The project was simple on paper: The Emerald Heights Resort.
To Mok, it was a career-making promotion. To the villagers of Oakhaven, it was a desecration.
From the moment the sleek black SUV climbed the winding mountain pass, the welcome had been ice-cold. The locals didn't protest with signs; they protested with silence. When Mok's team tried to hire local guides, the men spit on the ground and crossed their fingers. When Sarah tried to buy supplies at the general store, the shopkeeper stared at her with milky, clouded eyes and whispered, "The Maw eats what it does not know."
"Superstitious nonsense," Mok had muttered, adjusting his tie. "They're just trying to drive up the land value."
But the "nonsense" had quickly turned physical. On the second day, their high-end surveying equipment had melted—not from heat, but from a localized corrosion that smelled of sulfur. On the third, Leo had screamed when he found his sleeping bag filled with dead, sightless cicadas arranged in a perfect geometric circle.
The warnings were always the same: Stay away from the Outcropping. The Demon of the Maw is waiting for a ghost, and he does not like to be disturbed.
"He's been there five hundred years," an old woman had croaked at them as they hiked toward the site. "Waiting for the Sun Scholar to return. If you wake him and you aren't who he wants... he'll keep your soul to fill the silence."
Mok had ignored it all. He was a man of steel and glass, not myths. By the time they reached the cottage—a dilapidated structure near the forest's edge—the team was exhausted, jumpy, and looking to Mok for the logic he always provided. But as the sun vanished, even his logic began to fray at the edges.
By midnight, the cottage felt less like a shelter and more like a cage.
A thick, unnatural fog had rolled in from the forest, pressing against the windows. Mok lay awake, his skin buzzing with an inexplicable static. The air tasted of ozone and ancient pine. Beside him, Leo was snoring, but it was a deep, rhythmic sound—too deep.
Then, he heard it.
"Mok…"
It wasn't a shout. It was a sigh, a vibration that seemed to originate from inside his own chest.
"Mok… come back…"
He bolted upright. "Leo? Sarah?"
He shook Leo's shoulder. Nothing. He shoved him harder, practically throwing his weight into it, but the intern remained in a trance-like sleep, his breathing unnervingly slow. Mok ran to the common room. Sarah was slumped over her laptop, her eyes closed, the screen flickering a ghostly blue against her pale skin.
"Wake up!" Mok shouted, slamming his hand on the table.
Silence. The village dogs weren't barking. The crickets were mute. The world had stopped breathing, except for the voice.
"I have kept the moon for you," the voice whispered, clearer now. It was rich, melodic, and laced with a sorrow so profound it made Mok's throat ache.
Against his better judgment—against every instinct that had kept him alive in the cutthroat corporate world—Mok reached for the door. He told himself he was looking for help. He told himself he was going to find the source and stop it. But his hands moved as if pulled by invisible silver threads.
Into the Emerald Maw
The forest was different under the full moon. The trees didn't look like wood and leaf; they looked like skeletal fingers reaching for a silver sky.
Mok stumbled through the underbrush. He wasn't wearing shoes, but the sharp rocks and thorns didn't seem to cut him. The air grew colder, turning his breath into ghostly plumes. The deeper he went, the more the forest changed. The modern world—the resort project, his promotion, his mortgage—dissolved into irrelevance.
He reached a clearing where the trees had been twisted into grotesque arches. In the center stood a stone monolith, carved with symbols that seemed to writhe like snakes.
"Almost home," the voice hummed.
Mok followed the sound toward a jagged outcropping of rock hidden behind a curtain of weeping moss. He pushed through the greenery and found himself standing on the edge of a precipice. Below him lay a cavern that seemed to go down into the very heart of the earth.
"Who are you?" Mok cried out, his voice cracking. "Why am I here?"
A gust of wind, smelling of sandalwood and dried blood, rushed up from the abyss. It hit him with the force of a physical blow. Mok lost his footing. His fingers clawed at the damp moss, but it tore away like wet paper.
He didn't scream as he fell. For a split second, as the moon caught his face, he felt a strange sense of peace—a feeling that he wasn't falling into a hole, but falling back into a memory.
_The Bottom of the World_
The impact wasn't what he expected. Instead of the bone-shattering crunch of stone, he hit a slope of soft, ancient dust and slid, tumbling into the dark until he came to a rest on a flat, cold surface.
Mok groaned, his vision swimming with sparks. He was alive. He shouldn't be, but he was.
As his eyes adjusted, he realized the cave wasn't dark. It was glowing with a faint, pulsing crimson light. He was in a massive underground chamber. The walls were lined with thousands of blue lilies—flowers that shouldn't exist, blooming in the dark.
In the center of the chamber, sitting upon a throne of obsidian and bone, was a figure.
He looked human, at first. He wore robes of tattered black silk that flowed around him like smoke. His hair was as white as the moon above, cascading over his shoulders. But when he tilted his head, the light caught his eyes. They weren't brown or blue; they were the color of a dying star—burning, liquid red.
The figure rose, and the very air in the cave grew heavy, forcing Mok to his knees. The "demon" approached, his movements fluid and predatory, yet there was a devastating grace to him.
He stopped inches from Mok. A cold, pale hand reached out, trembling slightly, to touch Mok's cheek.
"You're late," the demon whispered, his voice a beautiful, terrifying caress. "Do you have any idea how many lifetimes I've had to burn while waiting for you to remember?"
Mok looked up into those crimson eyes, and for the first time in his life, the city boy forgot how to breathe. Because deep down, under the fear and the confusion, a terrifying thought took root:
He knew this touch.