The river ran down the mountain in a steady rush, its cold waters carving through the jagged rocks with a rhythmic, almost meditative persistenero crouched at the water’s edge, cupping his hands to drink. The chill biting into his skih him, the sand was bck—fine grains like crushed obsidian, shimmering faintly uhe light.

  His makeshift camp was crude: a small fire, its embers barely catg the wind, a small mound of pnt matter hastily arranged as a bed. And the remnants of a small animal he’d killed earlier. The kill had been swift, its skin a patchwork of smooth, translut scales that shimmered like oil in the dim light of the fire. Its legs were spindly, joi strange ahat made it appear almost i-like, yet it moved with a fluid, predatrace. Its head was bulbous, with wide, unblinking eyes that reflected the flickering fmes.

  It wasn’t the thing that had stalked him earlier; this creature had been easy to take down, uhe elusive, uling presehat had circled him. Whatever that thing was, it had been far more ing.

  Hunger had driven him to eat, though the thought of it twisted something deep in his stomach. He’d cooked it as best as he could over the fire, its flesh curling and crisping at the edges, releasing a st that was her pleasant nor repulsive—just unfamiliar. The taste had been the same, oddly metallic, with a faint bitterhat lingered on his to wasn’t satisfying, not really, but it was enough to keep him alive.

  Nero g the fire as it flickered, the warmth faded too quickly against the chill of the air. The world felt alien, everees seemed unfamiliar. Their twisted, gnarly shapes stretched upward in ways that defied reason, like they were trying to escape something. The trunks were uneven, bending at impossible angles, with bark that resembled cracked stone more than wood. Some trees had roots that dug deep into the earth, while others seemed to hover just above the ground, their roots curling upward as if to grasp at something hiddeh.

  “Fasating,” Sinthos’s voice slid into Nero’s mind, dripping with sarcasm. “What’s ? A lecture on the local fauna? I didn’t realize I was traveling with a botanist.”

  Nero frowned, ign the voice for a moment. He didn’t think he'd ever get used to it, the stant presen his mind. How had the other him dealt with it? The thought g him, an unwele remihat there had once been another version of himself—ohat wasn’t losing his mind.

  “You really should stop asking yourself questions you ’t answer.” Sinthos’s voice was a low hum, like the wind before a storm. “Actually, keep doing it. Drive yourself even madder.”

  Nero let out a deep breath, but didn’t respond. His mind flickered between the present and whatever fragments of the past that still g to him, his thoughts spiraling in circles, never finding an escape. The voice wasn’t doing him any favors.

  Sinthos mocked, “Oh, what’s this? No witty retort?” His voice broke his thoughts. “How quaint. I guess I’ll have to eain myself while you figure out how to hate yourself less.”

  The words hit him like a punch, but he forced himself to focus. There was no point in responding, no point iing Sinth him deeper into the hole he was stu.

  His eyes snapped back to the twisted ndscape around him—now a forest in stark trast to the grass field he’d woken up in. He had made it quite a way in the days he had been here. The terrain had shifted beh his feet, ging with unnatural fluidity, as if the nd itself was in flux.

  “Still lost in thought, huh?” Sinthos’s voice taunted, “You're just wasting time, you know. At least you could make it eaining.”

  The buzzing in his skull began again, like the enter with that thing days ago, the hum of Sinthos’s presence vibrating in his thoughts like an incessant i’s wings. The voice, relentless and grating, w its way into his mind, drowning out his own thoughts. He ched his jaw, trying to focus, but the stant pressure from Sinthos’s taunting words made it almost impossible.

  “Oh hell, enough of this,” hought, the frustration surging through him. He jumped to his feet, kig dirt aside. If he stayed here any longer, caught in this endless cycle of self-doubt and taunting voices, he’d aplish nothing.

  He turned his gaze away from the maddening ndscape and the ever-pressing silence of the forest, his eyes log onto the familiar sight of the mountains. They were closer now, looming in the distance. But they were… different. More unnatural, as if their peaks had been shaped by something far beyond nature’s reach. Their edges were sharper, more pointed, mgressive than any mountains he’d ever seen. Not that he remembered any mountains in particur. The fragments of his past remained scattered, too broken to make sense of.

  The buzzing in his head intensified even further, rising to an almost unbearable pitch. It felt like a thousand voices were eg in his skull at once, eae pushing against his tration. Sinthos’s voily stoked the fmes.

  “I’m sure you think there’s some grand purpose in all this,” Sinthos tinued, his tone dripping with mockery. “But let's be clear: there’s nothing. No purpose. You’re not special. Worse than ordinary—you’re a stain. A blemish that doesn’t belong.”

  Nero kept walking, his steps steady, but the words g to him like a weight, dragging at his resolve. The stant buzzing distorted his sense of focus. His head felt thick, as if he were wading through some kind of mental fog. He tried to push the words away, fog on the ground ahead, but they g him, getting sharper and sharper with each passing moment.

  The hours bled together in a haze ing footsteps and whispers. The forest around him had ged—denser now, the strarees pressing closer, their twisted limbs reag toward the sky like skeletal fingers.

  Sinthos had gone quiet, for now. He wasn’t sure what exactly triggered him to talk, but whatever the reason, Nero was enjoying the pead quiet. He had grown somewhat used to the stillness of the forest.

  He let his feet carry him without thinking, and for a fleeting moment, Nero almost felt… normal. Like he was just a man walking through a forest, nothing more, nothing less. There was no voi his head, no past to discover. Just the present, raw and unfiltered.

  But of course, that silence couldn’t st forever.

  Sinthos’s voice slithered ba, soft and insidious. “Enjoying the peace, are we? How pathetic. You think you escape me?”

  Nero’s shoulders involuntarily tensed, but he didn’t stop walking. No, he wouldn’t let it have that power over him. He kept moving, f his legs to push forward, steady aless. At least, until he saw what stood in front of him.

  A figure appeared in the distance. A human, he was hunched over, leaning against a tree for support, their posture slumped as though the weight of the world had crushed them. Their clothes were torn and filthy, their once-pristine armor now scratched and battered, stained with something that looked darker than just dirt.

  As Nero drew closer, the person lifted their head, revealing gaunt eyes—dull, lifeless, yet strangely aware. They had the look of someone who had given up, someone who had seen too much, lost too much. There was no fear, no anger, no sorrow. Just ay resignation, as if they had accepted that they were alone in this forsaken pce, and nothing mattered anymore.

  They didn’t speak. They didn’t move. They just stared at Nero as if he were a Seraph, desding from the sky above.

  The stillness betweeretched, Nero studied the person. He was a man, older than him, perhaps by three or four years. His features were sharp, almost birdlike—angur, with high cheekbones and a narrow here was a hollow weight to the man’s presence, as though the world had drained him of everything he once was. His eyes, dull and lifeless, held no warmth, no spark of life, only the remnants of something loinguished,

  “Why…” The man’s lips barely moved, his voiing out as a harsh rasp. “What did we do… to deserve this? To be dragged into this hell”

  Nero shifted awkwardly on his feet, unsure of how to respond. The question hung in the air, suffog the words before they could form. He opened his mouth, but no answer came—not because he didn’t want to respond, but because there simply wasn’t a clear one. He wasn’t sure there was an a all. He had opped to question why he was here, never dwelled on how he ended up in this forsaken pce. Instead he’d focused on surviving, on navigating the maze of his own shattered thoughts.

  Thankfully, the man tinued on, his voice distant “I tried in the beginning. I thought that I could find a way back… or at least survive” His words were slow, eae taking effort.

  “I even found some others,” the man tinued, his voice crag. “We were going to find somepce safe… but then that…fug monster came” He shuddered, his hands twitg as if trying to shake off the ghosts of that moment.

  The man finally addressed Nero, his voiing out strohan before. “Turn back stranger,” he said, his words heavy with warning. “Turn your heels and walk from where you came. Nothing awaits you ahead, but despair…ah.” His eyes bore into Nero’s, the desperation in his gaze matg the finality of his tone.

  The man’s words hung in the air, heavy and deafening, but Nero didn’t move. Instead, he tilted his neck back, exposing his o the sky. Through the thick opy of the forest, he caught a glimpse of the bruised sky—purple and swollen. The ominous clouds seemed to press down on the world.

  Nero’s gaze slowly drifted back to the broken man before him. There was no fear in the man’s eyes, just emptiness, as though he had already glimpsed the future and k wouldn’t ge.

  “Thank you for the warning,” Nero said, his voice low but steady. There was no bitterness, no fear in his response—just an eerie calm that trasted sharply with the man in front of him.

  Without annero turned and began to walk deeper into the abyss, the forest’s shadows stretg long and dark around him.

  Then the man’s voice shattered the silence, raw and desperate.“What do you think you’ll aplish? What do you hope to gain? You would knowingly walk into despair?”

  Nero didn’t stop. The question hung in the air, but it didn’t slow him. He could feel it scraping at the edges of his resolve, but he refused to turn, refused to aowledge them. Truthfully, he didn’t have an answer—he didn’t know what he was looking for, or if he even wao find it.

  What he did know was this: the alternative—the quiet, the ina—was a kind of death itself. And so, he walked. He walked because stopping would mean fag the emptiness.

  He couldn’t look back.