Chapter Text
There's something watching her from the treeline.
Zoey isn't entirely sure how she knows, just that she does. She can feel it, like a stick constantly poking her from behind. Pressing up between her shoulder blades when she least expects it, and catching her off guard each and every time.
She pauses, slightly out of breath, and scans it once more to no avail.
It's late, very late. The sun has all but set at this point. Painting the world a deep, rich purple as the last dredges of it poke over the horizon and paint the sky with violet and indigo hues. The shadows all but swallow the ground, and the few measly lanterns that Zoey had managed to procure from the general store are little more than distant yellow blobs from this particular corner of the farm.
With a final grunt of effort, Zoey drives her shovel into the ground. Resting an arm over the handle to lean against it, wiping the other over her brow like that's actually going to accomplish anything other than smearing all the sweat gathered there with the dirt caked along it. A couple strands of hair drift down into her face as if to illustrate the futile nature, Zoey blows them away.
Farming is hard, as it turns out.
She'd thought she'd known back-breaking manual labor. 12 hour shifts in a UPS shipping facility will do that to a girl, but this is different. At least at UPS she could complain to her coworkers and suffer as mutual, agreed upon wage slaves. This, this is entirely her doing.
She's the one that forces herself to get up at dawn and water the damn crops. She's the one that has to plan out what crops to grow and when. She's the one that has to decide what she can afford to spend on food, what has to go towards her sprinkler system she's slowly setting up, and what she can pay the cute girl at the Saloon that works every other night and is the only place in town that serves actual, cooked food.
Admittedly, that last one isn't as important as the first two, but it's still a thought that rings around in the back of her mind almost constantly.
Zoey sighs in frustration and shakes herself, glancing at the pile of rocks, tree-roots, and grass she's managed to clear from her land over the last couple hours. It's a pretty sizable pile, coming up to at least her waist, and she decides after only a few moments of studying it that she's made enough progress to let herself relax for the rest of the night.
She huffs, plucking her shovel from the ground, and hoists it over her shoulder with only the slightest whimper of effort.
"Stupid Mira and her stupid big arms and tall person proportions," she grumbles beneath her breath. Truth be told, the shovel is a bit big for her, but Mira had looked so proud of herself for finding her any tools at all, so Zoey had taken it without complaint.
Zoey's half-way back to the cabin when she hears another rustle from the woods.
She stills.
It's a futile hope. She's been trying to figure out what was in the woods for almost two weeks now, ever since that first night on the farm she could've sworn she heard someone tugging on her door handle in the middle of the night.
She hadn't found anything then, and she doesn't expect to now.
So the pair of startling, shining golden eyes staring out at her from the woods make her freeze like a deer caught in headlights.
They're small, and Zoey isn't particularly close– at least a good dozen or so feet away from just the treeline– so she can't exactly get the clearest look, but they're there. Unmistakably. Not simply just the reflection of light either, Zoey's seen that enough times from waking up in the middle of the night to Derpy having decided that her face was the best place to lie down. No, this is otherworldly. Real, magical, glowing golden eyes staring out at her from the treeline like something out of a fairytale.
Or a horror movie, another voice that sounds suspiciously like Mira's, whispers inside of Zoey's mind. She decides not to pay it any attention.
The eyes don't move. Don't blink. Simply stare, long and hard at Zoey. There's something distinctly intelligent about them. Something almost human, in a strange way. Zoey can't quite manage to word it in a way that makes sense in her own head, but it's definitely there. Almost absently, Zoey finds her feet moving back towards the treeline.
The eyes don't disappear. Don't look away. Simply continue to watch her as she makes her careful, quiet approach.
The closer she gets the more she can see the outline of something. It's tall, though not much more than Zoey, and distinctly human in shape. Or at least, almost human. With a head and shoulders, arms and legs. It's too dark for Zoey to make out much more than that and the cat-like slit of a pupil embedded in each iris. Just as she's starting to get up to the trees herself– she can feel the tall grass beginning to brush against the edges of her jeans which she'd tucked into her boots earlier to try and prevent ticks– a loud mmrow?! sounds from behind.
Zoey jumps. Whirling around to see Derpy, perched atop the steps of her front porch, glaring at her insistently from his spot beside the cat door. His own eyes narrow, glinting a pale yellow in the lamplight. He puffs himself up, all orange fur and malice before letting out another loud, pitiful "Mow!" before standing and circling twice, heading back through the cat door before peeking his head out once more to stare at her as if to say "are you coming?"
Zoey whirls back to the trees, but is unsurprised to find the glinting golden eyes have disappeared once more. Back into the ether or wherever they belong, without so much as a glint to remember them by.
~
"Local cryptids?" Mira's tone can, charitably, be described as disbelieving. More accurately would be to call it amused, perhaps even perturbed, or some strange place between the two. Zoey can't bring herself to try and decipher it right now. Not when it's 10 o'clock in the morning and she's already behind schedule if she wants to catch Bobby on his way from the Doctor's office on the west side of town to the fountain in the north.
Still, it's easy to get caught up in talking to Mira.
Mira is, for a lack of a better word, beautiful (gorgeous, breath-taking, a goddess in human form). All long legs and a dancer's grace packed into the lithe, towering countenance of a woman with sharp eyes and sharper features. Her pink hair is down today, as it is most days that she's working at the general store. Sometimes, if she's feeling it, she'll put it up in twin-tales on either side of her head, but she usually only puts it up fully when she's working a shift at the saloon. "Get's too much in the way." she said when Zoey asked last time she was there, and hadn't commented again on it since.
Zoey likes it down most, she thinks. There's something soft in how the pink locks fall around her face. Something devastatingly charming in how it spills over her shoulders and down her back, like a waterfall of sorts, melting into the soft, bronzed tone of her skin.
"I-I was just wondering," Zoey splutters, searching for an explanation that doesn't involve the mysterious glow from last night she's still not entirely sure she didn't dream. "I overheard Baby the other day-"
"Ok, see," Mira stops her, looking up from the magazine she'd been lazily paging through when Zoey came in to buy her morning Monster Energy. "Your first mistake was listening to literally anything that guy says."
Zoey snorts and Mira smirks. That soft, smug little twist of her lips that makes Zoey feel like the world has stopped for just a few short moments to let her bask it all in.
"But in all seriousness, there's literally nothing interesting around here." she shakes her head, not quite exasperatedly, though close. There's annoyance but something that Zoey might also dare to call fond. "I've got no idea why you'd wanna move out here. Especially not after living in Seoul of all places."
Zoey laughs a bit, massaging the back of her neck with her off hand.
"Oh you know… just… needed a change."
That was putting it mildly. She'd been on the edge of fully snapping and doing something drastic. Like becoming an accountant.
Zoey wasn't entirely sure what had possessed her to enter that raffle. But it was the best decision she'd made. Honmoon Valley is beautiful. All lush, natural plant life and cool, fresh air. The water is clean enough to drink straight from the ground, and she hasn't seen so much wildlife since she moved out of the US.
Compared to that tiny, claustrophobic apartment that she'd been living in before, this might as well have been paradise. Even if it meant that she was having to teach herself how to do agriculture while simultaneously adjusting to living in a town with a population so small she could name all of the residents on two hands.
Mira only hums at that response, like she knew it didn't cover the full story, but she doesn't press further. Instead she closes her magazine and reclines slightly in her stool. Zoey was about 80% sure that the old man that owned this place did not know she'd put behind the register. For a long moment she says nothing, seemingly weighing a thought before deciding it important enough to share. Zoey loves that about Mira, that she always seems to think through her words like she can feel the weight of them.
"As far as, like, actual local folklore, there's nothing. But if you're taking anecdotal evidence…" she glances back at Zoey, dark eyes glinting slightly. Something in Zoey's stomach area does a cartwheel. "According to Bobby, the old lady that used to own your property would sometimes leave, like, full meals outside on her back porch. Not even, like, ate her dinner and left a plate or a glass behind, I mean, like, full three course meal, uneaten and untouched, left out overnight. He said he tried to ask her about it once and she just, refused to acknowledge it."
Zoey blinks.
"What was Bobby doing on her property overnight?"
Mira snorts, shrugging.
"Hell if I know. Knowing him? Probably got lost in the mountains and spent the night wandering the woods trying to find his way back to town."
That startles a laugh out of her, mostly because it does in fact sound like something the– well-meaning but ultimately quite clueless– mayor would do. Mira smirks again, just the barest hint of a grin. She doesn't usually smile with her teeth, but now Zoey can make out the barest hint of them. Small and just the slightest bit uneven.
Cute.
Zoey darts her gaze away, hoping it isn't too obvious that she's an absolute mess in front of the literal first pretty girl she'd seen.
"Heh, but yeah, you're right that is… pretty weird…" she trails off, really digesting Mira's words.
Full meals, left out on the back porch. The… creature? that she'd seen the night before looked pretty human, or at least resembled one. And it had been in the woods behind Zoey's house, staring at the back porch.
Was it… hungry?
Zoey frowned, pressing her lips together in thought. She wasn't exactly what one would call a 'good cook'. She could do a souped up instant ramen, but that was about it. Did strange forest creatures like ramen? Given the environment she got the idea that they'd prefer something like, fresh garden salad with homegrown vegetables or something equally artisanal. Unfortunately, the best she could do right now would be some under-ripe cucumbers and cauliflower.
"Uh, earth to Zoey? You in there space-cadet?"
Zoey jerks back to attention, nearly launching herself forward and over the counter. She catches herself, barely, but in the process slams her hands on either side and all but slams her forehead into Mira's.
Mira blinks at her, owlishly. Her eyelashes tickle the tops of Zoey's cheeks. One perfectly manicured brow rises slowly, almost playfully.
"You good?"
Zoey laughs. Loud and slightly hysterical, backpedaling as fast as she can away from the counter.
"Yup! All good! Totally good! Never been better! I'm just gonna gay– I mean go! Go water my cat, yup! Gotta watter that guy, he gets super dry and it is not cute. Hahaha, bye!"
In her haste to get out of the store Zoey forgets that the doors are not automatic. So, when she spins on her heel to make a run for it, she ends up slamming headfirst into the glass.
She stumbles back, taking a moment to find her center of gravity once more and, against all common sense or self-preservation instincts, chances a glance over her shoulder to see if Mira saw that.
Mira's hand is pressed to her mouth, brows knit together, muscles in her jaw clenched as her shoulders shake with poorly suppressed laughter.
Zoey's face turns scarlet and she makes a run for it.
~
For her first attempt, Zoey just buys a bowl of stew from the saloon and warms it up in her microwave.
It's hardly ideal, but the fact of the matter is that the cute little farmhouse that Zoey won in that raffle all those months ago did not come equipped with a kitchen. It had a bathroom, and therefore, running water, but that was it. The best she could do was a hotplate she stored atop her bookshelf and the microwave that sat on the second shelf.
A small price to pay, Zoey thought, for the freedom of owning a property, but it did have its drawbacks.
Namely that, evidently, microwaved leftovers were not going to be enough to entice the local forest cryptid.
Zoey sighed. She'd been sitting out here for almost four hours after the sun went down and still, nothing. The stew had gone cold, she'd heated it up again, and then it sat out long enough to go cold once more.
It was good stew. Zoey would know, that first week in the valley she'd eaten it almost every single night, much to the concern of the Saloon's owner. Mystery had eventually cut her off, grumbling that she needed to eat something other than that or she'd die from sodium intake. She'd countered that, otherwise, she was just going to be eating instant ramen. He'd let her keep eating the stew, but started adding more vegetables to the broth when he thought she wasn't looking.
Still, evidently not enough. No golden eyes appeared from the dark, no subtle feeling of being watched, only the empty, cold night. The last cold snap before the heat of summer began to settle in for real. Zoey glanced down at the bowl, giving it a final nudge before standing and stretching to her full height, arms over her head to let out a couple resounding pops from her spine.
Nothing from the forest, only the gentle singing of crickets. The occasional distant hoot of an owl.
Zoey suppresses the urge to grab a lantern and tear off into the woods to search it herself.
Zoey has always been a curious girl. Impatient by nature. She knew that, for the most part she came across as kinda ditzy, and that wasn't to say that she wasn't. Some days she swore if she didn't have her head attached to her body she'd find a way to screw it on backwards. Possibly even upside down.
But Zoey wasn't stupid. Far from it. When she was a kid she devoured knowledge like a starving man at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Her parents had actually had to force her to put the books down every once in a while and do something else. Not because Zoey was really all that averse to the outdoors, or didn't like physical activity– far from it.
Zoey just loved to know.
Facts about dinosaurs, or airplanes, reptiles, planets, ancient egypt, anything she could get her hands on.
When she wasn't reading about them she was talking about it, and when she wasn't talking about it, she was thinking about it, and when she wasn't thinking about it– it went on and on.
It hadn't helped her reputation as the weird girl. Sure, she was cute and nice and could do cool skateboarding tricks, but if you started talking to her for longer than five minutes? Suddenly you were receiving a full lecture on different species of mollusk and why the best one was obviously the Jorunna parva, or the sea bunny.
All that was to say, Zoey wasn't good at not knowing. At having gaps in her knowledge. Far too many times in university she'd come across a term in some class reading she didn't understand– a term that wasn't even particularly relevant to the actual lesson– and find herself hours later in the library surrounded by books on a completely different major, having finished an entire research paper on Chromatography, which was absolutely not what her actual paper on Color Theory was supposed to be about.
This method, waiting for whatever was out there to come to her, was maddening.
She glares down at the bowl, nudging it a little with her toe. The slightly gelatinized surface jiggled back at her, impassive.
Zoey growls a little before spinning on her heel and stalking back into the cottage.
The bowl is empty in the morning, but she has no way of knowing if it was the creature who did it or something else.
~
For her second attempt, Zoey tries the ramyeon. It's a little difficult because finding ingredients for anything in the Valley oftentimes requires growing them yourself or ordering them at least a week in advance. Technically there is a supermarket, but the manager there gives Zoey the creeps and she'd rather not get anywhere near him more than absolutely necessary.
So, Zoey starts with the ingredients she knows she's going to want. Spring is just starting to round the bend into summer which makes it a little early for tomatoes and a bit late for bok choy, but Zoey knows that the soil is good and has the dedication to ensure that what would normally get scorched doesn't.
She gathers spring onions and preserves some in the freezer, combining the rest with her cabbage and begs Mira and Mystery for a good week straight before Mystery caves and lets her steal some of his aged gochujang paste.
Mira dares her to try a spoonful before she takes the tupperware home. Zoey is an idiot with a weakness for pretty girls so she does, and spends the next half hour sobbing into the countertop while Mira laughs her ass off and continuously pours her a glass of milk.
In retribution, she makes her buy her an ice cream from the stand that just opened by the museum and Mira does so without complaint. Flashing that cute little smile she does whenever she's proud of herself.
Zoey tries not to think about what that could mean.
She fails. Miserably. It keeps her awake for at least three days.
There's still no kitchen so she has to use the hot-plate she's half-convinced will burn down her house, and in the process ends up overcooking the noodles, burning some of the bok choy, and hard boiling the eggs instead of getting the jammy center she was going for.
She sighs, staring down at her sad, overcooked bowl of dollar-store ramyeon with mediocre toppings.
The woods yawn at her, daunting in the late evening light
She's learned a little bit from last time and, after setting down the bowl (with a plate to cover and hopefully keep in the heat), retreats back into the cabin, settling beside the window. She'd made sure to put it in a spot that allowed her to watch from the window without being obvious about it. Hopefully, just enough that the creature, if that is what got to it last time, won't feel intimidated by her stare.
Which, she reasons, it really shouldn't even if she were standing out there with it. The whole reason this began was because she caught the thing staring at her.
She digresses.
For the first few hours nothing happens. The bowl sits, the shadows grow long, longer, and longer still until the entire world has been swallowed by darkness. Stars poking out from the velvet black sky, glittering prettily in a way they never had back in the city.
Zoey always liked the city, she'd spent the majority of her childhood in Burbank, and what little she didn't was spent in Seoul. All she'd ever known was bustling streets and traffic, the first few nights spent in the valley where all she could hear was the soft singing of crickets in the distance felt like magic.
She was still getting used to it, three months in. Still soaking in the air and the sun, the grass, the sway of trees in the breeze. The gentle patter of rain between the leaves, the stirring of wildlife in the corners of her eyes whenever she ventured just a bit off the beaten path.
The stars, glittering in the sky, painting it all with a brilliance that took her breath away.
Derpy chirps, and Zoey blinks, having not realized that she'd gotten distracted.
He's sitting beside her on the little bench she'd dragged over from the table. Gaze set outside like he used to in her old apartment, watching the pigeons that would sometimes nest there and letting out soft, chittering noises.
The same noises he's making now.
Zoey whips around, following his gaze.
There, crouched beside the bowl on her porch, is a shape.
It's hard to make out in the low light, but that small fact is helped by the creature's markings.
Glittering, glowing, luminescent stripes that wander over it's shoulders, down it's arms, across its back. They curve up beneath a ribcage, winding over what Zoey assumes is the creature's waist, and down each long, toned leg like an artist's careful, loving brushstroke.
They glisten in the dark, soft purples and blues, the occasional flickering of other colors along the lines like spider webbing sparks of lightning in a storm. The creature lifts an arm to carefully turn over the plate Zoey had left atop the bowl.
It has hands, Zoey notes. Human hands, and a notable human-like body if the suggestions of the glowing marks are anything to go by.
The golden eyes are still there, but they look softer somehow. Less like headlights glinting out from the treeline and more similar to Derpy's. Curious, and a bit shy, as the creature lowers itself to sniff experimentally at the bowl.
Zoey sucks in a breath, realizing abruptly that she'd forgotten to leave out any utensils.
The creature doesn't seem to mind, sitting back up and, for just a moment, the porch light catches the shadow in just the right way that Zoey can make out the silhouette of the creature's profile.
Feminine. With a soft, sloping nose and high forehead, hair pulled back in some type of long braid, though with quite a few flyaways and what Zoey could only assume were bits of twigs and leaves poking out of them. There were marks on the creature's face too, though they were far more narrow than those that painted along their body.
The creature lifts the bowl to their lips, tilting it back with a couple long, throaty gulps. Like this was the most precious thing it had ever tasted. Like it was savoring the flavor, the taste. It's glowing golden eyes slide closed, and for a long moment Zoey wonders if, perhaps, hunger was not the only driving factor.
The creature lowers the bowl. Once again, the shadow is too deep for Zoey to make out it's expressions, but she is reminded of whenever Derpy finishes a meal and licks his lips. Something about the way the creature's jaw stretches. Remarkably catlike.
Then, the creature turns its head and stares directly at Zoey.
Not the house, Zoey. Like they always knew that she was there, watching. Like they simply let her, and now they wanted to know if she enjoyed the show.
Low in her ears, in her jaw, Zoey felt her pulse begin to pick up speed.
The creature stood. All slow, languid grace. Golden eyes glinting predatory and feral in the night. Purple stripes sparking with flecks of yellow and a light cyan. As it stood, Zoey watched as the braid she'd clocked earlier slid down around the creature's body, almost like a tail lashing. For a moment it caught the light and Zoey stared at the deep, amethyst locks before the braid was tugged back into the shadows.
The creature stared, eyes narrowed. Posture tall and defensive.
It lifted the bowl, holding it out, away from their body like it was poisonous, dropped it unceremoniously, before turning on its heel and tearing off into the night.
Zoey breathed, having not realized at what point she'd stopped.