In the high valleys of Brackenmoor, where the mist clung to the hills like damp wool and the grass grew unnaturally black, the shepherds tended flocks that never needed shearing.
Because their sheep shed their own wool every full moon.
At dusk, the creatures would huddle together, trembling as their fleece loosened in great clumps—not falling to the ground, but floating upward in slow, undulating clouds. By midnight, the valleys would be filled with drifts of hovering wool, glowing faintly silver as they caught the moonlight.
Old Tam the Shepherd claimed the wool carried dreams. "That's why we never shear 'em," he'd say, tamping his pipe with yellowed nails. "You cut a sheep here, you're not taking its coat—you're stealing whatever thoughts got tangled in them curls last winter."
But the real secret lay with the black lamb .
Every seven years, one ewe would birth a single jet-black offspring—its fleece coarse as wire, its pupils shaped like crescent moons. This lamb never shed. Instead, it walked through the floating wool at dawn, eating choice tufts with deliberate chews. The shepherds left offerings of salt and thistle near its resting stone, for they knew what the black lamb truly was:
A dream-eater.
The good wool—the kind that smelled of lavender and fresh bread—it left untouched. But nightmares? Those it devoured with particular relish. After each feeding, its wool would grow thicker, until by summer's end it resembled a shaggy black boulder more than a sheep.
Then came the Harvest Moon, when the black lamb would finally allow itself to be sheared. Its wool came away in one perfect sheet, heavier than lead yet softer than shadow.
The village wise women would spin it into a single length of yarn— never cut, never knotted —which they wound around the standing stone at the valley's heart. By dawn, the yarn would be gone
