured hopefully, half-asleep. “Maybe…they just…rest.”

Flare looked down at the crushed stems. “Maybe.” 

Flare’s eyes followed the footprints across the ridge. They led away from the garden toward the Moon. Each step gleamed faintly, as if the intruders carried moonlight in their heels.

For the first time, Flare looked upon the Moon not as a silent neighbor, but as something watching. Its pale surface stretched endlessly, cratered and scarred, full of hiding places and hollow shadows.

The idea that something might live there, something cruel enough to do this, lodged like a splinter in Flare’s heart.

Gula trembled. “Don’t go after them. You don’t know what’s waiting.”

Flare’s eyes flickered between anger and restraint. “If I don’t go, they’ll come back.”

“Then we’ll deal with them here!” Gula said. “Let them come!”

“No,” Flare said, voice suddenly calm. “We protect R Land by understanding the enemy. We’ll follow, not to strike, but to learn.”

Dawdlepot yawned, massive and mournful. “Learning sounds… tiring.”

“Then stay,” Flare said gently. “You’ve done enough.”

But Dawdlepot stirred, eyes half-open. “No. I…go.”

Gula sighed dramatically. “And where they go, I go. Because who will tell them when they’re being reckless otherwise?”

Flare smiled faintly. “Then it’s decided.”

Together, they set off toward the Moon. The path was unfamiliar. The bridge of debris that joined R Land to the Moon, made when Flare created R Land, felt frail, like a whisper made solid. Below them stretched the vast dark of space, and above, the Moon loomed enormous and pocked.

Each step deepened the quiet. Even Gula stopped talking, its petals folded tight, as though to shield itself. Dawdlepot’s slow tread echoed faintly, as though they were walking inside a bell that had lost its clapper.

Flare’s mind churned with questions. Who would want to hurt life so helpless? What kind of being destroys so cruelly?

And yet, beneath the anger, there was something else. Fear. Not for itself, but for what this meant. If others existed, it meant Flare was not alone. And whatever it was out there wanted something other than to create. The thought was colder than space.

Near the Moon’s surface, the footprints deepened. Here and there, Flare saw scraps of something unfamiliar: a sliver of twisted metal half-buried in dust, a shard of glass that reflected not light but memory.

Once, Gula pointed to a mark scorched into the stone, a long, curved line ending in a starburst. “What’s that?”

“Heat,” Flare said. “Like mine. But colder.”

“Can light be cold?”

“It can if it’s stolen,” Flare murmured.

They went on in silence until the trail vanished behind a jagged ridge. Beyond it, the Moon’s surface flattened into a field of powdery gray, a wasteland of craters and shadows.

There, for a moment, Flare thought it heard something: faint laughter, carried not by air but by vibration. A sound that didn’t belong to R Land’s gentle rhythm.

The laughter came again, soft, distant, mocking. Then it stopped.

“Did you hear that?” Gula whispered.

Flare nodded. “Yes. And whoever made it knows we’re here.”

Dawdlepot swayed slightly, uneasy. “Maybe…they’re gone.”

“Or hiding,” Flare said. “Watching.”

Gula glanced nervously around. “From where?”

“Everywhere,” Flare answered.

They stood there for a while, listening. But the sound didn’t return. Only the Moon’s silence remained, thicker now, almost deliberate. 

With no other leads, they decided to head back to R Land. On the way, they found a message. Not words, but a mark carved deep into the dust, glowing faintly with lunar silver. Three sharp strokes, intersecting in a pattern that suggested a grin.

It wasn’t a natural shape. It felt almost like a sort of sign language. Territorial, possessive, taunting.

“What does it mean?” Gula asked, voice trembling.

Flare’s eyes narrowed. “It means this wasn’t random. Someone wanted us to see this.”

Dawdlepot leaned in, blinking slowly. “Pretty pattern. Ugly feeling.”

Flare didn’t answer. Its mind was already racing, its anger folding inward, sharpening into resolve.

If others were out there, cruel, clever, laughing in the shadows, then they had just declared themselves. And Flare, who had built life from silence, would not let silence win again.

When they finally crossed back onto their small moon, the garden felt different. It was smaller somehow, and too quiet. The surviving flowers stirred faintly when Flare passed, as if asking whether the danger was gone.

“Sleep,” Flare told them. “Grow back when you can.”

The broken stems didn’t answer, but Flare thought it felt something under the soil — a faint pulse, weak but persistent. Life clinging on.

Gula hovered near Dawdlepot’s rim. “They’ll come again, won’t they?”

“Yes,” Flare said. “But next time, we’ll be ready.”

“How can you fight something when you don’t know what it is?”

Flare looked toward the Moon, now looming brighter than ever. “We can only try.”

That night, R Land did not sleep. Neither did Flare. It stood at the edge of the garden, watching the horizon where the Moon’s shadows met the stars. Dawdlepot snored softly nearby, its warmth like a campfire that refused to die. Gula curled within, feigning rest but whispering sometimes. small, anxious things.

Its gaze never left the Moon.

Every so often, a flicker of movement crossed its pale surface. A spark, a glint, something too rhythmic to be coincidence. And once, just once, Flare thought it saw three silhouettes standing on the ridge, outlined by moonlight, still as statues.  Then they were gone.

Flare’s fire burned brighter in its chest, not out of fear, but defiance. “If you’re watching,” it whispered into the void, “watch closely.”

By morning, the garden had already begun to heal. New sprouts pushed timidly through the wounded soil. Flare tended them with gentle hands, patient and silent.

But the joy of creation had changed. There was no longer only wonder; there was caution threaded through it, an awareness that every act of life draws notice.

When Gula woke and stretched toward the new light, it found Flare standing motionless, staring upward.

“What are you looking at?” Gula asked.

Flare didn’t answer for a long time. Finally, it said, “The Moon.”

“What have you seen?”

Flare shook its head. “Nothing. Not yet.”

That was the night R Land learned it was not alone. Not in the beautiful way Flare had hoped. but in the way every world eventually learns: where light exists, it will always attract those who would find it.

And somewhere, far above, in the folds of lunar shadow, something laughed. Soft, amused, and promising.

“Ohohohohoho…”