The black journal read:
The red moon rose on the darkest night of the harvest year! That terrible night, which engulfed the boring old village of Cherry Town in a sea of blood and nightmares, engraved forever as a cautionary tale to those lotus-eaters who would rest on their laurels and court the dangerous and heart rotting drug that is complacency! Never again, in the farmsteadery of Cherry Town shall a youth be denied the thrill of adventure by those so scarred and disfigured by failure, lest they seek to also court the wrath of the terrible Cherry Red Moon. It is so!
It was a cloudless night, as if the sky itself pried apart the veil of clouds to judge thee with it's single unblinking eye. One hundred times had the girl pleaded with her father and all the elder farmhands that she might leave the farm to make a life of her own. One hundred had she been denied! But no more, as the gaping harvest eye roiled with anger and pity for her. The sky itself would court her and save her from the wicked cherry wood prison!
The moonlight, which was not orange, but red, carried an evil soul-plague which touched every last farmer and their ilk. Except the girl! A plague that would fill the streets and all the houses with splatters of vomited blood. Woe would be to the elders, who against the girl's wishes, never established a road leading into the valley, out of fear of foreigners - the racist foolishness! And so Cherry Town never had a good source of paper or ink or anything for the girl to write her stories on! But most of all medicine!
As the moon waned the following nights, it would not lose its unholy red hue, just as the girl had feared once when she was just a child. But this time, she did not fear it, for she knew it was her friend, and that those people that had tormented her in this wooded prison were about to get what they deserved.
Not a single drop of rain would fall the coming moon cycle, but the crops would not wilt. The blood feeding the ground from the throats of the plague victims was more than enough to keep the crops healthy, for the people of the village have forgotten that while we feed and water and eat them, the plants are our masters in the end. When we die, it is they who will eat us!
A realization that was too late for the cherry folk. For from the soil soaked in their own blood would grow a wicked fungus who's spores would infect the ground and the air, made hungry and wild from the blood! The cherry folk would breathe in these spores, and it would be too late for them - but not the girl. She kept a mask of fabric on at all times when she first saw the fungus starting to grow. She knew the dangers, and would keep quiet about them.
On the last quarter of the waning moon cycle, the cherry folk would begin to feel a crawling, a seething from within their own bodies. A scratching, shooting pain like they were being stabbed with a wicked knife all over, but from nowhere at all. The fungus had begun to enter it's rapid growth period, but not from the ground, from within their own bodies. It would rend apart their flesh, and it would crawl within their very minds, engorging their organs until they popped within them. The elders would see the worst fate, and her father, the worst of them, would be the last, so she could see the look in his fungus-crawling eye sockets as he was split apart by the fungus!
On the last night of pain, at the height of the new moon, when all the voices could scream no more, and all the writhing bodies and open sores and mounds of flesh could do nothing but twitch and lie apart in agony, a sea of blood would wash over the land and take those ruined bodies with them. Nothing will remain but the girl, who stood on top of her farm's roof to escape it. And at last, she would smile, up at the lightless moon, which had exhausted it's power for her, and her alone.
And the crops ever after would be bountiful with the blood and the flesh offerings to it.
