Out front, the car coughed to life, a guttural sound that startled the stillness. The engine’s growl was the first noise this place had heard in years, maybe decades. It didn’t echo; there was nothing left to bounce off of. Just the flat, endless fields of yellow grass, swaying in the breeze like a sea of brittle straw. The road stretched out ahead, a ribbon of cracked asphalt that would soon crumble into dirt. To the right, a line of telephone poles marched into the horizon, their wires sagging, silent; no messages, no voices, just rusted sentinels watching over a world that no longer spoke. There was no destination. Just forward. The house was modest, weathered, but still standing. Its garage dominated the structure, a cavern of rust and concrete where a battered car sat ready, patched together with care. Three doors broke the garage’s walls: one opened to the front road, another descended into a cool, silent basement, and the third led into a narrow mud-room cluttered with toolboxes, a humming minifridge, and the quiet remnants of function. From there, a back door opened to tall grass and scattered parts of a dismantled van, with a staircase climbing the outer wall toward the attic. Upstairs, the attic held a few beds beneath the sloping roof; simple, untouched, and quiet. The house didn’t feel haunted or sacred, just still. It had become a shell for motion, a place where things were fixed and sleep came without ceremony. Outside, the world stretched in every direction, flat and yellow, with nothing but the road and the telephone poles to mark the horizon. And within it, the house waited; not for anyone, not for anything, just because it hadn’t yet been asked to fall.

Blackwood is an ancient, old-growth forest, a seemingly endless labyrinth that swallows the light. Its towering trees, thick with gnarled roots and heavy moss, form a vast, unbroken canopy, shrouding the forest floor in perpetual, inky darkness even at midday. As night falls, a chilling, pervasive fog coils through the skeletal trunks, rendering visibility to mere feet and distorting every sound. Within its depths, the howls of wolves and the unseen rustle of bears are common, but there are heavier, more deliberate movements too, hinting at a presence far grander and more dangerous than any known beast.