Rite of the Crimson Moon
Night carried the scent of iron as the villagers gathered around the old stone ring that rimmed the hill. The blood moon hung low, a bruised pearl bleeding through the clouds, and the field glowed with a pale, hungry light. No birds cried; only the soft rustle of leaves and the distant clink of charms your grandmother wore to ward off what ancient stories warned would return.
I arrived with nothing but a bag of borrowed courage, and a name not yet mine etched into the ledger kept by the circle’s elder. She combed her fingers through her hair, turning to the crowd with a look that tasted of rain and rust. This is not a rite for the faint of heart, she whispered, or for those who seek power, but for those who remember—remember what blood remembers. The ritual would bind the past to the present, and through that binding, something older than memory would be born.
As the moon thickened, the circle began to breathe. Chalk lines darkened into living veins; a chorus rose from the crowd, a low hum that sounded like wind through a throat. The steps were simple, and deadly in their simplicity:
- Trace a circle with ash, naming every ancestor who ever walked this land.
- Offer a single drop of blood, drawn by your own hand, to seal your oath.
- Sing the old names, in a cadence older than the trees surrounding us.
- Count the nine heartbeats that synchronize with the moon’s rhythm.
- Await the crimson blossom that blooms only when the eye of night is most hungry.
On the ninth heartbeat, the air tightened, and moonlight poured through the ring like a wound in space. A shape emerged from the shadows—not a demon, but a memory wearing a body: the village’s long-dead scribe, now awake and hungry for the living ink of promises. My breath faltered as I felt my own name slip from my lips, spoken as though someone else had written it on my tongue.
The rite was not summoning a god but rewriting the author of fate, and I, who had come seeking courage, found myself a page within a larger, blood-writ history. The scribe hovered close, tracing the lines of my fate with a finger that left a fever-lace shadow on my skin. When the first light of dawn brushed the hills, the circle stood empty, save for footprints that vanished into the pines and a new glimmer in my eyes—one that did not belong to me.
Under the crimson eye, truth bleeds through the skin of the world.