Countless hours later, Arthur still wandered through the forest.
The forest had begun to blur together — the trees, the moss, the low whisper of windless silence — but this place was different.
Arthur stopped the second he saw it.
It wasn't just that his feet halted. His breath froze. His blood seemed to still inside his veins. Every thought, every instinct, screamed to pay attention. Something ahead was wrong. Off. Not just wrong in the way everything in the forest was wrong — not the usual unease, not the sickly sweet tension that clung to everything here like humidity.
This was different.
Ahead, past a curtain of low-hanging branches and twisted bramble, was a clearing. A near-perfect oval of space where the trees bowed outward, leaning back as if respecting some invisible boundary. The ferns thinned. The underbrush stopped entirely. And in the center of this unnatural calm sat a camp.
Or rather… what used to be a camp.
Arthur crouched, narrowing his eyes, peering between leaves like he might catch the illusion slipping. But it didn't waver. The shapes remained. A ring of stones forming a fire pit. A stump with a canteen propped against its side. A neat little fold of fabric — a blanket, maybe — laid out beside it. And food. Real food. Not mushrooms, not berries, not something wriggling. Dried strips of meat, wrapped in cloth and tied with twine.
His stomach twisted at the sight.
Hunger wrestled with caution. Fear pressed its hand against his chest, flattening every breath.
He approached slowly, one careful step at a time, spear out in front of him. His fingers tightened around the smooth wood with white-knuckled resolve. Every footfall was too soft — the moss cushioned his steps more than it should. The earth here didn't feel like normal earth. It felt… padded. Spongy. Like stepping on skin stretched too tight over something moving underneath.
He swallowed dry air. "Hello?" he called, voice low and rasping.
No echo.
No reply.
The silence in the clearing was too deep. It didn't just lack noise — it resisted sound. His voice didn't bounce off the trees. It didn't even seem to reach the edges of the clearing. Like the very air choked it down.
His steps slowed as he reached the center.
The fire pit was cold. The ashes looked dry and grey, but they were arranged too carefully, like someone had cleaned them. No sign of rain, no smudge from wind or wildlife. Just perfect little flakes of charcoal dust, resting like someone had poured them there by hand.
He crouched beside the stump. The canteen was half-full. When he picked it up and shook it gently, it sloshed. Water. Clean, from the smell. And cold.
Arthur hesitated. Then he unscrewed the cap and sipped.
It was crisp. Too crisp. Cold in a way that didn't make sense. Like it had just come from a glacier. He lowered the canteen, his lips tingling.
Then he saw the blanket. Folded. Clean. No dust. No leaf litter. Not even an ant.
His gaze shifted — and that's when he noticed the book.
It was tucked under the edge of the stump, barely visible, almost deliberately hidden.
His fingers reached for it slowly, as if pulling the pin on something ancient.
The journal was leather-bound, stained with damp at the corners, but intact. He flipped it open, breath catching. Most pages were blank — not scribbled on, not ripped out, just untouched. Only the last page bore writing.
A single line.
"Don't believe the ground."
Arthur stared at the words so long his eyes began to water. The writing was jagged, etched into the page with such force it had cut through in places. The penmanship was frantic. Desperate. The kind of writing people did when they knew it was the last thing they'd ever write.
He swallowed, feeling his throat contract painfully.
"What does that even mean?" he muttered. "Don't believe the ground?"
He turned the page. Nothing. Blank. He flipped back. Read the sentence again.
Don't believe the ground.
He looked around, suddenly aware of how wrong the clearing still felt. How untouched it was. There were no insects. No rot. No signs of time passing. And no animals had disturbed the food.
The meat sat in the cloth like a shrine offering — perfect, dry, clean.
He picked one strip up. Smelled it. It smelled like smoke. Like campfires and salt. His stomach grumbled. Against his better judgment, he bit.
Chewed.
Swallowed.
It was… delicious.
And wrong.
Like tasting a memory. Like eating something that didn't come from here — or came from here too much.
Arthur turned in a slow circle, eyes searching the treetops, the edges, the sky.
Nothing moved.
But the silence pulsed. It had a pressure to it now — a weight — like the atmosphere in the clearing was pressing against his skull.
He set up a small lean-to just outside the edge of the clearing, not inside it. He couldn't sleep there. Wouldn't. He wasn't even sure it wanted him to.
That night, he tried not to sleep. He stared up at the stars through a lattice of tangled branches, listening to his heartbeat thrum against the night. The fireflies didn't come. No frogs croaked. Even the wind refused to blow.
He eventually drifted, despite himself.
And when the dream came, it came hard
He stood in the middle of the clearing, barefoot, stripped to the skin. The ground pulsed beneath him — visibly, like breathing. A heartbeat deep in the soil.
Around him, the trees bent inward. Not just leaned — bent. Their trunks arched like the ribs of some collapsed cathedral, groaning under the weight of memory.
Then the ground opened.
It didn't crack. It peeled. The soil tore back like skin, revealing veins of pale root, black bone, and wet, glistening flesh. Things moved inside — slow, wormlike, eyeless shapes that writhed without direction.
A voice whispered in the dark. His own voice.
"You're standing on skin."
Then the ground shuddered — jerked. A massive breath inhaled beneath him. The forest groaned.
He fell. He fell forever.
He woke with a scream.
Mouth full of dirt. Real dirt.
He spit, coughing and hacking until bile rose in his throat. He rolled onto his side, hands grasping at the torn blanket tangled around his legs.
His boots were missing.
He scrambled up, eyes wide, wild.
The lean-to was gone.
No — not gone. Sunken. Half-buried like it had melted into the earth. One of the poles had snapped at a clean angle, the tarp stretched tight over nothing, slowly sinking deeper, like the ground was swallowing it bite by bite.
Arthur backed away, heart hammering. His hands trembled. In one of them, he still clutched the journal. The cover was torn, the spine cracked.
He looked at the words again.
Don't believe the ground.
And now he did.
The clearing wasn't a place.
It was a mouth.
And he had slept on its tongue.
He turned and ran. Through the trees. Past his own fading footprints. Past the remnants of sense and direction.
The forest blurred around him — not just because of speed, but because it was shifting again.
Rewriting.
The clearing had moved.
It would move again.
It wasn't just a trap. It was a lure. Something placed with surgical intent. Something that needed him to rest. To stay.
And now it knew he wouldn't.
So it would change.
Arthur stopped running only when his legs gave out. He collapsed against a jagged rock, dry heaving, tears burning down his face.
He sat there, cradling the journal, too afraid to touch the earth with anything but the soles of his boots.
He didn't sleep that night.
He didn't move.
Because now he understood:
In this forest, the rules weren't just written on trees and stones.
They were alive.
And they were learning him.
Studying him.
Planning for next time.
And somewhere beneath it all — just under the surface — something had tasted him.
And it was waiting for more.