While the moon is oft visible during the day, the celestial confluence of the Mad Moon only ever occurs during the night. Perhaps such vile influence can only take root in the dark.

-Nico Voticel, in his essay "Historical Cycles of the Mad Moon"

The beast was out of sight for now, but Gaspard could still hears it’s jagged fingers clawing against the stone. Days spent dragging the creature’s corpulent mass had worn it’s fingers down to the bone, but still it crawled. Every grasping motion filled the air with the harsh, grating sound of bone against rock.

It baffled Gaspard that such a bloated, awkward creature could move so fast. He looked over his shoulder and saw the wall of flesh still pulling itself closer to him. A mouth large enough to swallow a man whole bared jagged teeth as the pursuing mass of flesh barreled towards him. Gaspard turned his eyes to the halls ahead. He had sought to avoid the massive creature by diving into the tight hallways of a nearby manor, but it pursued him still. The pursuer somehow had little difficulty squeezing its massive frame into even the smallest spaces.

The halls ahead split two ways. Gaspard went with a gut instinct and dashed to the right. He only made it a few frantic strides before realizing he’d made the wrong choice. The only path forward led down into a basement -an unlikely place to find an exit. Gaspard looked back, and found that the pursuer was already choking the width of the hall behind him. Gaspard continued forward, forced to hope that he could find some cellar door -or at least a more defensible position.

What little light filtered in through the windows of the manor faded as Gaspard descended into the cellar below. He had no time to light his lantern, and so he carried on in the darkness. He kept one hand on the right wall to guide him forward. The dull scrape of fingertip against stone still chased at his back, pushing him forward through the darkness.

After a few minutes proceeding through blackened halls, the wall slipped away from Gaspard’s hand. He groped in darkness and found it again, further back this time. A carved alcove in the otherwise smooth wall. He groped for purchase, and as his frantic hands sought a solid wall to guide them again, Gaspard felt out a shape in the darkness. Something long, smooth, and carved of heavy stone. A sarcophagus. Gaspard had wandered his way into a tomb. He did not have time to appreciate the irony in this.

With nowhere left to run, Gaspard’s primal instincts compelled him to hide. He chose the nearest possible hiding place. Insane as it seemed, even at the time, Gaspard pried open the lid to the sarcophagus and threw himself inside. The ancient skeleton within nearly crumbled to dust as Gaspard pushed it aside. His dead bedfellow raised no protest as Gaspard pushed the lid closed from within. He took the precaution of leaving a slight gap in the lid to allow himself a supply of (relatively) fresh air. He had no desire to choke on corpse dust as he hid.

As Gaspard pushed the lid into place, he could hear the bony scrape of the pursuer’s skeletal fingers matching the stone scrape of the tombs lid. Gaspard froze in place. Every muscle tensed, fearful of the slightest motion that might rattle the skeletal remains Gaspard shared the sarcophagus with. While Gaspard remained quiet as the grave, the pursuer drew closer.

Though nothing could be seen in the darkness, Gaspard could still feel the pursuer’s presence. The shifting of it’s gargantuan form could be felt even through the solid stone. The massive abomination drew nearer, and Gaspard could feel it’s presence as much as he could hear it’s scraping advance.

With a final bony pull, the pursuer stopped. Gaspard could feel how close it was -the weight of it, and the ungodly stench of its decaying, corpulent body. The air was filled with the sickly-sweet scent of fresh rot, to match the dry, dusty aroma of ancient death.

Gaspard took a long, slow breath. He heard the pursuer shift, and the breath froze in Gaspard’s lungs. The pursuer started to grope at the walls of the long hallway. Skeletal fingers dragged against the lid of the sarcophagus, filling the small space with the quiet, grating sound of bone against rock. Gaspard tried to time his breathing with the groping motions, to better mask the sounds of life amid the quiet chill of death. What he could not quiet was the pounding heartbeat in his chest, which seemed to be as loud as thunder now.

The groping motions of the pursuer came to a halt, and Gaspard was left with nothing but the sound of his own breathing, and the staccato cannon fire of his heartbeat. One misshapen hand still rested on the sarcophagus lid, weighing down heavier than the stone of the lid itself. Gaspard could feel the pressure of that single bony hand as clearly as if it rested on his own chest. Time passed slowly in the darkness, all the slower for Gaspard’s singular focus on the oppressive hand resting above him.

After a lifetime in the darkness, the weight of the pursuer shifted. The hand scraped away from the sarcophagus lid, and the harsh grating of the pursuer’s motion again filled the cramped tomb. The sound of its advance rang out again and again, fading further into the distance each time, until it finally vanished entirely, and the silence of the grave settled in once more.

Even as the deathly silence reigned, Gaspard dared not exit his hiding place. He could only see himself stepping out into the darkness, lighting his lantern, and coming face to twisted face with the pursuer lurking just around the corner. Gaspard allowed himself to relax his breathing, though he still held every lungful of dusty air in his chest for a moment, listening intently for any sign of the pursuer in the silence between breaths.

Gaspard had no way of knowing how much time had passed in the dark. He started to count the seconds between breaths, and almost regained his sense of time. His count was lost when a dull thud reverberated in the dark. Something knocked loose by the pursuers passage falling to the ground, most likely, but Gaspard could not shake the thought of the pursuer still remaining there, just around the corner, with one of it’s grasping limbs thumping idly to the ground.

Perhaps for minutes, perhaps for hours, Gaspard lingered. He lingered until his bones began to ache from stillness and the miasma of corpse dust began to choke his lungs. When he could bear the stagnant air of death no longer, Gaspard lifted the sarcophagus lid and looked into the darkness.

To his relief, only the darkness stared back. In such circumstances, dark was the best he could hope for.