My name is Father Malachi, and I am the man who brought a god's wrath to Havenwood.
It was my foolish arrogance, my scholar's greed, that led me to the dusty, iron-bound chest. I was searching for proof, for power, to rekindle the dying flame of my faith. Inside that chest, tucked beneath Egyptian linen, was the Ankh of Khonsu, the Moon God's focus, the divine compass point that guided his immense presence. I didn't steal a mere relic; I stole a leash, and now, the unleashed god was repaying my reverence with a terrifying lesson in ancient fear.
The full moon tonight wasn't silver; it was a brutal, spectral white, hanging too low and too heavy in the sky. It felt like a vast, malignant eye, scrutinizing the world below. This was Khonsu's light-not the gentle guide of travelers, but the vengeful god who could bend the laws of time and flesh.
I stood in the cold, desecrated silence of my church, the Ankh a pulsing, icy knot of silver beneath my tattered cassock. Outside, the world was ending. Khonsu had twisted the lunar cycle itself, forcing a constant, agonizing transformation on the townsfolk. Every night was the full moon for the afflicted, and their curse had become a nightly, self-sustaining contagion.
The noise started at the main doors: a wet, rhythmic shredding sound as claws-not natural paws, but grotesque, distorted human hands-tore through the century-old oak. The smell was suffocating: hot, rank fur, metallic blood, and the nauseating sweetness of accelerated, unnatural decay.
I had to break the tether. I had to destroy the Ankh.
I burst out of the rear sacristy door and into the alleyway. The moonlight was blinding, turning the familiar town into a canvas of blinding white and absolute black. I saw them immediately. Elias Thorne, the old veterinarian, was a hunched, patchy horror, his limbs broken and jerky, driven by pure, confused terror. And Sheriff Brody, tall and massive, a creature of focused black muscle and burning, gold-flecked eyes-the god's perfect executioner.
Brody moved. He didn't run; he glided, a silent, impossible rush that closed the distance in a single heartbeat. I screamed and threw up my only defense-a heavy brass candelabra-but his monstrous, clawed hand met the metal with a shriek of grinding force. I was flung against the brick wall, the air driven from my lungs.
He stood over me, his hot, fetid breath washing over my face. He didn't strike. Instead, he lowered his vast, sharp muzzle right onto my chest, right over the hidden artifact, and let out a deep, resonating purr.
The cold voice of Khonsu filled my mind: "I am the god of Time, little priest. You carry my power. I will watch you attempt to destroy it."
He wanted me to fail. He had spared me, making me the tortured, frantic bearer of the curse.
I scrambled up and ran, my body screaming with bruises and fear, running toward the only place I knew where a natural force might withstand the divine: the old quarry pit on the edge of town, where the blasting operations of decades past had exposed raw, unyielding basalt rock.
I could hear them behind me-not a pack, but scattered, quick bursts of movement. They were toying with me, letting me stumble toward my inevitable end.
I reached the rim of the quarry pit, gasping, my legs giving out. Below, the pit dropped seventy feet to a floor of fractured, black stone-the most permanent, violent end I could conceive.
I pulled the Ankh from my cassock. The silver was now vibrating so furiously it burned. I held it up, and in that cruel, white moonlight, it shone like a diamond-a beautiful, terrible thing.
"Khonsu!" I screamed, my voice raw and cracking. "You deal in time! Then let me show you finality!"
Just as I prepared to hurl the artifact, a small, dark shape darted out from the mouth of a nearby drainage pipe and slammed into my legs. It was Mrs. Gable, the baker, smaller and quicker, her face a mask of frantic, insane amusement.
I went down hard, the Ankh flying from my grip. It sailed over the edge of the pit.
Mrs. Gable let out a triumphant, hysterical giggle, her eyes fixed on the falling prize. She scrambled to the edge and lunged, trying to snag the relic before it fell.
Her desperation was my chance. I grabbed a fistful of her coarse, matted hair and hauled the creature back from the edge. We rolled, grappling on the wet shale and rock. She wasn't fighting me; she was tearing at the ground, trying to reach the Ankh's descent path.
I glanced over the edge. The artifact was plummeting toward the black, jagged basalt far below.
Khonsu is the god of Time and the Moon. To defy him, you must defy the passage of time itself.
I found my moment. As Mrs. Gable thrashed, I seized a loose, heavy piece of iron slag left from the old mining days-a piece of the Earth that had withstood the erosion of time. I brought it down, not on her head, but on her already distorted forearm, the limb she was reaching with, and smashed it with a terrible, wet sound of cracking bone.
She let out a final, raw, human scream of agony.
The scream was immediately answered by a new sound: the metallic crunch of the Ankh hitting the basalt floor far below.
The entire quarry pit seemed to shudder.
And then, nothing.
No explosion. No pillar of light. Just absolute, terrifying silence.
I looked down at the pit. The Ankh was a broken piece of twisted metal, shattered against the unyielding stone, the obsidian base pulverized.
I looked at the creature beside me. Mrs. Gable was still, her eyes wide, terrified, and utterly human. She was alive, but twisted and broken.
From the town, the howls and shrieks of the afflicted began to change. They were no longer screams of rage, but desperate wails of confusion. The divine tether was severed. Khonsu's power had been forced back from the temporal to the cyclical. The nightly curse was broken.
But the beasts were still here.
I pulled myself up, looking back at the dark, silent woods. Khonsu had been defied, but not defeated. I had stopped the accelerated time of the curse, but the afflicted would simply remain as they were-feral, broken, and stranded in their monstrous flesh until the next true full moon arrived a month away.
I was the only one left to guard the line between what they were and what they still might become. The vengeance of a god had been contained, but the horror had only just begun.
This is the end of the standalone story.