The Crimson Pact

The Crimson Pact

> “Two foxes danced under the haunted sky, unaware the lion wept with hunger nearby.”

It begins in the silence before the scream. The forest is still. Too still. Every leaf suspended in air like it had been waiting for something dreadful to arrive. Something ancient. Something inevitable.

Two foxes wandered side by side under the ghost-pale canopy. One of them, the smaller, had a limp. The other, older and more cunning, sniffed the air with suspicion.

The wind had stopped breathing.

Even the river had forgotten how to flow.

“Why does it feel like the trees are listening?” whispered the limping fox.

“Because they are,” said the elder. “This is not our part of the woods.”

They had entered the Bloodgrove. No fox dared cross it. Stories were told of the lion who lived beyond reason, beyond hunger, beyond even death. A lion that fed not for food, but for ritual. A lion who made pacts with shadows.

But tonight, survival meant breaking taboos. The foxes were desperate.

They hadn't eaten in three days.



A low rumble rolled through the earth. Not thunder. Not storm.

Footsteps.

Each one like a drumbeat of doom.

They froze, tails twitching.

Behind them, a roar.

Not just sound. It was felt. It rippled through bone and marrow.

The limping fox turned, and in that moment, the elder leapt.

“Run!”

But she couldn’t run fast enough.

The lion emerged like a nightmare made flesh — his mane tangled with thorns, teeth glistening like polished daggers. His eyes, burning coals.

He didn’t chase. He didn’t need to.

The forest would deliver them to him.



The limping fox stumbled and collapsed by a dying stream. Her leg burned, but her lungs burned more.

A shadow fell across her.

“I didn't mean to enter…” she gasped. “We just needed to pass.”

The lion said nothing. He circled her once.

“I’m not enough to feed you,” she whimpered. “I’m broken.”

Still, the lion said nothing.

But the trees whispered.

They whispered of old debts.

The lion opened his jaws, and the world went white.



When she awoke, she was alive.

Blood — not her own — coated her fur.

The elder fox was gone.

In her place, a severed tail. A silent sacrifice.

She stood, trembling. Had the lion let her live?

Or had he chosen her?



From that night, she changed.

She began hearing the forest’s murmurings. Began smelling blood before it was spilled. And sometimes, when she looked at her reflection in still water, it wasn’t her face she saw.

It was his.

The lion.

His eyes in her sockets.

His roar in her chest.



Weeks passed. Then months.

She was no longer limping.

She hunted in the dark and fed on what others left behind. But she wasn’t satisfied. Hunger gnawed at her.

Not for food.

For something else.

Her fur grew coarser.

Her patience thinner.

She began to prowl.

Other foxes avoided her. Birds fell silent when she approached. Even the wind curled away from her.

One night, beneath a red moon, she returned to the place it all began.

To the Bloodgrove.

Where the pact had been made.



There, in the clearing, sat the lion.

Still.

Stone-like.

But his eyes blinked once.

“You came back,” he growled.

“I feel you in me,” she said.

“You accepted the gift.”

“I didn’t ask for it.”

“You ran,” he said, “but she didn’t.”

The elder fox.

The price.

“I’m not her,” she snapped.

“No,” said the lion. “You’re me.”

And then the wind howled.

The sky cracked.

And the lion lunged.



But when the blood stopped flowing, it was not her body on the forest floor.

It was his.

The lion, king no more.

She stood over him, panting, crimson staining her muzzle.

“I didn’t come back for answers,” she whispered. “I came back to end it.”

But the forest only laughed.

Because endings don’t come in the Bloodgrove.

Only beginnings.



They say now two foxes walk the woods again. But not together.

One stalks.

One runs.

One carries the roar.

One remembers the pact.

And somewhere in the dark, a lion’s shadow watches, waiting to be reborn.