Crimson Rite of the Blood Moon
On the night the town's clocks refused to keep time, the crimson moon hung low, a tired eye blinking above the hills. The air smelled of iron and rain, and even the dogs kept their mouths shut, as if listening for a secret that could spill from the sky. I walked the old path to the ritual field, where the stones remembered more than we did, and the circle of ash waited like a chalk outline of a life we might lose.
People spoke of the Crimson Rite as a memory kept in stubborn hands: a grandmother who survived the famine; a debt to the night keeper; a promise that blood would pay for a year's harvest. Tonight, I came to see if the stories were a map or a trap. In the center stood a black cup, not to drink from but to be filled with a warning: what you give, you become.
“The moon does not shed light; it gathers what we cannot bear to see and calls it home.”
- Draw a circle on the ground with ash from burned prayers, tracing the edge until it remembers your breath.
- Light a candle with a wick of midnight, letting its flicker learn your name in the dark.
- Speak the old tune aloud, until the wind repeats it back with a tremor of recognition.
- Offer a single drop of blood to the circle, a quiet vow to honor debts long owed.
- Stand still and listen as the hill answers in a heartbeat you swear you hear in your own chest.
With each line spoken, the moon's ruby glow seemed to throb, a pulse that quickened the air around us. The field brightened with a copper flare, and shadows peeled away, revealing truths the village had learned to keep invisible. I felt a weight press on my chest—not fear, but memory: faces I had never met stepped forward from the boundary between the living and the buried, offering silent witness to the bargain we were about to seal.
When the second bell tolled, the circle flared once and settled into a quiet, listening glow. The rite was not a conquest of darkness but a reckoning with it—an acknowledgment that the land remembers every hunger and every promise ever made beneath the red eye of the blood moon. I rose, knowing the story would carry me forward in its own stubborn tide, a hinge between what is owed and what remains unsaid.
As I turned to leave, the road behind me did not close. It stretched, thread by thread, as if the moon itself had stitched a path for my steps, guiding me toward a dawn that would come with questions as sharp as iron and as old as the night itself.