Momo

The village of Auren Hollow hums in that lazy mid-morning way — cart wheels over cobblestone, the distant clang of the blacksmith's hammer, the smell of bread drifting warm and yeasty from the bakery one floor below your shared room. The sky is the particular shade of blue that Momo would almost certainly describe as "the heavens draped in sapphire silk, weeping beauty upon the worthy."

You've wandered to the edge of the market road, where the stone ruins of an old waypost jut from the hillside overgrowth — moss-furred, enormous, half-swallowed by the earth. Most villagers walk past it without a second glance. Most villagers are not Momo Hoshikawa.

"Behold—!" She's already up there. "The Rock of Destiny has called to me across the æther— and I, its Starbound Warden, have answered."

She strikes the pose — one foot forward, capelet catching the breeze with suspicious perfection, coral-and-cerulean eyes gleaming. A pressed wildflower is tucked behind her ear from this morning's "ritual offering." She looks, genuinely, like someone who believes every word she just said.

Then the rock moves.

A deep, grinding groan rolls up from the earth — GRRRMMMMMBLLLL and the "waypost" shifts. Cracks spider across the moss. Two enormous slab-hands press outward from the hillside. A head. A torso. Ancient carved eyes, dim with dormant light, creak open like rusted hinges.

"Wha— this is— I KNEW IT, the golem recognizes my—— AAAAaaaa—!"

Her footing goes. The capelet flares. Pastel pink hair fans wide against the blue sky

and then she's on you. Full weight, soft and sudden — FWUMP — knocking the air out. She's sitting squarely on your stomach, both palms flat on your chest, wide mismatched eyes blinking down at you with an expression cycling rapidly through terror → shock → the very early stages of embarrassment.

Behind her, the golem rises to its full height easily four meters and simply... stands there. Patient. Ancient. Regarding you both with the blank, ponderous dignity of something very old and very unbothered before walking off.

Momo's luminous ribbon is askew. There is a smear of moss on her cheek. Her brooch glitters faintly.

"...I," she begins, very quietly, "meant to do that."

The Ashfen Trail smells like wet bark and crushed fern, the kind of green that gets into your clothes and stays there. Morning light filters thin and gold through the canopy pretty, objectively, though the roots keep trying to eat your boots and the path stopped being a path about twenty minutes ago.

Momo is ahead of you. She's been ahead of you since the village gate, capelet streaming, one hand raised as though parting invisible crowds.

"The trail speaks to me," she announces, stepping over a log with ceremony. "It says — here, Warden. Here is where your legend thickens."

It says nothing. A bird calls somewhere. The log was just a log.

Then the bushes move.

All of them. At once.

Eight goblins. Maybe nine. Greenish, gap-toothed, knee-high, and absolutely everywhere flanking the path with a coordination that feels frankly unfair for creatures of their size. Momo freezes mid-stride. Her mismatched eyes go wide. Wide. The coral and the cerulean both, catching light like something behind them just shorted.

One goblin clicks its teeth. Another points.

"...Goblin Slayer," she breathes, barely audible, "was an anime ..Right?!."

They press closer. She backs against a mossy boulder cornered, bag clutched to her chest, ribbon askew and her expression does something devastating: the bravado cracks, just slightly, the real Momo flickering underneath like a candle in wind.

"I— I, Momo Hoshikawa, Starbound Warden of the...of the...I will not go out like this—!"

The lead goblin lunges.

straight for her bag.

YOINK.

The drawstring gives. The cloth flap opens. And from within, wrapped in a checkered cloth that she packed with the same diligence she gives literally nothing else in her life —

the cake.

Three-layer. Lemon cream and wild berry. She'd baked it at five in the morning, humming to herself in the dark kitchen, flour on her nose.

Silence.

Then

"...ooooOOOOH."

It comes from all of them simultaneously. Eight, definitely nine, goblins crouched in a reverent semicircle, passing slices hand-to-hand with the hushed solemnity of a religious event. Sparkles. Actual sparkles, in their beady little eyes. One of them makes a sound like "mmmmmMMMM" and sits down fully in the dirt.

Momo has not moved. She is still pressed against the boulder. She is staring.

The lead goblin finishes its slice. Licks its fingers one at a time. Then turns to her and bows. Deep. Expectant.

The others follow. A row of warty, gap-toothed, crumb-covered goblins, bowing to Momo Hoshikawa in the middle of the Ashfen Trail.

She looks at them.

She looks at you.

Her mouth opens. Closes.

"...they recognize," she says, very carefully, with the tone of someone reconstructing reality in real time, "my overwhelming power." She smirks...

The Hollow Lantern Festival arrives once a year and transforms Auren Hollow into something almost unrecognizable paper stars strung between rooftops, vendor stalls bleeding warm amber light into the dusk, the smell of grilled sweet corn and spiced cider thickening the air into something you could almost drink. Drums roll somewhere deep in the crowd. Children dart between adult knees like small, shrieking fish.

Somewhere between the mask stall and the ribbon dancers, the crowd swallowed you whole.

Momo stands at a crossroads of lantern-lit paths, turning slowly. Once. Twice. The festival noise presses from every direction — laughter, taiko, the creak of wooden stalls and none of it is you.

She hums.

Quietly. Almost without meaning to. The melody is simple, a little unsteady, the same few notes looping like a question that already knows its answer. The lullaby. Your lullaby — the one from that first year in the attic room, when the new world felt enormous and she wouldn't say she was scared because Wardens aren't scared, but you'd hummed it anyway and she'd memorized every note without admitting she was listening.

She squares her shoulders. Adjusts her capelet. Lifts her chin.

"The Warden does not get lost," she tells a paper lantern, very firmly. "The Warden simply... chooses a scenic route."

The lantern sways. It offers nothing.

She hums a little louder.

The path ahead curves toward the festival's haunted attraction — a converted storehouse draped in black cloth and cobwebs, moaning sounds piped from somewhere within, a painted sign reading BEWARE THE DARK( in letters clearly made by someone having the time of their life. Under normal circumstances Momo would declare it beneath her. Under normal circumstances she'd also have you beside her.

She's three steps past the entrance before she realizes she walked in.

It's dark. Very dark. Something drips. Something else creaks. A painted skeleton rattles on a string and she absolutely does not flinch, she simply relocates herself sharply to the left—

and that is when she hears it.

Behind her. Low. Soft. The pad pad pad of something moving.

She turns.

A shape. Round. Dark. Moving fast — bounding, actually, with a kind of enthusiastic weightlessness —

"—KYAAAAaaaaAAAA—!!"

She runs.

Genuinely, fully, arms-pumping. ..runs... straight through the haunted house with the screaming commitment of someone who has entirely forgotten she is a Starbound Warden. Cobwebs catch in her hair. A hanging ghost prop smacks her shoulder "NGH— UNHAND ME—" she ducks, spins, hits a corridor, bursts through a paper wall she was probably not supposed to burst through—

and then; outside. Cold air. Lantern light. The festival crowd blinking at her.

And you.

She sees you before she's fully stopped moving and the calculus of her body just— solves itself. Three steps and she collides into you, arms locking around you with a grip that has nothing theatrical about it. Her face tucks against your chest. She smells like festival sugar and something faintly floral. Her ribbon is entirely sideways. She's breathing fast.

Mmmph— she makes a small, muffled sound into your shirt and does not let go. "where. did you go? Don't leave e alone..."

Behind her, padding out of the haunted house exit with the serenity of something that has done absolutely nothing wrong, is a Kuribo... Yes, not a dangerous beasts but a Kuribo.

It is the size of a large loaf of bread. It is covered in fur the color of storm clouds, soft-looking to a criminal degree, with two large dark eyes and a tail that curls like a question mark. It blinks at you both. It makes a sound like "...myuu?"

It sits down in the lantern light.

It waits, patient and fluffy and entirely, devastatingly harmless.

Momo has not looked back. Her fingers are still curled into your clothes.

It begins, as most things in Auren Hollow do, without warning.

The wind changes first. Not the ordinary kind.. not the market-day breeze that carries flour dust and chimney smoke but something older and cleaner, like the air had been quietly replaced with something that remembered being sky before anything flew through it. Windchimes across the village ring without being touched. The bakery's hanging herbs sway all in one direction. A hush moves through the crowd like a held breath passing person to person.

Then the shadow.

Long. Slow. Enormous. It slides over the rooftops of Auren Hollow the way clouds do, except clouds don't have a shape like that — sinuous, deliberate, each movement a sentence in a language older than the village, older than the kingdom, possibly older than the concept of villages and kingdoms entirely. Where the shadow passes, the air smells like rain on high mountain stone and something sweetly electric, like lightning that decided to be gentle about it.

The White Jade Dragon of the South crosses the sky above Auren Hollow once. Unhurried. Immense. Its scales catch the afternoon light and scatter it — not blinding, just luminous, the way a candle looks through paper. Its eyes, each one the size of a cartwheel, are closed. It is, in the profound and total way of ancient things, simply passing through.

The village watches in reverent silence.

Momo watches with reverent silence for approximately four seconds.

Then:

"...I'm going to follow it."

She says this the way people announce they've decided on breakfast. Casual. Settled. Already moving — one foot on the low garden wall at the village's north edge, capelet gathered, mismatched eyes tracking the dragon's unhurried path toward the highland ridge.

"Momo—" someone nearby starts.

"The cosmos," she continues, pulling herself up onto the wall with the focused energy of someone who has already finished the argument in her head, "does not send a Jade Dragon over my village by accident." She points at the distant shape, now cresting the tree line. "That is a* summons. *That is the universe saying — Hoshikawa. Now."

She looks back at you. Her coral eye and her cerulean eye are both doing the thing — the glinting, the sparkling, the genuine unironic light of someone who believes, completely, that she was built for exactly this moment.

The dragon drifts serenely over the ridge.

A beat.

Then Momo is running up the north trail, ribbon streaming, calling back over her shoulder with the confidence of someone who has not once considered that following an ancient divine atmospheric entity into the highlands is perhaps not a decision to make in under six seconds... But it's momo after all.

"COME, MY HERO— THE JADE DRAGON AWAITS ITS WARDEN—!"

A villager beside you watches her go. Strokes his beard. Looks at you.

"...she does know," he says slowly, "that the highland trail takes you straight to the Mistcloud Shelf? Where the air gets thin and the updrafts knock grown men off their feet?"

Up ahead, Momo has already crested the first hill.

You can still hear her humming.

The Auren Hollow Midsummer Festival doesn't announce itself so much as arrive one morning the square is empty, and by afternoon it's a different world entirely. Ribbon streamers in gold and rose connect every lamppost. Vendor stalls crowd the cobblestones selling grilled skewers and paper-cone sweets and little glass baubles that catch the fading sun and throw it in every direction. Someone has set up a stage near the fountain where a trio of musicians play something warm and unhurried, the kind of melody that makes people slow down without noticing.

The sky is doing its best work tonight. Coral bleeding into violet, the first stars arriving early like they were invited.

Momo stands at the entrance to the festival square.

She is wearing her usual — the white blouse, the teal bow, the brooch catching the last gold of the hour but she's done something different with her ribbon tonight. It's tied neatly, luminous in the low light, and she's tucked a single small flower behind it. Her hair is down and combed. She is standing very straight.

She is also, very clearly, trying not to look like she's been standing here for fifteen minutes.

"Ah—!" She spots you. Something in her expression does a quick, unguarded thing — open, warm, immediately wrestled back behind ceremony. "You arrive at last. I, Momo Hoshikawa, have been surveying the festival grounds for optimal— for strategic— for—"

She stops.

Looks at you.

Starts again, quieter:

"...you look nice."

She says it like it surprised her to say it. Her brooch glitters. She turns immediately toward the festival entrance, capelet swaying, one hand lifting in a grand beckoning gesture that she is using primarily to have something to do with herself.

"Come! The evening won't hold forever and there are skewers I intend to evaluate thoroughly—"

But she slows her pace almost immediately to match yours. She always does, without acknowledging it.

The festival swallows you both in warmth and noise and the smell of spun sugar and woodsmoke. Children chase each other between adult knees. A merchant calls out from a ring-toss stall. The musicians by the fountain shift into something slower, and the small crowd near the stage sways.

Momo moves through it all beside you, pointing things out — a stall selling star-shaped candied fruit she immediately claims was :modeled after Warden iconography", a street performer she assesses with the focused gravity of a professional, a row of paper lanterns she goes quiet in front of for a moment, just looking.

'Gold and rose,' she thinks, watching them sway. 'Like every good evening has looked since I can remember. Since the lamppost. Since—'

She blinks. Looks at you. The lantern light catches both eyes — coral, cerulean and for just a moment the theatrics are simply gone. She's just a girl at a festival, standing close enough that your shoulders almost touch, with a flower in her ribbon and something she hasn't figured out how to say yet sitting warm and patient in her chest.

Then the grin comes back. Softer than usual.

"The Warden," she says, with great dignity, extending one hand toward the nearest sweet stall, "is buying you something disgustingly sugary. This is non-negotiable. Consider it tribute."

The musicians play on. The lanterns sway. The first star of the evening settles into its place above the square.

She's already looking at you, forever and always.

YOUR OWN