The Night of Shadows: What Is It?

At the beginning of 2026, I started getting a ton of ads on mobile games for these book apps that seemed to peddle werewolf smut. The ads are awful (just terrible A.i. slop images set to pirated music and maybe a third of an actual print novel’s chapter for you to read and presumably get hooked on), but also hilarious (because they ALL follow the exact same beats). Now, if there’s three things I like, it’s werewolves, smut, and free stories that I don’t have to pay for, so I downloaded a couple of the apps to check them out.

I quickly discovered that even the free stories were not really worth the struggle of trying to read them on these apps.

Out of the three apps I downloaded and read more than 10 “chapters” (*put a pin in that) of a story on, I’ve only finished stories on one of the apps and only one of those stories didn’t leave me feeling like I wasted my time waiting to earn enough tokens by checking in on the app on enough consecutive days to read a 1k word “chapter”.

*each chapter is actually a scene from a chapter, if this were an actual novel we were reading. they break it down like this so that there are more opportunities to charge people to read the book if they don’t buy the membership ,and the stories end up being upwards of 70+ chapters.

Around April, one of the apps started giving a pop up about a contest they were running. $10k for the winning story. I decided to try to enter it, despite the fact that I have been having issues with writing long-form since my TBI. I usually can’t keep things coherent for more than a page, maybe two. This contest was looking for 200k words, and the deadline was August 31th, 2026. I was already super depressed, life’s going nowhere, I want to kill myself because this shit is pointless - why not give this a try? Maybe I’ll get lucky and win $10k and get myself out of the current living situation I’m in that is the biggest contribution to my depression. After all, the majority of the stories I had started and stopped on that specific app couldn’t even be bothered to run a spellcheck on the stories, let alone try to have the stories make any sense. I could try this, at the very least.

And that’s what this is. I tried to cater to the vibe the app seemed to want from their stories, using a lot of terms I normally would never use in my own writing, even if I was writing about werewolves fucking each other. But I also tried to put some of my own voice in there, too.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter because my computer decided to go tits up at the beginning of July and I lost all my artwork, all my photos of Toki and Arya in our house, all my writing, pretty much everything. I was able o recover some stuff, this story was one of those things, but it wasn’t in time to finish it for the contest. I only have 75,100 words right now. I didn't try to submit it to the app outside of the contest (they supposedly accept WIP stories), and was rejected with “Can’t pass the review If you have any questions, please contact your editor for help”. The editor never responded back when I asked for help (I waited two weeks - replied within hours when I requested they delete my story off their app, though).

So, I’m on chapter 14 and I didn’t know what to do with it. I have to finish it because my granny bought me a new desktop specifically to finish it (I don’t know if she knows it’s a werewolf fuck story, I hope she doesn’t want to read it, that would be embarrassing). Figured I’ll post it here with the rest of my writing since I’m actually proud of myself for keeping on task for that many pages. It may be absolute crap, but at least it makes sense.