The river lay in a glassy stillness, as if the world itself had stopped breathing. Its mirror-like surface caught the faint shimmer of moonlight, reflecting it in perfect silence. Not any wave, not even a ripple was seen; only soft, rhythmic splash of a paddle dipping into the water broke that unnatural calm.

The woman sat alone in the small bamboo boat, her back slightly bent from hours of rowing. The boy lay curled at her feet, fast asleep, his shallow breathing was barely audible over the water's hush. But her eyes on the black stretch of river ahead, scanning and something searching.

Every now and then, she sang like a faint, quivering melody. The song of a woman who has no audience but had her own loneliness. The notes carried across the water, thin and broken, telling of nights heavy with full of grief.

She did not know where she was going. But she only knew she could not turn back.

Somewhere beneath the black surface, something was moving. She could not see it, but she could felt it, a presence vast and coiled. At first she imagined it was an big fish, then her mind recoiled - no, it was bigger. A hulking, ancient thing. Śalkavipraṇaśinī, (The elongated grace of an oarfish, yes, but fused with the monstrous bulk of a pliosaur, its form twisting in her imagination, scales and teeth and darkness.)

But the water did not stir. No swelling waves, no shifting current was there, only the delicate V-shaped ripples left by her oars. 

Her song trailed off.

Her eyes lifted briefly to the moon. Here, its face seemed gentler than the one she had last seen over the town, a pale, unbroken disk, untouched by the bloody veil that had once devoured it. From where she was now, the moon almost seemed pure.

Almost.

The faint echoes of battle still reached her ears—metal on metal, the screaming of things not entirely human. The sound was muffled by distance, yet still too sharp to be ignored. When she turned her head toward the shore, she saw it: a thick red aura smothering the town, pulsating, as if the very air above it had become a living wound.

She sighed. The river carried her onward towards unknown.

Then something shifted.

The moon, so constant and cold, now it flickered.

Her brow creased. She stared harder. The moon wasn't flickering like candlelight but it was glitching, its edges shivering in jagged distortions, as though some unseen blade were slicing it in strange angles and then

Boom.

A soundless shattering that somehow resonated inside her bones.

The moon fractured in her vision, not into pieces, but into absence. The silver glow vanished, replaced by a gaping void and with it, the night itself seemed to collapse inward. The river, the trees, even the air became a deeper kind of dark, an oppressive black where outlines blurred and depth no longer existed.

Then, just as abruptly, the moon flared back into existence.

But this was no gentle moonlight as before. She felt something was wrong as suspicion crept up her spine. It burned too bright, flooding the world in a pale, merciless glare like a miniature sun. Her eyes watered. She wanted to look away but could not.

From the moon's lower corner, a disturbance began. A blotch of black spread outward like ink bleeding through paper. She saw it was not a shadow, it was movement. A writhing mass of creatures, all black and glistening, crawling and tumbling over one another in impossible numbers. Their forms shifted, sometimes like insects, sometimes like beasts, sometimes like fragments of something human that had been swallowed by tar.

They were crawling across the surface of the moon.

She froze. Her throat tightened.

The mass began to consume the pale glow, eating it alive. The moon shuddered, as if resisting, and for a heartbeat the white light flared defiantly. The darkness peeled away, but then surged back, stronger.

It wasn't just covering the moon, it was devouring it. The writhing grew faster, forming vast spirals that churned around the fading light. She realized with horror that the rotation mirrored, she had seen it somewhere.

From her place on the river, she saw the moon's silver surface vanish beneath that living, black storm. Thin streaks of grey and dull white swirled through the darkness, like the last breaths of something dying. Then a shape, subtle at first, emerged around it. It was an outline of an eye. One, colossal, unblinking eye and moon became its iris.

On the moon surface, the writhing mass of crawling, obsidian creatures began to coil toward a single point. They pressed against each other, merging, twisting, forming an unnatural swelling, like a blister of shadow. It bulged outward with slow inevitability, pulsing, throbbing.

Then, with a sickening crack and a ripple that echoed across the sky, the bulge split.

What oozed forth was not blood, but a glistening sludge, black as midnight oil, thick like rotting pus. It poured in slow, revolting ropes, drifting down from the lunar wound.

From within that falling decay, shapes began to emerge.

The first was a towering, goat-shaped figure, its body lean and twisted, coated in the same tar-like skin as the creatures that had consumed the moon. Twin axes, chipped and dark, hung from its elongated hands. Its horns spiralled in jagged patterns, one bleached bone-white, the other soaked in black. Its eyes glowed faintly—one like ash, the other like pitch.

Behind it, a tiger-like beast crawled forth, but proportions were wrong. Its legs bent in unnatural ways, its gait jittering between fluid motion and spasms like a puppet yanked on tangled strings. Only one eye shone, a pale, milky white, while the other was a hollow socket filled with writhing shadow.

More came. They did not march, they crawled and fell. Tumbling from the moon's surface like dead things, only to writhe and twist in mid-air, their limbs rotating too far, their heads turning completely around, squishing as they landed.

Some merged upon impact, two creatures collapsing into each other and reshaping into new horrors. Others dragged themselves across the air as if it were solid ground, defying every rule of nature she had ever known.

The creatures began to crawl toward the river. Wherever they touched, the water darkened. Blue was consumed by an oily black that spread outward in ripples, exactly as it had on the moon's surface.

Her boat drifted into that cursed zone, the point where blue water met the encroaching black. She gripped her oar tighter.

The river was vast, but she suddenly felt it was not big enough to escape.

Somewhere behind her, something moved.

 The water seemed to breathe, then coil, then rise. She turned her head slightly and froze. It was a worm. No—something worm-like, but too large, too alive. Its girth was wide enough to crush her boat in half, its body layered in overlapping, translucent plates that shimmered with faint light from within. 

The creature did not simply emerge, it erupted, exploding upward with a roar that rattled her bones. In one swift motion, she channelled her energy into the oar, stabbing it deep into the water with a force, a surge of power erupted from the strike, and the boat shot upward, airborne.

Below, the river convulsed.

Not one worm, but many—dozens—burst from beneath, their gaping maws unfurling like grotesque petals of blackened flesh. Rows of glistening teeth lined their throats, and their bodies twisted over each other in a frenzy. They were feeding. The black sludge dripping from the moon's horrors had reached them, and the worms devoured it in mouthfuls, their bodies shuddering with each swallow.

Her boat slammed back onto the water. Without pausing, she began to row, faster, harder than before. The river's surface blurred beneath her.

.........................

The worms moved like a wall of living hunger, pressing in, their bodies twisting over one another until the river's surface was nothing but a pulsating carpet of black flesh and glistening jaws. The air smelled of rot and something sharp, like burning metal mixed with spoiled meat. The dome of darkness above closed tighter, leaving only an eye, staring down at them.

She could hear it now, a deep vibration through the boat. Every screech from the worms carried a tearing sound, as if their throats were ripping open with every cry. The small worms kept leaping at the bigger ones, clamping their flower-shaped jaws onto the slick skin and tearing away chunks. The pus poured out in ribbons, hitting the water and instantly writhing into new half-formed bodies that screamed as they were born.

Her glowing eyes caught every twitch, every coil and every shadow. Her hands were tight on the row, stabbing it deep into the riverbed again and again, trying to push the boat away from the thickest swarm. One worm lunged from the side and she stabbed that pin inside that creature's mouth. She drew the seal with a rapid, practiced motion, and fire burst over the worm's head, the flames twisting into strange shapes as they clung to the wet skin. It shrieked, flailing, and in its death-thrash knocked three smaller worms into the air.

Before they could fall back into the water, she stabbed the row down, sending the boat into another jump. Mid-air, another worm rose huge, its jaw unhinged far wider than anything natural, rows of petal-like teeth trembling in hunger. From behind it, more came, faster than before, faster than thought, their bodies breaking the water like black whips.

They surrounded her in no time, gaps was filling. The gap was closing. All around, the sound became a single, endless screech, vibrating the river and making her skull ache. Even the water itself seemed to curl and twist, boiling without heat. The smaller worms went mad, throwing themselves onto the giants, biting deep, drinking pus, ripping each other apart, and still the pieces kept moving.

They started to go inside of the water. All things were going into silence.

To be Continued...