Letters from Nightshade — Volume I
ORIGINAL FICTION · 2025
A field manual, buried for decades in a dead man’s garage. A trail that leads into fog-choked forest. And a question the soldiers never dared to answer aloud.
The dispatch
It began at a folding table in the corner of a veterans’ estate sale in San Luis Obispo — the home of a decorated Army scout, dead the autumn before. In a drawer of an old military sideboard sat a 1943 standard-issue field manual. It should have held survival tactics and land navigation. It did. But page after page was also scored in cramped pencil with warnings found in no Army protocol, clustered around a list of five initials under a single heading: “They saw it too.”
The annotations point to an Allied reconnaissance unit stationed in the Vosges Mountains during the winter of 1944 — and to something they were briefed to fear but never to name. Now Elias Nightshade, an independent investigator of obscured histories, has followed that trail into the trees. What he uncovers are not echoes of the war, but something older, stranger, and infinitely more disturbing. What’s hidden in some places doesn’t always stay buried.
Told as an immersive letter to a trusted recipient — you — this chilling debut blends historical fiction, cosmic horror, and investigative folklore into a singular experience. What begins as a study of found documents spirals into something far more dangerous: a corruption seated in the landscape itself, and a whistling presence that waits in the fog.
Read carefully. Once the letter is unsealed, you’re no longer alone.
Inside the dispatch
From the recovered letter
MAY 28, 2025 — FROM THE DESK OF ELIAS NIGHTSHADE
LOCATION: UNDISCLOSED
To you —
I trust you’ve received my prior correspondence in whole. If not, the contents may appear increasingly fragmented. This is the hazard of documentation by mail: narrative frays, and context decays unless the recipient reads in the proper sequence. But I suspect you’re already inclined toward pattern recognition, or else you would not be reading this.
There was a time, not long ago, when I still believed it might be enough to bury the box and never speak of it again. I even imagined I could forget what I’d seen if I only left it undisturbed long enough. But I was wrong. You knew that before I did. That’s why I’m writing.
What follows may strain credibility, but I am not writing to persuade — only to document. I hope, as ever, that in the event I am forced to stop writing altogether, someone will carry the thread forward.
— E.N.
Recovered footage
