Chapter 4: The Ungodly Ascent

Chapter 4: The Ungodly Ascent

“WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?” Isaac’s roar was a raw, physical force, his heavy body pinning Leo to the cold stone of the ridge. The scent of pine and his friend’s furious sweat filled Leo’s nostrils. “Are you insane? That was the shot of a lifetime! You—”

“Look,” Leo choked out, his voice a broken whisper. He wasn’t struggling; he was frozen, his terrified gaze locked on the distant cliff face across the chasm.

Isaac’s rage faltered, thrown off by the sheer, unadulterated horror on Leo’s face. He followed his friend’s line of sight, his eyes narrowing, ready to dismiss whatever phantom Leo had seen. But what he saw silenced the anger in his throat, replacing it with a cold, creeping dread.

The magnificent stag hadn’t moved. But the crimson eyes, which had been distant points of light, now burned with the intensity of welders’ torches. They blazed with a hateful, sentient fury that seemed to collapse the mile of empty air between them, making it feel as if the creature were standing inches away, its gaze boring directly into their souls.

Then a sound began, not a sound they heard with their ears, but one they felt in the marrow of their bones. It was a deep, guttural vibration that resonated up from the bedrock, a hum that set their teeth on edge. On the far cliff, the stag’s noble form began to… buckle.

Its front legs bent backwards at the knee with a wet, percussive crack that echoed across the silent valley. Its spine bowed upwards, elongating with a series of sickening, rapid-fire pops. It was a symphony of dislocation, the sound of a divine creation being brutally torn apart and reassembled into something profane.

“No,” Isaac breathed, scrambling off Leo, his mind refusing to process what his eyes were seeing. “No way.”

The beautiful gray-and-white hide split and sloughed away like wet paper, revealing a mottled, dark skin beneath that looked like a diseased hybrid of bark and cured leather. The creature’s neck stretched, growing longer, more sinewy. Its majestic head tilted back at an unnatural angle, its jaw unhinging with a sound of tearing cartilage. The flesh of its face seemed to melt away, receding from the bone until all that remained was the bleached, horrifying architecture of a deer’s skull.

Before their horrified eyes, the creature rose. It unfolded itself, its limbs stretching, lengthening into impossibly long, spindly arms and legs. Bones, thick as saplings, pushed through its emaciated frame, snapping into new, unholy configurations. It grew, and grew, until it stood erect on two legs, a nine-foot-tall abomination silhouetted against the sky. Its dark antlers were no longer a crown of nature but a thorny, dead-wood effigy. And in the hollow, black sockets of the deer skull, the two crimson eyes burned with an intelligent, undiluted hatred.

The transformation was complete. This was the thing that had returned the arrow. This was the thing that had sliced his bowstring. This was the truth behind the human scream.

The monster, this Leshen born from their transgression, threw back its skeletal head. A mouth that should not have existed opened in the shadows beneath the skull, a lipless gash of pure darkness. A roar erupted from it, a sound that was a blasphemous violation of nature. It was the enraged bellow of a great bull, the shriek of a cornered panther, and woven through it all was the clear, piercing agony of that human scream they had heard in the woods, now amplified into a declaration of war.

The roar slammed into them, a physical wave of sound and malice. Then, the creature charged.

It did not scramble down the rocks or seek a path. It took two loping, impossibly fast strides to the edge of its cliff and leaped into the abyss. For a heart-stopping second, it fell, a nightmarish silhouette against the distant sky. Then its long, spindly arms shot out, and the razor-sharp claws at the end of its fingers gouged into the sheer rock face with a shriek of scraping stone.

It began to climb. Not like a man or an animal. It moved like a monstrous insect, scaling the vertical cliff wall, its limbs finding purchase where none should exist. It moved with an ungodly, terrifying speed, defying gravity, its crimson eyes never leaving them. The mile of safe distance, the vast canyon that had felt like a fortress wall, was vanishing before their eyes.

“Isaac!” Leo screamed, his voice cracking. He scrambled backwards, his feet tangling beneath him. The world had tilted on its axis; the paranormal blogger who had desperately wanted proof was now drowning in a reality he could not have imagined in his most fevered nightmares.

Isaac was a statue of disbelief, his face as white as the skull across the chasm. His expensive compound bow lay forgotten at his feet. His hands, calloused and capable, were trembling as he fumbled for the simple, primitive spear strapped to his back. His entire pragmatic, sensible world had been shattered in less than a minute.

“Run,” Leo shrieked, grabbing Isaac’s arm and hauling him to his feet. “ISAAC, RUN!”

The spell broke. Isaac’s survival instinct finally kicked in, overriding the cognitive dissonance that had paralyzed him. With a choked cry, he turned and they fled, plunging back into the dense, dark woods they had just left.

The forest was no longer a sanctuary. It had become the creature’s territory, an extension of its will. The trail they had followed to the ridge seemed to have vanished, swallowed by the undergrowth. Branches that had been chest-high now seemed to lower like pikes, whipping at their faces and snagging their clothes. Roots, thick as pythons, seemed to writhe up from the earth, tripping their panicked feet. The canopy overhead thickened, plunging the woods into a gloomy, claustrophobic twilight.

Behind them, the sounds of pursuit were relentless and terrifying. They could hear the splintering crash of timber as the creature tore through the forest, its unnatural stride covering ground at a sickening pace. It wasn't running around obstacles; it was annihilating them.

Gasping for breath, lungs burning, they stumbled on. Fear was a physical poison, making their legs feel like lead. Leo risked a glance over his shoulder and saw nothing but a churning vortex of shadows and snapping branches. But he could feel it, its presence a cold pressure wave moving through the trees, closing in.

“This way!” Isaac grunted, veering left, his spear held out in front of him like a desperate ward.

They burst into a small clearing, the momentary sunlight blinding them. For a second, they thought they might have gained some ground. The illusion was shattered by a deafening CRACK directly behind them.

They spun around just in time to see a massive hundred-foot pine at the edge of the clearing shudder violently. It leaned, hesitated, and then toppled over with a ground-shaking roar of splintering wood, its base snapped clean in two as if it were a dry twig.

And from the dust and debris behind the fallen giant, the creature emerged. It was closer, far too close. It stood there for a heartbeat, its skull head cocked to the side as if savoring their terror, the crimson fire in its eyes pulsing with imminent violence. They were no longer running from a sound; they were running from the monster itself. And it was about to catch them.