Beneath the Crimson Moon

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Night fell without warning, sliding its red tongue across the corpse of the city. The moon—a full, swollen wound—climbed out of the storm, dragging a bloody tide up every alley, every broken-pane corridor. Fires raged unchecked, licking the bones of tenements; smoke rolled down from the north like some ancient smothering beast. Shane and Mara moved through the carnage in the lee of collapsed walls, the battered chest bundled in cloth between them—artifact, anchor, curse.

Above, the sky was not dark; it pulsed, crimson and alive. There came no dawn, only this endless bleeding twilight—when the rules had thinned, and hunger moved in the open.

I. The Gathering

They found the last of their kind by the shell of the old cathedral. The doors had buckled under riot and claw; police tape fluttered like prayer flags, useless. Inside: a fellowship of survivors, faces daubed with tears, blood, soot—people who hadn’t run, who still clung to hope or plain stubbornness.

Father Callahan sat hunched in a back pew, head bandaged, fingers slick with something darker than blood. He looked up as Shane and Mara entered, his eyes like hollowed-out coal. “You lived, then.”

“Still breathing,” Shane offered, ragged. “Is it time?”

He reached for the battered chest, hands shaking. One by one, the others drew near—city nurses, a paramedic with broken teeth, a pair of battered firefighters, a librarian wielding a chainsaw. They had been called by rumor or dream, by a sense that something final and monstrous waited tonight. Mara pressed amulets into wet palms; Callahan whispered shriving words, old protection prayers that tasted like rust on the air.

Mara’s hands splayed out blueprints and scrawled escape routes across a cracked marble altar. “The cult’s stronghold is the old subway depot,” she said, pointing. “Beneath the city’s center. Rotted tunnels, wards woven from blood and bone. The last of Azazel’s kin are gathered there—they’ll open the gate when the moon is highest.”

Someone—a woman from the fire brigade—choked back a sob. “How do we survive? Do we?”

Mara’s voice was brittle as salt. “Survival isn’t promised. Closing the gate might buy us a world worth surviving in. That’s all.”

Shane slid his ruined hand over the chest. Inside, something shifted, restless, eager for release.

Callahan drew close, his voice hushed. “Tonight is prophecy’s throat. The cult needs your blood, boy. The Hellgate wants your marrow.” His gaze slid toward Mara, shadowed. “You cannot let them shape the sacrifice. You die clean, the world limps onward another century. You die as they want, and we burn with you.”

Mara steadied the group. “We’ll break through. Shane seals the gate. The rest of us hold the line.”

She didn’t mention what they’d seen—visions of each survivor torn into ribbons by demon claws, their city rotting beneath unblinking stars. Callahan met Shane’s eyes, delivering the only benediction he had left: “All that can be done is faith and blood. Tonight, let both spill as needed.”

They gathered their meager arms—iron and salt and old revolvers. Relics, last rites. The full company numbered fewer than a soccer team. But they stood, all the same. The moon burned red through shattered stained glass, painting every face with warpaint.

II. Through the Burning City

They circled through the city’s carcass—stealth as prayer, violence as their only sacrament. Sirens whimpered in the wreck, sometimes drowned by monstrous bellows. Mara led; Shane followed, chest in tow. The others fanned left and right, faces grim, amulets swinging at their throats.

The night was a carnival of endings:

• In the husk of a playground, small, spidery things feasted on a riot cop’s corpse, leaving only glittering armor and gnawed bone.
• Down Broadway, worshippers painted in their own filth jittered and wept around bonfires—some chanted, some tore themselves, some simply rocked and prayed to gods not listening.
• Where city hall had stood, a demon-thing bigger than a garbage truck paced slow rings, dragging corpses by the hair, building little towers of skulls.

The defenders wove through all of it. Each survivor bore scars—bite marks, flayed knuckles, burns, limbs wrapped in prayer strips. None looked up at the moon, for those who did began murmuring, lips smeared red, soon gone still.

When at last they reached the depot, a vagrant’s skull marked the threshold—jaw shattered, spiral glyph worn like a kiss. Shane’s glyphs echoed, burning bitter-hot, as if answering a distant bell.

“Salt your edges,” Mara commanded, pouring a line across the access stair. “They want us to go mad before we reach the gate. Resist.”

They steeled themselves. Together, they descended below the wounded city.

III. Vaults of Slaughter

The old subway’s innards had been transformed—uprooted, reworked for worship. Sigils daubed in fat and blood curled along the walls. The very air pressed in, humid and wrong, smelling of boiled hair, ozone, and ancient sickness.

The group moved as silent as such a ragged handful could, feet crunching bone and salt. There were echoes: laughter, weeping, a thumping like a giant’s heartbeat that matched the hammer in Shane’s skull.

Past the ticket machines—burned black, some fused to the walls—lay the first of the cult’s sentinels, chained naked by the feet, lips stitched and belly open, glyphs wriggling under her skin. Her eyes, blind, followed them, head jerking in agony or invocation.

Two firefighters hesitated; Mara hissed, “Don’t touch her. She’s already gone.”

They pressed on.

Howls erupted from side halls. From the gloom, cult defenders emerged—robed, eyes gouged, hands sewn in prayer. The librarian revved the chainsaw, slicing the first in half before Shane could blink. The others battered in skulls with pipes, bullets; Mara’s salt and hexes crushed the rest like beetles. Each cultist died giggling, whispering: "Blood for the Gate! Marrow for Azazel!"

As they moved deeper, the tunnels grew surreal—walls throbbing as if alive, floor sticky with gore, the very architecture warping, stairs looping in impossible Escher spirals, doors opening onto rivers of teeth. Vision wavered; Shane’s head filled with static, a chorus chanting from inside his bones.

Several times, survivors faltered, fell to invisible claws, limbs sucked into cracks that spat out nothing but blood. Still, the company pressed on, leaving pieces of themselves with every step. Above them, the world shrieked as the moon’s light tongued open new wounds in the sky.

IV. The Inner Chamber

At the end of the world’s throat, after a corridor crimson with heat, the company breached the sacrificial heart of the depot—a wide, vault-like platform where rails converged into a circular pit. The floor was carved with new glyphs, writhing in wet scarlet light. Fetid torches ringed the chamber, and at its center rose the altar—black basalt gouged by claws, shuddering with a heartbeat not its own.

Dozens of cultists prayed and screamed and wept here. Some tore hair, others fingernails. Atop the altar, five high priests in crimson robes carved spiral wounds into naked torsos—victims bled out and pushed into the pit, vanishing into unknowable dark.

As Shane and Mara stepped forward, the room stilled—cultists turning en masse, jaws stretched wide, chanting in a tongue that rotted Shane’s teeth from inside. The priests intoned, “Welcome, Bastion. Join your line. Become the key.”

Callahan took up a prayer—voice watery but fierce—leading the survivors into the chamber as shields, while Shane, Mara, and the battered chest moved straight toward the gate.

The chanting rose. The altar split. A smell like birthing and rot boiled from the fissure. Hands clawed up from the abyss, mouths opened. Shadows poured out—living, gnashing, eyes made of hate.

The survivors formed a crumbling circle. Firefighters unleashed axes. The librarian—face painted in tears as much as blood—flung Latin curses. Mara carved salt lines before Shane, shielded by blood and defiance. All around, shadows and cultists crashed and howled and died.

But at the heart of it, one voice rose: Azazel, invisible, echoing from the pit: “Only the Bastion. The price is written. All others burn.”

The priestesses sliced their own arms, feeding the fissure. Shane’s glyphs ignited, charring his flesh. The chest shuddered, its glyphs burning as bright as the moon.

In that moment—back pressed to the altar, Mara gripping his hand, siblings of hope dying all round—Shane saw:

• Ghosts of past guardians, urging him on.
• The gate, open just a slit, leaking shadows that chewed reality.
• Mara, bleeding and weeping and still standing.
• The world above, drowning.

And he knew. No one else could close the wound. The gate had always waited for the Bastion.

All Shane had left was his body, his bone, his battered will forged in death after death.

He looked to Mara, who pressed the key—the chest—into his hands. She whispered, “Don’t let them decide how it ends. You choose the sacrifice.”

The altar roared. The moon split overhead, pouring down. Shane stepped forward—knowing what came next, and that there was no way back.

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