Descent Into the Dark

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A branch snapped high overhead—a brittle, wet break that sent all three spinning to silence. Mia’s breathing hissed, sharp in the black, and Harper’s hand clamped over her mouth. Tori halted behind them, hands pressed hard to her temples.

Another crack, closer.

Harper’s mind ricocheted: No running. Stay low. Move slow. She wondered if the cultists could see in the dark—or if they were just so used to moving in terror that they barely needed eyes at all.

She tried, again, to recall the slinking animal trail looping behind the bonfire. Her shoes made suction sounds in the mud. Ahead, Mia kept flicking glances behind her, as if afraid something would hiss up beside them. The woods had gone thick with fog—red-tinged beneath the corrupted moonlight so every shape became another threat.

Behind, Tori started crying. The sound was animal, desperate. "Wait!" she hissed, but Harper clenched her jaw. They couldn’t stop now. They couldn’t—

The roar from the clearing, a chant rising, made Harper’s knees turn molten. Danny’s scream—a high, cracking sob—thudded across the trees. Mia staggered. “Harper, stop! We can’t leave him!”

“We. Will. Not. Survive,” Harper growled, words barely more than spit. “We get eyes on him first. Then we figure out—”

Mia’s nails dug crescents in Harper’s arm. “You’re the one who said never leave anyone. You swore.”

“Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I don’t know how not to get us killed.”

Too late—they froze. A shifting movement in the trees, heavy steps, the orange flicker of fire catching on carved wood. One of them. A cultist, face shrouded by a grinning bear’s jaw, sweeping the brush with a wicked, hook-bladed staff.

Tori went rigid behind them, her breath catching on a whimper.

“Down,” Harper mouthed.

But Tori stood stock still, shaking. The cultist’s light swept—flickered. Stopped right on Tori’s sneakers.

Everything broke at once. Harper shoved Mia sideways, heard Tori’s scream shred the dark as the bear-mask surged forward, and sprinted. There was barely a second—shock, panic, the dull ham-hammer of her heart—before Harper snatched Mia’s wrist and tumbled behind a fallen log.

Tori—no. The scream echoed—pain, terror. Branches exploded. Mia started to scramble to her feet, but Harper forced her down. “You run, they see us. They hear us!”

“But Tori—”

“Too late!”

Leaves tore under something heavy—the cultist, hauling Tori by the hair, snarled curses beneath the carved mask. Tori kicked and thrashed, drawing blood from her scalp, ramming an elbow backward. “Let go! Let go!”

The hook-staff cracked her shoulder, sent her sprawling—and then the bear-mask raised it again for a killing blow. A spasm of adrenaline made Tori bite out a tasting scream—right as her fingers closed around a jagged rock. She swung up, blind, smashed the rock into the mask’s gaping jaw. Bone split with a sick, wet snap. The cultist reeled, roaring, blood waterfalling down his chest. Tori staggered and ran, pushing pain back behind thick walls of shock.

Harper, frozen, could only listen. Mia sobbed, softly, hunched in dirt. The woods filled with Tori’s fractured sprint and the cultist’s bellowing rage.

Another chant—closer. New footsteps, many. Harper’s mind spun. They’d been seen. The plan—if there had ever been a plan—was ruined.

“We can’t just sit here,” Mia gasped. “Danny’s—Tori’s—they’re gonna die because we—”

“I know!” Harper grabbed her by both shoulders and forced her to face her. “You want to die for them? For Lex? For a friend who might already be—”

A silence, heavy. Mia’s fury burned in the pitch dark, lips trembling. “You don’t trust anyone. Not even me. Maybe that’s how you survive, right—alone?”

Harper let her go. She wanted to say something kind. Or true. Couldn’t.

Somewhere in the haze, Tori crashed blindly through brush, blood streaking from her torn scalp and arm. She fell, hard, and crawled—trailing grime and hot, urgent breath. The pain, now, was a limb; she held it close, using her other hand to grope forward. Fear drove her, wild, but so did shame.

I led us here. I wanted this.

In her jeans pocket, her phone buzzed—ghostly, dim. No service for calls. Only a text, short and nameless:

THE BLOOD MOON WANTS YOU HOME.

Tori dropped the phone, pulse hammered by fresh terror.

Back under the rotting log, Harper stared at the mud against her palms. Mia wouldn’t meet her eyes. “It’s not just the cult,” Mia hissed. “It’s Tori. She knew things about this. She led us here. You saw the symbols first, remember?”

Harper’s mind caught, snagged on memory. Tori poring over occult forums. Tori insisting they answer the invitation.

A beat—a cold, crawling realization. Harper reached for Mia’s bag for the backup flashlight and her fingers brushed paper—creased, soaked. A notebook. Tori’s handwriting: choruses of sigil sketches, runic circles, and a phrase repeated: Elias welcomes the lost. Ritual at the red stones. A blood moon will open the gate.

She thrust the page at Mia. “She’s been talking to them. To—Elias. Whoever that is.”

Mia’s face twisted—grief, betrayal, hope shriveled at once. “Why didn’t she tell us?”

Tori stumbled through brush and pain. She tried to scream, but her voice clung to her teeth. The forest deepened—every shadow a whispered threat. She pressed her back to a tree and, for a breath, sobbed. Her phone vibrated again. Another message lit the cracked screen:

If you run, we take them all.

Harper caught a pulse of movement—Tori staggering toward them, hair caked in blood, one arm cradled useless. The bear-mask was gone but more figures threaded through the dark, chasing.

“Get up!” Harper barked. “We move—now!”

Mia glared at Tori, eyes wet. “Did you know? Did you bring us here for this?”

Tori’s sob was animal. “I didn’t think—I just wanted to see. I thought—I wanted to belong somewhere.”

Harper’s anger flared, bright and quick. “You lied to us. You knew about the Blood Moon. The cult. You knew.”

Tori shrank, clutching her ruined arm, stained and shuddering. “You don’t understand, Harper. There were messages—I thought it was just stories. Prophecies, scavenger hunts—stuff people do for a thrill. Not—” She broke off, eyes swimming with blood and regret.

“They have Danny. Lex is gone. Now they have us all.” Mia spat. “And maybe that’s what you wanted.”

“That’s not—” Tori’s voice broke.

A shriek tore through the black, near enough Harper tasted its violence. Mia spun, panic breaking through. “We shouldn’t have followed you. We should’ve left when we had the chance.”

“You think I wanted this?” Tori moaned, head pressed to her knees. “You think I wanted any of you hurt?”

Harper drew herself up, arm blood-slicked from Tori’s wounds. The fighting, the words, the old betrayals and fresh trauma—none of it mattered. Not now. If they didn’t move, didn’t act, it’d be more than friendship dying in these woods.

Another branch snapped. Shadows flickered, voices rising—dogged, searching. The hunt was closing in.

Harper growled, grabbing Mia’s hand with one, dragging Tori to her feet with the other. “Doesn’t matter. We move. We survive. That’s what’s left.”

They ran. The three, brutalized and broken, staggered into the moonlit dark together—no trust, just survival. Behind them, something howled—a warning, a victory, a promise of death. The Blood Moon, swollen and leering, washed their path in red silence.