Goblins withdrew.
The Song followed.
Its sound folded inward, slipping into the forest as if pulled underground. The goblins obeyed retreat without hesitation. Those still alive broke away in clean, staggered lines, vanishing between trees and roots with instinctual certainty.
Sawyer ran.
Branches tore at him. Roots clawed at his boots. The forest pitched and twisted, but his pace never broke. Breath stayed even. The Song clung to him in thin, fraying threads—like a web failing to catch its prey, tugging him straight when the ground fell away, urging him high when branches swept for his throat.
Ahead, shapes moved.
Small.
Fast.
Desperate
One slowed just enough to be seen.
Yellow eyes glanced back—wide, reflective—then vanished sideways between two boulders half-swallowed by moss. Another shape took its place, then another, each appearing only long enough to confirm the path before slipping away.
Always one more.
Always deeper.
Sawyer knew it was wrong.
The Song knew it first.
Its threads tightened—not to guide, but to resist.
A subtle pressure built behind his sternum, like hands braced flat against his chest. Not pain. Not fear. A warning delivered through weight rather than sound. His stride shortened despite himself, boots skidding slightly as the ground began to slope downward.
The forest thinned.
Roots gave way to stone.
The air cooled sharply, damp enough that his breath fogged despite the exertion. Ahead, the trees parted around a jagged opening in the earth—a tear in the hillside where stone had collapsed inward long ago. Vines curtained the entrance. Old claw marks scored the rock around it, worn smooth by repetition.
A cave.
The goblins vanished into it without hesitation.
Sawyer reached the mouth at a run—
And nearly stumbled.
The Song spiked.
Not inward.
outward.
It constricted around his ribs, around his spine, around the base of his skull. Every step toward the entrance was met with mounting resistance, as if the air itself thickened with each pace forward.
Stop.
The meaning wasn't spoken. It was felt—a compression of intent, a tightening of resonance that refused to resolve into harmony. The Song did not want him there.
It was bracing.
Sawyer planted a hand against the cave wall to steady himself.
The stone was cold.
And beneath that cold—
Echo.
The moment his skin touched rock, the Song folded back on itself. Threads that had stretched thin across forest and road snapped inward, ricocheting off stone, overlapping in tight, suffocating layers.
Sawyer sucked in a sharp breath.
Warmth flooded his chest.
Not his own.
A pressure against his back.
Arms.
Enclosing. Firm. Certain.
For half a heartbeat, his body remembered something it had never lived.
Then it was gone.
He staggered back a step, pulse suddenly loud in his ears.
The Song pushed harder.
His limbs felt heavier now, as if gravity itself had doubled. Each instinct screamed forward—finish it, end it, don't let them escape—but the resonance dug in, opposing him with quiet, immovable force.
This place mattered.
This place remembered.
This place hides.
From within the cave came movement.
Not retreat.
Waiting.
A faint sound reached him then—not a voice, not a call.
A soft, repetitive noise.
High.
Thin.
The kind of sound made without language.
Sawyer's fingers tightened around his weapon.
The Song pressed again, harder this time, its resistance no longer subtle. His breath came shallow. His thoughts began to blur at the edges, crowded by impressions that were not his own.
Darkness.
Stone.
The absence of something vital.
A need so old it had no name.
Sawyer took one step closer to the threshold.
Pain flared—not sharp, but total. A full-body rejection, as if every bone vibrated out of alignment. His vision swam. The Song screamed silently, resonance folding until it threatened to tear itself apart.
Do not go further.
Not command.
Plea.
Sawyer stood at the cave's mouth, blood drying on his skin, breath ragged, caught between pursuit and understanding.
Inside the earth, something waited.
And the Song—ancient, impartial, and rarely benevolent—was trying, desperately, to keep him out.
Sawyer stepped forward anyway.
The moment his boot crossed the threshold, the Song buckled.
Not snapped—compressed. The resonance folded inward on itself, rebounding off stone and earth until it crowded every inch of him. The resistance became physical. His joints felt misaligned, muscles tightening against commands they had obeyed without question moments before.
The cave swallowed the light.
His torch flared as damp air rushed past it, flame guttering low and unstable. The walls pressed close, rough stone scraped raw by generations of passage. Old claw marks scored the rock in overlapping arcs, worn smooth at the edges by repetition.
The Song pushed.
Each step forward demanded intention. Not effort—justification. His balance wavered where it never had before. The Song tugged at his heels, twisted his sense of space, bent momentum just enough to make forward motion feel wrong.
Leave.
Sawyer clenched his jaw and kept moving.
The cave sloped downward.
The air grew colder. Wetter. His breath fogged thick and heavy now, clinging to his face before sliding away. Every sound echoed back at him distorted—his boots too loud, his breathing not his own.
The Song layered itself deeper with every pace.
What had been pressure became density. Vibrations crawled along his spine, pooled behind his eyes, settled into his ribs like a second, heavier skeleton trying to occupy the same space.
Warmth surged again.
Unwanted.
A memory without ownership pressed into his chest—tight, enclosing, right. Arms around a small body. A heartbeat larger and steadier than his own. A low vibration that quieted panic before thought could form.
Sawyer staggered, catching himself against the wall.
"No," he muttered, the word swallowed instantly by stone.
The Song did not care.
It pushed the sensation again.
Then again.
Layered.
Overlapping.
Dozens of impressions piled atop one another—smallness, need, absence. The echo of something vital removed too early, leaving only the shape behind.
The tunnel widened.
Platforms appeared—crude ledges carved into the stone, reinforced with timber darkened by age and oil. Scraps of cloth hung from pegs driven into the walls. Some were knotted tight, others torn and frayed from being handled too often.
Held.
Clutched.
The Song howled.
Not in sound.
In force.
Sawyer dropped to one knee as the resonance slammed into him, vibrating his bones until his teeth chattered. His vision blurred, edges doubling, as sensations not his own poured in unchecked.
Cold.
Stone.
Darkness stretching too far in every direction.
Then—
Light.
Firelight.
Flickering warmth.
The sense of gathering.
He forced himself up and pressed on.
Each step felt like wading against a current that flowed directly through his nervous system. His muscles protested, coordination slipping in subtle, dangerous ways. The Song twisted his sense of direction, nudged his footfalls wrong, robbed him of the effortless certainty it had always granted.
Turn back.
The tunnel opened suddenly.
The nest lay below.
A vast chamber carved deep into the earth, its ceiling lost in shadow. Platforms ringed the walls in spiraling tiers. Fires burned low and constant, their light casting trembling halos across stone.
And goblins.
Dozens.
Hundreds.
They gathered in clusters around the chamber, crouched low, bodies turned inward. Some rocked slowly. Some pressed foreheads to stone. Many clutched scraps of cloth tight against their chests.
The Song detonated.
Sawyer felt like screaming.
Not aloud—his lungs forgot how.
The resonance reached a volume beyond sound, a pressure so immense it felt as though the earth itself was screaming directly into his bones. Memories—not his—slammed into him all at once.
Warmth.
Loss.
Cold.
Hunger.
The absence of something essential.
A need that never diminished, only repeated.
Cradles lined the lowest tier.
Carved wood. Stained cloth.
Inside them—
The Song surged again, impossibly louder, overlapping echoes of the same moment repeated across generations.
Being held.
Being taken.
Being changed.
And one single imprint surviving the corruption.
Mother.
Sawyer collapsed to both knees at the chamber's edge, hands clawing at stone as the resonance threatened to tear him apart from the inside. His vision swam. His heart hammered out of sync with his breath.
The goblins did not attack.
They felt him.
Heads turned as one toward his position. Yellow eyes reflected firelight, wide and unblinking. The Song bound them together into a single, thrumming presence—an echo chamber of arrested need and endless replication.
This was the center.
The point of convergence.
The place where the Song no longer warned or guided.
It confessed.
Sawyer knelt at the threshold of the nest, drowning in a truth the earth itself could no longer contain, as the Song reached a pitch so intense it erased the boundary between understanding and pain.
And still—
It did not let him leave.
The Song broke.
Not shattered—opened.
The pressure did not lessen. It resolved.
What had been noise became shape. What had been force became sequence. The resonance stopped battering Sawyer's body and began to flow through it, uncoiling into something that resembled time.
He stopped screaming.
Because the sound was no longer around him.
It was inside him.
And it was not his.
Warmth.
Remembered—known.
A small body pressed against something larger, softer. Skin against skin. A steady rise and fall beneath his cheek. Fingers curled instinctively into fabric that smelled like sweat and earth and life.
A heartbeat.
Slow. Certain. Endless.
Time passed.
Not measured in days or seasons, but in motion. Walking. Working. Sleeping. Waking. The world moving forward in a rhythm that did not need to be understood to be trusted.
The child never questioned it.
Why would he?
The world was arms and breath and warmth.
Then—
The Song changed.
Not the one Sawyer learned. The one he remembered.
Something older.
Something vast.
A vibration that did not guide but rewrote.
The ground hummed wrong. The air thickened. The rhythm that had carried the world forward twisted, stuttered, pulled sideways. The larger heartbeat faltered.
The arms tightened.
Fear entered the memory for the first time.
The child did not understand it—only felt the sudden urgency in the body that held him. The faster breathing. The sharp scent of panic. Hands clutching too tightly now, as if pressure alone could keep something from being taken.
Light flared.
Heat.
A tearing sensation that did not belong to flesh but to connection.
The world screamed.
The Song surged—not harmony, not guidance, but corruption, pouring through the land and changing what it touched.
The arms were pulled away.
The warmth vanished.
The child fell.
Stone scraped skin. Cold slammed into his back, into his lungs. Breath left him in a sharp, broken cry that echoed too loudly in a space suddenly too empty.
He reached.
Small hands clawed at nothing.
The larger presence was gone.
Not dead.
Gone.
The world kept moving.
The child did not.
Cold set in.
Not just of skin—but of absence. The space where warmth had always been now a hollow that burned worse than frost. The heartbeat that had defined existence gone silent, replaced by an unbearable quiet.
He cried.
Then screamed.
Then begged.
Not with words.
With need.
Time stretched.
The Song did not return to fix it.
It returned to answer.
Not with mercy.
With mutation.
The child's body changed first.
Bones bent. Muscles tightened. The softness of infancy hardened into something capable of survival. Teeth sharpened. Nails lengthened. Skin thickened.
But the mind—
The mind remained there.
Stuck at the moment of loss.
The final thought burned into it as the world twisted around his screaming form.
Warmth.
Arms.
Mother.
The Song wrapped around that wish.
And froze it.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Sawyer felt it multiply.
Not one child.
Thousands.
Generations.
Each born wrong, but remembering the same ending. Each awakening already starving for something they could not name. Each inheriting the same final, unfulfilled desire.
The goblins.
They did not grow.
They looped.
They learned shapes. Sizes. Scents. The way warmth felt when pressed close. The way a larger body could enclose a smaller one. The way a heartbeat could drown out fear.
Women became approximations.
Bodies became containers.
Pregnancy became ritual.
Not sex.
Not domination.
Recreation. A need.
A desperate, animal attempt to manufacture mother.
To turn the world back to the moment before the Song took everything away.
Every impregnation was not conquest—
It was prayer.
Every nest was not a lair—
It was a failed cradle.
Sawyer gasped as the memories reached their end.
The dying wish echoed one final time through the chamber, through the stone, through his bones:
Just once more.
Please.
Let me feel her arms again…Let me hug my mother one last time.
The Song fell silent.
The goblins looked at him remained motionless, hunched inward, clutching scraps of cloth to their chests as if holding ghosts that would never hold them back.
Sawyer knelt at the edge of the nest, shaking, eyes burning, lungs aching.
Understanding had arrived.
Not clean.
Not redemptive.
Just complete.
They were not monsters born evil.
They were children who never finished dying.
Children who remembered nothing but that wish.
And the world had answered their grief by turning it into hunger.
Sawyer closed his eyes.
And rose.
Because knowing why made him understand.
Knowing why cemented a fact.
The Song had never spoken truth.
It never needed to. It never wanted to.
It guided. It shaped. It corrected—just enough to keep things moving where it wished. Flesh bent. Lives aligned. Meaning was suggested and allowed to rot into belief.
It did not care who listened.
It did not care what was broken.
It only moved forward, rewriting what resisted until resistance stopped.
And Sawyer understood then—
not that the Song was cruel,
but that it never changed. Its cruelty is always the byproduct of its indulgence.
And it hungered for it. Desperately.
He stood. And for the first time in the new world.
A primal fury radiated from a man.
A man without song.
Reality did not bend. It did not react.
Only an instinct from those who are given life.
The primal fear of death struck every single heart.
All except one.
And the hunter descends into the abyss one more time.