The first night Wyatt's gaze drifted a moment too long upon the glowing face of the smallest moon, an odd disquiet took hold in his mind.
Yet something in the smallest orb's radiance needled strangely at his thoughts, hooks sinking deeper each time it swung through the darkness overhead. A pull that went beyond appreciation of its cold, distant beauty. Almost a whispering promise of profound revelations, if he would devote himself fully to its light.
Wyatt shoved these fancies aside, immersed himself in his work throughout the sunlit hours. But as twilight fell across Lamneth, bringing with it glimpses of pale crescents in the gloaming sky, focus became difficult. Attention drifted again and again to the strange alluring glow rising in the east.
The smallest moon's luminance held an entrancing purity this night that he felt helpless to resist.
It was as if the moon held the very essence of beauty, a celestial gem beyond the comprehension of human minds. Its brilliance transformed the mundane into the sublime, turning the streets of Revtal into a kaleidoscope of shadows and silver.
As Wyatt stood before the open window, his gaze fixed skyward, he couldn't help but feel like a devoted pilgrim in the presence of the divine. The moon's surface, riddled with craters and ridges, appeared not as a desolate wasteland but as a masterpiece of holy craftsmanship. Each feature seemed to shift and dance in the moon's radiant glow, a living, breathing entity in the cosmos. Wyatt was consumed by an obsession. It was a sweet intoxication, an infatuation that knew no bounds. He couldn't tear his eyes away from the celestial wonder and he found himself surrendering willingly to its enchantment.
The moon, he thought, was the epitome of all things sweet and deserving of his adoration.
Later, he emerged from the hypnotic reverie to find the streets below devoid of traffic, windows shuttered around him. With a shudder, Wyatt noted the third moon approaching its zenith, and felt despair at all the wasted hours. He could recall nothing of how they had passed, only hazy recollections of trembling before the open window glass with his eyes fixed skyward and a sense of the infinite beckoning.
Wyatt vowed to leave the moons be and consult a physician in the morning. But the smallest orb still hung low in the west, gleaming accusingly, and he yielded to the burning need to see its cold majesty again with his own eyes. This time he would be vigilant against any lapse. He rationalized that facing the compulsion would help overcome it.
The third night, Wyatt barely registered climbing the attic stairs at dusk to stare mesmerized as the four moons emerged in procession. He surfaced to consciousness just as the sun crested the horizon again, his body weak and trembling, throat parched.
The moons seemed to regard him with detached amusement before surrendering the sky to day.
So began a cycle from which Wyatt lacked any desire to escape. Each day found him in the fields, picking at the crops that swayed in the breeze under the sun's oppressive gaze. But his chores were no longer a labor of love; instead, they became a mechanical ritual.
As the sun painted the sky in hues of amber and crimson, he could be seen pushing his plow or pulling weeds with malaise. His gaze, usually focused on the earth at his feet, was now frequently lifted to the heavens. The tantalizing promise of twilight loomed on the horizon, and it was in the twilight that the real work began.
Sometimes he awoke from restless sleep to find that hours, even entire mornings, had vanished, lost to an inexorable pull beyond the farm's walls. He'd stand by the open window, pale fingers gripping the sill, gazing out at the boundless cosmos for hours.
The sustenance he once relished held no allure now. Food lay uneaten, and thirst went unquenched as his form took on an eerie pallor. Friends whispered their concerns about his diminishing vitality, watching as his body wasted away. But the lunar radiance, that pale, haunting glow from the heavens, was his siren's call. It bathed his face with its ethereal touch, casting strange and elongated shadows across his features, as if the light conspired to reveal mysteries locked deep within his psyche.
What were mundane needs like hunger and thirst compared to the intoxicating wonders he glimpsed in the moon's light?
As the seventh night descended, the once-sturdy farmer Wyatt found himself teetering. The hunger within him had transformed into a ravenous beast, one that mortal fare could no longer sate. It gnawed at his insides, a relentless force that consumed his body and soul. And yet, Wyatt pushed it from his mind. It no longer mattered.
The gibbous moons hung in the heavens like malevolent sentinels. Bathed Wyatt's gaunt features in spectral illumination. His eyes, once a familiar reflection of earthly concerns, were now windows to a maddening void. They mirrored a frenzied waltz of forces beyond the grasp of human comprehension.
Wyatt had become little more than a vessel for some unknowable entity. Night after night, he would stand beneath the moons, his frail form trembling in the frigid air, and exult in wordless communion with their cold light. He had been initiated into the arcane secrets of the universe and the revelation was both a blessing and a curse.
The other villagers had noticed the change in him, the unsettling transformation that had taken hold of their once-ordinary neighbor. Whispers of concern and fear rippled through the community, but no one dared to confront the madness that had ensnared Wyatt. They could only watch in trepidation as he drifted further into the abyss, his obsession with the moons eclipsing all reason and sanity. The world seemed to hold its breath, awaiting the inevitable.
Then on the tenth night, clouds blotted the sky. Bereft of lunar nectar, Wyatt's frail shell of a body writhed and contorted in the grips of withdrawal. His wasted legs failed under him repeatedly as he crawled with bloodied fingers toward the open window and the cruelly empty sky. Tears streamed down his sunken cheeks at the denied glimpse of transcendence. The empty blackness drained his remaining life force steadily as the hours crept past.
At last, just before dawn stilled the night, a single sickly ray broke through the boiling clouds to illuminate Wyatt's outstretched arms and sunken chest and cheeks. He summoned the last dregs of strength to pull himself upright against the window, upper body framed by the cold luminance as it engulfed him. The returning moonbeam reflected in his dark dilated pupils, vessels rupturing under the resurgent pressure of contact. His head knocked against the pane, blood leaking like dark tears as he breathed a betrayed gurgle toward the fading light.
In the distance, the relentless roar of the tempestuous sea grew louder. Beckoning.
Wyatt's body, hollowed and ravaged by his all-consuming obsession, stirred to unnatural life, animated now only by the moons' malevolent influence. His emaciated limbs twitched and jerked, muscles spasming as if receiving signals from an unseen cattle prod. Deep in the recess of his fragmented mind, Wyatt shrieked and pled, but the hand that seized the window frame was no longer his to command. With preternatural strength, his arm smashed through the glass barrier keeping him from the open sky above.
Wyatt felt no pain, only an overriding compulsion dragging him through the glass and into the cold night. His movements held a dreadful, fitful urgency. Out, he had to get out.
Once beneath the moonlight, an awful rictus grin split Wyatt's mangled face. The whispering of waves grew louder, promising dissolution for what remained of his soul if only this broken body could traverse the last distance.
His pilgrimage.
Wyatt's glazed eyes rolled wildly in protest, but already his shattered legs were lurching forward, dragging and scuffing his wasted body across the rough terrain. Stomach shredded and split under the relentless momentum, bits of forearm and shin peeling off to expose muscle and ligaments beneath as broken fingernails clawed uneven furrows through sand and stone.
It crunched relentlessly onward, a ruined marionette compelled by cosmic directives. Wyatt's mouth gaped open, emitting a silent wail of hopeless defiance. He was a prisoner in this disintegrating shell of gnarled meat and bone.
At long last, the edge neared. Wyatt gazed over the precipice at the black waters churning below the light of his moons. They had awaited this moment, the promised union. His mind recoiled violently, but ruined sinews still managed to hurl his broken form forward into the roiling surf. Wyatt's ultimate scream was swallowed by the depths as they embraced this newest acolyte into their oneness.
Above, the moons observed with cold inevitable patience. The pact was sealed. All mortal roads converged here in time, to feed eternal hunger.
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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