BLOOD IN THE MOONLIGHT
648 Words
The forest went silent.
The feral stood at the edge of the clearing, its eyes like pools of midnight. It didn’t snarl again. It didn’t move. It simply… stared at Jared.
Kael stepped forward slowly, every muscle coiled, but she didn’t attack. Something in her expression—confusion, recognition, maybe even fear—kept her still.
Then, without a sound, the feral turned and slipped back into the trees.
The shadows swallowed it whole.
Jared could still feel its gaze on him long after it was gone.
“What was that thing?” he asked, voice unsteady.
Kael’s eyes flicked toward the forest, then back at him. Her tone was low, measured.
“It’s gone. That’s all you need to know for tonight.”
“But it spoke—”
“Enough.”
Her voice cracked like lightning, sharp and final. The air between them went cold.
Jared wanted to push—demand answers—but something in her face stopped him. She looked… tired. Not angry, not dismissive, but burdened.
“Go to bed, Jared,” she said quietly. “You need rest.”
He hesitated. “Kael—”
“Please.”
That single word, soft but weighted, silenced him.
He nodded and turned away, though the unease followed him like a shadow.
His room felt colder than usual. The moon hung over the window like a single, watching eye. He lay on the bed and stared at it until the edges of the world blurred.
Sleep took him before he realized he’d fallen.
And then—he dreamed.
It had been years since the last one. Back at the orphanage, his dreams used to feel real—too real. They were always the same: a forest under a violet sky, wolves with silver coats and eyes like stars. He never knew them, yet somehow he did. They felt like family, like something lost.
But tonight’s dream was different.
The air shimmered with gold light. The ground beneath him pulsed faintly, alive. In the distance, he saw figures—wolf-shapes, tall and luminous, their forms shifting like smoke.
And they were calling him.
Not with words, but with sound—an ancient rhythm that stirred something deep in his chest. It wasn’t a song. It was… a memory.
He tried to move closer, but the light around him grew thicker, almost liquid. The wolves turned toward him, their eyes bright as moons.
“Come,” one of them whispered—or maybe it was inside his head. “You’ve slept too long.”
Jared reached out. The moment his fingers brushed the air between them, pain lanced through his skull—sharp, searing, blinding.
He fell to his knees, clutching his head. The world cracked open like shattered glass, and for a second, he saw something—a sigil glowing on his chest, burning gold through his skin.
Then it was gone.
He woke up with a gasp.
Sweat slicked his face, his heart pounding like a drum. The moon was lower now, pale against the thinning clouds.
He sat up, trembling. The dream clung to him, alive in his veins.
On his palm, faint and fading, was a mark—shaped like the sigil he’d seen.
His breath caught. “What…?”
The mark pulsed once—then vanished.
From outside, a floorboard creaked. Someone was awake.
Jared looked toward the door, listening. A voice drifted faintly down the hall—Kael’s—low, urgent, speaking to someone he couldn’t see.
“It’s starting sooner than I thought.”
“Then what do we do?” another voice whispered.
Kael’s answer came like a shadow.
“Pray he never remembers.”
The air in his room grew colder. The moon dimmed behind the clouds.
Jared lay back, wide-eyed, heart hammerin
g, as the word remembers echoed through his skull.
He didn’t sleep again that night.
- Writer
