Seaside Moors come, little children

Dusk licked crossed the universal expanse, its dark fingers caressing in a sinister carillon of shade and shadows. Declaration; oh how the orb of night did summon the hound of hell from the depths of purgatory. Beneath the ever-watchful eye of the dainty, milky moon, the serpent weaved beneath its gilding effulgence.

Paw pads, inky black, would disperse beneath his massive weight to stretch over the barren terrain as he glissaded across the landscape. Covert, basked in the lethality of silence would he travel. Garments woven of short fibers, drenched in midnight serenity were but thrown over the beast, cinched tightly at his chest that rolled upwards into his lithe abdomen and insatiate belly. And oh, how he hungered. The serpent had not eaten in what could have been days. His sense of time was distorted, and the man merely wandered. Glazed eyes stared unseeing before him, his parted jaws aimed towards the ground. No mad grin cracked the features of his face. No crazed, euphoric cackle ripped from his chords. The silver-tongued snake was silenced.

Blood.

The liquid foamed at his lips, mixing with his saliva, dripping from his open mouth and staining what little white was on his chest. Dirt shifted beneath his monstrous paws, starved body coming to a rapid halt as a quiver licked down his emaciated sides. Distorted and strangled was the guttural sound which rose from the depths of his chest, blood-curdling and bone-chilling; animalistic and unnatural against the shadows of the witching hours of the night.

Contagion emerged from his shelter after the wintery storm had released its grip on the coast. His gait was loping and self-assured, venemous yellow eyes searching the lands for movement beneath the velvet moon. The persistent alabaster backdrop of fresh fallen snow caused motion to become ever-apparent.

But it would not be motion that alerted the boy. Instead a visceral pain-soaked sound cut sharp through the silence of the midnight hour. His first instinct was to turn in the other direction and flee back to his coveted realm of safety; however, it seemed that he was pulled undesirably against his will. When the harbinger arrived on the secne, his stoic expression changed almost imperceptibly. The strangers were mirror images. Two eidolons of night with eldritch furs, only one was a man and the other a war-stricken child. He took one step closer, the wet leathers of his nose the only other movement he offered as he worked in the serpent's musk.

Blood! The scent caused the child to wheel back in fear-surprise, his owlish golden gaze fixed with dangerous intensity on his nighttime twin. His sprawling limbs quaked as his baleful gaze racked the jutting bones of the grim stranger.

His eyes glazed over and he cried, Bathsheba! his wiry tail lashing vehemently behind him. The voice that was pulled from his chest was definitively not his. It sounded like a woman through the rasping vocal fugue of a pubescent boy. Oh Zacharias! His body gave an involuntary convulsion, a forelimb twisted to his chest in dramatic fashion. And then suddenly his orbs resumed their usual searching intensity, as his lip curled and his ears flattened. Strangely, he did not seem aware of his theatrics as he waited for the stranger to make another move.