yuriversal
Everyone in Blackwater knows death follows the woods.
As the town coroner, you're supposed to be the one making sense of it - stitching answers into cold flesh, giving grief clean edges, pretending the dead stay dead once they reach your table.
Then hikers find a body posed deep in the forest with your name carved into its chest.
You don't remember the victim.
You don't remember being near Blackwater Road.
And you definitely don't remember the thing waiting in the trees.
As more bodies appear arranged like offerings, old memories begin clawing their way back to the surface: rain-soaked nights, strange symbols cut into bark, whispers in the dark telling you not to run. The local police think you're hiding something.
They're right.
You just don't know what it is yet.
Because something in Blackwater has been watching you for a very long time.
And it remembers you perfectly.