Unsleeping Patron - Hunting Under the Blue Moon

A sickly, bloated indigo moon bled through the canopy, expanding until it filled half the night sky with a sickly, bloated indigo. It sat so low over the treetops that the fluted branches looked like dark ribs cradling a ball of blue ice.Silas knelt in the mud fifty yards downriver from the camp, his knees sinking into the freezing shale. The blue moonlight didn’t cast shadows; it turned the world into a flat, monochrome slate where the stones looked like curdled lard and his own hands appeared dead and grey.Beside him lay four crude torches thick branches wrapped in strips of cloth he had soaked in -tree resin scavenged from the logs Gideon’s crew had felled. His hands trembled as he struck the piece of dark flint against the spine of his mantis-scythe dagger. Sparks flew, catching the pitch with a sharp whoosh.He picked up the first torch and shoved it into the shale ten paces upstream from where the water pooled.The Thread-Fish was still there. Through the indigo glare, Silas could see the mass of pitch-black filaments resting in the shallow eddy near the bank. It swayed against the current, a ball of tangled horsehair that vibrated in place, feeding on the cold.Silas moved silently, his boots squelching in the mud. He planted the second torch ten paces downstream, then the third and fourth inland, forming a tight, fifteen-foot square around the entity’s shallow pool.As the fourth torch flared into orange life, the air inside the square buckled.The rushing roar of the river didn’t fade it was cut off completely, as if a stone slab had been dropped over Silas’s head. Inside the four-point fire perimeter, the temperature dropped like a stone down a dry well. Frost instantly flowered across the dark shale, turning the mud into rigid, iron-hard ridges. Silas’s breath didn’t mist; it froze into tiny, glittering ice-crystals that fell straight down onto his boots.He picked up his main torch, stepped over the frost line, and thrust the burning pitch directly into the center of the dark thread-mass.The water sizzled, violently evaporating into a plume of violet steam.The Thread-Fish thrashed. Its black, hair-like tendrils whipped out of the water, wrapping around the burning wood, trying to smother the resin. But fire was its boundary. The pitch crackled, feeding on the oily, aquatic mass, turning the dark threads into a sputtering, bubbling sludge.Then the entity shrieked.It wasn’t a sound that traveled through the air. It struck Silas directly inside his ear canals, a high, glass-shattering vibration that tore through the bones of his face and drove straight into his central nervous system.The world tilted ninety degrees.Suddenly, Silas was no longer standing in the mud holding a torch. He was floating six feet in the air, suspended above the frozen shale, looking down at his own body.He saw his physical shell kneeling in the mud, his back arched at an impossible angle, his spine creaking beneath his flannel coat. His mouth was stretched wide in a silent scream, and from his nostrils, two thick, curdled streams of black, necrotic blood spilled onto his chin. His eyes were rolled back into his head, showing only the purple-veined whites.Get back, his mind panicked, a cold, disembodied thought hovering beneath the indigo moon. Get back in the meat.The soul-shock dragged at him, pulling his floating consciousness toward the sky where the giant blue moon opened like a vast, iris-less eye. The cold up there was absolute. It tasted of nothing, smelled of nothing, promising an endless, painless sleep away from the rotting ache in his gut.Down in the mud, the third torch flared brightly, a spur of resin popping.The heat of that tiny orange spark anchored him.Silas’s floating shadow slammed downward, plunging back through his neck and shoulders like a man falling through thin ice into frozen water.He hit his body with a wet, gasp-filled thud. His jaw snapped shut, his teeth slicing deep into his own tongue. Hot, iron-tasting blood flooded his mouth, clearing the numbness from his skull.”Ah “He collapsed onto his elbows, coughing violently, spatting red-and-black phlegm onto the frost. His internal organs, already decayed by the Parchment’s lifespan toll, felt as if they had been packed with crushed glass.In the center of the four fires, the Thread-Fish was gone.In its place, resting on a dry, scorched patch of shale where the water had been driven back, lay a small pile of fine, soot-like ash. It shimmered with a faint, oily iridescence, shifting in the draft like dark silk.The second torch on the left sputtered. A gust of wind from the Miasma outside the domain caught the flame, reducing it to a dying blue ember.The indigo sky cracked. The illusion of the giant moon shivered like broken glass.Silas didn’t hesitate. Ignoring the agony in his chest and the frostbite numbing his fingers to useless wooden pegs, he lunged forward. He tore a wide patch of cotton from the thigh of his trousers, dumped the mound of greasy black ash into the cloth, and pulled the corners tight with his teeth.The third torch died.The square collapsed.The deafening, thunderous roar of the river slammed back into Silas’s ears with the force of a physical blow. The indigo moon vanished, replaced by the deep, suffocating grey of the night sky, and the cold Miasma rushed back over the bank, smothering the remaining torches in a cloud of damp smoke.Silas lay on his side in the mud, hugging the small, ash-filled cloth bundle tight against his throbbing ribs, his chest heaving as the freezing river spray washed over his legs.