They said the land was cursed long before the first footprints scarred its surface. Before the roads, before the fences, before the promises of salvation. The desert held its breath through the centuries, swallowing secrets and sins alike, grinding them down into powdery dust. And under that thin, shifting skin of earth, something ancient and patient waited — something that had never forgotten the voices that called it into being.

On nights when the stars disappeared behind a veil of black clouds, when even the coyotes fell silent and the winds refused to howl, the ground would tremble with a sound no living ear could hear. A sound not born of rock or root, but of something older — the scrape of bone against bone, the low moan of a soul too twisted to rest. It was then, in the heart of the deepest dark, that the Skinwalker stirred, dragging itself through the fabric of the world like a jagged tear.