It came first at night.
A sound so long, so deep, it didn't seem like it came from lungs at all. It wasn't an animal's call, not a predator's cry. No hunger. No anger. No urgency.
Just one, continuous, hollow note — like mourning played through a flute carved from something ancient and dead.
And it never truly ended.
Each time it faded, it did so reluctantly, bleeding out of the forest like a fog curling back into the soil. Then the quiet. Then five full minutes of waiting. Of breath-holding. Of the trees somehow listening alongside him. And then—
It returned. Exactly the same. Exactly five minutes later.
Arthur had counted. Once. Twice. Thirteen times before the sun began to rise — or what passed for sunrise in this place. The sky turned from ashen violet to pale gold, but no warmth followed. The air remained cold. The light remained dull. Like the sun itself had been buried, and the sky was its grave marker.
But the sound continued.
The Hollow Howl.
Arthur moved like prey beneath it. Calculated. Careful. He counted in his head — one hundred, two hundred, three hundred seconds — then paused. Waited. Froze. When the howl came, he became still. When it faded, he would breathe. Move. Adjust.
He built his entire day around the rhythm of that sound. His body responded before his mind did. His heart began to beat in synchrony. He lived in five-minute increments.
The sound had become a god.
By midday, he'd begun to hear it not just in the air, but in the earth. It echoed under his boots, low and rattling, like it was in the roots. Sometimes it seemed to come from above — far beyond the canopy, from the sky itself. Other times, deep below, like the forest floor was a ceiling over something vaster.
He spoke aloud to break the noise in his head.
"If it's pattern-based," he muttered, crouched behind a wind-curled stump, "then it's tracking. If it's that consistent, it's not just calling — it's watching. Searching."
The twenty-fourth howl came. He flinched instinctively.
But again, nothing followed.
Nothing ever followed.
Not yet.
The forest changed that day.
Not visibly. Not at first.
But something had… shifted. The shadows bent at odd angles. The undergrowth thinned into barren stretches where the soil turned black and cracked. Trees grew in perfect rows in some places now, too straight, too symmetrical — like they were planted.
Arthur knew it well enough by now. The forest rearranged when it wanted to. Rewrote itself, room by room. It was no longer a wilderness. It was a structure. A place, with rules and chambers and doors that didn't look like doors.
And someone — or something — had begun leaving him signs.
He saw the first bone circle near a dry streambed.
White sticks, curved and delicate, laid in a ring too precise to be natural. Vertebrae. Finger bones. A skull fragment, polished and clean, perched like a crown at the center. No meat. No flies. No rot. Just purity. Ritual.
Then another. Fifteen meters further. Slightly different arrangement.
Then a third.
He found seven by late afternoon. Each one within sight of the next. Like a path. Or a warning.
Each circle unique — one shaped like an eye, another like a sunburst, one aligned to the trees around it with a perfection that made his skin crawl. These weren't random. They were curated. Made.
He crouched at the fourth and stared long and hard, looking for something he'd missed.
"What are you trying to show me?" he whispered.
The forest didn't answer.
But the howl did.
It washed over the trees again, impossibly distant, and yet so near his eardrums it hurt.
He clenched his jaw. "You want ritual?" he muttered. "You want belief? I'll give you that."
He gathered bones from the eighth circle. Small ones — knuckles, teeth, a shard of jawbone. He stacked them with dried leaves and old pine needles into a pyramid and sparked a fire.
It didn't catch right away.
But when it did, it burned cold.
The flames licked upward in near silence. They gave off light, but no warmth. The smoke was nearly invisible — a faint shimmer in the air, like heat mirage. But the air didn't warm. If anything, it chilled.
Arthur sat cross-legged before the fire and pulled the bone-handled knife from his belt. The blade was rusted, but still sharp enough. He dragged it across his left forearm. Not deep — just enough to draw blood. Just enough to write.
He smeared spirals onto his skin. A jagged eye above his wrist. A crooked symbol he'd seen carved into bark weeks ago, drawn across his collarbone now in red. Symbols he didn't understand, but which felt familiar. Protective. Ancient.
He inked himself as the howl returned again.
"I see you," he muttered. "I hear you. I move between the howls."
Another mark.
"You do not own the space between."
Another howl. Closer.
And behind it — maybe just barely — a tremor. Not a voice. Not a word.
A presence.
Something had heard him.
He stopped sleeping after that.
Sleep became risk. Every time his eyes closed, he saw himself — older, emaciated, hair like straw, mouth twitching as he whispered to himself in languages Arthur couldn't place.
When he opened his eyes again, he found strange things: twigs arranged in triangles. Pebbles balanced atop one another. His shirt torn in a pattern. His knife placed beside him with the blade pointing due east.
He had no memory of doing any of it.
The circles began appearing in trees — suspended in vine, shaped like dreamcatchers, but woven with jawbones and vertebrae. Some spun gently, even when there was no wind.
One night, he found one still dripping.
Still wet.
The bones gleamed with blood. The body it had belonged to was gone.
Arthur didn't speak. He didn't scream. He just backed away, slow and shaking.
He returned to his camp and found a new symbol on his stomach — not one he had drawn.
Clean lines. Precision. Inked in something dark and dry.
He didn't know what it meant.
He didn't want to.
The forest stopped pretending to be nature. The birds were gone. The insects stopped buzzing. Even the glowing mosses dimmed. The howls continued — endless, unwavering, always five minutes apart. Like breath. Like heartbeat.
He wandered now without aim. There were no trails. No progress. The forest curved inward. Trees twisted into shapes with unnatural symmetry. He began seeing the same landmarks twice — then thrice. Sometimes in different arrangements.
It wasn't just memory playing tricks anymore. The place was rewriting itself while he was inside it.
He carved his own signs into trees: spirals, slashes, eyes. Markers. But some came back… wrong.
One spiral was reversed. Another was mirrored and doubled. Some were smeared out entirely, clawed by something with too many fingers.
He stopped trusting them. He stopped trusting himself.
He turned inward.
He became ritual.
By the fifth day, he understood that he was no longer lost.
He had been chosen.
The forest didn't let him go because it needed him. Watched him. Studied him.
And the Hollow Howl?
It wasn't a threat.
It was an announcement.
The first voice of something still arriving.
That night, in the lull between the 88th and 89th howls, Arthur sat near the edge of a circle woven in hair and bone. His chest was marked. His face, painted. Blood dried in cryptic lines across his forearms.
He didn't remember falling asleep.
But when he woke — if that's what it was — he found himself cross-legged across from… himself.
Older.
Pale.
Eyes blank.
The double spoke in a whisper that came from the trees.
And when Arthur woke for real, there were teeth in his pocket.
Not his.
And a tooth missing from his own mouth.
When the next howl came, it sounded closer.
And beneath it — just faintly — he heard something else.
A second voice.
Higher. Lighter.
Like a child trying to harmonize.
Arthur rose.
He tied bone charms to his spear with a strip of his own shirt.
He pressed his marked fingers to his chest.
And whispered to the silence:
"Come find me, then."