Full Moon

[DM_Equinox]

Full moon.

A quiet whisper of cloth on gravel is the loudest sound around the small building, punctuated by an occasional sibilant whisper. They're hungry. They can smell their food, the hot, live blood pulsing through soft veins.

As a keening howl tears through the night, they share a look. Not just a wolf, that. They know that one, if only through shreddered remains discovered and tales told by fearful live ones. That one does not leave many witnesses behind. It has caused much damage to their ranks lately. Snarls replace the whispers as pallid faces turn westward, towards the sound.

Then they smell the live ones getting closer, and hunger obliterates all.

[DM_Equinox]

She burst from the woods edge, flinging herself bodily over the boundary fence and into the field beyond; she skidded momentarily, scrabbling for purchase on the slick mud before finding purchase and charging on towards the shuttered farmhouse.

Her clothes, once fine and pretty garments, were now matted to her thin frame by mud, water and blood. Her flight through the woods had been frantic and panicked, even the woods had seemed to be in league with the terror that pursued her; her clothes and flesh were torn and tattered, slashed by branches, thorns and briars.

Behind her she heard the fence creak and break under some great weight, a muffled thud of some terrible mass pounding towards her.

Her breath came in frantic gasps, a testament to the terror in her mind as she’d had no need to draw breath for fourscore years and more. Her footsteps beat a frenzied staccato as she sprinted for the farm.

It caught her at the door step. The thing's bulk slamming her against the door frame, almost tearing it free of the building and forcing the air from her lungs with a strange percussion as her ribs folded and snapped. Her one free arm beat feebly against the creature's back as its head, and those terrible finger long white teeth worked with cyclonic fury below her chest.

The creature reared back, spilling her across the floor, its small eyes glaring orange in the blue light of the fat, full, moon. It looked between her ruined form, her arm now clutching out towards some imaginary freedom, and the town below. It lifted back its head and roared.

Not a wolf’s howl, but a guttural and terrible noise. A scream of victory, satisfaction, hunger and furious challenge that carried over Sestra like the screaming winds of hell.

In the silence that followed, only broken by a faint sobbing beyond the farmhouse door, the beast turned to regard her shattered shape, its lips parting in a bloodstained mockery of a grin.

Evisceration was just the beginning.

[DM_Equinox]

Full moon.

Villagers huddle fearfully as a terrible scream sounds in the nearby woods, transforming moments later into a fierce, keening howl, cut short by an angry growl.

Red dominates his vision as he runs, the foul stench of his arch-enemies filling his nose. Vaguely, he recalls the name of the town whose outskirts he passes.

Sestra.

The stench is strong here, and his hackles rise. He would die, and gladly, for a chance at destroying the meanest of them. He craved the rotten stink of their putrid flesh more than he did fresh, live prey. Not for eating, of course. It was a desire fed by hatred.

He barely notices the group of live ones as his nose detects a group of the undead wretches, moments before they swim into his blood-coated vision. With a primal howl, he hurls himself at them.

It's a short and uneven battle. He stands shaking the last of the broken corpses between his mighty jaws when he realizes that the live ones are standing there staring at him with steel bared.

For now, they seem stumped by what they have just witnessed; however, he suspects they will not appreciate his presence much more than that of the foul vampires, and he has felt steel before - it was not pleasant. Before they can regroup, he roars a warning at them, before turning and darting back out of the town gates, into the night.

There is more prey to be hunted out there.