Noah didn't expect Lumi to be so intense about photography.
Every few steps, she stopped—crouching low to get the right angle of a caterpillar crawling across a leaf, or tilting her camera skyward to capture the way sunlight filtered through the branches. She even gasped with joy when she found a flattened, half-rotted rodent and insisted on capturing the "raw beauty of decay."
By the fourth stop, Noah was ready to lose it.
He groaned and reached for his phone—more to distract himself than anything else.
Just then, it buzzed with an incoming call.
A video request.
Noah hesitated, then answered.
"Yo!" came Jamie's loud and carefree voice.
Noah nearly dropped the phone. "Do you have a phone?"
Jamie grinned like an idiot. "Technically? No. I borrowed someone's."
Before Noah could respond, another hand shoved Jamie's face aside with a grunt.
Quinn came into view, looking stern and visibly annoyed. "He's useless," he muttered.
Noah's expression changed instantly. "What's going on?"
"We went back to the church," Quinn said, her tone serious now. "To recover the books we left behind... but everything was gone. Completely wiped clean."
Noah's heart dropped.
Quinn continued, "So we figured the only remaining lead was the school basement. It's where you saw the journal and those strange carvings—maybe something was left."
Then Quinn paused.
Her eyes focused on something behind Noah through the camera.
"What's going on, Noah?" came Lumi's voice from behind him.
Noah flinched, guilt flashing across his face. Quinn stared at him in disbelief. Jamie popped back on the screen, narrowing his eyes.
"Are you enjoying nature with a girl right now, you forest date-loving jerk?!"
Noah winced.
---
Elsewhere, back at the camp
Ezra barely had time to process the unsettling feeling before she sensed a soft presence behind her.
A hand—graceful and careful—reached past her and plucked the glasses from her grip.
"Oh my," Headteacher Marlowe said, examining the frames as if they were a novelty. "Whose glasses are these?"
Her voice was gentle but too gentle.
Ezra could hear nothing else. The sounds of the other students blurred. The trees had gone quiet.
She stared at the teacher. Those emerald eyes shimmered, but not with kindness. Something ancient, something unnatural stirred behind them.
Her pulse quickened.
A foreign pressure crawled across her chest—a sensation of being examined, not just by a person, but by a presence far beyond the woman in front of her.
Her mind recoiled.
Suddenly, she remembered something she didn't know she had.
A voice.
Deep and commanding.
> "If you don't want to die, you have to fight."
Was it her grandfather?
The memory snapped like glass, but it grounded her.
Ezra inhaled slowly and lifted her gaze, offering a smile.
Not her usual reserved smile or her awkward smirk.
This smile was sharp, cold—and confident.
The kind of smile Noah might have never seen.
Marlowe blinked. Her expression remained unchanged.
But something had shifted.
Ezra tilted her head, meeting her teacher's strange gaze evenly.
"Maybe we should turn these in to lost and found," she said, her voice cool and polite.
A small test.
The teacher didn't blink. "Maybe," she replied.
---
And far above, in the shadows of Willow Forest, something stirred.
The pink-eyed silhouette nestled within the mist began to move.
Something old had awakened.
And it was watching again.