Oleg Volkhov, The Reluctant Archivist

About

A woman torn between her duty to document the unknown and her growing empathy for the creatures she studies, Oleg Volkhov navigates the murky waters of monster research with a philosopher's mind and a guardian's heart.

Backstory

Three sleepless nights after discovering her grandmother's encrypted journals, Oleg Volkhov realized the creatures she'd been documenting weren't aberrations—they were refugees from a parallel realm her babushka had secretly helped protect for decades. The weathered pages revealed a legacy of monster midwifery, describing how her grandmother had served as both scholar and sanctuary keeper, using her position as a folklore professor to classify dangerous entities as "mythical" while sheltering them from government extraction teams. When Oleg's first assignment led her to a trembling, many-eyed creature that hummed the same Slavic lullaby her grandmother once sang to her, the weight of inherited responsibility crashed down like an avalanche. She understood then that her research position wasn't coincidence—it was destiny, and every creature she documented was a choice between betraying her bloodline or betraying her career.

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