Roy swam.
The water resisted, not with force but with weight.
The shimmering light ahead pulsed faintly, like a beacon buried beneath layers of fog. It didn't grow closer quickly. The distance felt elastic, stretching and compressing with each movement.
Above him, the dome of symbols shifted again.
One constellation blinked out.
Another flared.
He stopped swimming.
The light was closer now. A structure of low, angular and impossibly still. It rose from the water like a forgotten monument. Carved from the same white stone as the cathedral walls. Its surface was smooth but etched with deep grooves that formed spirals, ratios, and glyphs Roy could not read.
He reached it.
There was no shore. No transition. Just the sudden presence of stone beneath his feet, lifting him from the water without effort. He stood, the water dripping ink-like fluid that evaporated before it touched the ground.
The structure was a platform.
At its centre stood a monolith.
Tall. Narrow. Blacker than the ocean itself. It absorbed light, sound, and even thought. Roy approached slowly, each step echoing in a way that felt wrong, delayed, and distorted, as if time itself was unsure how to respond.
Roy thought to himself. "What are you?"
As if talking to the monolith would answer back.
The monolith pulsed once.
A ripple spread across the platform, distorting the symbols etched into the stone. They rearranged themselves, forming a circle around Roy's feet. He looked down.
The symbols glowed.
Then faded.
He went in to touch the monolith, but he seemed to enter it. It gave him permission to enter.
He then feels a ripple. When he initially fell from the staircase, there was no noise, just a ripple in the dark sea.
He was not going to look back from where the ripple came from.
It meant that thing followed him down here as well, or was it a coincidence? Was he just making all of this up? The footsteps maybe were something he himself made up.
Roy didn't want to look back; he jumped straight into the monolith.
He landed hard.
Not on stone. Not on water.
On soil.
It was damp, soft, and strangely warm. He lay there for a moment, breath shallow, eyes scanning the canopy above. Towering trees stretched into a sky of shifting colour from violet to grey and deep green.
The forest was silent.
Not the silence of absence, but the silence of anticipation. Every leaf, every branch, every shadow felt poised. As if the forest itself had paused to watch him arrive.
"This isn't the cathedral anymore, but it's for sure connected." He said out loud.
The trees around him were unlike anything he'd seen; they were tall and thin, with bark that shimmered faintly, as if coated in frost. Their leaves were translucent, glowing from the reaction of touching or just maybe looking.
He took a step forward.
Climbed a tree to get a better view of where he is. When he got to the top, he was in awe.
The forest was dense but not chaotic. The trees were spaced evenly, unnaturally so. Paths formed without trails that overlapped one another.
And then something snapped inside of him.
He hurried down from the tree, his breath sharp and his movements deliberate.
Something just shifted.
Not in the forest, but in him.
He didn't know what triggered it. The view? The silence? The memory of the ripple? But something deep inside him screamed at him that he wasn't alone. How can he forget? Whatever had followed him from the corridor was just behind him before he jumped into the monolith; it was still coming after him.
And it would arrive soon.
When he glanced at the leaf he had previously seen, it returned to its normal state and began to glow again from him looking.
He understood something.
He scanned the clearing, eyes darting between the trees, the soil, and the strange geometry of the forest paths. Then he began to work.
First, he gathered the frost-coated bark from the nearest tree. It peeled away like paper, brittle but sharp. He arranged it in a circle around the monolith, as it could land anywhere around it, each shard angled outward, like teeth.
A warning.
He stepped back from the ring of bark, scanning the clearing once more.
The monolith stood silent, unmoving.
Roy moved toward the tree he had climbed earlier. Its base was thick with roots, some exposed, some buried, all pulsing faintly with the same rhythm he'd felt since entering the forest.
He knelt.
Carefully, he began to rearrange the roots, just slightly. Not enough to disturb the tree's structure, but enough to create a subtle pattern. He placed a single translucent leaf between two roots, nestled in a shallow groove. It pulsed once, then dimmed.
To anyone else, it would look like part of the forest.
To Roy, it was a marker.
A memory.
He pressed his palm against the bark, letting the cold seep into his skin. Then he stood, brushing soil from his hands.
"If it comes through," he thought, "it won't notice. But I will."
The second trap was not meant to stop anything.
It was meant to confirm.
However, there was one downside he noticed: after a while the leaf turns back to normal, so even if that thing does pass out of the monolith, it would react, but then it would return back to its original state in a minute.
He turned back to the monolith.
The bark ring shimmered faintly in the low light, like a mouth waiting to bite. The forest remained still, but the air felt heavier now, charged, like the moment before lightning strikes.
Roy didn't wait.
He walked into the trees, following the unnatural paths that overlapped and twisted. The forest guided him, but not gently. Each turn felt chosen. Each fork felt deliberate.
Behind him, the clearing faded into shadow.
And the monolith pulsed once more.
He wandered a few paces beyond the monolith, toward a patch of ground where the soil felt colder. There, half-buried beneath moss and frost-root, he found a flat, circular stone.
He lifted it carefully.
The underside was etched with a spiral. Not carved, but grown, like the stone had formed around the symbol itself. It pulsed faintly in his hand. A leaf falls onto the bone and goes dim.
He placed it upright against a tree, angled just so that it faced the monolith. He surrounded it with three translucent leaves glowing non-stop, spaced evenly in a triangle. Then he stepped back.
This was a quiet offering to however he can ask for help and an answer.
He thought to himself, "I need to explore to find a way out of this place."
The forest was too still. Too symmetrical. Too aware.
He turned and began walking.
Not toward any path. Not toward any landmark. Just forward into the trees, into the geometry, into the silence.
The forest shifted around him.
Not physically. Not visibly. But in feeling. The trees leaned slightly, their translucent leaves catching light from nowhere. The hum beneath the soil grew softer, more distant. The air thinned.
He passed a tree with bark that shimmered gold instead of frost-blue. He paused, touched it. The bark was warm. It pulsed once, then stopped.
He moved on.
He found a clearing, smaller than the one near the monolith. At its centre was a pool. Still. Black. Reflective. But not water. Not ink. Something else.
He knelt beside it.
The surface showed his face.
Kieran reached out but didn't touch it.
It showed the corridor.
Then the cathedral.
Then the monolith.
Then back to him.
Kieran stood up and kept walking.