He did not rush into it.
That alone marked the difference.
Days ago, he would have stumbled forward driven by panic, hunger, or despair, mistaking motion for hope. Now, he prepared. Slowly. Methodically. As much as a broken, one-armed student stranded in a graveyard could prepare.
He checked the bandage around his stump first.
Still tight. Still stained dark, but no longer dripping. The infection burned under the skin like a coal pressed too deep, a dull, constant reminder that time was not on his side. He adjusted the knot with his teeth, breathing through the pain until the world stopped trembling.
Water skin, half full.Charred stick, sharpened, useless as a weapon, comforting as an idea.The map, scratched into stone, copied again and again in his mind.
And the warnings.
He stood before the cave wall one last time, tracing the markings with his fingers.
Jagged lines.Circles broken violently.A symbol carved so deep the stone around it had cracked.
DO NOT GO — in a language he barely recognized, letters malformed by shaking hands.Below it, something older. Latin, maybe. Or a cousin of it.
Hic manet mors.
Death waits here.
He swallowed.
"Figures," he muttered, voice dry.
The place was marked. Circled. Avoided by every map he had inherited, improved, survived through. A blank spot in a forest that tolerated nothing. That alone made it suspicious.
And necessary.
He stepped out of the shelter at dawn, if dawn was the right word. The sky never truly changed here, only lightening from pitch to ash. He moved carefully, placing each step where broken trunks formed something almost solid. His breath stayed slow. Controlled.
The forest listened.
It always did.
At first, nothing happened. No tremors. No shifting shadows. Just the endless graveyard of titanic remains, black pillars rising like snapped bones, their broken crowns lost somewhere above the ashen haze. The deadfall below was a labyrinth of angles and voids, gaps deep enough to swallow him whole if he misstepped.
Then the silence changed.
Not vanished. Tightened.
His skin prickled.
He froze.
A vibration rippled through the deadwood to his left, subtle, rhythmic, wrong. Ash slid off a nearby trunk, falling upward for a heartbeat before drifting down again. His mouth went dry.
Medium threat, he thought distantly. Moving. Searching.
He turned without hesitation.
Running here was never about speed. It was about direction.
He moved diagonally, weaving between leaning trunks, keeping obstacles between himself and the presence. He did not look back. He did not need to. The forest told him enough — creaking wood, shifting weight, something vast dragging itself through spaces that should not have fit it.
His lungs burned. His vision narrowed.
The thing followed.
Not rushing. Herding.
Panic scratched at the edges of his mind, but he forced it down, clinging to rules carved by strangers who had died screaming so he could live a little longer.
Never run straight.Never corner yourself.If the forest goes quiet, you are already late.
The symbol appeared ahead.
Carved into a slab of stone half-buried beneath charred roots. The same one from the cave. Deep. Violent. Surrounded by desperate marks — clawed fingers, broken nails, madness frozen in rock.
He hesitated for half a second.
Behind him, the vibration deepened.
He chose.
Crossing the threshold felt like stepping off a cliff that never came.
The pressure vanished.
The sound of pursuit stopped so abruptly he almost fell forward, disoriented by the absence of terror. He stumbled, caught himself against a slanted trunk, and realized his hands were shaking uncontrollably.
He laughed once. A short, broken sound.
The forest beyond the mark… recoiled.
He turned, heart pounding, and saw the abomination lingering at the edge of the zone. It did not cross. Its presence distorted the air, twisted the ash into spirals of movement — but it remained outside, circling, frustrated.
Trapped.
So was he.
He backed away slowly, every instinct screaming at him not to turn his back, not to breathe too loudly, not to exist at all. The air here felt thin, stretched, like reality had been pulled too tight and left to tear.
But for the first time since waking in this nightmare—
He was not being hunted.
The realization did not bring relief.
Only dread.
He stood alone, marked by ash and blood, staring into a place no one had survived long enough to describe.
And for the first time, he understood something with terrifying clarity.
This forest was not trying to kill him anymore.
It was guiding him somewhere worse.