The more he tried to sleep, the more he felt an unexplainable pull towards his grandmother's diary. Finally after twenty minutes of tossing and turning, he got up.

Now, sitting on the bed cross-legged with the old wooden box of his grandmother balanced on his knees he opened it, the hinges creaking. 

A week before Grandmum Elena died, she had given her precious box to James. Inside lay a journal, along with some costume jewelry and old postcards.

He took out the journal. It's soft leather cover had become smooth by decades of use. The rich brown color faded to tan around the edges, and the binding was little bit cracked.

He held it in his hand, remembering the past. At that time he was just a lanky and nerdy fourteen year old.  From childhood he was very close to her, so when she got admitted due to lung infections, James visited her every day at the hospital. 

As usual he had gone to the hospital after school, she told him to take out the box from the bedside drawer. As he took out the box and was about to her give her, she smiled.

“Make sure to keep it safe.” Her thin pale hands squeezed his with unexpected strength. “You’ll understand when the time comes.” James was very suprised and tried very hard not to cry in front of her. That day he understood his beloved grandmum will go, so he didn’t argue and returned home with a heavy heart.

He assumed that she meant it as a souvenir, to keep her memory alive. But now he felt unsure.

He slowly began to open the  journal. The first few pages contained sketch of different flowers like roses and daisies, as well as some wildflowers he didn’t recognize. He knew that his grandmother had been skilled and always admired her drawing every time he saw them. They were done with such meticulous detail that it appeared to be alive.

Afterwards, the trees appeared. She labeled different trees oak, ash, birch and adding insights about there characteristics in her immaculate handwriting. "Oak for strong, Ash for protection." Strange annotations for what should have been simple  sketches, but James, whenever he saw them earlier, had always believed it was just her being whimsical.

As he kept on turning the pages, there were, "The Wolves."

As a teenager, James had spent hours studying these drawings. Some depicted figures in mid-air, muscles tensed, frozen in that split second before they hit the ground. Others were more serene, their eyes so meticulously detailed that James often felt as if they were gazing right back at him.

But it was the weird images that piqued his interest today.

There were wolves that somehow felt...peculiar. Their proportions seemed strange, with limbs that were too elongated or faces that were overly expressive. One sketch showed a wolf standing upright, its front paws resembling hands. Another captured the creature in a moment of change—part human, part beast, caught between two worlds.

A few years back,one morning during breakfast, James had questioned Rachel about them. She'd stared at them over her tea and laughed dismissively. "Your grandmother collected all kinds of strange things, dear.  She must have probably copied them from an ancient folklore book. You know how she was."

But Rachel’s smile wasn’t quite reaching her eyes.

James flipped through more pages; past illustrations of architectural layouts—strange circular buildings with symbols he didn't understand. He was nearing the end of  the journal, approaching the pages he normally skipped since they were unfinished and less sophisticated than the previous work.

And there it was.

"The pressed flower." 

He had previously seen it numerous times, it was very hard to miss – a beautiful silver-white flower, perfectly preserved between two sheets of thin paper. Even after all these years, the petals retained an almost metallic luster. James had always imagined it was just some ordinary flower which looked special because of his grandmother's careful preservation.

But tonight, he looked more closely.

Underneath the flower something was written in ancient Gaelic. His grandmother had never taught him how to read it, and he had never taken the time to search for a translation.

Beneath the Gaelic, in the same handwriting were words written in English.

“When the time comes for James to choose, safety or truth?”

His heart stared to beat rapidly.

Who had written it? And when? And more importantly, why hadn't he looked at it before? 

James stroked the page lightly, half expecting something to occur. 

Nothing happened.

He flicked to the last page of the journal, it had a rough sketch of a mountain landscape with towering pine trees marching up steep slopes toward rocky peaks that scraped the sky.

At the bottom of the page, almost obscured by the shadows of the tree line, were the words written by his grandmother.

"Silver Crest."

And just below that, completely faded and barely readable:

"Where the old ways still live."

James felt a chill run down his spine.

This couldn't just be a coincidence.

James felt anxious as he closed the journal , his mind was filled with scattered thoughts. 

He looked outside, the pre-dawn sky was starting to turn purple-grey, he had completely forgotten about time, atleast he should try to get some sleep. 

Instead, he opened up his laptop. 

He typed "Silver Crest, Washington State."

The results showed, just a few mentions on hiking forums, some references to it being an unincorporated community in the Cascades. There was no solid information that would explain why his grandmother would have drawn a sketch of it.

He tried again "Silver Crest old ways", nothing relevant could be found. 

Ultimately, on impulse, he looked for "Wolves standing like humans from folklore."

The findings were detailed and comprehensive. There were werewolf folklore from various cultures, myths associated with shapeshifters, stories about people who could exist in both human and animal forms. 

James laughed out loudly but his laughter sounded hollow even to his own ears, and he couldn't help but notice how his hands trembled as he scrolled through pages of folklore and legends. 

"For God's sake, Grandmum," James shouted into the empty flat. "What did you know?" 

 Then and there, James made up his mind. 

He was going to Silver Crest.