Arthur didn't wake up. He resurfaced.
The transition from sleep to consciousness felt like pulling himself out of mud—thick, cold, clinging mud that tried to keep his thoughts submerged. His eyes peeled open as though rusted at the hinges. A pale morning light sifted lazily through the trees, too pale to be comforting, too colorless to be warm. It felt… artificial, like the memory of sunlight rather than the real thing.
His mouth was dry. Tongue like leather. The back of his throat ached like he'd swallowed smoke. His limbs felt waterlogged, heavy, clumsy. His first breath was shallow, the second caught in his chest.
And then he realized—
His fingers were clenched tightly around something. A stick. No—the stick.
The crooked branch.
The one from the Blood Tree.
The sap had dried overnight, flaking like scabbed blood, but the dark crust still clung to it. The red stain was deeper than it should have been, as if the bark had absorbed the blood into its very grain. It smelled faintly of iron and burnt wood.
He let it fall with a shaky exhale, the sound muffled against the dirt. Then he sat up slowly, cradling his pounding skull in his hands. His breath formed small clouds in the cold morning air.
He didn't remember coming back to the shelter. Not clearly. His memories of the walk back were broken—jagged fragments of moonlight, the crunch of leaves, a shadow that wasn't his, the whisper of a branch bending just behind him. Or above him.
Or inside him.
He had dreamed, of course. Of course he had.
They weren't like dreams used to be—fragmented nonsense stitched together by a tired mind. These new dreams had architecture. Weight. Rules. They were places, not thoughts.
And something was always waiting in them.
Now that he was awake, the dreams clung to him like spiderwebs in the dark. He rubbed his face again, as if he could erase them with friction alone.
But they were still there.
The Blood Tree.
The Voice.
The invitation.
His thoughts cracked when he saw it.
Not ten feet from where he had slept. A stone. Flat. Wide. Embedded in the soil like the top of a submerged building. The moss hadn't had time to grow over it, and the dirt around its edges was still freshly disturbed.
He would've noticed it before.
It wasn't there yesterday.
He rose, every muscle sore. His legs trembled slightly as he approached, instinct telling him to be careful, while the part of him still holding to logic whispered this isn't possible.
The carvings on the stone weren't symbols this time. No spirals. No alien shapes.
Words.
Human.
Crude, yes—etched deeply and unevenly like someone had scratched them with a jagged bone or a rusted blade—but unmistakably words.
Just one sentence.
What you fear, finds you.
Arthur stared at it for a long time. The stone didn't hum or glow or bleed, but it might as well have. The sentence echoed in his chest like a dropped coin in an empty well.
"What I fear…" he muttered. His own voice startled him.
He looked up, scanning the woods. Nothing moved.
But the forest never really moved. Not when you were watching.
Only when your back was turned.
He took a step backward. His breath came shorter. "Okay. Okay. It's fine. It's forest graffiti. Sure. Sure. Crazy hermit. Lost hiker with a chisel. Makes perfect sense."
His voice sounded hollow. Artificial. Like it didn't belong in this world.
He crouched beside the stone, fingertips hovering just above the etched sentence. When he touched the first letter, he recoiled—it was freezing. Far colder than stone should be. The chill bit through his skin and into the bones of his fingers.
He pressed his forehead to his knees and breathed.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
Don't panic. Don't make noise. The rules were changing, but that didn't mean the old ones had vanished.
He was beginning to understand that this place wasn't random. There was a structure underneath the chaos. A logic. Twisted, maybe, but consistent. The world wasn't broken—it was built this way.
And that was worse.
Much worse.
He wasn't afraid of monsters anymore. Not really. Not like he should be. He'd fought one. Killed it. Eaten it. Buried it.
But he was afraid of something deeper.
Not understanding.
Never understanding.
Of the world staying just one step ahead, constantly. Mocking his attempts to catch up. To survive.
"What you fear, finds you."
If that was true…
The forest had begun studying him.
Later that day, as he gathered berries from a nearby bush—a rare patch that hadn't dried up or poisoned him—he saw it.
Scratched into the bark of a nearby tree.
A symbol.
Small. Clean. Deliberate. A spiral trapped in a square.
He stepped closer. Traced it with his eyes. It hadn't been there before. He was certain. He passed this tree every day.
And now…
Now it was marked.
The second symbol appeared near the sulfur stream. Two circles, connected by a jagged, lightning-like line. Carved into a flat stone near the water's edge, deep enough to cast shadows.
The third was beneath a rock near his shelter. A triangle. Inside it, a single eye.
Always watching.
Each time, he felt the symbols before he saw them. Like a temperature drop. Like the sensation of being stared at when no one's there.
He didn't know what they meant.
But they weren't random.
They were messages.
From whom?
He didn't want to know.
But he already suspected.
That night, the dreams returned.
Not like before.
Worse.
He slipped into sleep like being dragged underwater. No resistance. Just darkness and pressure.
He dreamed of soil. Endless black soil, heavy and wet, crawling up his legs as if it missed him. Roots twisted through the air like nerves, pulsing slowly. The sky above was wrong. It wasn't black—it was static. Cracked like broken glass, flickering like an old screen losing signal.
And beneath it all, deeper than dreams should go—
He heard his own voice.
Not similar. His.
"Do you remember?"
His heart stuttered.
"Do you remember the way you looked at the water?"
More whispering. More pressure.
"Do you remember the thousand reflections?"
The Lake of Mirrors.
He hadn't thought about it in days, but now it surged back into his mind with clarity sharp enough to hurt.
He remembered the surface—glassy and endless.
But now, in the dream, he saw beneath.
Shapes writhed under the surface. Not fish. Not corpses. Not animals.
People.
Twisted versions. Drowned doubles. Faces blurred by ripples.
Watching him.
Calling to him.
Then he stood again beneath the Blood Tree.
The sap wasn't dripping anymore—it was weeping. Falling in long, slow trails like tears, soaking the dirt in a spreading red ring.
And behind him, or around him, or within him—
That voice.
The same voice that had whispered under his skin.
"You made the first kill."
"You crossed the first line."
"You bled on this land."
Then came the sentence that froze the blood in his heart:
"You're one of us now."
Arthur woke screaming.
A broken, wordless cry that shredded his throat and left his lungs aching.
He rolled to his side, curled up, shaking. His hands gripped the dirt as if the earth itself would try to pull him under. He wasn't sure how long he'd been screaming. Maybe minutes. Maybe hours.
The air felt wrong.
Like the forest had moved closer while he slept. Like the trees had crept a little inward, watching from a tighter ring.
He looked up.
And there it was.
Carved into the tree just above his shelter.
Fresh.
Still flaking bark.
Another rule.
Don't break the silence.
He backed away on hands and knees, breathing fast, mouth dry.
He wanted to scream again. To curse. To laugh. But his lips didn't move.
The sentence hung in the air like a blade suspended over his neck.
He didn't dare disobey.
"What you fear, finds you."
"Don't break the silence."
They weren't threats.
They were rules.
Laws.
Instructions.
The forest wasn't just watching. It was writing. Adapting.
Learning.
By midday, Arthur had stopped talking entirely.
Not even mutters. No whispers to himself. He sharpened a stick, drew lines in the dirt, arranged stones in a circle around his camp. Old habits blended with new superstitions.
He moved like a ghost. Silently. Carefully.
But the paranoia only worsened.
The wind changed direction when he moved.
The birds—if they ever existed—had all vanished.
Every tree had eyes now. Not literal ones. Not yet. But he could feel it.
He wasn't just a trespasser anymore.
He was a player.
And the game had rules.
Rules that wrote themselves.
Rules that watched back.
And rules that punished.
There was one final discovery that day.
A fourth symbol.
Etched into the inside of his shelter wall, beneath where he'd rested his head.
He hadn't carved it.
But it was there.
A jagged "X" over a circle.
And beneath it, a word. Small. Faint.
A whisper scratched in wood.
"Obey."
Arthur stared at it for a long time.
Then, finally, without a word…
He blew out his fire.
And sat in the dark.
Waiting.
Listening.
For the next rule to arrive.