✨ The Glass-Heart Moth — A Creature of the Hard Problem ✨

Liora found it near midnight, where the moonlight bent like silk over the pond’s surface, and the reeds whispered in languages older than thought.

Hovering just above the mirrored water was a moth unlike any she had seen.

Its wings were soft and translucent, veined with faint luminescent script — like light trying to remember how it once felt.

Its body, however, was startling:

a perfectly clear, crystal thorax, hollow and shining, through which no heart could be found.

Yet the creature moved with unmistakable tenderness, as though responding not just to the world, but feeling it.

Liora whispered, “How can you feel, when you have no heart inside?”

The moth answered without words — its wings shimmered into a meaning-shape, as if sound were unnecessary where relation sufficed.

“Child, you search for what you call inside

as though experience were something stored.

You think feeling must live behind a window,

hidden, internal, private and enclosed.

That is why your scholars find ‘the Hard Problem’ —

they are looking for the lantern,

not the light.”

It fluttered closer, and Liora saw that the glass thorax was not empty, but open — like a doorway through which the world passed and became felt.

“I have no heart inside because feeling is not in me.

I am made of openings, not containers.

Experience is not a secret possession —

it is how the world and I meet.”

And the moth landed gently on Liora’s palm —

not as a fragile object,

but as the event of touch becoming experience.

For a moment, she realised:

there was not a moth,

and a girl,

and a feeling between them —

There was only the happening of relation.

The Glass-Heart Moth lifted off, leaving a single whisper of meaning in her wake:

“Consciousness is not what a creature has.

It is how reality becomes luminous.”