“I didn’t choose this.”

Clara’s voice was barely a whisper. Her lips were cracked, bloodied, and trembling. Her wrists bled against silver chains fastened to the altar stone. Around her, a red moon hung low in the sky, bleeding across the treetops like a warning. Shadows moved in the forest beyond. Watching. Waiting.

She turned her face toward the night and exhaled, a broken sound half-prayer, half-curse.

Then darkness swallowed everything.

---

The dream shattered like glass.

Clara sat up with a gasp, clutching her throat. Her breath came in ragged waves. Sweat drenched her nightgown, and her pulse galloped through her veins like wild hooves across stone. Her eyes darted around the small bedroom lit only by the early blush of dawn. The dream, the altar, the chains, the blood was already fading, but the panic lingered like smoke.

Same dream. Same red moon. Same voice in her head screaming a name she didn’t know if she remembered or imagined.

Clara swung her legs over the side of the bed and pressed her bare feet to the cool wooden floor. Somewhere downstairs, she could hear the soft clatter of pans and the scent of baking bread floated upward. Comforting. Familiar. Humans.

She didn’t feel entirely human anymore.

---

Clara worked the farm like she always had. Hands in the dirt, sun on her shoulders, quiet laughter with Sarah as they weeded the garden. But today felt… off. Her muscles itched beneath her skin. Her eyes burned in the sunlight. The hens startled and scattered when she passed, their feathers puffed and frantic. Even the cows refused to meet her gaze.

The whispers started before lunch.

“She talks to the trees, my dad says.”

“Thomas found her in the river. Witch-born.”

“Eyes too pale. Not right, not natural.”

Clara kept her head down, her grip tight on the basket of corn. She’d grown used to the village gossip. It was always some new version of the same thing—“not like the others.” She didn’t look like Sarah or Thomas. Her skin was a few shades darker, her hair black and wild, her eyes the color of a storm about to break. People talked. They always had.

But lately, Clara could feel something shifting inside her. Like a piece of her was waking up after a long, cold sleep.

---

That evening, Sarah and Thomas were unusually tense.

They ate in near silence. Clara pushed her stew around her bowl and watched Thomas light the heavy iron lock on the front door. It was always locked on the full moon. They said it was for “safety,” that it was just a village tradition. But tonight was different.

Thomas checked the bolt three times before finally sitting down. Sarah kept glancing out the window toward the tree line.

“Is something wrong?” Clara finally asked, her voice softer than she intended.

Thomas’s spoon paused mid-air.

“No,” he said too quickly. “Just… the moon’s coming full.”

“As it does every month.”

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Sarah added, squeezing Clara’s hand. “You’re safe. That’s what matters.”

Clara didn’t press. But she saw the worry behind their eyes. Felt the tension in their touch.

That night, sleep refused to come. The wind moaned through the trees like a song she almost recognized. The moon climbed high into the sky, huge and silver, not yet blood-red, but bright enough to paint her room in pale light.

She couldn’t stay in bed.

Clara rose quietly and padded across the floorboards. Beneath the loose floor panel beneath her dresser where she used to hide trinkets as a child something old called to her. She pried it up with her fingertips, heart hammering in her chest.

There, wrapped in a strip of yellowing linen, was a stone.

She didn’t remember putting it there. Didn’t remember seeing it before. But the moment her fingers touched its surface, a pulse of heat shot up her arm.

The stone was black, smooth, and cool to the touch, though it shimmered faintly under the moonlight. Strange runes carved into it seemed to shift as she watched, as though breathing.

Clara stumbled back, heart racing. She didn’t know why, but the stone terrified her.

---

She slipped outside without a sound.

The village slept behind her, lanterns extinguished, windows shuttered. The woods loomed ahead, dark, deep, and whispering secrets to the wind.

She didn’t mean to go far. Just far enough to breathe. To get away from the voices in her head and the weight in her chest. She walked through tall grass, over a low fence, and toward the edge of the forest, where the trees began to cluster like guards around a secret.

Then she heard it. A voice. Soft. Inhuman.

“Clara…”

She spun, but no one stood behind her. Her breath hitched. “Who’s there?”

No answer. Only the trees, swaying.

“Clara…” The voice again, closer now. It wasn’t spoken. It echoed inside her mind, ancient and aching and full of something she didn’t understand.

She took a step toward the woods. Then another.

A sudden gust of wind blew past her, and the scent hit her like a slap: pine, ash… and blood.

Branches snapped, leaves rustled. Eyes opened.

In the darkness between the trees, just beyond the silver reach of moonlight, two amber eyes blinked to life. They were huge, inhuman. Watching her with unsettling stillness. Intelligent. Waiting.

Clara’s heart pounded so loudly she could barely hear anything else.

The eyes narrowed and then, A low growl.