Chapter 1
Jasmine woke cold and raw, the damp earth pressing against her cheek. Her hands were smeared with dark, sticky stains she didn’t recognize, and every breath tasted faintly of smoke. The forest loomed around her—silent, watching, as if it held its breath waiting for something to happen. She tried to sit, but the ache in her limbs pulled her back down, the edges of her memory bleeding into shadow. She remembered running. Running from home, from the suffocating weight of everything she couldn’t fix inside her. But after that, nothing. Just silence and darkness.
The world wasn’t supposed to feel like this. Her doctors said the pills would keep the worst at bay—the voices, the flickers at the corner of her vision, the dizzying blackouts where she lost hours, sometimes days. But the medication was a slow poison, dulling everything until she barely felt alive at all. Lately, those flickers had grown sharper, the voices more urgent, pulling her toward something she couldn’t name. Now, as she squinted through the gloom, shapes flickered between the trees—shadows that didn’t belong to branches or animals. Or maybe it was just her mind turning against her again.
A faint glow pulsed deeper in the woods, a rhythmic beat like a heartbeat wrapped in smoke and whispered chants. Jasmine’s chest tightened; part of her screamed to run, but another part—hungry, desperate—moved toward the light. The air thickened with something ancient and terrible, yet strangely familiar. Her fingers trembled as she reached out, brushing against a cold, rough surface carved with strange symbols that pulsed faintly under her skin. The forest seemed to breathe around her, and for a moment, the shadows weren’t so frightening. They were inviting.
She knew she was stepping into something she shouldn’t—something that would change everything—but the ache inside her had grown too loud to ignore. The glow ahead pulsed stronger now, revealing flickering candles arranged in a circle, their flames casting twisted shadows on the faces gathered around it. Strange symbols were painted in dark red on their skin, and low chanting hummed through the air like a living thing. For a fractured moment, the chaos inside her quieted, replaced by a twisted hope: that maybe here, in the dark, she could find a place to belong.
The chanting deepened as Jasmine stepped into the circle, her limbs moving without her permission. No one stopped her. The robed figures barely looked up, their eyes rolled back, mouths spilling words too old for human tongues. The glow from the candles grew blinding, and the symbols painted on their skin pulsed in sync with something vast and unseen. Jasmine felt it too—a presence curling around her bones, slipping beneath her skin like smoke and hunger.
A scream—inhuman and deep—ripped through the clearing, though no one moved to flee. The forest roared in her ears, and the ground lurched like it was breathing. Something rushed toward her, massive and cold, a shadow within shadows. Her body seized, mouth open in a silent cry as darkness crashed down on her like a wave. She felt herself falling—inside out, backward, nowhere—and then nothing at all.
When she woke, the forest was still. The candles were gone. The circle empty. The earth beneath her was scorched, symbols carved into the dirt like claw marks. Jasmine sat up slowly, heart pounding, her hands covered in ash. She told herself it was another break—another lost night swallowed by her fractured mind. Her doctors warned this could happen if she stopped taking her meds. This was just her illness. It had to be.
But as she stumbled through the trees, heading toward the vague direction of home, fragments of memory clawed their way back. The voices hadn’t been hers. The presence hadn’t been imagined. And when she reached the edge of the forest and saw the scorched symbol still burned into her wrist, Jasmine knew. She hadn't hallucinated. She had stood at the threshold of something real—and what waited in the dark had called itself Satan.
