By the time the sun began to rise fully, the forest had already started to thin out behind me, and the world ahead slowly shifted into something that felt unfamiliar in a way I could not immediately name. The trees gave way to open land, the scent of earth and moss fading beneath something sharper, something artificial, something distinctly human.
I didn't slow down.
Not because I wasn't tired, but because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant going back to everything I had deliberately left behind.
The deeper I moved toward the city, the more the world changed around me, and yet none of it made me feel any safer.
If anything, it felt wrong.
Not dangerous in the way the forest was, not alive with instincts and hidden threats, but disconnected, as if I had stepped into a place where I didn't belong and never truly could.
