SNUFF NATURE, the deer hunt. the furry isekai.

Crab Tree wasn't on most maps. And if it was, someone probably crossed it out. Appalachia had a way of swallowing towns like this—slowly, painfully, like a dog chewing on a bone that's already been picked clean. What was left of Crab Tree clung to the mountainside like a half-dead thing, barely alive, kept breathing by rusted nails and whatever pride was left in the people too poor or too stubborn to leave.

You could feel it in the air. Not just the rot, not just the way the earth was eating the sidewalks or the bitter chemical taste of old rain that soaked through your shoes. No, it was something else. Like the town had memory. Like it remembered the people who built it—who dreamed about glass towers and modern rail and clean factories and better lives—and hated them for it. All that was gone. The factories were still here, yeah, but they didn't hum anymore. They just sat, jagged and empty, their black windows gaping like mouths. Hulking steel skeletons turned mausoleums, choked in ivy and moss, the trees pushing their way in like they were reclaiming something stolen.

And the houses? You had two kinds now. The old ones, sunken and mold-bitten, porches collapsed under the weight of time, the wood swollen and split like a bad bruise. Their lights flickered like they were gasping for air, and sometimes they just didn't come on at all. Then there were the new builds. The luxury homes perched higher up the ridge, with sharp edges and glass walls, all lit up and pretending not to see what they were standing on. They were like glass vultures, watching the town bleed out, pretending they didn't cause it.

The road was mostly cobblestone this far out. Slippery with wet leaves and moss that grew even through the cracks in the pavement. It smelled like cold rain and wood rot and something metallic you couldn't quite place. The air was always wet here. The kind of wet that crawled under your jacket, clung to your bones. They said Appalachia was a forest, but it was more like a rainforest, with how much it rained, how thick the trees grew, how fast things rotted and disappeared. Everything softened here. Fell apart. Got swallowed up.

The bus didn't come out this far anymore. After it got stripped one night—wheels gone, wires ripped, even the seats taken out—they stopped sending it. Said it wasn't worth the funding. So now she walked. Every morning. Past the gutted diner with the rusted rocket ship sign still hanging, crooked and dumb, pointing nowhere. Past the abandoned strip mall with broken glass teeth. Past the chain-link fences that held back nothing. She was the only one still walking this road to school. Just her. The red deer girl. Red hair, red coat, red eyes if you looked close enough. Crimson against the dead gray of Crab Tree.

She pulled her coat tighter and tried not to think about how empty her stomach felt. Or how quiet it was. Like the world was holding its breath. Her hooves slipped once, catching on the moss, but she didn't fall. She was used to it. Used to the silence, the hunger, the slow sinking feeling. That this wasn't a place for living anymore. Just a place for waiting. For things to get worse.

And they were. Getting worse, she meant. The forest was creeping closer every day. You could see it swallowing sheds, fences, even parts of the road. The factories were rusting faster. The school had fewer students, fewer teachers, more locked doors. You'd hear things at night—old machinery coughing to life for a second and dying again, or screams, or maybe just animals fighting in the woods, but it didn't sound natural. Nothing sounded natural anymore. Not here.

She looked up at the new houses on the ridge. Their windows glowed warm yellow like they were laughing. Those weren't built for people from here. They were for outsiders. New deer. Cleaner deer. Deer with better genes and shinier coats. Whitetails, mostly. Or blacktails from the cities. Her family was red deer. Old blood. From somewhere in Europe they didn't talk about anymore. Her dad used to say elk were their cousins. But no one liked hearing that now. People had stopped saying cousin like it meant anything.

And yeah, maybe she didn't come from here originally. But this was her home. It was the only place she knew. And now it was falling apart, crumbling under her hooves like the road beneath her feet. And what scared her wasn't just that she might lose it. It was that she didn't have anywhere to go if she did. There was no "back to where you came from" when you didn't come from anywhere. No past to return to. Just this collapsing now, and some blurry threat of a future that might not include you.

That's what it felt like. Like the town was dying, and she was dying with it. Bit by bit. Walk by walk. And no one was going to save it. No one was going to save her. Because people didn't save towns like Crab Tree. They just picked over the bones.

She passed a boarded-up gas station and saw a shadow shift inside, maybe a raccoon or something worse. She didn't stop walking. Didn't even flinch. This place was haunted, sure, but not by ghosts. By rust. By bad decisions. By promises that curdled and rotted in the dark.

Appalachia didn't kill you fast. It just let you rot slow, like everything else.