Story 1141: The Lurker’s Return

The fog rolled in unnaturally thick that night, swallowing streets, steeples, and screams alike. Even the gaslamps flickered like dying stars. In the deepest alleys of the Drowned District, something old had begun to move again.

They said it had no face—only antlers, ribs like knives, and a voice like wet breath behind your ear.

They called it the Lurker of the Fog.

And it had returned.

For years, the Lurker was a myth—a tale whispered in dusk taverns and across frostbitten graveyards. The fog was its veil. Its home. When the Spiral took hold of Greybridge, most assumed the Lurker had been consumed like the rest.

They were wrong.

It had been waiting.

Elric Dunn, an ex-cultist turned scavenger, stumbled across its trail by accident. He’d been looting a charred chapel for relics to sell—bones, holy symbols, whatever the cultists hadn’t burned in their rituals. That’s when he saw the antlers.