**DEVOURING MOONLIGHT**

**THE HUNGER INSIDE**

_Before the Change, little William’s world was small and bright, filled with his mother’s soft lullabies, teddy bears and blocks, gentle milk feeds and warm arms. He was three months old the night the Hunger first knocked gently at the door of his mind—a hunger that mewled with an intelligence as dark as midnight._

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### **Chapter 1: Whispered Hunger**

It began with a nightmare. His mother was rocking him to sleep, the television flickering softly in the corner, when his eyes fixed on the shadows pooling beneath the window. Something moved there, impossible for mortal eyes to catch, but the infant brain, still so plastic, registered it—a shifting ripple in the gloom.

William’s little fists clenched. His baby blue eyes glistened wetly, reflecting the moon. The presence, the _thing_, called to something buried deep in his bones.

He screamed—louder than he ever had, sharp with fear and an inexpressible wanting. His mother cried out, “It’s okay, baby! Mama’s here!” but it wasn’t enough.

He screamed until his throat was raw, until a strange, metallic tingling shivered under his swollen gums. The shadows curled tighter, almost fondly.

That night, three months old, William’s first tooth began to come in. It was sharp, sharper than any human tooth had a right to be.

---

### **Chapter 2: Growth by Moonlight**

The next night, the change accelerated with unnatural speed.

William’s mother, exhausted, strapped him in his crib and let the television drone on while she dozed. Moonlight filtered in, silver-bright. William’s limbs twitched.

His bones churned, tender joints throbbing. He whimpered, little fists pressed to his lips. The Hunger, a black fog coiling inside his skull, _whispered: Feed. Grow. Take._

He wailed, but it wasn't pain that made him cry—it was _want_.

He kicked and jerked in spurts. Tiny legs lengthened, muscles corded under his delicate skin. His mouth split in a silent scream as his torso swelled, ribcage thickening. His skull ached; the fontanelle, still soft, pulsed and pressed outward as if his brain were expanding within.

Minutes ticked by. Where a baby had lain, now a toddler’s broad body was tangled in crib sheets. By morning, William had grown to the size of a preschooler. His mother nearly fainted when she lifted him, her hands fluttering, searching for a rational explanation—a fever, a swelling? Her desperate fear only pulled the Hunger tighter, thickening his saliva, sharpening his teeth.

That day, William’s voice, thin and high, echoed with a timbre entirely _wrong_.

“Ma…ma,” he said, but the word was glutted with a rasp that was much too old.

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### **Chapter 3: The Mirror Lies**

Each night, the acceleration worsened. His mother couldn’t keep up—tomorrow’s clothes straining at the seams, diapers no longer fitting, appetite insatiable. The family doctor, perplexed, ordered test after test.

William’s flesh crawled, as if a thousand ants writhed beneath. He watched himself in the vanity mirror and saw the shadows at the corner of the glass curl in greedy anticipation.

His gums itched. He bared his teeth—fangs now, glinting—even sharper. His irises began to darken, blue deepening to midnight black.

The Hunger was no longer content to whisper; it was a chorus now, a monstrous, masculine choir in his little head: _Grow. Feed. Shed._

One evening, while his mother was asleep, William stood in front of the mirror, certain he’d see the plush-cheeked toddler that had gone to bed. Instead, he glimpsed knobby cheekbones, hollowing eyes, the frame of a child standing on the threshold of adolescence, all within the space of days.

And when he opened his mouth to scream, it was not a child’s voice that answered, but an inhuman growl echoing from his chest.

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### **Chapter 4: Flesh and Mind**

Puberty crashed into him like a freight train. Hair sprouted overnight, coarse and tangled, running wild across his arms, chest, and jawline.

His hands grew, elegant yet bestial, nails hardening into claws just short of monstrous. His face, once cherub-round, contorted—jaw lengthening, lips thinning, nose sharpening.

It wasn’t just his body. The world inside his skull changed, too, expanding in bursts of alien insight. Words—so many words—flooded him, knowledge twisting and shaping his tiny memory into something immense, unwieldy. The voices multiplied, not just the Hunger, but the cold clarity of a predator’s reasoning.

He craved—milk was nothing, bread and soup tasteless. He wanted blood. He wanted _fear_.

His mind warped around his body’s needs.

Some nights, he dreamed of the window and the shadow waiting outside. In these dreams, he was older, a teenager with haunted eyes and monstrous fangs, silhouetted in moonlight. The shadow pressed its forehead to his—he felt its intent, its pride.

You are mine, it seemed to whisper. It is a _legacy_.

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### **Chapter 5: Voice Like Thunder**

He tried to talk to his mother, clutching her sleeve one morning with a hand already too long, voice stretching deep and hoarse.

“Mama… I… am… hungry.”

The voice shocked her—the high, piping note of a child sinking into something older, wetter, guttural. Each word rode lower in his chest, rattling like a distant drum.

She stared at him, horrified, realizing he spoke as if he were _old_.

He tried to smile, but his lips curled up too far, revealing the predatory fangs. His hunger slipped free, unwillingly, and she flinched.

The next day, gray streaks threaded her hair.

Servants whispered; neighbors avoided their windows. When the police arrived, they found the windows painted black, the doors barred.

Inside, William, now the size of a gangly thirteen-year-old, laughed—a sound unmoored from infancy, blooming into the bass of a growing monster.

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### **Chapter 6: The Path of the Beast**

Transformation, then, was a roiling agony. His skin stretched, bones cracking, muscles writhing. He fell to his knees, hands clutching his skull as twin horns broke through the skin above his temples, curling small and sharp.

The world reduced to feverish sensation: the taste of copper, the scent of panic, the thunder of his own pulse. He imagined his body splitting along fault lines, reforming. Wings—skeletal, fleshy, bat-like—shivered out of his back, folding and unfolding as if remembering forgotten motion.

The mind was a mirror, too, shattering and healing.

Thoughts of childhood—of soft toys, warm milk, bedtime stories—bled into nothingness. New thoughts hatched: the flick of a knife, the metallic tang of blood on the tongue, the rhythm of the hunt. His language refined itself, voice thickening into what would, in a normal boy, be a rumbling baritone.

It wasn’t normal, though. It crawled between octaves, deeper and deeper, until it sounded like a father’s voice echoing through a mausoleum.

When he screamed now, whole flocks of birds erupted from the trees outside.

---

### **Chapter 7: The Hunger Unleashed**

One final night—the crescent moon swollen with crimson light—he towered in the living room, a boy now fully claimed by the vampiric gift.

William was fourteen in appearance: wild-haired, gaunt, yet strangely beautiful, and monstrous. His mother cowered, but he only watched her with a wry, tragic wisdom.

The Hunger was a drumbeat, an ache inside his skull. The voices, no longer multiple, had merged at last—a single, cold voice that was his and not his.

_You are ready_, it whispered, low and satisfied.

His mother trembled. “William? My baby?”

He blinked slowly.

“No,” he rumbled. “I am not.”

And when he spoke, the infant’s timbre was all but gone—the new voice, heavy and thick, was that of a monster, ancient as time, echoing with sorrow and inevitability.

He wept then, for the mother he could not keep and the world he would forever haunt.

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### **Chapter 8: Into the Night**

That night, William climbed out the window, taloned hands and midnight wings folding around his strange new teenage frame.

His mind, flooded with predatory intelligence, catalogued the stars and the scent of blood rising from every living thing. His tongue ran along his fangs.

He was no child, no longer human. The world shrank to the pinprick focus of the Hunger, but somewhere—buried deep where the baby once had been—a fragment of love flickered for his mother and the life he had been forced to leave.

He loosed a final, thunderous cry, voice resounding between what he had always been and what he must now become—a boy haunted by shadow, ravenous and alone.

And the night, hungry as he was, swallowed him whole.

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**END**

This story was generated by user peyton1 with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.

Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.

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