Mystery of the Moonlit Rumpelstiltskin's Dance

More about Mystery of the Moonlit Rumpelstiltskin's Dance

It was the night before the last day of the lunar year when the forest awoke silently. The trees, usually dreamy, leaned slightly toward the center of the clearing, where something strange was happening. A fire, bluish and cold, licked across the black ground, and around this fire danced a creature barely larger than a child, but older than any song. His gait was crooked, but his step was swift. His hands, withered by time, snapped to the beat, while his boots pounded the ground with a wild rhythm. Rumpelstiltskin was his name—but no one knew that. Not anymore. And perhaps that was his curse. He didn't dance for an audience. He danced for the words that were leaving him, and for the name that had once bound him. And as the flames rose higher and the wind wound around him, he began to sing. The voice was slanted, almost breaking – but it carried a melody that slumbered deep beneath the crust of the world: "Today I bake, tomorrow I brew, the day after tomorrow I'll take the queen's child. Oh, how good that no one knows my name is Rumpelstiltskin." He threw back his head, croaked with laughter, and the song flew up like a bird from the darkness. It whirled through the forest, got lost in leaves, collected in drops on the moss – and finally found an ear. A child sat hidden among the ferns. It had large, alert eyes, hair like spider silk, and a finger on its lips. It had found the thread that led from a spinning wheel in a tower to here – a golden, shining thread, barely visible to those who had forgotten how to believe. Rumpelstiltskin was unaware of the eavesdropping. It kept spinning, faster and faster, and its song wove itself into the air. Shadows danced around him, old names flickered, then faded away again. He sang again, this time more quietly, almost to himself: "I was forgotten, I was lost, but my name remains born. There in the beat, in the step, in the sound – I am the rhyme, I am the urge." The clearing trembled as if the forest wanted to remember. And the child who listened placed the song like a pearl in his mind. It was no prince's child, no queen's daughter. But it had ears that heard the truth – and a heart that knew how to save a name. When the dance ended, Rumpelstiltskin knelt, his forehead pressed to the ground. His feet still steamed, his words had faded away. Then the fire dissolved, and with it the figure – into smoke, into dust, into sleep. But the name remained. In the song. In the moss. In the voice of the child who remembered. And somewhere, in another story, it will say: “Oh, how good that no one knows…” But there will be someone who knows.