He walked for a long time before realizing distance had stopped meaning anything.
At first, he tried to count his steps. It was a habit, something grounding. One hundred. Two hundred. Three—He lost track somewhere after that. Not because he was tired, but because the numbers slipped away the moment he thought them. As if they had never existed in the first place.
The ground here did not behave.
Ash sometimes felt solid beneath his feet, then softened suddenly, swallowing his boot halfway before releasing it again without resistance. Broken trunks leaned at impossible angles, casting shadows that did not match the direction of the dim light above. Some shadows moved when nothing else did.
The air was heavy with something invisible.
Not smoke.Not heat.
Weight.
Breathing felt like inhaling memories that were not his.
He stopped when he noticed the sound of his footsteps had vanished.
No crunch.No scrape.No echo.
His boots still moved. He could see them lifting, setting down. But the world refused to acknowledge the act.
"…Okay," he whispered.
The word sounded wrong. Thinner. Like it had lost meaning halfway out of his mouth.
He pressed on, increasingly uncertain whether he was walking forward or merely repeating the same moment again and again. Time stretched, then folded. At one point, he felt certain he had been here for hours. At another, he was convinced he had only just crossed the boundary.
Something brushed against his mind.
A thought that was not quite a thought.A feeling without an origin.
Sadness, deep and vast, rolled through him like a tide. Not sharp. Not personal. Ancient. Grief stripped of identity, lingering long after the one who felt it had turned to dust.
His chest tightened.
He dropped to one knee without realizing when he had stopped walking. His breath came uneven now, fogging the ashen air though there was no cold.
Why does this hurt? he wondered dimly.
The question lingered, unanswered. Then faded.
He blinked.
For a moment—just a moment—he could not remember his parents' faces.
Panic surged instantly, raw and animal. He clawed at the thought, trying to pull it back, only to realize there was nothing to grab onto. The memory had not been taken violently. It had simply… drifted away.
Like ash in the wind.
"No," he said hoarsely. "No, no—"
The word mother felt familiar. Important. But when he tried to attach meaning to it, his mind slipped, as if the concept refused to stay still.
He staggered to his feet.
The place reacted.
The air rippled, and suddenly he was somewhere else — or maybe the same place seen through a different emotion. The trunks loomed closer, their broken surfaces carved with patterns that were not marks but impressions, like feelings pressed into matter.
He touched one.
Instantly, a memory bloomed in his mind.
A classroom.Sunlight through a window.The smell of chalk and dust.Laughter — his own?
Then it shattered.
Pain lanced through his skull, sharp and disorienting. He recoiled, gasping, clutching his head as the memory unraveled into fragments that dissolved before he could understand them.
The tree did not move.
But he felt… satisfied.Or rather — it did.
The realization chilled him deeper than fear.
This place was not merely strange.
It was sorting him.
Memories surfaced without warning. Moments from his life — trivial, precious, humiliating — rose unbidden, then slipped away if he paid them too much attention. The more he tried to hold on, the faster they faded.
But emotions remained.
Fear.Longing.A stubborn, ridiculous urge to live.
Those clung to him like hooks.
He laughed weakly, the sound breaking apart halfway through.
"So that's how it is," he murmured. "You don't want who I was. Just… how I feel."
The forest did not answer.
Or maybe it did, in a language made of absence.
He continued walking, lost in every sense of the word. Direction was meaningless now. Landmarks shifted when he wasn't looking. At one point, he saw himself standing several meters away — thinner, blurred, watching him with hollow eyes — only for the image to dissolve when he blinked.
His name hovered on the edge of his thoughts.
He knew he had one.
He knew it mattered.
But when he reached for it—
Nothing.
A sharp spike of terror pierced the fog, grounding him just enough to stumble forward again. He focused on that fear, clung to it shamelessly.
I'm still here, he told himself.I'm still me. Even if I don't remember why.
Somewhere deep within the zone, something stirred.
Not awake.
Not asleep.
Aware.
And as he walked deeper into the dead heart of a god that once ruled souls, memory, and emotion.
Pieces of him continued to fall away, unnoticed.
Like offerings left behind on a path no one was meant to survive.