31 Days of Horror 2025: Apply

It was application season for the Academy, all walks of life picked their lives up and made the march toward Bournemere in hopes of a red cloak and badge. Unfortunately for the soldiers of the campus grounds, this was also time rife with clean up and letters of regrets sent back along their trail. Not everyone was cut out for the wilderness, nature's own way to weed through the hopeful applicants.

The Academy had spent months trying to quell the growing numbers of the Karnath, fighting back their numbers each night with their most skilled soldiers. But the migration of new applicants had the creatures breeding like rabbits, expecting a new food source to supplement their numbers. Nothing worked to cease the carnage, not even flyers set on each main road towards the campus grounds warning of the danger of being on foot or alone at night.

In the rush to prepare, the small trails scattered through the woods were forgotten. Those foolish enough to wander that way were left behind, forgotten until the cleanup crew was making their rounds early the fifth morning after the last applicant made their way in.

Lomin yanked his cloak over his nose as the scent of rot and copper shifted upon the wind and assaulted his nostrils. "I think I found one." He called back over his shoulder, voice tight with the instinctual desire to gag as he shouldered through the brush into a clearing.

The scene caused him to stumble and sign the symbol of Mortem over his throat. Viscera littered the dampened grass, dark with decay and the swarm of bugs. A circle of boulders hung around the outskirts, some stained with ichor and others twisted over massive skin drums half buried in silt.

"Karnath kill. Clear as day." Nyette tsked as she stepped around Lomin to get a closer look. More seasoned than the young buck, the scene didn't phase her. She had cleaned up plenty of bodies desecrated by the hands of these creatures.

"K-Karnath? Again?"

Nyette simply nodded as she stepped over an unidentifiable limb. She knelt down by a boulder nested in the midst of the strange circle outcropping. In the light, the Karnath were nothing but rock. It was the moment the sun went down that these creatures became bloodthirsty. "Were any Nocthys on the list of missing?"

Lomin scrambled for the journal with names and races at his side, flipping through pages of scratched out names and notes. "None that haven't been found." He stammered and forced his eyes away as Nyette turned to him. In her hands was the gnawed upon and bloody head of the knife eared race from the dark woods.

She turned it in her hands and stared down at the eyeless face with a contemplative sigh. "Add to the list of unknown. Nocthys. Of age." Nyette had to pause and look from pile of viscera to the next. "Assumed male. Plum hair. There - There appears to be no other identifiable markings. Any belongings they had, seemed to have been nicked days ago while these crags enjoyed their feast."
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"Y-Yes ma'am." This wasn't Lomin's first time on clean up. Yet, each one still left that pit in his stomach of dread for what the applicants must have suffered the night they chose the wrong trail.