Chapter 1: Moonrise Shadows
Silvercrest was not a town people stumbled into by accident. It sat hidden beneath a canopy of ancient trees, wrapped in a constant shroud of mist that clung to the earth like a secret unwilling to be told.
The forest surrounding it was older than memory, older than maps, and the townspeople treated it with a quiet, reverent fear.
At night, that fear came alive.
The trees creaked and whispered, their branches twisting like skeletal fingers clawing at the sky. Above them hung the moon—bloated, heavy, and impossibly bright—casting silver light that seemed almost too deliberate, as though it were watching rather than illuminating.
Silvercrest bled secrets.
And the oldest of them all wore fur and fangs.
Werewolves.
Lara Thompson had heard the stories when she first arrived—half-laughed rumors exchanged over coffee, warnings disguised as jokes, the kind of folklore that clung stubbornly to small towns. As a wildlife photographer, she had dismissed them easily.
Every place had its myths. Silver crest just happened to romanticize theirs.
But myths didn’t show up in photographs.
At least, they weren’t supposed to.
Lara leaned over her desk, fingers tightening around the edges of her camera as she scrolled through the images again. Each one told the same unsettling story—dark forest scenes interrupted by something unnatural.
Blurred shapes that moved too deliberately to be shadows. Eyes that glowed, not from reflection, but from something alive within them. Watching.
Always watching.
Her editor had waved it off during their last call.
“Lens distortion,” he had said. “Low light interference. You’ve been working too hard, Lara.”
But Lara knew her equipment. She trusted it the way a hunter trusted instinct.
And her instinct was screaming. Something was out there.
“Okay,” Mara had said earlier that day, spinning in her chair as lines of code flickered across her laptop screen. “I’ve run diagnostics on the metadata, checked for corruption, glitches, even environmental interference.”
Lara leaned forward. “And?”
Mara turned, her expression unusually serious. “It’s not your camera.”
A chill had crawled up Lara’s spine. “Then what is it?”
Mara hesitated, then shrugged, though the unease in her eyes betrayed her. “Something’s messing with your lens. Or… whatever you’re pointing it at doesn’t want to be captured.”
That answer had been enough.
Enough to push Lara back into the forest that same night.
