Chapter 1157: Story 1157: Ritual Under the Pale Moon
The moon rose pale and thin over the valley of Gallows Reach, casting no warmth, only silver suspicion. The villagers knew to stay indoors on such nights. The kind of moon that drew blood from stone and stirred mories better left buried.
In a crumbling chapel swallowed by ivy, a ritual was being prepared.
Not by priests, but by the Hollow Sisterhood—four won cloaked in tattered veils, their mouths stitched shut with crow-feathers and twine. They moved in silence, drawing sigils into the dirt with sharpened bone, surrounding the ancient altar that pulsed with a dim, sickly light.
Tonight, they would call down the Pale One.
Not a god. Not a demon. Sothing older.
Elsbeth Varrow was only seventeen, a foundling girl raised by the local midwife. She’d lived her life on the edge of fear and forest, always hearing stories of the Sisterhood, but never daring to believe them.
Until they ca for her.
She was taken without violence, only a soft whisper in her ear and a lullaby she sohow already knew.
When she awoke in the chapel, her limbs were bound not by rope, but by vines that pulsed like veins. She did not scream.
Sowhere deep inside, part of her rembered this place.
One of the sisters approached, her stitched mouth twitching as if trying to speak. In her hands, she held a shard of moonstone, slick with dew and sothing darker. She placed it above Elsbeth’s heart and stepped back into the circle.
As the chant began—not from mouths, but from the wind itself—the room dimd. The moonlight pooled into the altar like liquid silver. Shadows flickered unnaturally, stretching and curling like hungry snakes.
And then it ca.
The Pale One.
It arrived not with a roar, but with silence so total it rang in the bones. A figure made of mist and moonlight, tall as the chapel’s steeple, its face a hollow ring where a scream should be.
It looked down at Elsbeth.
And she rembered.
Not just this life—but all her lives. A line of blood and bone stretching back to the first Sister, the first sacrifice, the first night the Pale One was called from beyond.
She was not a prisoner.
She was the vessel.
With a whisper, the creature reached forward, not to harm, but to claim.
Elsbeth’s eyes turned white. Her body floated above the altar, her soul peeling back like silk in the wind.
The sisters bowed low.
And in that mont, Elsbeth Varrow was no more.
There was only the Moonborn.
The ritual was complete.
In the days that followed, strange things happened in Gallows Reach. Crops blood out of season. Graves opened with no signs of disturbance. The air grew heavy with static before each dawn.
And every night, the pale moon never left the sky.
Even at noon.
So rituals are not ant to be broken.
So moons never truly set.
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