Raging Moon

    Black smoke rose and obscured what had been a brilliant full moon.  Outside the raging fire's glow, shadows were cast by its silvery light.  The wheat field burned unchecked, witnessed by none other than his majesty's guard and the huddled serfs who had come running for fear that the fire was some mishap.  Intense heat blasted the crowd as the conflagration roared and its orangish glow at once lit up and then darkened the audiences' myriad expressions.  Grim determination set the soldiers' features, while confusion and cautious terror colored the peasants' filthy visages.

    Above the crackle and rush of the flames, a priest held his bible aloft and hurled encouragement to the inferno, his incantations serving to fuel it.

    The cursed be relegated to flames!  He decreed.  Return, spawn of hell, from whence you came!  His words, garbled through ripples of immense heat, wafted amidst the grains yet to be incinerated and found their intended.

    The desperate beast crashed blindly through the soot and the ash looking for some escape but was met on all attempts by walls of flame and singeing heat.  Thick smoke tightened its grip around his throat.  Exhaustion and embers made breathing a labor.

    Slightly humanoid, it moved with incredible speed-- only to discover its refuge was growing ever smaller.  There would be no escape.

    Its crime had been killing deer from his majesty's herd.  None but the king and those he favored were allowed that pleasure under penalty of death.  As a man, the brute was in every sense, law-abiding but his lycanthropy blurred human dominion.  As a beast he was beholden to no such regulation.  And now, as a beast, he would die.  Cinders bored into his hide and with animal panic, he ran straight through an impending wall of fire.


----------------------------------------------------------------