Blessed By The Moon

Chapter 44

The forest thinned as I pushed forward, I had been walking all day and yet I didn't feel tired, despite holding the weight of my decision. The knife I had sitting in my back waistband was tugging a little into my skin, the trees were growing more twisted, darker, like the land itself was warning me to turn around. But I didn't. The wind was sharp against my skin, cold despite the season, carrying with it the faintest trace of something wrong, metallic and sour.

Blood?

I stepped into the clearing expecting to find sentries, scouts, anyone. But the place was empty. Silent. Too silent.

Am I walking into a trap? Did they know I was going to come?

No birds. No breathing. No movement.

It was unnatural.

My heart thudded louder in the quiet as I slowed my steps. The first body was curled near the base of a tree, eyes wide open, mouth frozen in a scream that would never finish. His chest was carved open, deep claw marks shredded through muscle and bone. His entrails were half-pulled from the cavity, tangled in dried leaves like grotesque streamers.

I staggered backward. Not from fear. From recognition.

This was one of Daniel's men. The one who saw me before I hid under the moonlight.

I turned my head, and there was the second one.

This time, a woman. Her throat was torn clean through, and her face was stuck in a peaceful expression that somehow made it worse. Her hands were still up, mid-cast of a spell, a witch? an Oracle? and her fingers had been snapped backwards at impossible angles, bones protruding through the skin like jagged knives.

Something had ripped through here.

Something merciless. I felt like I was back in my nightmare again.

I kept walking.

Blood coated the grass in streaks, some smeared like people had tried to crawl away, others splattered high up the trees. My boots were soaked by the time I reached the heart of the carnage. I stopped breathing altogether.

The bodies were everywhere.

Were they attacked by an army? Did one of our alliances do this? and one more thought snuck up in my head, is Storm okay?

Torn limbs lay like discarded toys. Torsos had been slashed open, left to rot in the sun. Some had been burned, their charred outlines barely recognizable as human. A few hadn't even been killed conventionally, their minds had been crushed in, faces twisted in insanity, as if something had shattered their very souls before death came.

The air felt heavier. Time itself slower.

I stepped around a severed head, its mouth still quivering with the last remnants of a spell, and I couldn't stop the chill crawling down my back.

This wasn't a battle. It was a massacre.

Something had happened here, something darker than I had ever seen. And I'd seen death. I'd caused it.

But this? This was carnage from a nightmare. My hands trembled. I should have come sooner, no, maybe I shouldn't have come at all.

I didn't know if Daniel or Storm were still alive. I didn't know if they had caused this or if they were victims of it. But the silence that followed the scream of the wind made me feel like I had just missed something enormous.

A reckoning.

And somewhere, deep in my chest, something twisted.

The doors to the pack house loomed ahead like the gaping maw of a beast, blackened steel and crumbling stone, old magic still humming faintly through the cracks. I pushed them open slowly, the rusted hinges screaming, echoing like a shriek through the empty halls. Inside, the air was colder, thicker, stagnant with blood and smoke and something that reeked of death and old power.