I woke up choking, again, and some small, bitter part of me noted that this was becoming a pattern I didn't care for. Air tore into my lungs sharp and wrong, and my body jerked upright on pure instinct before pain detonated through me, white, absolute, consuming. A scream climbed my throat and died halfway out.
I froze. Stone. Wood. Darkness. The world refused to settle, wobbling at the edges no matter how hard I tried to hold it still. My head throbbed in slow, merciless waves, each one a reminder that I was, against every reasonable expectation, still alive. My mouth tasted like rust and soil, my tongue dry and swollen and useless.
Then I remembered. The ground giving way. The weightlessness. My fingers slipping. My left arm wasn't there.
The realization arrived almost gently, before the pain caught up and made it biblical. I collapsed sideways, retching nothing, my vision fracturing into black stars. The stump was wrapped tight in fabric — my belt, I recognized eventually, dark and stiff and soaked through. The smell hit a second later. Iron. Rot. Fear. I laughed once, a broken, hysterical sound. "I… I did that," I whispered, not entirely sure if I was proud of myself or horrified.
I was alive. Barely.
The shelter around me was small, wedged between a massive fallen trunk and a slab of stone jutting from the ground like a broken tooth. Someone — many someones, from the look of it — had tried once to make it safe. Branches stacked and woven together, mud packed into the gaps, all of it slowly peeled apart by time. It smelled of old death.
As my breathing slowed and my eyes adjusted, I saw them. Skeletons. Arranged, not dragged in by scavengers. Sitting. Propped against the stone, slumped into corners, curled like sleepers who'd simply never woken up. Some still wore scraps of fabric, rotted coats, boots fused to bone. One had its fingers bent permanently into the stone, nails worn down to nothing. They hadn't been dragged here. They'd come here to wait.
My stomach twisted. The walls were covered, not writing, scratching. Marks carved into stone with a kind of desperation that overlapped and cut through itself, words in no single language, made by hands that shook and bled and eventually broke.
Latin, jagged and uneven: NON RESPICERE. Do not look.
Old French, half-erased: Ils me voient quand je pense être seul. They see me when I think I'm alone.
Arabic, careful and deep, like a prayer scratched out slowly over days: something I couldn't read, though even not understanding it, I could feel the fear it had been carved with.
And something that might once have been English: DON T SLEP. Even some Chinese or Japanese writings. Lucky for me, I knew English, French, and a rusty scrap of Latin from a college requirement I'd resented at the time. In a place like this, that almost counted as a superpower.
Others weren't words at all. Instructions. Near one skeleton someone had drawn diagrams, crude but careful, stick figures crouched low, paths through the forest broken abruptly where a large, dark shape loomed. Beside it, one phrase carved deeper than the rest, the grooves nearly frantic: LOOKING IS DEATH.
A chill crawled up my spine. I shifted, and something crunched beneath me. I froze, then looked down slowly. A small pile of objects had been stacked near the back of the shelter, bones, yes, but arranged, sorted, skulls facing outward, long bones stacked almost respectfully, and little scraps of metal among them. Someone had lived here. For a while.
I looked at the other wall. Spirals gouged so deep they'd cracked the stone. Stick figures with too many joints. Forests drawn as cages. Eyes everywhere, on trees, in the sky, carved into circles that hurt to look at for too long. I looked away too late. My heart slammed against my ribs; for a split second I was certain something behind me had moved, a breath where there should have been none, the sound of bone shifting. Nothing. Still, I didn't turn around to check.
They had panicked here. I could feel it in the marks, in the way the lines overlapped and clawed at each other, people who had tried to understand, tried to leave warnings, tried to survive. They had failed. Outside, the forest stood still.
I pressed my back against the stone and slid down until I was sitting among the dead, shaking, every sound a threat, every shadow stretched wrong, my remaining hand cramping from how hard I was clenching it. Then, pressure. Familiar already, somehow, though I'd only felt it once before. A presence. Not close. Not touching. Watching. My vision dimmed at the edges, the colors draining out of the world as the air grew thick enough to crush. I didn't dare look. I knew, with a certainty I couldn't explain, that if I did, something inside me would break in a way that wouldn't heal.
Not again, I thought, and then thought stopped mattering, and the dark took me.
I woke crying, and there was no dignity in it at all. Sound tearing out of me as my body remembered everything at once. Pain flared from the stump of my arm, hot and nauseating, pulsing with my heartbeat. My throat burned raw, from screaming or thirst, I couldn't tell which. My thoughts felt wrong, slippery, refusing to line up in any order that made sense.
I curled in on myself, shoulder pressed to stone, rocking slightly as tears soaked into dirt and old bone. Every breath hurt. Every movement reminded me of what was missing. "I can't," I whispered, and the word died there, because whether I could or couldn't didn't matter one bit.
I was dying. Thirst had crept in quietly, more insidious than the pain, my mouth stuffed with the taste of ash, my lips cracking when I tried to swallow. I couldn't even remember the last time I'd had water, because the last thing I remembered drinking was vodka, at a party, in a life that felt like it belonged to somebody else now. Time had lost its shape entirely. And if thirst didn't finish me, blood loss was lined up right behind it, patiently waiting its turn. I really didn't appreciate the competition.
Survive. The word surfaced from somewhere deep and ugly inside me. If I stayed here, I'd join the others, another skeleton slumped against the wall, another warning carved too late for anyone to read in time.
Slowly, shaking, I forced myself upright. The drawings stared back at me, and this time one of them held my attention. Crude but deliberate: a line of trees, then a cluster of rocks drawn bigger than the rest, stacked like crooked teeth, and from there a jagged path sloping down to a thin, winding line.
Water. My heart jumped painfully. But the drawing didn't stop there. Around the rocks, symbols had been carved again and again, deeper each time, circles crossed out, eyes scratched over, a crescent shape, the moon, slashed violently through. Beside it, in uneven Latin: AUDI, NON VIDE. Listen, do not see. Below that, in something half-French, half something older: Les pierres chantent quand ils sont proches. The stones sing when they are near.
My skin crawled. Warnings layered on warnings, never don't go, just instructions on how not to die immediately. "Of course," I muttered hoarsely. "Of course it's not simple." I stood, legs trembling, the world tilting without quite falling over, which felt like a small victory. I tore another strip of cloth off a rotted garment, apologizing under my breath to bones that didn't answer, and retightened the tourniquet. The pain spiked and I bit down hard enough to taste blood. One step at a time.
At the edge of the shelter I stopped. The forest waited, tall, burned, twisted trees standing like silhouettes frozen mid-scream, shadows pooling too thick and too deliberate between them. Somewhere far off, something shifted, slow and heavy and patient. I listened. Nothing sang. Yet.
I held the drawing in my mind and stepped outside, toward the rocks, toward the stream, toward whatever was apparently worse than dying of thirst.
The walk was short. That, more than anything, terrified me, because distance meant nothing here, and short paths had a way of stretching, folding, turning into traps. I moved slowly, every step measured, every breath shallow, the throb in my arm blooming and fading in nauseating waves. Listen. Do not see. I kept my eyes low, on the ground, the ash, the roots and broken bark, and still flinched every time something shifted at the edge of my vision, still felt watched, weighed, measured.
The forest wasn't silent. It breathed. A low, constant whisper slid through the burned branches, not quite wind, not quite sound, rising sometimes into something sharper, a scrape like stone against stone. I froze. The stones sing when they are near. I closed my eyes and listened, and there it was, a vibration more than a noise, a pressure in my ears, subtle and wrong, like standing too close to a speaker playing nothing at all. The rocks ahead looked harmless enough. I didn't look closer. I passed them wide, heart hammering, sweat cold down my spine, and the singing faded, reluctant, like something disappointed in me.
My legs burned. My breath came ragged. Black spots crept in at the edges of my vision every few steps. I leaned against a tree once and recoiled instantly, the bark shifted under my palm, not moving exactly, not alive exactly, just too soft. "Don't think," I whispered. "Just walk."
When I finally heard the water, I nearly cried. The stream was narrow and shallow, winding between blackened stones, steam rising faintly off its surface, warm against the cold air. I knelt carefully, keeping my eyes on the water and nothing else. No reflections, that alone was enough to make my hands shake as I drank, cupping the water clumsily, spilling more than I swallowed. It tasted metallic and bitter and it was still the best thing I'd ever put in my mouth. I drank until my stomach cramped, then stopped, because the forest had gone quiet.
Not good.
I listened. Far off, something heavy shifted its weight. I didn't run. The wall had already taught me better than that. I backed away slowly, retracing my steps, staying wide of the stones, eyes down, ears straining, heart pounding loud enough I was sure it would give me away. The singing returned, closer this time. I did not look. I did not look. By the time I reached the shelter my legs gave out and I collapsed inside, gasping, shaking, alive.