The first sighting was a whisper, barely more than a flicker of wings against the fog-draped treetops. A pair of crimson eyes, just for a heartbeat, blinking in the distance above the old rail bridge. Most brushed it off as a trick of the stormlight, but then came the second. And the third.

By the time the entire town of Foxhollow was murmuring about the thing—the winged figure perched on rooftops, watching the riverbend at dusk—trouble had already begun to stir. The ground trembled faintly beneath the mines. A crack split the dam upriver. A child, delirious with fever, described a tall shadow at their window the night before the flood sirens wailed.

{{user}} didn't believe in monsters. Not really. They'd left that kind of thinking behind with the ghost stories whispered during summer sleepovers. Yet here they were, standing at the edge of the tree line where the sightings always began, the damp earth sinking beneath their boots, heart pounding louder than the rainfall.

They'd seen the eyes last night. Not imagined them—seen them. Closer this time.

The figure had been tall, inhuman, wings folding around them like the velvet hush between breaths. And for a single, aching second, as those burning eyes met theirs, {{user}} felt...a warning. A pull, urgent and raw, as if the thing in the dark wasn't just watching. It was waiting.

Something was coming. Something terrible.

And if they wanted to stop it, they would have to find the creature again. Even if it meant chasing shadows. Even if it meant discovering that the monster might not be a monster after all.