Chapter 1: The Invitation

Chapter 1: The Invitation

The night in Blackwood Creek didn't fall; it seeped. It bled from the dense, ancient woods that choked the town on all sides, a cold, pine-scented ink that stained the sky and swallowed the light. For Alex Miller, the darkness was a comfort, a shroud for the husk of a man he had become.

He walked the cracked pavement of Old Mill Road, his worn-out sneakers scuffing a lonely rhythm against the asphalt. Each step was a deliberate punctuation mark in the final sentence of his life. The air was heavy with the damp scent of decaying leaves and the distant, mournful rush of the creek that gave the town its name. It was a good night to disappear.

His mind, as always, was a carousel of ghosts. The screech of tires on wet asphalt. The crystalline spiderweb of a shattering windshield. The smell of rain, gasoline, and something metallic and sweet that still clung to the back of his throat. And her voice, a fading echo that guilt kept on a torturous loop. He deserved this walk. He deserved the silence at the end of it.

Just a little further, he thought, the words a familiar, grim mantra. The old bridge. No one ever goes there this late.

He'd been composing the invitation for years, writing it in the lines on his face, in the hollows beneath his eyes, in the slump of his shoulders as he stocked shelves under the sterile, fluorescent buzz of the grocery store's night shift. An invitation to oblivion. Tonight, he was finally ready to deliver it. The self-hatred that had been his constant companion was now a physical weight, pressing down on his lungs, making each breath a chore. It was a suffocating blanket he was desperate to throw off, even if it meant throwing his life away with it.

Ahead, a single streetlight cast a sickly orange dome of light, a fragile bastion against the encroaching forest. It was the last light on this road before it dissolved completely into the woods. As he approached, the light seemed to flicker, not like a faulty bulb, but as if the darkness itself were taking hungry bites out of its edges.

He stopped just inside the circle of light, the sudden illumination feeling like an unwanted spotlight. He looked up, his gaze drawn to the thick, gnarled branches of the oaks that overhung the road, their limbs like skeletal fingers clawing at the night sky. The sheer, oppressive weight of the forest felt ancient, alive, and utterly indifferent to the scurrying miseries of men. This was a good place. A quiet place.

That’s when he saw it.

It stepped from the impenetrable shadow of the trees into the orange glow with a silence that was fundamentally wrong. It had the shape of a deer, but the resemblance ended there. A large buck, its head crowned with an elaborate rack of antlers that looked less like bone and more like fire-blackened branches, twisted and sharp. It didn’t move with the fluid grace of a wild animal. Each step was deliberate, measured, as if it were placing its hooves on the precise points of an invisible map.

Alex froze, his heart, which had been a dull, tired drum, suddenly hammering against his ribs with a panicked, unfamiliar rhythm. Animals weren't uncommon here, but this felt different. An intrusion. The deer stood perfectly still at the edge of the light, its body half-swallowed by shadow. It turned its head, and its eyes caught the glow of the streetlight.

They were not the soft, dark, liquid eyes of a deer. They were ancient and intelligent, pits of polished obsidian that held no reflection. They seemed to look past his physical form, past the faded hoodie and gaunt face, and peer directly into the festering rot of his soul. In those eyes, he saw a terrifying, patient stillness. The stillness of a predator that knows its prey is already cornered.

The world seemed to fall silent. The rustle of leaves ceased. The rush of the creek vanished. There was only the low hum of the streetlight and the profound, absolute silence emanating from the creature.

Alex couldn't move. He was a bug pinned to a board. The carefully constructed despair that had driven him out here began to fracture, replaced by a thread of something primal and cold: fear.

His internal monologue, his constant, self-flagellating companion, screamed into the void of his mind. This is it. This is the end. Just let it be over. Please, just take me. I don’t want to do it myself. Let the world do it. Just let it end.

The plea was a raw, silent scream of pure exhaustion. He was tired of breathing, tired of remembering, tired of being the living monument to his greatest failure. He closed his eyes, a single, hot tear finally breaking free and tracing a path through the grime on his cheek. Take me.

A voice answered.

It was not a sound that traveled through the air. It didn't vibrate in his eardrums. It bloomed directly inside his skull, a voice like stones grinding together at the bottom of a cold, deep lake. It was ancient, calm, and utterly devoid of any emotion he could name.

Not you.

Alex’s eyes snapped open. The air punched out of his lungs in a choked gasp. He scanned the road, the trees. Nothing. The deer hadn't moved. Its jaw was still, its obsidian eyes still fixed on him. The voice couldn't have come from the deer. That was insane. It was a hallucination. His mind, finally breaking under the strain.

The thought was a desperate lifeline to sanity, but it snapped the instant the voice came again, clearer this time, a definitive, horrifying answer to the plea he had only ever screamed in the privacy of his own mind.

Me.

The word was a key turning a lock deep inside him. It wasn't a suggestion. It was a statement of fact. A correction. A terrifying proposition that shattered his understanding of reality. He wasn't offering his life to the indifferent void of death. He had offered it to… something. And that something had just accepted the invitation, but on its own horrifying terms.

The creature took one slow, deliberate step forward, its cloven hoof clicking once on the asphalt. The sound was like a gavel striking, sealing a verdict.

Abject horror, pure and undiluted, finally broke Alex's paralysis. The desire for death, which had been the singular, driving force of his existence for years, vanished in an instant, incinerated by a new, more powerful instinct: the will to live.

He didn't scream. The sound was trapped in his throat, a knot of pure terror. He just stumbled backward, his legs clumsy and weak. He turned and ran. He fled from the orange light, plunging into the familiar, comforting darkness that now felt alive with unseen teeth, his ragged breaths tearing at the cold night air, the two terrible words echoing in his skull not as a memory, but as a promise.

Not you. Me.