Moon phase
A last pared sliver before dawn — the part of the cycle allowed to do nothing at all.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
The final stretch runs from last quarter back to new, about seven and a half days, thinning each morning. Look for it low in the east before sunrise, a narrow crescent going out; the last two or three nights, when it is effectively invisible, are what most practitioners mean by the dark moon. Its lit edge faces the opposite way from the waxing crescent, which is the quickest way to tell at a glance whether the month is coming or going.
This is the balloon phase of the cycle. It is also, in a lot of modern practice, the only sanctioned rest in a calendar that otherwise asks for something at every turn. Older lunar folklore mostly treats these nights as unlucky for beginnings and useful for endings, which amounts to the same instruction: do not start here.
Work suited to it is banishing, shadow work, deliberate emptiness, and sleep. Practitioners who keep a lunar practice at all tend to say this is the phase they neglect and the one they most need, in roughly that order.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
Common in contemporary practice
Nothing scheduled, nothing lit, nothing asked for. Several traditions build a rest period into the month here, and the practitioners who keep it are usually the ones still practising in ten years.
Credit what you carry. Much of this comes from living traditions, and some of it from traditions that are closed — held by particular peoples and not offered for general use. Where you know whose practice a reading came from, name them; where you don't, say that too.