The Heretic

Gloria’s nightmare begins when she is kidnapped by a cult during a night haunted by a locust moon, a ritual conducted behind grotesque masks, and a staged suicide that leaves her future years scarred by fear. Fast forward five years, and a traumatized Gloria lives with her mother Ruth, slowly inching toward stability. She attends a therapy group at her local church, sharing space with her lover, Joan, who hints at something special planned for their anniversary. But the fragile calm is shattered when a man named Thomas—whose face bears a brutal burn scar—snatches Gloria away and ferries her to a remote countryside cabin, setting in motion a chain of escalating danger and revelation.

Joan’s frantic search for Gloria spirals into volatile action, as she pulls a knife on a bystander who seems indifferent to Gloria’s disappearance. A police officer, hearing of Joan’s escalating violence, suspects she may be involved, and his suspicions lead to tragedy when he is killed, along with an unwitting witness named Ruth. In a key, painful confession, Thomas reveals that he was one of the cultists who abducted Gloria years earlier, and that he had been moved by her humanity on that night. He faked his own suicide and abducted Gloria to shield her from the remaining cultists, who intend to complete the ritual under the looming locust moon. The cult’s belief holds that they implanted the demon Abaddon, the “Taker of Souls,” into Gloria’s body, and that the demon has been growing inside her for five years.

Under the light of the locust moon, Gloria’s health deteriorates as she becomes increasingly ill, and she begs Thomas to take her to a hospital. Both Gloria and Thomas experience visions of Abaddon, while ominous signs hint at a malevolent supernatural force lingering in the cabin. As her transformation progresses, Gloria’s body appears to take on inhuman facets, and she begins to grow wings. Thomas grows convinced that the transformation is real, even as he wrestles with the moral horror of what he might have to do to stop it. Into this storm steps Joan’s shocking true role: she is the cult’s leader who orchestrated Gloria’s kidnapping, while Thomas reveals that Joan is actually his sadistic sister Gwendolyn, who scarred him with fire.

Gloria’s metamorphosis pushes her further from humanity, and she speaks in the voice of Abaddon, vowing to kill Thomas and claim his soul for hell. Gwendolyn, seeking power and proof, learns from a witness that the kidnapper bore a scarred, burned face and deduces that Thomas was the man who took Gloria. She travels to the cabin—once their parents’ home—where she overpowers a bound Thomas, taunts the deteriorating Gloria, and begins a final occult ritual. Thomas breaks free, defeats Gwendolyn, and drags a seemingly dead Gloria into the pale dawn. Yet Gloria awakens, lunges at him, and, in the voice of Abaddon, declares that she will claim his soul for hell.

In the tense aftermath, Gloria’s transformation continues to blur the lines between human and demon, hope and horror, as the living room of the cabin gives way to a reckoning with forces believed to be supernatural. The story threads together a history of trauma, manipulation, and ritualistic fear, culminating in a confrontation where a survivor’s fate hangs in the balance between mercy and damnation.

Last Updated: October 09, 2025 at 15:55