I don't know how long I lay there after. Time had already started losing its shape, seconds stretching and folding into each other while the pain kept its own rhythm, steady and enormous, like a second heartbeat that had taken over the first. At some point the shock started to burn off, and what replaced it was worse, clarity.
I was bleeding to death and in a place that didn't have a name I recognized and no hospital in sight.
I forced myself to sit up, forced my remaining hand to move, and looked at the wreck of my arm without letting myself look away. Blood, dark and glistening, pulsing out in a rhythm that scared me more than the wound itself. I understood, distantly, in the flat voice of someone reciting facts they'd read once in a magazine, that I needed to stop that before anything else mattered.
I tore fabric from my own jacket sleeve with my teeth and one shaking hand, wrapped it above the wound, and pulled it tight enough to make new stars burst behind my eyes. I nearly passed out doing it. I remember deciding, with the strange, detached authority of a man giving himself instructions he had no right to trust, that passing out here would be the last mistake I ever made.
So I didn't.
I don't remember standing. I remember being upright, swaying, one hand pressed to my chest holding the tourniquet in place, and the forest tilting gently around me like it was trying to shake me loose. Every few steps my vision would gray out at the edges and I'd have to stop, breathe, count, start again. I didn't know where I was walking. I only knew that stillness had already tried to kill me once tonight and I wasn't giving it a second chance.
The trunks blurred past, black, endless, indifferent. Somewhere behind the pain, a small, useless part of my mind kept trying to make sense of things. Hospital. I need a hospital. Where's a hospital. The thought would surface, absurd and pathetic, and dissolve again the moment my foot caught on a root and sent fresh agony rocketing up what was left of my arm. I fell more than once. Each time, getting up took longer. Each time, I told myself it would be the last time, and each time it wasn't quite true.
I stumbled forward with no real destination anymore. Every step was decided by whatever leg happened to move first. The forest blurred around me, reduced to streaks of black trunks and drifting ash. Sometimes I leaned against the charred giants just to stay upright, each pause lasting a little longer than the last. Blood dripped steadily from the ruined stump despite my desperate grip, leaving a dark trail behind me. I noticed it only once before deciding there was nothing I could do about it.
The silence felt heavier now. Every sound I made seemed to linger between the burned trees. A loose branch snapped under my boot. Somewhere far away, another branch answered. The reply came several seconds later, too deliberate to be an echo. I froze, every muscle locking. Nothing followed. Still, I found myself placing each step with painful care, as though walking quietly could somehow erase the trail I had already left behind.
Something changed as I pushed deeper into the forest. At first I couldn't tell what it was. The trees remained the same towering corpses, the ash still covered everything, and the silence had only grown heavier. Then my eyes caught something that didn't belong.
A branch had been cut. Not broken by time or crushed beneath a fallen trunk. Cut. The end was too clean, the angle too deliberate. I stopped beside it, staring for several seconds before moving on. A little farther, another sign waited. Stones stacked one above another, only three of them, half collapsed under centuries of ash. Nature didn't build little towers. Someone had.
My pulse quickened. People. They had been here. Of course, the skeleton. People used to be here, the had to have lived somewhere and maybe some were still alive.
I began noticing more as I walked. A shallow groove carved into the bark of a charred trunk. Another farther ahead. Broken branches piled against a fallen giant in a way that looked intentional. A strip of cloth, almost fused into the wood by age, fluttered weakly whenever the stale air shifted. None of it was recent. Time had almost erased every trace, yet enough remained to guide someone paying attention.
Hope rose before reason could stop it. Maybe they had survived. Maybe there was a camp nearby. A shelter. Fire. Water. Other people.
My pace quickened despite the dizziness threatening to throw me back to the ground. Every clue became another promise, another reason to ignore the pain screaming through my body. I followed the trail with growing desperation, never asking myself the question I should have.
If people still lived here...
But...why do every sign look so impossibly old?
The ground slowly changed beneath my feet. The endless maze of broken trunks gave way to a narrow stretch of packed earth protected by the roots of an enormous fallen tree. Massive slabs of stone rose from the ash like the ribs of some buried beast, creating deep pockets of shadow. It wasn't much, but after so long spent exposed among the dead forest, it felt almost welcoming.
I circled the place once, forcing my exhausted mind to think. If something lived here, entering meant death. If nothing did, walking away probably meant the same thing. My thoughts drifted in slow circles, unable to settle on either answer. Blood loss had turned every simple decision into an impossible puzzle.
"I can't..." My knees buckled before I finished the sentence.
I crawled the last few meters, dragging myself between the stone and the enormous trunk until the darkness swallowed me. The space barely allowed me to sit upright. It smelled of damp earth, old ash... and something else. Copper. Rot. A scent so old it had become part of the stone itself.
A shelter. Or a grave. At that moment, I honestly couldn't tell the difference.
I let my head fall against the cold rock. If something lived inside, I no longer had the strength to fight it. If death waited here, at least I wouldn't meet it standing in the open. The last thing I registered, before the dark finally took me whole, was the smell. Old blood. Older than mine. And something underneath it that might have been fear, if fear could leave a residue in stone.