There was no moon.
The sky should have held something—silver, clouded, broken—but it was empty, a black plate pressed low over the forest. Even the stars had withdrawn, as if light itself had learned caution.
The road cut through the trees like a scar, narrow and uneven. Lanterns marked it at long intervals, their they glowed with the blue light of the moon, glass chimneys fogged with breath that did not belong to the night. Between them, darkness pooled thickly, swallowing sound. A man ran.
His boots struck mud and stone, slipped, recovered. He did not look back at first. He had already learned better from the wound on his arm. His breath tore at his throat, loud in the quiet, each gasp sounding wrong—too sharp, too exposed. The forest did not echo it. The forest absorbed.
Moon shrines stood crooked along the roadside, small stone basins etched with crescent grooves. Their crystals were dim. One flickered and went out entirely as the man passed. He stumbled.Something moved behind him.
Not fast. Not loud. Just enough to disturb the undergrowth, branches bowing without breaking, leaves shifting without wind. The man turned then, just once, and the lantern nearest him guttered violently.He opened his mouth to scream.
The sound cut off halfway, severed cleanly, as if swallowed by a closing door. The lantern burned on.
Dawn did not break so much as dilute the dark.
The black of the forest thinned to charcoal, then to a bruised gray. Frost lay shallow along the road, clinging to ruts and stone. The lanterns still burned, their blue glow paling against the reluctant light.
It was Tomas who found him.
He had risen before the bells, as he always did, to check the shrine basins before the traders came through. The road was safest at morning. Safer, at least, than night.
He noticed the lantern first.
It was still lit.
Tomas slowed.
They were never still lit.
He stepped closer, boots grinding frost into mud. The glass chimney was fogged from within, beaded with condensation that trembled but did not fall. The blue flame inside burned steady and thin.
Too steady.
The body lay three paces beyond it.
At first it seemed like a shadow thrown wrong across the road. Then the shape resolved into limbs. A shoulder. A hand twisted into the dirt as if gripping something no longer there.
Tomas stopped breathing.
The man's body had not been picked at by something and several pieces of flesh were missing.
His eyes were open.
Not wide in terror.
Wider than that.
The frost had gathered along his lashes.
Tomas swallowed hard and forced himself forward. The shrine basin beside the road stood crooked, one of its crescent grooves split down the middle. The crystal within it was dark—completely dark. Not dim. Not fading.
Empty.
A thin line ran from the basin across the ground, a hairline fracture in the earth itself, as if something heavy had pressed down and then lifted away without leaving weight behind.
Behind him, another set of boots approached at a cautious pace.
"Did you find—"
The voice faltered.
Mira stood several yards back, a bundle of kindling tucked under one arm. She stared past Tomas, past the lantern, at the shape on the ground.
"He shouldn't be here," she whispered. "They said he made it past the second marker."
Tomas nodded once. Slow. Mechanical.
"The lantern didn't go out."
Mira's gaze shifted to it. The blue light trembled slightly now, as if aware of being watched.
"That's not right," she said.
Nothing else in the forest moved. No birds called. No insects stirred in the frost. Even the wind seemed to wait at the tree line, unwilling to cross the road.
Tomas crouched beside the body, careful not to touch skin.
The wound on the man's arm was still there — shallow, crescent-shaped, as though something had grazed him rather than bitten. The flesh around it was pale and dry.
Drained, Tomas thought, though he could not have said of what.
Behind them, another shrine crystal flickered once.
Then steadied.
Mira took a step back.
"We should get the elders." Tomas did not argue.
As they turned to leave, the lantern nearest the body guttered for the first time since dawn — not violently, not dramatically.
Just enough to thin.
Just enough to remind them that night had not truly left.
The Guild rider arrived just past noon.
Hoofbeats announced her long before the villagers saw her — steady, unhurried. A Guild cloak carried authority even before a word was spoken.
Crows lifted from the road as she dismounted, black wings beating the air in slow, resentful arcs. Something smaller — fox, perhaps — slipped back into the brush at her approach.
There was a crowd of villagers watching as the rider moved to inspect the body.
"Who found him?" the rider asked.
"James," Mira answered.
The rider nodded once and stepped forward.
The corpse was no longer whole.
The man's face had been partially pecked at the soft parts. One sleeve torn where something had eaten the flesh beneath. The shallow wound on his arm was no longer clean; it had been widened by teeth and beaks into something uglier and less precise
There was blood on the ground around the body. Not pooled from a single killing blow, but smeared and scattered by feeding.
The rider crouched, expression neutral.
"Did anyone disturb the body?" She asked
"No, we made sure nothing disturbed the scene" Mira replied.
"Time of death?" The Rider asked.
"Last night after supper, he had dinner with me and my mum" James said. "He was fine when he left".
"Do you often see Carrion Feeders around here?" The rider asked
James hesitated. "No."
She examined the ground. Boot gouges showed where the man had run. But around the body, the earth was churned — claw prints overlapping, indistinct. Small tracks everywhere. Nothing large. Nothing organized.
She pressed two fingers to the man's throat out of habit, though the stiffness had already set in. "Likely he was injured and collapsed," she said. "Scavengers finished the rest."
Mira swallowed. "The lantern didn't go out."
The rider looked at it. The blue flame burned thin, steady. She rose and stepped closer. A lantern extinguishing mechanism was designed to react to significant proximity disturbance — aggressive energy fluctuations, violent impact. It was not meant to respond to common animals.
She removed her gloves and touched the metal frame. Cold.
No fracture. No distortion.
"Most likely a Minor malfunction," she said. "Cold seals can fail, please being this in to get repaired as soon as possible." She moved to the shrine basin. The crystal inside was dark. Not shattered — just drained of moonlight.
She retrieved a brass instrument from her satchel and held it over the basin. The needle trembled faintly before settling at baseline. No residual instability. No measurable phase variance. She scanned the treeline. No broken branches around the area. No deep impressions in the soil. No pattern suggesting coordinated predation.
Only small scavengers from the looks of things. She returned her gaze to the body.
The damage was messy now. Indistinct. Clearly had been eaten by scavengers. She thought with relief. She took one last look at the surrounding area and the body.
"There's nothing to worry about" she said at last. "Increased vermin density along the second marker. A clearing squad will be assigned." Relief rippled through the villagers. There was a surprisingly little amount of fear in the village. After all since the Pale Reach began crossing into our world, scavenger beasts were often seen in the countryside. Most people have Learned that death is almost routine at this point. And routine meant solvable. Routine meant no larger threat had crossed the boundary.
James stared at the ground near the shrine basin. The hairline fracture he had noticed at dawn was gone — trampled over by boots and claws alike. Or perhaps it had never been there.
The rider mounted her horse. "Seal the road until the hunters arrive. Replace the shrine crystal before nightfall." As she turned away, Mira called, "So it was just scavengers?" The rider paused only briefly. "Yes, it's almost a new moon and their usual hunting grounds are being taken over by creature to big for them to eat causing them to search for food elsewhere."
This time, the words carried more weight not certainty, but sufficiency. Behind her, the lantern finally flickered. Not out. Just thinner.
Deep in the forest, something shifted — not with the quick skitter of scavengers, but with the slow withdrawal of something that had already taken what it wanted and left the rest for smaller mouths.