Chapter 1 - The Disappearance

The mist had been clinging to Blackwood for three nights straight. It rolled in from the forest after dusk, curling down the cobblestone streets like pale fingers. Elara pressed her forehead to the glass of her bedroom window and stared into it, searching for something she couldn't name. Her town was quiet, too quiet - like it was holding its breath.

It had been two days since Mara vanished.

Everyone said the same thing: she must have run away. The sheriff shrugged, Mara's parents kept to their house, and the townsfolk whispered over their market stalls. But Elara knew her best friend better than that. Mara wouldn't leave without a word, not when they had planned to sneak out together for the festival lights. And certainly not after the last thing Mara had said to her - "I saw eyes in the woods. Red ones. They were watching me."

Elara replayed those words every night, each time more hollow than the last.

That evening, unable to sit still any longer, she pulled on her jacket and slipped out the back door. The fog swallowed her instantly. Streetlamps burned weakly, their light broken into halos. The silence was so thick she could hear her own heartbeat.

She walked fast, clutching Mara's notebook in her pocket. She had found it tucked beneath her friend's pillow earlier that day. Its pages were filled with half-scribbled sketches of trees, symbols, and - in one shaky drawing - the outline of a church with a jagged cross. At the top of that page, Mara had scrawled two words: "It's waking."

Elara shivered.

The church sat on the edge of Blackwood, long abandoned, its roof sagging and its bell tower cracked. No one went there, not since the stories about what lived beneath it. She had laughed at those tales when she was younger. Now they didn't seem so funny.

As she neared the iron gates, the air grew colder. The grass crunched under her boots though there was no frost. She pushed the gate, and it groaned open like a wounded animal. For a moment, she thought she heard footsteps behind her. She spun, heart pounding - but the street was empty, the fog unbroken.

Inside the churchyard, the mist was thicker, pressing against her like damp cloth. The broken stained-glass windows gaped like dark eyes. She moved closer, notebook clutched tight, when something caught her eye on the stone steps.

Blood.

Dark streaks, almost black in the dim light, smeared across the crumbling stone. She crouched, reaching out before jerking her hand back. It was fresh.

Her breath came short. She rose, pulse hammering. A sound echoed inside the church. A scrape, like stone dragging against stone. Then? a whisper.

"Elara?"

Her name. Drawn out, soft, like it came from deep underground.

She stumbled back, chest tight, eyes darting to the shattered doorway. The whisper came again, stronger this time, curling around her like smoke.

"Elara?"

Her legs screamed to run, but her feet rooted to the ground. She could feel it - something waiting just beyond the threshold. Watching.

The wind picked up suddenly, rattling the broken glass. And then she saw it: a shape in the doorway. Tall, too tall, with eyes that burned a dim, unnatural red.

The whisper turned into a low hiss.

"Elara? come inside."

Her throat closed. She staggered back one step, then another, clutching the notebook like a shield. The blood on the steps gleamed under the lamplight, and the figure shifted closer, one foot sliding forward into the mist.

Elara spun and ran.

She didn't look back. Couldn't. The gate screamed as she shoved through it, her breath tearing in her lungs. The streets of Blackwood blurred around her, her only thought to reach the safety of her home. But even as she ran, she could still hear it - her name, whispered on the fog, closer with every step.

And in the silence of her room, long after she had bolted the door and collapsed against it, she realized something terrible: Mara's notebook wasn't the only thing left behind.

On its last page, in handwriting that wasn't Mara's, were three words scrawled in crimson ink:

"See you soon."

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