The night was warm and the hour long, the moon swollen and bright in the sky, shining through an open window to fall softly across the restless form of a young baby. She stirred and hiccupped and cried, her large anxious eyes turning this way and that in the cold wash of moonlight mixed with shadow.

“Hush,” whispered the woman by her cradle, her mother; a woman whose voice she had heard thousands of times. Instinctively, she turned towards the sound, reaching towards the woman. Hold me, the babe's outstretched arms seemed to beg.

“No, no,” came the mother's voice. “It's late… sleep… sleep, my child.” As the baby listened with tearful eyes and a full throat, the woman began to sing softly and soothingly. Her mother's voice caused a comforting reaction in the baby, after all, she'd only just been born, not yet christened, and her mother's voice, distant and warm, was the most familiar thing to her now. The baby whimpered, then closed her eyes… and only a few moments after that, the woman's eyes closed in the chair besides the cradle and her figure slumped against its back.

A breeze moved across the room, a whisper of moonlight come to life, it almost seemed. The curtains danced and fluttered in the breeze. The child stirred but didn't awaken; the woman at the cradle-side did not even stir. The patch of moonlight on the bed seemed to darken, and the breeze only increased, its howling intermixed with a silver sprinkling of notes, notes that reached high, low, around, and everywhere. The mother remained fast asleep, but the baby's eyes opened, opened wide, large and gray and staring.

“Don't you worry, little one,” a soft, alien voice said, but the baby's wide eyes were blank, absolutely blank, her attention focused fully on the music, the music drifting through the window and melting into the corners, shadowy figures with long fingers that plucked strings and covered holes, shaped sound and movement itself. Either with strange devices to create the sound or with their own voices, they wove a haunting strain, and the child's eyes never stopped staring, staring. Her mother snored in the background, barely stirring.

“Come with us,” came the next intonation, and gentle hands so unlike her mother's touch took a hold on the baby, and still her eyes stared at them, stared, almost as if it were the music she was seeing, or trying to see. A moment later they had whisked her away into the night, leaving only a frail and strange-looking one of their number in the cradle, laying there as a surrogate, awaiting the mother's return from slumber…

The night stretched out endlessly, and it was so warm, very warm. A tiny cornfield and garden seemed to almost blossom in the warm air and the moonlight, tingeing shadowy around the edges. Most nights, the light was scarce and colors dulled, almost nonexistent. Tonight, however, the cornfield and the surrounding meadows and trees seemed alive with color, the grass undulating in the breeze with green and blue and gold, the cornstalks resplendent in orange and purple, the trees covered in reds and greens and yellows.

The cause of the celebration was none other than a human child, a baby, fresh and new and healthy. The elusive races of the Otherworld danced and sang, and it was their music that colored the night. They were not the only ones to witness this delightful ritual, though all humans around them were fast asleep, in a depth of slumber, filled with dreams that would be remembered only in snatches. The dreams were the dreams of the fae, during that time when faerie kind and human kind knew each other but lived in separate worlds, worlds apart from each other, worlds where time has different meanings and you should not always believe what you see.

But they were not the only ones here tonight. Two spots of yellow-orange peered from the cornfield seemingly untouched by the moon. Watching the dancing lights, the music swirling through the air, the playful leaping and the colorful and elaborate ornamentation, was a young being just making its first forays into a new experience. Though small and young, little older than the human babe that had been whisked away to the tinkling of bells and the patter of tiny feet, here was a creature who lay low, unknowing that it was watched from afar, not by the fae, but by its elders, some as expansive as the cosmos themselves, living among the stars and holding the world in the steady palm of their minds, knowing it, not caring about it and yet loving it for its whole self.

While from the house a cat cried, yowled, the Otherworldly entourage departed, keeping the human babe close inside its group, departed on swift steeds and enchanting music. The creature in the cornfield stayed where it was, even as the woman in the house awakened. The cornfield dweller heard her cries of anger against the feline, the feline who knew that the thing in the cradle was not a human baby. More yowls followed, then the sound of an inhumane and sorrowful wailing as the surrogate demanded to be fed. The creature in the cornfield blinked brown eyes as its head emerged from between the stalks, the shadow falling away. It crawled into the grass, then spread uncertain gauzy wings, looked up to the bright moonlit sky, and, flapping those wings, struggled to align itself with the upward currents of air and the earth, soaring young and curious and free into the night sky.