⟁≋)) The Killing Moon & The Shadowed Sun: On Healing, Sovereignty, and the End of Performance

A study in rupture, sovereignty, and the refusal to perform healing

the death of decaying emotions to birth a light—  

a depth of feeling that moves impervious  

between midnight and the noon day sun,  

tendered by love.  

Reading Rainbow Tings

Reading Rainbow Tings is where books stop being entertainment and become companions. Every story I enter changes the atmosphere of my own body, leaving behind new language, new questions, and sometimes entirely new cosmologies.

Reading Rainbow is a space for the books, ideas, and Afrofuturist worlds that move me—curated through my own reading practice and obsessions.

It’s about exploring texts that expand the mind, ignite imagination, and connect us to histories, futures, and embodied ways of knowing.

Reading here is active, reflective, and deeply personal, inviting engagement that shapes how we see, think, and inhabit the world.

Some books end when the final page is turned. Others continue unfolding long afterward. The Dreamblood Duology became one of those books for me—its pages opening into conversations about sovereignty, grief, healing, embodiment, and the slow refusal to keep performing a life that no longer fit.

⟁≋)) The Killing Moon & The Shadowed Sun: On Healing, Sovereignty, and the End of Performance

Healing is not the removal of darkness. It is learning which parts of yourself have already died, which deserve to be mourned, and which are finally ready to live without performance. These books became less about dream magic and more about the difficult sovereignty of remaining with myself.

The Killing Moon & The Shadowed Sun  

subtitle : A study in rupture, sovereignty, and the refusal to perform healing

the death of decaying emotions to birth a light—  

a depth of feeling that moves impervious  

between midnight and the noon day sun,  

tendered by love.  

————————

I am an N.K. Jemisin fan.  

Not in a celebrity way. Not in a pedestal way.  

I do not know this author. I just know the work.  

And the work is undeniable.  

The Broken Earth trilogy and The Inheritance trilogy sit firmly in my top ten when it comes to Afro futurism, fantasy, and the kind of worldbuilding that does not just entertain, but reorganizes how you understand power, land, and the body.  

So when I came to the Dreamblood Duology, I was caught off guard.  

It did not pull me in immediately.  

Not in the way I had been trained to expect from her later work.  

There was no immediate emotional grip.  

No instant immersion into urgency or danger.  

Instead, there was ceremony.  

Structure.  

Distance.  

And at first, I resisted that.  

Because I am used to being pulled in quickly.  

I am used to feeling the stakes in my body almost immediately.  

But Dreamblood does not move like that.  

It asks you to sit.  

To observe.  

To learn the system before you are allowed to feel its consequences.  

And that felt slow to me.  

Until I understood what I was actually being asked to do.  

After realizing that these were her earliest works, everything shifted.  

Not in a way that excused the experience—  

but in a way that revealed it.  

This is foundation work.  

This is where you see the architecture forming.  

The early language of what would later become the vast, emotionally immersive worlds I fell in love with.  

And more than that—  

this is where I had to recognize something about myself.  

I do not always enter story through structure.  

I enter through embodiment.  

Through feeling.  

Through consequence.  

Through rupture.  

Through the moment where something breaks  

and I am forced to respond.  

And Dreamblood delays that.  

Until it doesn’t.  

And when it opens—  

it does not open gently.  

Like much of what I read, I did not come to these books by accident.  

I tend to encounter stories at the exact moment they are able to reflect something back to me that I could not yet name on my own.  

Not as escape.  

But as recognition.  

And these books, especially The Shadowed Sun,  

met me in the middle of something I am actively living through.  

A process that, from the outside, has been read as instability.  

As distance.  

As rupture without direction.  

But internally, has been structure forming itself.  

These books did not just give me language.  

They gave me a mirror.

What follows is not analysis.

It is what remained after the rupture.

---

I do not review books. I study what they awaken inside my body. The Dreamblood Duology became a companion through rupture, helping me understand that what others called chaos was often structure quietly forming beneath the surface.

I did not understand at first.

The Killing Moon felt distant.  

Ceremonial. Structured.  

A world of rules, of containment, of bodies disciplined into purpose.  

It read like control.  

It read like something removed from feeling.  

But I stayed.  

And what I did not yet have language for was this:  

what looked like chaos in my own life  

was actually structure forming itself.  

Not imposed.  

Not approved.  

Not easily legible to others.  

But forming.  

For the past five years, I have been watched  

as if I were unraveling.  

As if I had lost coherence.  

As if I had stepped outside of something stable  

and could not return.  

But what was being witnessed was not madness.  

It was construction.  

Slow. Internal. Unvalidated.  

A structure that did not ask for permission to exist.  

Because it did not perform stability,  

it was named instability.  

The Killing Moon is that space.  

Where systems are built beneath the surface.  

Where discipline is learned.  

Where power is understood  

before it is ever allowed to be felt.  

And then the breaking comes.  

The Shadowed Sun is not a continuation.  

It is a submersion.  

This is where structure meets consequence.  

Where power is no longer theoretical.  

Where the body must hold  

what the mind has already learned.  

Not all water soothes.  

Some water breaks you open.  

Some water baptizes you into a self you did not choose—  

but must learn to become.  

This is that water.  

And this is where perception begins to split.  

Because from the outside,  

what this kind of transformation looks like  

is inconsistency.  

Withdrawal.  

Distance.  

Refusal.  

It does not look like healing.  

Because most people have only been taught  

how to recognize healing when it is performative.  

When it is soft.  

When it is legible.  

When it reassures others  

that you are still safe to them.  

Real healing does not ask to be understood.  

It prioritizes truth.  

Sometimes that truth looks like rupture.  

Sometimes it looks like no longer participating.  

Sometimes it looks like removing yourself  

from the very structures that taught you how to survive.  

I am learning that sovereignty is not a clean act.  

It is not empowerment in the way it is often spoken about.  

It is not clarity.  

It is not ease.  

Every book I read eventually becomes an ecosystem. Afroscape is my way of studying literature as embodied climate—mapping the movement of rupture, discernment, circulation, and sovereignty rather than reducing stories to plot. The Dreamblood books became one of the first complete hydrosystems in this growing atlas.

Sometimes sovereignty looks like distance.  

Sometimes it looks like silence.  

Sometimes it looks like remaining out of contact  

with the very people who taught you what love was supposed to be.  

And that is where the depth of harm lives.  

Not just in what was done,  

but in what was expected to be endured  

in the name of connection.  

“knowledge of what it meant to be betrayed  

(given away, disrespected, exploited)  

by those who should have nurtured and protected.”  

That cannot be softened.  

And still—  

the body remembers love.  

“it helped, somehow, to know that she would not stop missing the people she loved”  

I am learning to live inside that sentence.  

To not return  

just to relieve the ache.  

To not collapse distance  

in order to feel held.  

Because this is also a form of baptism.  

“to enter a soul trapped in a nightmare one had to become a nightmare”  

Healing is not performance.  

And I am no longer performing it.  

Sometimes healing requires entering the nightmare.  

Naming it.  

Feeling it.  

Refusing to pretend it was anything else.  

This is where I am.  

In the movement between  

wanting things to change  

and understanding that they may not.  

In the space where hope exists  

without certainty.  

In the space where I am no longer waiting  

for resolution  

before I allow myself to continue.  

The killing moon did not destroy me.  

It ended what had already begun to decay.  

The shadowed sun did not remove my darkness.  

It taught me how to live with it.  

I am not waiting to become.  

I am learning how to stand  

inside what has already begun.  

Even when it is not understood.  

Even when it is not received.  

Even when truth costs me connection.  

Tendered by love.

⟁≋)) The Killing Moon & The Shadowed Sun: On Healing, Sovereignty, and the End of Performance

COSMOS WATERSHED

Field	Content
Companion	Freshwater; Son of the Storm; the Embodiment Diagram; The Wata(ring) W(hole); Reading Rainbow Tings; Afroscape Environmental Atlas.
Origin	Written during a season of estrangement, late neurodivergent self-understanding, and the realization that sovereignty often requires remaining with yourself long before anyone else understands your becoming.
Expansion	Establishes the first literary Afroscape hydrosystem. Introduces ritual water, dream climates, and environmental embodiment as a way of reading speculative fiction beyond plot, character, or genre.
Application	Invites readers to distinguish between performative healing and embodied healing. Encourages reading as an ecological practice where books alter atmosphere, circulation, discernment, and one’s relationship to self.
Lineage	Connects directly to ⟁≋)) Reading Rainbow Tings, ◉≋ Afroscape, ≋ The Six Waters, ⟁| Trans Learn Tings, Colonial Wildfire, the Embodiment Diagram, Reverse Osmo(cis), and the emerging Atmospheric Extension of the Wata(ring) W(hole).
Counter Currents	Performance vs. process. Collapse vs. construction. External perception vs. internal formation. Ritual vs. spectacle. Decay vs. discernment. Midnight and noon as companions rather than opposites.