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.
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But then, the river shook. A quake burst through the darkness as if the water itself had been split in two. From deep within, light exploded upward, a spear of brilliance came out from beneath of the water. In the heart of it bloomed a colossal lotus, each petal white-gold, dripping fire that did not smoke, fire that devoured without mercy. The worms screamed, their bodies writhing as the light touched them, skin blistering, pus hissing into vapor. In seconds, the swarm was nothing but charred husks drifting lifeless on the boiling surface.
The water around her cleared, the burned corpses sinking away. She leapt from the wrecked boat, clutching only a bamboo pole, and drove it into the riverbed again and again, rowing faster, stabbing harder, heart pounding like a drum in her throat.
After what felt like miles, she slowed, breath ragged. The surface lay still. No shapes moved beneath. She realized she had gone far beyond the shadow's reach, beyond where the dome had fallen before. For a heartbeat, she thought it was over.
...........................
Nothing could be seen behind the dome now. Her boat had fallen back onto the river's skin with a hollow slap, sending ripples into the dark. She turned her head, staring at that looming shape. No moonlight to guide her - not this time either. Then she noticed it: ahead, the river's path was being swallowed by mist. Not the soft kind that kissed the water, but a heavy, unnatural haze. A dark mist.
Her gut twisted. Something about its movement told her - this was bad. Worse than the dome. The darkness above her felt as if it had spread across the whole world, choking out every star.
Then came the sound. A laugh, but not one voice, total thirteen, with same sentence different voice. Each one with a different timbre, layered like cracking wood, like chewing meat, like wet, sloppy munching. The chorus broke into whispers between the laughter:
"In lonely moon… why a beauty drifts alone? Come to us."
"Why alone?"
"Why protect?"
"What will you gain? What will you lose?"
The words slid under her skin like cold needles.
She held her ground on the still boat, eyes narrowing as shapes began to form in the mist — thirteen silhouettes. Five clearly women, four clearly men, and four… not human in any way she could name. Their proportions were wrong, joints bent backward, outlines flickering as if they were unfinished.
Her breath slowed. She raised her right hand. From her palm, a small orb of yellow light was born, rising into the choking fog. It climbed higher, pulsing faintly… before stopping mid air.
Then it swelled, suddenly, violently, a sunflower burst of light. The mist didn't vanish; it collapsed, settling into the river as if being swallowed by the current.
Something in that collapse made her instincts scream. She drew in her energy fast, wrapping her whole body in it.
And then, from the dark, the voice came again — layered, hungry, amused:
"Will you feed them… or will you feed me?"
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The fog peeled away in curling wisps, revealing a sky where no stars breathed, no moon glowed—until she looked up and saw it.
A moon, caught in an eternal eclipse, hung unnaturally low above the river. Its dim edge pulsed faintly, as if something beneath its surface was trying to push through. A deep, humming vibration trembled in the air, crawling over her skin.
Her grip tightened on the bamboo pole. The river had grown still, unnaturally still—its surface now a dull mirror reflecting the suffocating darkness above.
Then she saw it.
Something… rising.
At first, just a curve appeared at the moon's lower edge, and from that curve a face emerged—half black, half white, the division cutting straight down the middle. The teeth followed the same pattern: alternating black and white in perfect symmetry. Two eyes, both glowing yellow like molten gold, stared directly into her.
A sharp peek escaped the thing's mouth as it crawled out of the moon's surface like an insect leaving a shell. One clawed hand gripped the lunar edge, but the other slipped—its black half dangling for a heartbeat before catching itself again.
Then the moon changed.
From its corners, red veins began to burst into view—like cracks on an inflamed eye. They bulged outward, spreading in jagged threads across the pale surface, inching toward the centre. Each strand was thick, pulsing with dark clots that dried instantly, forming brittle rivers of scarlet.
The veins pushed down past the moon's edge, dangling toward the earth. They hung there, swaying in an unseen wind, a grotesque curtain of dried blood threads.
It might have been beautiful - had it not been alive.
The moon began to melt.
Its silver-white surface sagged inward, dripping in slow rivulets toward a single point along the curve. The molten lunar flesh gathered and thickened, then began to split. Something was inside.
The first wing tore free, a membrane slick and trembling, red as raw muscle. Then another. And another. The things inside clawed their way out like new-borns desperate for breath. They were bats, but wrong, each snout curved too sharply, each set of teeth far too long. Their wings were strung with black veins, their eyes hollow pits.
They fell from the moon in clusters, unfurling as they dropped.
First one. Then ten. Then fifty. Then a hundred.
The sky darkened as thousands poured from the lunar wound, blotting out what little light remained. They swirled in tightening circles before breaking into a downward torrent.
She didn't think, as she saw them coming.
Her hairpin spun between her fingers, its metal glinting faintly. In a swift motion, she unfurled it into a rotating construct, a strange, umbrella-like shield that whirled. The first wave of bats struck it and scattered, their shrieks slicing the air.
For a moment, she thought she'd held them back.
Then she heard it.
A tune. Soft. Drawn-out. Almost… deliberate.
From the moon's surface, it began to bleed again - but this time it did not form a bulged shape. Instead, it shaped itself into the figure of a woman, lying asleep along the moon's curve. A gentle breeze blew. From the wax of this woman's figure, the surface began to melt, and a real woman emerged. She silently opened her eyes, stretched in a yawning motion, then stared at her with blankness.
She wore red, the folds of her garments heavy as if soaked in blood. A single paramita flower bloomed over one eye as it was open, its pale petals strangely untainted. Her other eye was a shattered thing, like broken glass holding the fragments of many irises. Light green hair spilled down her shoulders in slow waves, shifting with an unseen breeze.
The figure moved not toward her, but around her, as if inspecting prey. Her lips curled faintly, the ghost of a smile forming before fading again.
Then she lifted one hand, slowly, gracefully, until it aligned with the level of the moon's edge.
But her posture shifted. Her head tilted, and in that instant, her presence darkened.
The bats had returned, swirling in a tightening funnel above the river. They began to gather again, their bodies pressing together in a writhing mass until they were almost solid.
From the red woman's shadow, an object took shape.
A violin.
Its body was unlike any mortal instrument, strings of varying colours stretched taut: some black, some bone-white, others the deep blue of midnight or the wet crimson of fresh blood. Each string ended in a small bell that swayed gently, giving off faint, uneven chimes.
The violin's frame was carved from something pale, smooth, and unmistakably human. The bow was worse—fashioned from a torso's length of bone, with two tiny, blinking eyes embedded where the hair began. Instead of horsehair, the bow's string was a bundle of pulsing veins, weaving over one another into a rope-like thickness.
The woman's hand moved.
The bow touched the strings.
The first note was made. it was pressure. A pulse that shuddered through the river, the mist, the sky. Her teeth ached. Her chest tightened. The air thickened as if it were trying to enter her lungs and choke her from the inside.
A flower-shaped bell began to materialize, hanging from the top corner of the moon. It rang softly as a gentle breeze blew.
And beneath the music… whispering.
She couldn't tell if it was coming from the violin or from somewhere deeper...
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So, what will happen next? Who are these people? And why do they want to hurt them?
To find out more, keep reading Nirbindra.
To be Continued...