Moonfall Kingdom

You might say it started with a rabbit. A rush to go nowhere fast. You might say is started with loneliness.

That's not all of it though. Honestly, that's not even how it started. That's just when things got weird. So where do I start? Where I was born? A city in the South. If you have to ask which South, then you obviously aren't from there. When was I born? Longer ago than you might think. Who am I, and why am I being so vague? I'm your humble narrator, and it all comes back to a bunny and a game as old as the universe.

I guess the best place to start is the road trip to South Fork to visit my aunt. I had come into a bit of money and was about to start losing vacation days, so I put up an out of office email, loaded up my truck, and headed west-ish to a place where dial up modems and land lines were the height of technology. Working where I worked, you had to really get off the grid to enjoy a vacation.

The drive generally takes two days, unless I'm in a rush. I do my best not to rush while I'm on vacation, so on the first night sundown saw me pulling into a tiny town in the middle of nowhere looking for a cheap motel and a bite to eat. The motel had a faded sign and mattresses that were surprisingly soft considering they seemed to be made of solid rock. The dinner came from a diner on the outskirts of town. The place was rundown and covered with dust and rust and dead leaves from an ancient tree that covered the back half of the building, a deep and ancient shadow in the bright light of the full moon. A sign in the window claimed they were open and a chalkboard on the door claimed this was the Jade Rabbit, home of fine Chinese cuisine.

I probably should have avoided a ramshackle ethnic food place in a backwoods town so white bread that the old women running the motel had called me a "furr-in-er" under her breath, but I've never been able to avoid trying food in a place that it doesn't belong, because, once in a rare while, the meal is wonderful. This time, the gamble paid off. The inside was far better kept up than the outside. The walls were a deep forest green and covered in an intricate pattern that I later realized was made up mostly of different rabbits. The decor was not the only thing better than expected. I was treated to some amazing dumplings and cha siu bao that rivaled anything that I've had at dim-sum. The food was so good that I drifted off into my own little world, lost in the tastes and the smells for longer than I care to admit.

When I came to my senses I realized that I was pleasantly full and the restaurant completely empty, save for my waiter, a spritely old asian man that seemed to be pulling double duty as the cook. Realizing that he had been serenely sitting there, watching as I rudely stuffed my face, was more than a little unnerving. "Oh. Uh. The food was great." I'm not the most eloquent when caught off guard.

"Yes."

I waited for a moment to see if he would continue. When it became apparent that he wasn't going to say anything else, I offered "Love the place too. Interesting decor. Matches the name really well." Other than the old redneck at the motel, I hadn't spoken to anyone outside of work in nearly three weeks. My conversational skills were a little rusty.

He nodded. "The rabbit is of nature. The rabbit is of the moon. On a night like tonight, with the moon high in the sky, the walls separating the worlds weaken. There are gifts to be given, fortunes to be made."

I grinned. "Gifts? From moon bunnies?"

The old man did not smile with me. "Adventure. Immortality. Laughter. Which would you choose?"

"Immortality." I said without any hesitation.

"A good choice", he nodded thoughtfully, "but not a wise one. Not wise to not ask the price of the gift. All magic has a cost."

"What is the cost?" I asked cautiously.

"Adventure brings madness and danger. The risk of death. Immortality brings isolation, loneliness. Betrayal. Laughter brings pain, and with every joke performed for you, there is another played on you. Are you still content with your choice?"

"Oh. Well, I'd rather not have the madness, and laughter doesn't seem to be that good a trade. I can find my own laughter without lunar intervention. In this hypothetical situation, what would happen if I chose nothing?"

He shook his head. "One does not refuse a gift from the heavens. Houyi tried, and Chang'e suffered. Some cannot even find it for all the trying in the world. Michael Collins searched longer than anyone knows, traveled to the moon itself, and history has mostly forgotten his name."

"Oh, well. In that case, I would choose immortality, and all that comes with it."

He nods, the ghost of a smile crossing his face, and turns back to the kitchen. He returns moments later with a steaming pot of tea and a porcelain. "It is herbal. Cinnamon, mostly. Fresh, from the tree out back. On the house."

I took the cup with a smile. I could be melodramatic and say that I knew from the instant that liquid touched my lips that my life had changed. That destiny, if there is such a thing, had swept me up in its current and my future was no longer my own. But honestly, at that moment, all I knew was that I was drinking a good cup of tea.

I didn't begin to get suspicious until the next morning, as I was leaving town and decided to see if the old man served breakfast. The Jade Rabbit, and the cinnamon tree that shaded it, were gone in the bright light of day. I drove around for almost an hour before I gave up, circling the entire town twice, even going so far as to ask the lady working the desk at the motel. She had never heard of it.

I left the town a bit nervous, but wrote it off as some strange dream. It wasn't until hours later, after dozing off at the wrong moment, catching a bit of gravel, sliding off the steep road, and plummeting to the valley almost a hundred feet below that I knew. Sitting in the wreckage of my truck, watching my bones and flesh knit themselves whole, I knew that I hadn't been dreaming. I knew that life was never going to be the same again.