THE MOON LION

Once upon a time in a forest there lived a joyous, golden-haired maiden. Her beauty and laughter warmed the trees around her like rays of sunlight. As she began to grow older, and her voice grew stronger, it attracted the attention of a terrible sorcerer. He coveted her innocent light as a source of power for himself and desired no one else to look upon her. So, he stole the beautiful girl from the forest and raised her in his castle with high walls of stone. He claimed the walls were for her own safety, protecting her from predators, and over time she forgot her original nature of joy and freedom.

Thus, the girl spent many years within the confines of the sorcerer’s castle, thanking the walls for protecting her from the outside world. Some days she would look out over the castle gardens and tremble at the shape of giant lion paws pacing the grounds around her window. The sorcerer played on her fears, telling her that she would stay safe from the lion as long as she remained pure of body and mind. She channeled these instructions into her daily task of scrubbing the castle from top to bottom. Whenever she felt an aching unrest in her bones and found herself wondering about the world, she would remember the lion awaiting her and tremble with terror. It would take scrubbing everything clean again to settle the image of those giant paws in her mind. 

However, the maiden did not know her laughter and fierce independence had been too much for the sorcerer to capture entirely. Although her memory would fade with each sunrise, she was spelled to live as a girl by day, and a lion by night. With this trickery, the sorcerer had separated her from the essence of her womanhood, her brilliant and untamed self sequestered to live in the dark - where no one could experience her full truth. By night, her lion-self would awaken in a field and travel the lands around the castle. Even though she felt more fully alive as a lion, her loneliness was so intense that every night she found herself pacing underneath the castle windows, hoping someone would witness her. 

One night, under a brilliant full moon, the lion could no longer stand her plight and cried for help from the sky above her. Her voice was so lovely in the night that the moon answered her, mirroring the light of the sun down upon her golden mane. The lion turned to follow this light and gasped as it illuminated the stone walls. Her deep knowledge of the castle, mixed with the light of the moon, allowed her to see imperfections and weaknesses in the stone. She took her natural gift of cleaning and turned it into cleansing. As she clawed at the stone it turned from masonry into natural rock - rock that had never been touched by the sorcerer’s magic. As the walls fell away, the lion made it all the way to her bedroom and roared loud enough to scare the sorcerer into running away. She thanked the moon, and drifted to sleep as the sun rose. In the morning she awoke as a woman again, dazed with a dream that felt incredibly vivid. She stood and looked in a mirror, and saw a beautiful lion in the reflection. In that moment, she knew a deep truth that all she had ever needed was to truly witness herself. Embracing the lion within, she smiled at her reflection and chose to walk out of the crumbled castle, into the world beyond. From that day on, she remained a woman through the day and night, but could always look to the full moon to remember the strength of the lion within her.