The Woman Who Carried Two Moons - By Sabiha Atturkhan

Written By: Sabiha Atturkhan

Category: Short Stories

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

Sabiha Atturkhan's short story, "The Woman Who Carried Two Moons," is a compelling contribution to the Short Stories category of the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. In this narrative, Atturkhan explores the intricate themes of identity and legacy through the life of Hayley Marshall, a character navigating her dual existence. The piece captures the struggle and strength inherent in embracing one's multifaceted nature.

About the Work

Atturkhan's story delves into the duality of existence, weaving a rich tapestry of supernatural elements with profound human emotions. The mood is both poignant and empowering, as Hayley Marshall confronts her werewolf and vampire identities. The vivid imagery and haunting prose invite readers into a world where legacy and present collide, crafting a narrative that resonates with the universal quest for self-acceptance.

The Woman Who Carried Two Moons

Original Submission by Sabiha Atturkhan

THE WOMAN WHO CARRIED TWO MOONS

The story of Hayley Marshall, before the end

by Sabiha Atturkhan

— ✶ —

Hayley Marshall had been running since she was twelve.

Not metaphorically. Literally. On four legs, under the full moon, with the wind in what had briefly been her fur and the night opening in front of her like a gift. Running was the thing her wolf had always done best — better than fighting, better than howling, better than the careful political manoeuvres of the Crescent pack that had produced her and abandoned her in the same breath.

Running, she had always felt like only one thing.

For eight years it was enough. Eight years of the wolf and nothing else — the full moon predictable as a heartbeat, the pack scattered but the blood still singing its particular frequency, the body hers and only hers in the way it was only ever hers for three weeks out of four. She had built a life around those three weeks. She had learned to be a person in the spaces the moon left her.

Then the other thing arrived.

The problem was that she was two things. Had been, since the night Klaus Mikaelson had looked at her across a room and seen in her something that had no name yet.

— ✶ —

She had been twenty when the vampire side emerged.

Not gently. Nothing about Hayley Marshall had ever happened gently. It arrived the way her wolf had arrived — in crisis, in darkness, in a moment when something had to change or something would break. She had drunk from a dying hybrid and the hybrid’s blood had found the dormant thing in her veins and woken it with the efficiency of a key in a lock.

She had stood in a clearing afterwards, in the dark, and taken inventory.

Wolf: present. Had been since birth, activated at twelve, reliably unreliable around the full moon.

Vampire: present. New. Strange. The hunger was a different colour than the wolf’s hunger — more precise, more patient, less like fire and more like water finding its way through stone.

Human: still there, somewhere in the middle, holding the other two apart like a woman standing between two walls that wanted to meet.

She had gone home — or what passed for home that year, a borrowed apartment in a city where no one knew her name — and she had sat at the kitchen table and she had thought: I need to write this down.

Not for herself. She already knew it.

For the daughter she had not yet decided to have.

— ✶ —

The Marshall grimoire had been in her family for four hundred years.

She had inherited it at twenty-two from a great-aunt who had pressed it into her hands with the solemnity of someone passing a weapon. Learn what we are, the woman had said. And then teach it better than we did.

Hayley had opened the grimoire and read the list at the back — the names, the dates, the lives compressed into sentences. Marguerite. Cécile. Rebekah. Women she would never meet, women whose blood she carried, women who had figured out before her that the thing she was had no proper name yet because no one had survived it long enough to name it.

She had read until three in the morning.

Then she had picked up a quill and added her own entry.

Hayley Marshall, 1994 — present. Still figuring it out.

She had crossed out that last part and tried again.

Hayley Marshall, 1994 — present. Wolf and vampire. Two natures, one body. Learning to hold both without either breaking the other.

Better. Not complete. But better.

— ✶ —

She went to Malfoy Manor in the winter of her sixteenth year carrying the child.

Not because she had run out of options — she had always been good at options, at finding exits where other people saw only walls. She went because of Severus Snape, who had been her friend for three years and who was the only person she trusted with the thing she now understood about what she was carrying.

Not just a child.

The first tribrid.

Wolf from her. Vampire from her. Witch from Severus. Three natures in one body, and the body was not yet born, and Hayley Marshall was sixteen and terrified and she would not let anyone see it.

Severus met her at the gate.

He looked at her the way he always looked at her — with an attention that most people found uncomfortable and that Hayley had always found steadying, because it meant he was actually seeing her, not the performance of her.

You know what you’re carrying, he said. It wasn’t a question.

Yes.

And you know the risks.

Yes.

He was quiet for a moment. The cold was sharp. Behind him, the Manor’s windows glowed warm.

Then: Come inside. Lucius and Narcissa are expecting you. We’ve prepared a room.

She followed him in. The Manor’s wards wrapped around her when she crossed the threshold — warm, welcoming, the magic of a house that had been protecting secrets for centuries recognising her immediately as another secret worth protecting.

She had not expected to feel at home.

She felt at home.

— ✶ —

In the months that followed, she wrote.

She wrote during the days when she felt well, and on the days she didn’t she dictated to Narcissa, who had a Quick-Quotes Quill and no patience for what she called dramatic pauses. She wrote everything the Marshall grimoire didn’t already contain — the specific texture of carrying two natures simultaneously, the way the vampire’s patience modified the wolf’s urgency, the discoveries she’d made about blood magic that none of her ancestors had had the right combination of natures to attempt.

She wrote a section called: What the tribrid will need to know.

She wrote it as a letter.

To the daughter who reads this:

You carry the Crescent legacy — the wolf who runs beneath the moon, the vampire who walks in darkness. But you have something more, don’t you? Something from your father’s side. Something that makes you three instead of two.

I don’t know what that means yet. I don’t know what it will ask of you or give to you. I only know that every woman in this book has figured it out — has found a way to hold what they were without it breaking them.

You will too.

Use it. Use all of it. Be what none of us could be.

— Your mother, who loved you before she ever saw your face

She read it back three times.

Then she added: The door is open. Because Lucius had said that to her once, standing in the Manor’s entrance hall with his hand extended in welcome, and she had understood immediately that he meant something larger than a physical door.

She wanted her daughter to understand it too.

— ✶ —

She died in the spring, as the Healers had warned.

Not quietly. Hayley Marshall had never done anything quietly. The child arrived fighting — screaming, changing, the three natures cycling through her small body like weather — and Hayley held on long enough to hear it, that first sound, the proof that something unprecedented had made it through.

Severus was there. Lucius was there. Narcissa had the child already, wrapping her in something warm, speaking to her in the low steady voice she used for frightened things.

Hayley looked at the child across the room — screaming, changing, the three natures cycling through her small body like weather — and thought: I named her Heaven. I hope she earns it.

The door is open.

Severus took her hand.

I’ll teach her, he said. Everything. All of it. I promise.

She knew he would. That was why she had come here. That was why she had trusted him with the most important thing she had.

Good, she said.

The Manor breathed around her. The wards hummed. Across the room, Heaven Marshall Snape opened her eyes for the first time — changing, cycling, settling on something between gold and green — and looked at the world with an expression of ancient, exhausted patience.

As though she had been waiting.

As though she had always known she would get here.

Hayley Marshall closed her eyes.

The list in the grimoire waited for her daughter to find it.

The door stayed open.

— ✶ —

Category: Short Stories

Author: Sabiha Atturkhan

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar is a prestigious platform celebrating diverse voices in creative arts. It encourages writers from all over the globe to share their unique stories, poems, and essays, fostering a vibrant community of literary talent. This competition highlights the power of words in connecting cultures and expressing the human experience.

We extend our heartfelt thanks to Sabiha Atturkhan for her captivating entry, "The Woman Who Carried Two Moons," in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. Her contribution adds depth and diversity to the competition, and we are grateful for her exploration of identity and legacy through her artful storytelling.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.