2024.04.10

Everything kept on going from bad to worse than you thought possible.
You first started seeing it a few days into the camping trip - a little bit of motion at the edge of the fire’s light, a shadow darting behind a tree, a crackling of leaves on an otherwise silent night. Things all too easy to chalk up to nerves, this far out into the wilderness and away from human contact. You took reasonable precautions against animals, and had everything you needed to defend yourself if the situation arose, but it seemed that your fear was your own worst enemy out here. Playing tricks on you, ones you confidently brushed off as the lurking remnants of stupid horror stories you’ve read and the cowardice you came here to dispel yourself of in the first place.
Still, it was hard to sleep when your increasingly frayed nerves kept on insisting on seeing a silhouette in the distance that didn’t look quite like a tree, or imagined a sorrowful baying in the background of a windy night. You could ignore your overactive imagination and push it to the side, but it never seemed to be too far away. Between hiking, attempts at hunting, and generally the activities of keeping yourself alive this far in isolation, you could keep yourself occupied and distracted from the nagging instincts tugging at the back of your mind.
At least, until a week or so had passed. Then the crackling branches far off in the distance came far too close to your tent for comfort one night; the hoofprints you found in the dirt not a stone’s throw from where you slept did nothing to help settle you down, and you were up until dawn, looking over your shoulder and trying to find the pair of eyes you could feel boring into you. You saw the deer’s eyeshine (it must’ve been a deer; be reasonable, stay calm) one or twice, up on the hill, and started to feel a bit ridiculous by the time dawn started to break. (You tried to ignore the fact that there wasn’t a hill where you thought there was, and that the height of those eyes must have been halfway up the trees.)
Your mysterious stalker decided to make its presence known after dark the next night, after twilight had completely faded into shadow and you were doing your best to put together a passable fire with damp sticks and kindling. You were so busy pouring your attention into the sputtering campfire and trying to ignore your nonsensical fears to notice the silence that had crept up on you, and when you stopped for a moment to reconsider your failing efforts all you could feel was a presence, hanging still in the oppressive quiet. Immediately, every instinct was screaming out to run but you could barely make yourself move. Slowly, you turned around, and looked into the dark outside your campsite.
It was ten feet, easy; looming over you like the trees around it. Bone thin; coarse black fur; legs bending backwards in a way that made you sick. Dangling arms ending in jagged claws; a cervine skull, worn white with age, tilted and expressionless; antlers arching out above it into the sky. A faint white cloud of breath exhaled into the cold air.
And like that you were gone. In your mindless panic, you aimed for the rough path you took here, but rapidly lost it; desperately tried turning in every direction that looked familiar, hoping for either your campsite or a way with a vague hope of returning to civilization alive. Neither occured, and with every turn, every panicked sprint and near-collapse afterward, you could feel yourself getting more and more lost, hope sputtering and fading like embers in rain. Nothing looked familiar in the deep forest, and every time you risked a glimpse over your shoulder, there was that towering shadow somewhere at the edge of the hill, right around the curve, never too close but never too far. Toying with you like some kind of prey, some game of cat and mouse, wearing you down like an endurance predator. This is how it ends, isn’t it? You’re going to be a fucking Missing 411 case. You never should’ve come out here. You don’t want to die like this. The moon above gave just enough light to make out the reflecting eyes of the monster in the treeline
Eventually, something under you gave. Maybe it was a rotten log or a burrow hole, but one way or another you were flat on the ground and all your ankle knew was pain. It felt sprained at best, probably broken. Maybe under ideal circumstances you could keep going like this, but you’ve been fleeing for what felt like hours. Every attempt to pull yourself up just sent a spear of pain down your leg again, and back down on the mossy ground you went. One frantic glance in the distance after another showed the last thing you wanted to see, and eventually you just closed your eyes and prayed as you heard sticks cracking under slowly approaching feet.
You felt it more than heard it above you. Towering. Cold. You swear the air temperature dropped twenty degrees. You muster up what little bravery is left and try to look it in the eye, die with some dignity, but shut them as hard as you could after you saw its dark form arching above you, skull tilted quizzically with an expression you couldn’t make out if you tried. Melancholy? Emaciated. Moss in its fur.
Closing your eyes couldn’t stop you from feeling as it crouched above you, as those arms settled themselves on either side, as its gleaming teeth got closer, as a single broken claw reached and tilted your head upwards. At least it would be quick about it as it, it… it…
…was it licking you?
It was like sandpaper and cold as ice, but that’s certainly what it was doing. Being frozen out of terror rapidly gave way to being frozen out of confusion (and admittedly more than a little terror still,) and you almost laughed at the absurdity of it. At least, before you felt a rough-furred arm latch around your back and another around your neck, holding still for a moment before pulling you suddenly into a crushing embrace, holding you almost off the ground entirely and clutched tight to its chest.
It smelled like pine and smoke and mildew and metal. You momentarily tried kicking it away, but the broken ankle put a swift stop to, and you lost what little breath you had left from the pain. With its ribs almost protruding even through the thick fur, embedded with dust and leaves, you wouldn’t expect it to have much strength, but every inhale and swelling of its lungs almost crushed the air out of yours. Its pulse was slow but all-consuming, held as tightly as you were, and its muzzle was even colder than the rest, rested on the top of your head almost tenderly (at least compared to the fact that it was otherwise all but hugging the life out of you.) The creature wasn’t shaking as nearly hard as you were, but it was definitely trembling.
It was hard to hear it’s voice at first since it blended in so seamlessly with the noise of the forest. Consonants of creaking trees and crackling underbrush, low words molded out of howling night wind, somehow sculpted into something resembling human language. The words blended together like a dozen natural sounds falling into the vague shape of words, every sentence shivering and falling into silence sound by sound as the next one formed.
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘶𝘯 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴𝘯’𝘵 𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴𝘯’𝘵 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘮𝘺 𝘣𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴, 𝘯𝘰 𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘮𝘵𝘩 𝘯𝘰 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘵 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨
𝘚-𝘴-𝘴-𝘴𝘰 𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘥… 𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘥, 𝘴𝘰 𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘐’𝘷𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘮…  𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘐’𝘷𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘢 𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘮𝘵𝘩 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴, 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭…
Before you knew it you were on the ground again, it's arching shape blocking out the moon, and a sudden jab of it's claw under your head put your face at level with it's eyes, burning spectral glimmers in hollow sockets but still somehow staring into yours. You saw hunger in them, and some kind of sadness. Even if it wasn't holding you mere inches from it's face there was a desperation there you couldn't pull your gaze away from if you tried.