Lunar Enchantment

Shadows of the Moon

"Grams!" I gasped.

"I see you found your way into the trunk."

I nodded my head.

She sat on one of the boxes not far from me, pulling her favorite red scarf from around her neck. "How on earth did you find that key?"

"A lot of looking," I said.

She took a deep breath and walked over to where I sat. She picked up the ledger I was looking at and flipped to the back, pulling out a large piece of parchment paper.

"Here. Look at this."

I opened it up and saw that it was a bunch of names written down. 

"A family tree?" I asked.

Grandma nodded her head. "That's our family going back for quite some time."

I glanced at all of the names. Some I recognized, others I didn't. I stopped at my grandmothers name and my parents.

"Hey, Grams?"

"Yes?"

"Is your date of birth wrong on this thing?"

She glanced over my shoulder. "Um, no. That is correct."

"If can't be," I said quietly.

"Why not?" She questioned.

"Grandma. I know that you're old, but you're not that old. You were not born in 1900. You would be..."

"123 years old next month."

"Grandma....Grams...come on..."

"What? I was born December 10, 1900."

"There is no way. You are not 123 years old. That's simply impossible."

"For normal folks yeah, that is impossible. For us, that's normal."

"Us?" I asked hesitantly. 

"Keep reading through all of that and you'll find all the answers that you're looking for," she said standing up. "Don't be up too late though."

"That doesn't answer my question!"

"Just read."

"Grams..." She kept walking away as I called for her. "Grandma! GRANDMOTHER!"

She closed the door behind her, leaving me with all of the family secrets.

"Okay, Grams is 123." I looked at the family tree and at my parents birth years. "That doesn't make sense. They were born in 1955? That would make them 68? That's not possible...they look like they're in their late thirties. Not in their late 60s."

I pulled out another ledger and read a few pages. The top of each page said Lunari family + Location.

"Wait, Lunari isn't a person?"

Each page had different last names, including ours. And Aiden's.

At the very bottom of the trunk in one last small buddle of papers I didn't pull out yet was a scroll rolled up. 

I carefully unrolled it and started reading. It detailed a people unlike any other in history. They were humans pushed t o the bring and turned to their Gods for help. The Gods answered their prayers for help and gave them the ability to change their shapes. These shape-shifters possessed a mystical connection with the moon and were known to transform into majestic panthers, harnessing both the grace of the feline and the power of the celestial body that governed their existence.

Scroll of the Lunari

In a time when the world was cloaked in darkness, and the cosmos cast its silvery glow upon the earth, there dwelt a tribe known as the Lunari. They were a tribe apart, with eyes that mirrored the endless night sky and souls bound to the lunar rhythms. Each Lunari was an embodiment of the moon's ethereal essence, blessed or perhaps cursed with the ability to assume the form of a panther at will.