“Please…” it hissed. “End it… I don’t want to become like them…”
The trembling became worse. One eye turned fully crimson. The other soon followed.
Timur stepped forward. “Should we kill it?”
“It’s begging for it,” Robin muttered. “But if it dies… won’t it trigger the last moon shift?”
Ludwig’s voice was grim. “If we don’t kill him… something worse might happen.”
The werewolf opened its mouth one last time. Its voice was almost reverent.
“Thank you… young unde—”
Oathcarver came down in a single, vertical arc.
The blow cleaved the creature from shoulder to thigh in one savage, unmerciful stroke. The sound it made was not a scream, but a wet, final exhale—as if the breath had been held for centuries and finally let go.
The blade didn’t stop at flesh.
It tore through the floor behind it, splitting the rotted wood and stone alike.
Silence fell.
Even the Reavers outside seemed to pause.
Ludwig stood still, Oathcarver buried deep into the earth.
And behind him, the others stood slack-jawed.
Robin’s expression was unreadable. Timur slowly lowered his blade. Gorak blinked twice.
“I… didn’t expect that much power from those tiny arms of yours…” Gorak finally muttered.
“It’s not the size of muscle that matters,” Ludwig replied dryly, placing Oathcarver slowly into the floor again.
What mattered more was that none of them had caught the slip—the final words of the werewolf.
Undead.
They had been too shocked by the brutality. Too caught in the awe.
Ludwig gave no sign of relief, but inwardly he let out a breathless sigh.
[You have slain the Werewolf Lord.]
[You have obtained {Brave Soul} x2]
[You have obtained: Defiled Core Fragment]
[The Treacherous Fanged Apostle sensed the death of their first creation. Do be careful…Stay safe…]
{The final Lord has died. The final Core Fragment is obtained. You currently hold 3.
Obtain the final one to stop the full descent of the moon.}
Almost too loud to suffer the words came to everyone at once, loud soul speaking words that felt as if they were being spoken to them but spoken at and through them.
****
When the moon turns red and real,
And the earth forgets to feel…
He comes with ribs like twisted bells,
And eyes that drank the stars and knelt.
***
No flesh, no flame, no blessed word
Can halt the march once it’s heard.
The stone won’t speak, the sky won’t cry—
Even silence has learned to die.
***
Where he treads, the Reavers rise.
Where he speaks, the marrow lies.
No prayer, no pact, no holy song…
The Flayed King walks, and the night is long.
****
The air had thickened.
Not with heat.
Not with stench.
But with presence.
The kind that made the soul want to look away, even if the eyes hadn’t seen anything yet.
The flickering sconces along the manor walls dimmed, as if the flames themselves had begun to doubt their light. Even the cold felt different—no longer a sensation of temperature, but of loss. Like something had been taken from the air. From the world.
Melisande was the first to notice it.
Her staff, still warm with residual holy light, began to flicker at its tip—then gutter out. No wind. No touch. Just… silence.
“…Something’s wrong, you all heard that right?” she said softly, but no one answered.
Their silence was answer enough
Timur, ever the prudent, had gone still. His hands remained on his swords, but he didn’t draw them. His instincts didn’t scream at him to fight.
They screamed at him to run.
Outside, the Moon Reavers had not moved.
But they had turned.
Every single one of them.
They now faced the manor.
And though their mouths did not open, though their wings did not beat, the sound began to rise.
A hum.
No—not a hum. A tone.
Low. Vibrating. Distant.
Robin pressed his back to the stone wall near the entry, his daggers drawn. “First a poem and now a hum… feels like we’re in a funeral.”
Gorak tightened his grip on his weapon. “Let’s not make it our own.”
Ludwig slowly withdrew Oathcarver from the ground , the blade sliding free with a dry, gritty crack. He said nothing.
Because he heard something else beneath the tone.
Words?
Or not words. Intentions.
As if something unseen was looking at him now.
At all of them.
And it was… smiling.
The werewolf’s corpse twitched.
Not a resurrection. Not undeath.
Just a final reflex—a ripple through its body, a shiver.
And from the great wound Ludwig had carved through it, black mist began to spill.
Not smoke.
Not blood.
Mist that dragged itself along the floor like it had claws, it rapidly seeped into the manor and out of it like it was rushing to meet something.
Timur finally spoke.
“Something’s wrong here, we shouldn’t stay any longer” he said backing away.
Melisande backed away from the spreading darkness, clutching her staff, whispering spells that sputtered uselessly in her throat.
“I’m not a big fan of giving up,” Gorak said, “But I’m a worse fan for fighting black magic…”
Ludwig stared at the fleeting black mist. He knew.
Killing the final Lord was simply bait. The Reavers could have done it themselves, but they didn’t. They gave it to Ludwig, and by killing it inside the manor…
Only then did Ludwig’s eyes snap to the massive barrier surrounding the manor, the barrier which was protecting them against the moon’s curse. The fleeting smoke from the corpse of the werewolf slammed into it and began merging with it.
The barrier began shaking, shuddering, and visibly weakening.
“AAAREEGHHHHH!”
Gorak fell down first on his knees, then Melisande, Robin, and finally Timur whose eyes bulged from strain.
Only after all four of them were gripping their ears, did Ludwig finally hear the second part of the poem.
***
When the Eye unblinks, the Flayed King walks.
Ribs like twisted bells. Breath that stills the clocks.
The Wrathful’s herald. The Moon’s tongue.
He cracks the sky where no dirge is sung.
***
The poem whispered itself again.
Not aloud.
In their bones.
The temperature dropped again—but not like before. This wasn’t cold.
This was absence.
The Reavers outside bent low—kneeling. Not to the corpse. Not to the manor.
But to something rising.
And far above, the moon—which had hovered bloated and red for hours—shivered.
Its light bent. Folded. Sharpened.
And then—opened.
An eye.
No pupil.
Just a gaping void with teeth behind it.
The Gibbus Moon was no longer a moon.
It was watching.
“We… should run!” Timur shouted as the group barely got their bearings.
Ludwig turned, voice low and grim.
“We don’t run.” he added once again
Robin turned to him, panic rising. “We have to! Whatever that thing is, we’re not equipped—”
“We don’t run,” Ludwig repeated, planting Oathcarver into the floor. “This place is already surrounded. The moment that beast died, we entered this thing’s playground.”
Timur was shaking now, not visibly, but in his voice.
“What the hell have you brought us into, Davon?” Robin shouted. Though he knew deep down that it was they who walked into this march by their own feet.
Ludwig didn’t answer.
Not because he couldn’t.
But because outside, in the dead garden, something tall was now walking between the kneeling Reavers.
[The Flayed King has emerged.]