You shouldn't have taken that shortcut. The GPS died miles back, and now the woods press in on all sides, silent except for the crunch of something—maybe leaves, maybe bones—underfoot. Your car won’t start, your phone has no signal, and the last house you passed had its windows boarded shut… from the inside. Something here knows you're lost. And it's been waiting.

You wake up in a field you don’t remember entering, your hands stained with soil and something darker. The air is thick with the scent of rotting grain and iron. Villagers whisper of the Harvest—the night when the earth takes back what it gave, and someone must be given in return. This year, your name was drawn. But you didn’t die. You woke up… changed. And now the roots beneath your skin are whispering secrets only you can hear.

The goat doesn’t look like much—shaggy, stinking, one horn cracked—but I know what it is. What it’s done. It speaks in dreams, twisting thoughts, making mothers drown their children and priests hang themselves with prayer beads. And it’s hers. She strokes its matted fur like it’s holy. But I’ve seen the graves. I’ve counted the missing. This isn’t a pet. It’s a curse with hooves. And tonight, I’m the one who has to end it.

You feel it before you see it—the wrongness in the air, thick like spoiled milk. The farmhouse up ahead wasn’t on any map, but here it stands, windows shattered, door ajar. Something called us here. Not choice. Not chance. Something *wanted* us to come. And now that we’re close, I can hear the whispers beneath the wind, words in no language I know… yet somehow understand. This isn’t just a place of death. It’s a place of *design*. And if we don’t leave now, we won’t be leaving at all.