Blood Moon Harvest
Five friends seeking a weekend escape in the backwoods stumble upon a dark cult preparing for an ancient ritual under the Blood Moon. As night falls, the forest becomes a hunting ground, and survival means facing not only masked killers but secrets among themselves. In the heart of the hellish night, who will make it out alive—and who will be claimed by the blood harvest?
Blood Moon Rising
Mist clawed at Harper’s throat as she ran, each breath raw and wet in her chest, Mia’s hand sticky in her own and Tori limping behind, half-carried. Branches lashed her face; every step a new wound. Somewhere, the hunting cries of the cult roiled through the woods—low, inhuman, growing louder as the Blood Moon thundered toward its peak.
Something alive and cold grabbed Harper from behind. Hands over her mouth. The world spun—a hard, wet thud as she crashed to earth. Mia shrieked. Tori sagged to her knees in panic. They’d run straight into a cultist’s snare: thick rope and camo netting, tangled around their feet.
Rough voices. Masks looming. The jagged tusks of a boar, the gnarled grins of wolves. Harper clawed and kneed, but elbows found her ribs—hard, practiced. Her world narrowed to the stink of sweat, pine, and blood.
From the shadows, a single torch rose. A figure in a black robe and stag skull mask strode forward—taller, broader, terrifyingly calm. The hoop of bone glared with moon-painted menace. The cult deferred, parting with animal deference. The leader.
Harper’s heart thudded, poisoned and wild. Her friends—Mia’s face blanched, Tori’s streaming blood, their fear folding in on itself.
The leader’s voice, low and shuddering. “You, girl. The mark is upon you. Bring her.”
Harper barely felt the ground as they dragged her—fists digging into her arms, her legs kicking through dirt and leaves, branches clawing at her calves. She was half-shoved, half-flung through the bonfire’s haze.
The clearing was reborn as a neverworld. Bonfires burned impossibly bright, making twisted silhouettes writhe on the trees. Stones—slicked with blood, daubed in ancient glyphs—encircled the altar. The air throbbed with humming, chanting, a thousand fevered voices birthing a singular, murderous need.
She was forced to kneel at the foot of the makeshift altar.
Mia hurled herself at a cultist—a flail, a snarl, but another masked figure cracked her temple with the butt of a staff. Tori sagged beside her, clutching a broken arm. All around, the cult moved in ritualistic formation—each motion honed, obsessed. No Lex. No Danny. Just relics of both: Lex’s Zippo tethered to the altar, Danny’s bloodied jacket hung from the stones.
The leader, stag skull gleaming crimson, knelt before Harper. Fingers, delicate and terrible, brushed the side of her cheek. “You came freely, Harper Kane. All the lost come to the moon in the end.”
She spat. “You’re insane.”
The stag skull tilted, a pale toothy grin hidden by shadow. “Insane?” The leader’s chuckle was quiet, almost forgiving. “I am a vessel. This land—this moon—this blood, they chose me. And the prophecy chose you.”
Behind them, cultists began to chant. The sound stung like wasps, a circular rhythm—every word chiseling meaning into the bone-drenched air.
“Let me go,” Harper rasped. “Let them go.”
The leader rose, arms framed against the moon. “The Old Night requires three betrayals, three sacrificed by their own. You, marked by past sins—abandoner, survivor, coward. Your fear has fed the ritual, given strength to the devoted.”
He turned; Mia and Tori were wrenched to their knees beside her.
Mia bared bloodied teeth. “You won’t win. Someone will come.”
He shook his head. “Nobody comes to Red Pines. Not for the harvest. The Blood Moon has closed all doors.”
He motioned; two cultists rimmed Tori and Mia with an oily rope, looping wrists to the blood-painted altar stakes.
Harper’s mind crumbled and rebuilt, desperate. She scanned the circle. Most cultists were transfixed in the ritual, eyes and hands devoted to the altar. A few—a child’s size, a woman’s shape—kept to the periphery, nervous. Weapons flashed—the bone knife, ceremonial, and handaxes stolen from camping kits.
“I get it now,” Harper hissed. “You kill us. The moon rises, you get your power—what? Immortality?”
The leader didn’t blink. “A world remade. The true faithful reborn. This forest made clean by blood. Fear—the greatest sacrifice.”
Next to her, Tori’s eyes filled with hot, desperate tears.
“I can stop this,” Tori mouthed. “I know what they want.”
Harper’s voice cracked. “Don’t be a hero. Not now.”
Tori leaned into the altar, face twisted in pain. “I brought us here. This is on me.”
The leader raised his voice—an invocation rolling down his throat, words old as rot and earth.
“In the name of Elias Finch, in the name of the moon that hungers, tonight the blood gate opens anew!”
Cultists roared, wild in their devotion. A frenzied circle now, all attention on the leader. In that fever, Harper felt the rope slacken—one cultist distracted by the chant, knuckles white on the bone-blade. Harper tensed, jaw working, scanning for weight, angles—an opening, and risk.
A flicker—Mia caught her eyes. In a flash, she spat at her nearest captor. Their head turned; Harper used the split-second to twist, freeing her wrists. She snatched a stray rock, smashed it into the cultist’s knee with all her force. A howl—the bone knife clattered to the ground.
“GO!” Mia screeched.
The chaos was immediate. Mia, all claws and spit, slammed herself sideways at the altar’s legs, upending candles and the bowl of blood. Tori, screaming, ripped her own arm free and staggered up, blood pouring from her temple.
Harper lunged for the bone knife, icy in her palm. Every move was hunger, terror, rage. She twisted up, driving the blade into the thigh of a robed cultist as he rushed her. Hot spray. A strangled moan.
As the cult broke ranks, a dozen claws all reached at once. Mia took a glancing blow to the scalp; Tori went down again, shrieking, then seized a burning torch from the ground. She jammed it into the altar, fire licking at the blood-soaked wood.
“NO!” Elias’s voice thundered.
Harper grabbed Mia’s wrist, dragging her toward the forest’s gaping maw. The flames caught the altar—crackling, roaring. Tori faltered, staring at the fire with wild, defeated eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed, hurling herself onto the burning altar as cultists surged forward, too late. As the fire shrieked, she slammed her wounded body down across the stones, meeting Harper’s shattered gaze. “You have to run. You have to LIVE.”
Elias screamed a curse, scrambling to pull Tori free, but she clung to the altar, willing her own flesh to become a barricade. The smoke thickened with the stench of burning blood, a foul red haze that made cultists stagger, coughing, blind and momentarily vulnerable.
Harper ran, legs failing, firelight strobing through branches. Mia stumbled after, clutching her bleeding head, red smeared to her chin. Behind—yells, confusion, the leader roaring, Tori’s last acts choking the circle in chaos and fire. But the woods still twisted—a labyrinth that never let its prey escape.
They crashed through brush. Harper lost her footing, tumbled, then spat out mud and forced herself up. Every nerve ached for collapse. But the dawn threatened on the far horizon—faint and impossible blue, a promise or a lie.
Mia gasped, “I can’t—I’m—”
“Don’t say it,” Harper hissed, dragging her up, every cell screaming with loss and horror. “If you stop, it’s over.”
A last howl rose—Elias’s voice, guttural, cracked with fury, “No one escapes! The moon’s mercy is only for the faithful!”
But even in rags, blasted by blood and betrayal, the two girls shoved through, night giving way. No footsteps behind now. Only the forest’s cold memory, and the smell of fire and char and old, spilled dreams.
Epilogue
Morning burned away the mist, washing the carnage into sepia: blackened stones, scorched earth, and a bitter sweetness in the air. The cult’s shapes moved like ghosts through the ruined ritual site. Elias Finch, mask cracked but spirit undimmed, knelt among the ashes, fingers tracing new sigils into the embers.
Far off, in the hush of the waking pines, two figures staggered along a deer run—Harper and Mia, haggard, heads lowered, hands locked even in their exhaustion and terror. Blood trailed behind them:
Mia limping, clutching Harper’s arm; Harper’s eyes dead with guilt, loss, and hopeful venom. They emerged, not into safety, but into a future forever stained—a world humming with what they could never leave behind.
Back as the sun crowned, Elias rose, mask discarded. In his palm: a locket dropped by Tori, glinting in the new dawn. He whispered to the trees—already, movement rustled further down the ridge. Another name would be called to the Blood Moon. Another harvest would come.