The graveyard was quiet that night, except for the wind sighing through crooked iron gates. Silver moonlight spilled across broken headstones, glimmering faintly on damp grass and cracked stone angels. Most people in the village never came here. It was said to be haunted, cursed, and crawling with the dead.
They weren't wrong.
At the far edge of the cemetery, where weeds grew tall and thorny, something moved. A small hand, gray and dirt-stained, pushed aside the tangled grass. Then came a girl—small, thin, no older than ten. Her eyes, pale and cloudy, blinked wide at the moon.
Her name was Luna, though she wasn't sure how she knew it. The name sat heavy and warm in her chest, as if someone had whispered it to her long ago.
Luna wasn't like the other things in the graveyard. She had seen them before—zombies dragging broken limbs, groaning with endless hunger, mindless and empty. She didn't shuffle like them. She didn't crave the living the way they did. Instead, Luna liked to sit by the tallest gravestone and hum a tune she didn't remember learning.
But tonight, something was different. The night was too quiet. Too lonely.
Her bare foot stepped onto the path, crunching softly against gravel. She turned her head toward the village beyond the cemetery walls. She could see faint orange glows—windows lit by candlelight, smoke rising from chimneys, a warm flicker that seemed to call her closer.
Inside her chest, something stirred. Hunger, yes, but also something else. A memory? A dream?
"I… want to see," Luna whispered. Her voice rasped, dry as fallen leaves.
She walked to the gates. The iron bars loomed tall and rusty, covered in vines, but a broken space at the bottom left just enough room for her to slip through. She crouched down, her ragged dress catching on the thorns, and crawled onto the road beyond.
The night air outside was different—lighter, cleaner. Luna tilted her head back to breathe it in, though she had no breath in her lungs. The scent of bread drifted faintly on the wind. Her stomach groaned with hollow emptiness.
She took a step toward the village. Then another. Her movements were clumsy but determined.
But before she could get far, a sound froze her in place.
Clip-clop. Clip-clop.
Hooves. A lantern bobbed in the darkness as a horse-drawn cart approached on the road. Luna ducked behind a tree, peering out with wide, pale eyes.
On the cart sat a farmer, humming to himself. Beside him was a basket filled with vegetables, and a little boy, fast asleep under a blanket.
Luna's chest ached. Not from hunger, but from something sharper—longing. The boy's hair was golden, his cheeks rosy with warmth. She didn't remember much of her life before the graveyard, but for a flicker of a moment, she thought she had once looked like that too.
The cart passed, wheels crunching on gravel. The lantern glow faded into the night.
Luna stepped out from behind the tree, staring after it until it disappeared completely.
"I don't want to stay in the dark anymore," she murmured.
The village lights shimmered ahead, and though fear and hunger curled inside her, Luna took another step forward. She didn't know what awaited her beyond those glowing windows—fear, kindness, or something worse.
But she knew one thing for certain: for the first time since she had woken in the graveyard, she wasn't going back.
And so began the journey of Luna, the little zombie girl who dreamed.