The nights had grown quiet in the remote farming settlement of Revtal on Lamneth. Where once laughter and songs rang out from rowdy bars, now only hurried footsteps tapping down darkened streets broke the smothering silence. Locked doors and shuttered windows sealed every home as the suns sank below the distant jagged peaks.
Nobody dared speak above a whisper about why things had changed, or acknowledge the dread haunting their hollow eyes. Better to keep heads down, avoid stray glances skyward on cloudless nights, and pray for the chance to see another dawn.
For farmer Teera, solitude had become her only refuge from creeping madness. She had witnessed the valley’s lunar guardian break free on that accursed harvest moon one year prior, hovering above her farm with tendrils dripping void-stuff to scar the soil.
Its voice had demanded flesh tithes in reverberating psychic shrieks only she seemed to hear. Then the stars reclaimed their places, and the moon retreated as if nothing impossible had occurred.
Yet no one believed Teera’s desperate accounts. So she withdrew into herself on her little plot, stockpiling food and supplies for the endless night she felt creeping closer beneath the smiling daylight skies. When eerie glowing mists began rising at odd hours around her crops, none else saw them. And when sounds of skittering and whispering at the edge of hearing kept her wide-eyed every night, she stopped speaking of them too.
The fitful snatches of sleep she managed were haunted by visions of the moon’s mottled face pressing close against her window pane, millions of tiny insectoid creatures scuttling out from the craters toward her bed.
During the days, Teera labored ceaselessly to fortify her small home, covering windows and stringing warding fetishes across the perimeter. Part of her knew these measures were futile against what had turned its gaze upon their valley. Work occupied her fraying mind and she prayed the charms might grant even an hour’s reprieve when the end came.
The townsfolk in turn learned to avert their eyes from the reclusive woman, her gaunt frame draped in ragged clothing as she dug in the soil. None dared speak of the implements sometimes visible in her wheelbarrow - twisted iron spikes or chunks of carved bone with obscure runes whose origins were best left unconsidered. Teera frightened them almost as deeply as the unseen threat she ranted of in rare whispered ravings.
Then the harvest moon returned from the stars.
The awful voice in Teera’s head suddenly resumed, stronger than ever before, demanding the promised tithe be rendered without delay.
She had known this reckoning was coming, dreaded it throughout the past year. Her own role in the machinations remained unclear, yet innate horror left her paralyzed. Perhaps she had indeed gone mad - for on that terrible night, nobody from the next town reported seeing the moon depart orbit again or heard its vile utterances.
But the evidence soon became irrefutable to those within Revtal. A lingering odor akin to saltwater mixed with strange spices settled over the town at dusk. Planar rifts briefly opened in remote cornfields and pastures, disgorging misshapen gnarled forms that hungered in ways mortals were ill-equipped to satisfy.
When the awful crimson moon pulsed and split into a yawning abyss ringed by countless thin squirming arms beckoning down, only Teera stood mesmerized at the sight. The cosmic voice echoed in her skull, proclaiming the tithe was long overdue and must be rendered in full, never again to be postponed. As she watched, transfixed by the unfolding evil, the first of the gnarled titan-mouths burst through the soil of Teera's yard to feast.
From adjacent streets came answering cries of horror as the hidden things below the valley awoke ravenously in response. Doors splintered in a fraction of a second as the frenzied mouths burst into homes to claim the promised tribute.
In mere minutes, no structure remained standing, only mounds of rubble strewn with rags and bones. Not a single person could be glimpsed still drawing breath amid the endless cacophony of consuming maws. The entire valley had in the blink of an eye become one colossal, seething organism focused only on ingestion.
When at last the final echoing shrieks faded away, the convulsing mouths slithered back into porous earth now soaked with blood and gore. Revtal stood silent once again, any evidence a thriving community ever occupied this cursed ground wiped away entirely.
The work completed, the blasphemous orb retracted its writhing appendages and began to ascend slowly back into the familiar empty void. But as it withdrew, a single package wrapped in dark unearthly metal descended on invisible strings from its receding bulk to land at Teera’s feet. Her name was etched upon it in alien glyphs.
Shaking, she lifted the mysterious parcel, and found it was not heavy but seemed to throb and flutter with its own unnerving vitality. Opening it cautiously, Teera glimpsed inside a raw lump of flesh and metal ores that made her soul recoil instinctively. Yet she understood with instant revulsion that this material was meant as payment...and as the seed for cultivating the next grim tithe when the lunar horror returned to feed again.
And it would return - this truth was now seared indelibly into the core of Teera’s being.
However many seasons or lifetimes might pass, the blasphemous intelligence that adopted this planet as feeding ground was eternal, unbound from simple cycles of mortality. She had been chosen as its mouthpiece and servant, fated to oversee the perverse harvest rituals. It had made her behold the offering so none could deny or forget the debt owed below its cyclopean gaze.
In some future dusk when the stars aligned just so, it would spread its umbral wings again across the horizon. Until then, Teera must nurture the kernels left behind, prepare the next lambs for the slaughter. For it was always hungry.
Do you like what you're reading? You can find two more stories from Eldrispace in the anthology Macabre and Monstrous! My first published work and I couldn't be more excited to share it with two amazing authors, great friends, and fellow Anvilites, Sapha and Dazz. Available now! Get your copy now!
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