A pale moon illuminated the clear night's sky over the cemetery. There was no movement, no sound; just a calmness, a stillness that permeated the surroundings. Faintly, a clock tower's bells rang twelve, its sound strained by the distance it traveled.
Once the bells faded away, the quiet could not return; scratching began to rise; the sound of something clawing at the ground. Slowly, growing in volume, the scratching became quicker and quicker, more panicked in its work.
A gnarled, clawed hand ripped at the plot in front of the tombstone of one Серей Мариус Петреску; clawing its way out of the ground, followed closely by a second hand. The mangled hands were attached to knobby arms and further connected to a hideously scarred and deformed body which pulled itself out of the ground.
The hunched creature shook itself, throwing loose any remaining dirt from the tatters of rags that covered it. The figure then craned its neck up, muscles popping and cracking as a result, to study the stars of the night sky.
It stood there, breathing heavily for several moments, eyes darting from one corner of the sky to another. The intelligence behind the eyes worked out some computation of infinite size.
“Yes, yes,” it hissed, “Good. I timed things correctly. My ascension is nigh. The Grand Conjunction is at hand.”
A twig snapped. The thing turned and scanned the area for the origin of the noise. Near the edge of the rows upon rows of graves was a man holding a flashlight. Well into his late seventies, the bald old man seemed quite in shape. “Hey! You! Ya can't be out here. Doesn't matter if theses graves are more'n a century old, you shouldn't be disturbin' things out here.”
The creature's sharpened teeth gleamed in the moonlight. Tonight would be the beginning: its beginning. It was also the end: humanity's end. It snarled and hissed as the flashlight bearer walked closer and closer. The creature had yet to show up in the beam of the flashlight. The light moved closer and closer; the creature savored this moment, this anticipation. It was waiting for the right moment to strike.
The cemetery guard moved in closer and when the creature's face was caught in the flashlight, the monster yelled out, “Fhtgan!”
In its target’s momentary confusion, the creature lunged at the guard and dug its talons into the rib cage of the unsuspecting guard, a sharp crack resulting from breaking the sternum. It licked and slurped up the blood and gore as it dug into the man's chest cavity. The creature ripped the heart out and then slowed its attack, as if taking care to not damage the heart as it raised the organ into the moonlight from the sky above, and then biting into its succulence.
Oh yes . . . By the Hunter's Moon, his ascension would be complete.
YOU ARE READING
Hunter's Moon
ФэнтезиJoin Matthew Westerna and his friends as they're plunged into a world forgotten and ignored by most, one of magic and monsters. While simply trying to save a young girl's life, they run across a plan that would kill countless people. They only have...
