Chapter 1: The Crimson-Eyed King

Chapter 1: The Crimson-Eyed King

The mist clinging to the slopes of Mount Shasta was a living thing. It coiled around the ancient pines and choked the narrow game trails, tasting of damp earth and secrets older than memory. For Leo, it was perfect. The air, thin and sharp in his lungs, was an antidote to the recycled, sterile atmosphere of his office cubicle. This was reality. Everything else was just waiting.

He moved with a practiced silence, his modern camouflage gear a stark, pixelated intrusion on the primeval landscape. Every snap of a twig under his boot was an offense. He was a hunter, but not for deer. Not really. He was hunting for the weird, the unexplained, the crack in the mundane facade of the world. He was hunting for proof.

His blog, ‘The Concrete Cryptid,’ had a respectable following, but it was all theory and secondhand accounts. He needed something tangible, something irrefutable. And Shasta, a global hotspot for high strangeness, from Lemurian cities to Bigfoot sightings, was his holy land.

His friend Isaac, currently back at their makeshift camp nursing a beer and probably sharpening his ridiculous spear, called it a fool's errand. "You'll see a bear, Leo," he'd grumbled as Leo had packed his day kit. "You'll mistake it for the ghost of a UFO pilot and write a thousand words on it."

Leo smirked, adjusting the grip on his high-tech compound bow. Isaac was his ballast, the anchor of practicality that kept him from drifting completely into the esoteric. But sometimes, an anchor just holds you back. Isaac couldn't understand the gnawing hunger Leo felt—the desperate need to prove that the world was more than just mortgages and data entry. That it was still magical, and terrifying.

A profound stillness settled over the forest, a silence so heavy it felt like a pressure against his eardrums. The usual chatter of birds and squirrels had vanished. The wind died. Even the drip of condensation from the pine needles seemed to have ceased. It was the kind of unnatural quiet he’d only read about in witness reports, the tell-tale sign that a predator of a different order was near.

Desire coiled hot in his gut. This was it.

He crouched behind a moss-slicked fallen log, scanning the trees. His eyes, intense and curious, darted back and forth, trying to pierce the swirling grey fog. He wasn't afraid. His arrogance was a suit of armor; he'd read the books, he'd studied the lore. He was prepared. He even had the 9mm pistol tucked into the small of his back, a relic from a brief, misguided stint as a security guard, his personal ‘cheat code’ against anything that got too close.

Then he saw it.

Through a sudden, temporary parting in the mist, standing in a small clearing not eighty yards away, was a stag. The word felt insultingly inadequate. This was a monarch, a forest god rendered in flesh and bone. It was colossal, its shoulders nearly level with Leo’s head even from this distance. Its fur was a strange, ethereal pattern of gray and white, like birch bark in moonlight. But it was the antlers that stole his breath—a vast, dark crown that seemed to tear at the sky.

Leo’s heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat in the oppressive silence. This was beyond a trophy. This was a legend. But as the creature turned its head, its gaze sweeping the woods, Leo saw its eyes.

They were not the soft brown of a deer. They were a burning, intelligent crimson. They glowed with a soft internal light, like embers in the twilight, and they were fixed directly on him. There was no animal curiosity in that stare, no simple fear. There was only an ancient, patient awareness. It knew he was there. It had known all along.

This was the obstacle. The moment of truth. Was he an observer, a blogger who would take a blurry photo and write a breathless post? Or was he a hunter who would claim the impossible? His hubris, that deep-seated need to conquer the unknown and drag it into the light, made the choice for him.

His movements were fluid, instinct taking over. The high-tech bow came up, a smooth, silent motion. He nocked one of his custom arrows, the one with the distinctive red masking tape wrapped just below the fletching. He drew the string back to his cheek, the cams turning over with a faint, satisfying hum. The world narrowed to the space between his eye, the fiber-optic pin of his sight, and the majestic creature’s chest.

He was documenting it, he told himself. Proving it. Proving himself.

He exhaled, his finger tightening on the release. The stag stood perfectly still, its crimson eyes holding his, an unblinking challenge. It was not an animal. It was a dare.

Leo accepted.

The thwack of the bowstring was unnaturally loud in the vacuum-sealed silence. The red-taped arrow disappeared from his sight, a fleeting streak of color swallowed by the eighty yards of mist. For a split second, nothing happened. The stag didn't flinch, didn't bolt. It simply stood there, a statue of primordial grace.

Then, a shudder wracked its massive frame. It took a single, staggering step back. Leo saw the dark patch spreading on its white-and-gray flank, the red of his arrow a tiny flag of victory.

Triumph surged through him, hot and electrifying. He did it. He—

The sound that ripped through the forest was not the panicked bleat of a wounded deer. It was not an animal cry at all.

It was a scream.

A high, piercing, unmistakably human scream, filled with such agony and incandescent rage that it felt like it was tearing the very fabric of the air. The sound scraped Leo's nerves raw, bypassing his ears and sinking directly into his bones, a primal violation of natural law.

His blood ran cold. The bow slipped from his suddenly nerveless fingers, clattering against the log. As the last echoes of that horrifying scream died away, the stag, the impossible monarch with the crimson eyes, simply dissolved into the mist, vanishing as if it had never been there at all.

And then the silence returned. But it was different now. It was no longer a heavy, expectant quiet. It was a void. A hollow, ringing emptiness that was a direct consequence of his action. The forest was not just quiet; it was holding its breath, listening. Judging.

Staring at the empty clearing, the human scream still replaying in his mind, a dawning horror began to bloom in Leo's chest, cold and sharp. He was no longer a hunter. He was an intruder. A transgressor.

And he was suddenly, terrifyingly, alone.