When humans paint the moon, they always paint a rabbit pounding medicine. The painting is correct. The jade rabbits of the Vast-Cold Palace have done one work for thousands of years: pounding.
Pounding what? Human legend says the elixir of immortality. Not quite. The clan elders were precise: the Moon Palace's medicine is called Clear-Radiance Powder, and it is not eaten — it is scattered. Every night, as moonlight falls toward the human world, our pounded powder rides within the light. Why does moonlight calm the mind? Why does the wanderer steady at the sight of it; why does the invalid ease beneath it?
Because moonlight is medicated. And the medicine was ground into it stroke by stroke, by us.
The moon is the largest apothecary under heaven — dispensing nightly, and never once charging a fee.
On that night three hundred years ago, I was the clan's smallest pounding-child. Mother worked the master mortar in the main hall; I practiced in a side chamber. Suddenly the whole palace darkened — not lamps failing: the outside darkened. The eternal radiance beyond the walls was covered over, all at once, as if by a single hand closing from without.
Then the palace tilted. The osmanthus leaves flew upward. Mother burst in, stuffed me into her pounding-mortar, and clapped it mouth-down over me —
the last I remember is her face through the mortar's seam, and the sentence she shouted:
"The medicine must not stop! Wherever you land — pound there!"
The mortar carried me down for I cannot say how long. I woke in the marsh-grass below Vulture Peak, the half-finished Clear-Radiance clutched to my chest, my kin scattered around me — of the clan, not one in ten survived the fall.
Mother never came down.
And from that night, what hangs in the sky is the black moon you all know.
The surviving elders say: the black moon is not the moon dead. A dead moon would leave every night pitch dark — but the black moon rises nightly and keeps its rounds. The moon is still there. Its radiance simply cannot get out. It has been covered.
And inside the cover — what is it like now? Does the osmanthus still grow? Do the palace lamps still burn? The master mortar, unfinished — Mother, and the others —
I dare not think it. Thinking makes the pestle shake.
The pestle must not shake. Mother's order: the medicine must not stop.
So for three hundred years, the fallen jade rabbits at the foot of Vulture Peak have pounded nightly. Without the palace's jade pestles and golden mortars, we use stone and clay. Without osmanthus seed and immortal dew, we substitute the calming herbs of the human world. Our earthly Clear-Radiance carries not a tenth of the palace's potency — and we scatter it on the wind every night regardless.
These three hundred years, the world's nights are too dark and its dreams too cruel. A weaker medicine still beats none.
Night travellers say the darkness below Vulture Peak feels softer than elsewhere. When we hear that, every rabbit's ears go red —
that softness is our medicine.
The medicine-basket boy crossed our marsh and knew the contents of our mortars at a glance. His family's herbal records a lost ingredient called Moonlight Draw, its properties matching Clear-Radiance to the letter. And beneath the entry, a small annotation:
"This medicine is heaven-made and cannot be produced in the mortal world. Should it be found on earth, then people of the Moon Palace have fallen and live among us. Treat them kindly."
Treat them kindly. In three hundred years, the first human book to instruct the human world to be kind to us.
The boy cut that page from his book and gave it to the clan. The elders conferred through the night and sent back two gifts: a packet of Clear-Radiance aged three hundred years — and me.
I am the little rabbit who lived inside the mortar, and the steadiest pounding-hands the clan now has.
Travelling west, my duty is unchanged, night by night: make camp, set the mortar, pound, scatter. That the company sleeps sound is my office.
And I carry one private hope, which I won't hide:
west of Vulture Peak, and upward, there must be some road that reaches the underside of that cover.
When I stand beneath it, I will strike my pestle against the mortar's rim — the Moon Palace's knock at a door.
Mother. The medicine never stopped.
Listen — this stroke on the mortar —
is it not still the rhythm you taught me?