"If madness is inevitable, why fear it? Better to make a festival of it, and delight in our descent."
-Alfonse Vivald, astrologist and philosopher, in his first proposal for the Lunar Carnival
The world had been a hundred colors all at once, and then every color was overtaken by red. For days the city had drowned in debauchery, throwing a grand Lunar Carnival to delight the mind and body before the Mad Moons light, that most crimson of crimsons, came to warp the mind and twist the body. The moon had passed, but the crimson remained -the once colorful banners of celebration now bathed in the red blood of the celebrants.
The music was still ringing in Gaspard's ears as he awoke. The last thing he remembered was dancing with a woman. Neither had expected to see the next dawn, and they had danced with wild abandon until the moon began to rise. Gaspard had never bothered to learn her name. Given that one of the corpses surrounding him was wearing the tatters of her ornate ballgown, it had been a prudent decision. She was just another corpse; one of hundreds, no doubt. All of them luckier than Gaspard.
After the Mad Moon passed and took the sanity of man with it, there were always a rare few untouched by it's lunatic light. The few unfortunate survivors stuck with the unenviable task of cleaning up the gory messes left behind by the Moon's corruption, to rebuild the world until the Mad Moon returned many centuries later. Gaspard took a look around at the corpses he was lying among and sighed. The dead were the least of his worries. As the sound of the festival's music faded from his ears, he could hear movement -and chewing.
Gaspard recalled last night's festivities once again, specifically one of his fellow celebrants. An old man, a once-esteemed general of some sort, brandishing an antique weapon. With a pitcher of wine in one hand and his blade in the other, the general had delighted in describing how he would disembowel his fellow guests once the madness took him. Gaspard remained on his back amid the corpses, not daring to attract the attention of whatever crawled behind him, but he scanned the room with his eyes. There, on a far wall, was what remained of the general, his torso pinned to the wall with his own sword. His night had not gone as planned, it seemed.
The crawling thing behind Gaspard crunched down on something hard enough to snap bone. It sounded close. He judged his distance to the sword, contemplated his odds, and came to the conclusion that the odds didn't matter. He remembered the events of the previous night, and what he had learned from his host. There was yet unfinished business in this world -and Gaspard would risk more than death to see it finished.
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With some difficulty, Gaspard pulled himself free of the pile of corpses and made a dash for the sword. The crawling thing let out a choked grunt of surprise and then scrambled after him. Gaspard resisted the urge to look over his shoulder. The ground was littered with scattered limbs and slick with blood, and seeing some monstrosity nipping at his heels would only make Gaspard more likely to trip and fall face first into death.
His feet splashed through a pool of blood as Gaspard took the last few steps towards the dead general and his sword. He grabbed the ornate hilt with shaking hands and pulled with all his might. The blade cracked and Gaspard pulled free half of a sword. It would have to do. The corpse of the general slid towards the ground as Gaspard spun and swung his half-blade. By luck alone his wild swing connected with his opponent, and the creature reeled back from the blow, giving Gaspard enough time to appraise it.
The philospher’s had said that the Mad Moon was a mere cosmic coincidence, a convergence of celestial energy with unfortunate side effects, but Gaspard looked at this monster and could only believe that the Mad Moon was not only aware but malevolent. What else but a cruel and malicious sense of irony could have crafted such an abomination? Gaspard recognized not one but two faces in the creature now hunting him: two lovers who had held each other close and sworn never to be apart as the Mad Moon's light had washed over them. Now their promise was kept, as misshapen flesh and bone fused together into a slavering predator, with the two heads of the lovers merged into a single pair of hungering jaws.
Gaspard swung his half-sword again, wanting nothing more than to see this creature dead, both for his own safety and to put the abomination out of its misery. The fused beast didn't have the cunning that the two heads might imply, and it struggled to avoid strikes from even half a sword. Striking down again and again, even stabbing with the broken point of the blade, Gaspard's desperate strikes finally cut through something vital and the beast fell limp to the ground. Gaspard stepped away from it, broken blade still at the ready, watching and waiting for it to make even the slightest move.
Time passed, and Gaspard gradually realized that it was, in fact, dead. The final echoes of last nights music faded from Gaspard's ears, and he confronted the silence of the ballroom. He was alive, and cursed with sanity in the wake of madness. The city was bathed in blood and beasts, with only a few scattered survivors still human enough to feel terror. Gaspard looked at the half-blade he held, and the ragged, bloodstained festival clothes he wore.
He needed a change of outfit, and a much better weapon. The long red night had ended, but many red days were ahead for those who yet lived.