“Aww, you should be celebration, Greyview! Soon, you are getting fancy treats from warm places!“
“See? Grim specter of noogie hangs like shroud over us all.“
Don’t point (or gesture at all really, but specifically point) at the moon. Else the moon will think you’re planning on stealing her, and she’ll send her beasts after you. In the morning they’ll find nothing but scraps of cloth and animal prints, too large to be natural.
Long ago there were two moons in the sky. And they weren’t really moons, because if you watched patiently you would see the moons slowly disappear out; as if it were two eyes, slowly blinking at you. The giant nightbeast never interfered with folks so folks never interfered with her. Until one day rumors spread that some witch was making a spell, a really powerful one, and she needed a special ingredient. Some folks heard it that she was planning on going after the nightbeast.
No one thought she was really going to do it. Half the folk thought she weren’t really making a potion, and it was all scuttlebutt. But one night when the moons were big and bright and full and the stars were all shining, there was a terrible sound. It echoed over the oceanfront, and the buildings trembled. The birds screamed and the dogs howled. People thought the world was ending, and it felt like it almost did what with the giant waves that crashed into the ports.
Finally, the world went quiet. Folk were so busy getting ahold of their nerves and their beasts and raging at the destruction of their livelihoods, they near missed it. There were only one moon in the big dark sky now. One single harsh-looking crescent, when before people had gone to bed there had been two lovely round disks.
They didn’t know what to do, so they went to the witch. She greeted them with a glassy, white eye, hanging from her neck. Well obviously, folks could do a bit of short thinking. They knew she’d gone and taken the eye from the nightbeast. Some were scared that the beast would take its terrible anger out on everyone, they wanted to take the eye back in hopes of appeasing the night. Others were scared the witch would kill them afore they could do anything about the eye.
One fellow, brave some called him, but stupid is what my grandad said, snuck into the witch’s house one morning. He knew that witches do their work best at dusk and night, so he waited till he thought she was sleeping. He snuck in with plans to kill the witch and take the eye back.
Well, one man, a boy really, against a witch who’d stolen from the great nightbeast isn’t much of a fight, is it? The whole harbor could hear his wails and screams for days. No one dared go near her home. The trees and vines that grew around it got darker and seemed to swell. They grew strong, and barbs that leaked some black goo began to protect the house. When folks heard nothing more from the boy and the witch, his family held a burial, without his body. They thought him dead.
But then, strange things, well, stranger things, began to happen around the town. Streaks of bloody claw marks appeared on building walls. Small game, rabbits, birds of prey, even a young deer once, showed up in alleyways, torn apart, half-eaten. Town thought a seacat had come up from the coves, but the fishermen insisted that they’d never seen a seacat with paws as big as these marks. Never seen a seacat only half consume its prey.
Whispers went around town that the witch had cast a curse on the boy and turned him into her pet beast. She’d taken the nightbeast’s eye to make a foul spell or hex, and the boy had been her first experiment. Next she’d be planning on cursing the whole town. Folks even talked about moving away. They never did. We never do. But the things that tie us here . . that’s a different story of course.
Anyway, turns out folks were dead wrong about the witch and the beast. At the next full moon, with only one unblinking eye staring down at us, a woman were telling some visiting seafolk about the nightbeast and the stolen eye. She waved her hand enthusiastically at the sky, caught up in the momentum of her story.
Folk later said they could hear her screams, mingled with something else; almost human sounding. Almost sounding like that stupid boy who’d tried to kill the witch. The next morning all they could find of the woman were scraps of her shirt, and great big pawprints in the muck and blood.
Some say that if you die trying to do something good for the nightbeast, or the Moon gods, or in service to the stars, the nightbeast might bless you and turn you into one of its own land guardians. They say never to gesture at the moon, otherwise you’ll make the nightbeast think you’re planning on stealing its one good eye, and it’ll send its own beasts after you.
That old witch’s house still exists. It's at the heart of that big bramble forest, up on the hill out of town. Course, the brambles and trees grew so big and dark, you can’t see the house anymore. But it's definitely there. I’ve a cousin who got close enough to touch the brambles; she wears a thorn she cut off around her neck for good luck.
