The first thing I noticed was the air.
Cool, heavy, and still — the kind of stillness that makes sound feel distant, as if the world is paused in time. A thin layer of fog curled around my ankles, softening each step, and the faint scent of dry leaves drifted through the darkness.
Shapes gradually formed around me.
Pine trunks rose from the mist, straight and tall, their branches vanishing into a sky so dark it felt like a different world. Leaves crunched quietly underfoot, the only sound breaking the quiet as the forest closed in along the narrow path ahead.
Through the haze, a glint caught my attention — an elevated pitched-roof structure, the classic Thai architectural building. As I walked closer, the fog parted just enough for the outline to emerge. A wall, white at a distance but clearly weathered up close, enclosed a small temple ground. The paint on the wall was uneven, worn thin in places where age had scraped down to the stone beneath. Time had shaped it more than hands.
A narrow opening was cut into the left side of the wall. No door, no threshold — just space, as though the structure expected a visitor long before I arrived.
As I slowly closing in on the wall, a presence stirred at the edge of my senses.
One silhouette appeared inside the wall.
A full-grown Bengal tiger slowly emerged from the right side of the entrance wall, its stride unhurried, the weight of its paws settling softly into the grass. Its eyes met mine with a calm, measured awareness, neither threatening nor curious — simply acknowledging and then it continued walking past the entrance wall.
And when I cross through the wall entrance while I look to the left to find if the tiger earlier was still present, but none, however as I turned toward the front, another surprising appearance which I didn't notice from earlier, another full-grown tiger rested near the roots of a large tree, the distant was so close as I could almost felt its hot breath from its pitched-black nose, its head raised slightly as if watching over the path.
There was no tension in its posture, and I notice its reflective eyes looked at me without a blink as I looked back, unfazed, but unexpectedly.
If anything, something in the air around both tigers felt… welcoming, in a way I didn't fully grasp.
And then while I was about to continue walking towards the only temple hall inside the compound which is just around no more than twenty steps away, I immediately notice another movement flickered at the corner of my right eye, and I quickly turned over. What appeared nearly gave me a shock, another tiger stood on the edge of the wall just right over my head — larger than the others, the orange and black-stripe fur seem even longer than the others with its fur catching the faint ambient glow, the stripes tracing patterns that seemed to shift with the light. It stood elegantly and perfectly still, looked right at me, observing me with a steady gaze that carried weight without aggression.
The longer I looked at it, the more the unease faded. Curiosity settled in its place, a pull that guided my steps through the opening and really set foot within the temple ground.
The atmosphere changed gently.
The stone path beneath my feet gave off a muted warmth, subtle but alive, like the lingering heat of incense long extinguished. Lantern frames hung from the eaves, their paper long rotted away, yet a faint residue of light clung to their contours as if memory kept them lit. The scent of old incense lingered in the air, thin and dry, threading through the stillness.
I turned back to the entrance.
The tiger that was on the wall earlier was somehow lifting up.
Not by jumping, but rising—weightless, as though gravity had loosened its hold. The stripes along its body brightened and shifted, forming a flowing pattern that gradually phased onto the wall. The symbols embedded themselves slowly into the stone wall, burning with a controlled intensity.
The tiger's form unraveled into streams of deep red light.
Then I felt my chest and spine tighten, heat building in steady waves. It didn't feel like the Qi-energy heat I knew from my own circulation, so it had to be coming from somewhere else. But as it continued, the sensation didn't feel foreign, and it wasn't a threatening kind of pain. Little by little, the warmth spread through my entire body, no longer only my chest and spine.
Eventually, it felt almost as if something long dormant inside me had begun to stir, leaving behind only a strange familiarity. The suffocating pressure faded completely.
A moment later, a low vibration passed through the courtyard, resonating through my heartbeat and breath. The edges of my vision flared white, the light pulling everything out of focus.
The warmth pressed deeper, carving into my back in deliberate strokes, each mark carrying weight and intention. The force wasn't violent, but it was overwhelming—ancient, decisive, impossible to resist.
When the light finally receded, I opened my eyes and found myself drenched in sweat on a medical bed in some facility. I quickly jumped up and ran to find the toilet mirror, checking my chest and back to see whether the heat from the dream had left any sign on my body—but there was nothing.
Still, I understood instinctively that whatever had marked me was not symbolic.
It had chosen to bind itself to me with intention.