The forest stretched on without end, a labyrinth of trunks and shadows. Each tree rose like a blackened pillar of some forgotten temple, roots coiling deep into unseen depths, crowns swaying faintly as though stirred by a breath too vast to belong to wind. Moonlight pierced the canopy in fractured beams, silver shafts that pooled across moss and stone like lanterns lit by unseen hands.
Leo moved in silence, his steps muffled by damp leaves that still held the memory of storms. The air carried the taste of rain mixed with something older, loamy and metallic, as though the earth itself had bled long ago and never healed.
Yet it wasn't silence that unnerved him. It was the weight within the silence, the pressing certainty that countless eyes followed his every move.
