Dark settled over the trees like a lid closing over a paint can. Everything stopped.

The wolves waited with baited teeth, the leaves dripping onto the forest floor stopped mid-drop, and the little mushroom people called Caps scrunched close and still against the loam. Nothing could move under her shadow, for Bright equaled motion.

She sought the sparks of Bright.

Dark crouched on the branch of a tall tree, next to a knothole where an owl pressed itself, trembling. Dark bared her fangs and watched for movement, for creatures with Bright spreading through them like a sunrise.

A darting, a flash! A fish in the brook! The water had stilled, but an orange minnow had managed to hold on to the heat of noon even under Dark’s sway.

She dove with the speed of the owl, drawing on the idea of a creature with wings. She grew a beak of sorts, and talons, and skimmed the surface of the still water, grabbing at the minnow, at its Bright. The fish burst forward out of her reach, swimming and knocking against another stilled fish, then bouncing off a stick. Then it slowed and stopped, having used all its Bright.

Dark pulled up from the stream, absorbing her talons and beak back into herself, but

keeping the wings. She flapped to the other side and landed on the forest floor, in the crinkling loam. The ants under it had all paused and the Caps did not scatter in fear, using any Bright they may have hidden. She shoved one, pushing it over in a sudden fit of anger.

She didn’t just want Bright. She needed it. How else could she endure the endless void of herself, when the sun banished her back to that paralysis space, that unending rigidity no matter how she vibrated with the maddening desire to move—

The Cap she had knocked over had landed with their finger pointing, and their little blue eyes seemed to stare at something behind Dark. She whirled and a Brightness netted her attention, something sliding into a lesser darkness, a hole in the ground. She crouched and whispered with the lips of the mushroom people, “Thank you.”

Their eyes seemed to acknowledge her, and on a whim, she propped them back upright with a half-formed mushroom cap of her own.

She bolted forward with the speed of the brook, with the frothing of water through its forest trough. She arrived at the hole where the creature with the Bright had descended and funneled herself down it, rolling herself into a long, thin tube. She bunched up at first but thinned her bulky front end and slid along through the hole in the ground. Brightness showed up ahead, and she went nearly mad, slow as she felt in the tunnel. It reminded her of the void of herself, and she shuddered.

The tunnel branched to the right, and she followed the creature, a snake of some kind with bright green scales. How they flickered, how they shone! How she wished she could live in this world in the sun. They didn’t know what they had. They didn’t know the agony of staying motionless for millennia, and even before that. She hadn’t known what years were, before. Time had not existed before motion. Motion had not existed before Bright. And a frozen part of Dark had always existed, the core of her that never moved, never brightened, no matter how much Bright she consumed.

She’d almost caught up with the snake when it shot down another branching way, then another just as quick. It held a lot of Bright. It must have sunned all day to have so much. She followed, but the tunnel had branched too many ways, and she lost it.

She slunk back the way she had come. She didn’t have much Bright in herself left. That was always the gamble: to acquire more Bright, she had to use the Bright and motion she had already taken.

A bright patch of Bright caught her gaze. She zeroed in on it.

The Caps had set up a little campfire, and they danced around it, bouncing off each others’ mushroom tops. They fell backwards, laughing.

Dark growled. She called the sense of the snake she’d hunted, winding towards them soundlessly. An older one, with a wizened cap, pointed at her and shouted. They all bobbled towards their fire and scooped dirt on it. It sputtered, and died out, and the Bright faded in all of them, too.

She paused, confused. How had they started the fire in the first place, if they hadn’t had Bright? How could they have moved?

Then one peeked out from behind one of their little root houses, the same one that had motioned her towards the snake. She recognized their blue cap with red dots, and their blue eyes. Bright pulsed inside them.

Dark almost lunged forward, but . . .

“Did that fire help you all move? Without Bright?”

The Cap nodded.

“How?”

They waddled towards the fire and showed her, with two sticks, how to create fire. With patience and just a little motion, they lit all the Caps like a display. A feast of Bright for her. The mushroom person tilted their cap up, and a shy smile slanted their lips. “Come dance with us!”

They didn’t deserve what they didn’t appreciate. They could never know perpetual immobility!

But should they suffer just because I do?

I don’t want to take their Bright if I don’t have to.

The two thoughts rubbed together like the mushroom person’s sticks, and the frozen stillness in her core shifted for the first time. Heat and motion flared inside her. She glowed with the sense of fire.

Now she could become Bright whenever she needed, even in the void. She didn’t have to steal Bright anymore.

She danced with the Caps as their fire that night, sparks of Bright and Dark coexisting in the shadows of her flame.