The Roompt dreaming of a forest—a forest piled with decaying leaves, where the cold embraced my body. A forest stuck in forever autumn.
My surroundings stretched endlessly. The trees were thin and crooked, their bare branches clawing at a sky colored with ash. The ground was always buried beneath layers of damp, decaying leaves. Each step I made sank slightly, as if the earth itself were buying time for a bear to maul me.
A pale fog drifted low, curling around roots and ankles; no wind passed through the trees, yet the leaves rustled faintly. The air smelled of rot and wet bark. Light filtered through in dull fragments, never warm, never enough, leaving everything in a state of perpetual dusk.
Here and there, half-hidden by moss and fallen leaves, stood old statues, their forms eroded and broken, depicting creatures no living thing should resemble. Some had faces stretched into expressions that might once have been worship or agony. Time had softened their edges, cracked their stone skin, yet they still loomed with quiet intent, as if they could move at any moment.
Many times within this forest, I died. I got lost and starved until my body gave in. Sometimes, I was mauled by that bear lurking somewhere beyond the fog. And when I finally managed to live long enough, I was impaled by something I could never see.
Every time I died, I woke—soaked in sweat, my heart hammering against my ribs.
This day marked the twenty-ninth time I had dreamed of that forest.
"This again," I murmured. My voice sounded wrong—too soft, as if the forest swallowed it the moment it left my mouth.
I took a step forward. Leaves shifted beneath my feet, releasing a wet, squelching sound. I remembered how I had died each time I saw a particular spot.
I stopped walking.
"Twenty-nine," I whispered. "This is the twenty-ninth time."
The forest didn't respond.
But something else did.
Ahead of me, through the trees, there was movement—not the slow sway of branches, but straight lines where there shouldn't have been any. Vertical. Deliberate. I squinted, my heart pounding.
Rooflines.
I continued forward, and a village emerged gradually, as if it had been waiting for me to notice it. Houses leaned into one another, their wooden frames warped and darkened by age. No lights shone from the windows. No smoke rose from chimneys. Yet the place didn't feel abandoned.
As I stepped closer, the cold's embrace grew comfortably lighter.
'This is new.'
The words barely left my lips when I spun around, searching my surroundings. There was nothing—only trees, fallen leaves, and the quiet, persistent presence of the forest.
The village did not welcome me. It did not reject me either.
As I crossed the invisible threshold between forest and settlement, the air changed. It's strangely warmer. The houses stood in crooked rows, doors shut, windows dark, their surfaces scarred by time and something else I couldn't name.
I took another step. The ground beneath my foot shifted—not leaves this time, but packed earth, firm and uneven. A place meant to be walked on. Used and lived in.
"Hello?" I called. My voice echoed once, then vanished.
That was when my phone vibrated.
I picked it up and rubbed my eyes.
November 28, 2025, 7:12 a.m.
I woke up. I did not die this time.
I turned off my phone and rested my wrist on the edge of the mattress. My room was quiet, except for the faint hum of the electric fan and my own breathing. But as soon as I shut my eyes, the phone lit up and rang shortly.
I raised the phone above my face. The banner over my Hatsune Miku lockscreen started with: "Alex, the Adviser didn't…"
I stared at it. My thumb hovered, then pressed the notification. The screen shifted to a plain white chat interface:
"Alex, the Adviser didn't sign our research paper. Apparently, it has fifteen grammatical errors. Just minor issues, though, I can do them just fine. You can leave this to me, Mr. Primary Author."
I see…
"Sure, thanks, Mike. Let me see the corrections later before you do the revisions." I pressed send and set the phone down on my chest.
The screen dimmed, then went black. For a few seconds, nothing happened; no follow-up messages. No vibration. Just the familiar weight of the device and the slow return of my breathing.
I let out a small laugh. It came out weak.
Of course. It's just Mike. Just a research paper. Just another ordinary problem.
I turned my head toward the window. Morning light filtered through the curtains in thin, pale strips.
November's sunlight always looked tired to me, as if it had already given up halfway through the year. Somewhere outside, a tricycle passed by, its engine coughing and sputtering. The world was still here. Solid. Mundane.
I closed my eyes again, letting the hum of the fan fill the quiet room. Sleep came slowly this time, my mind still tangled in the shapes of the forest and the village.
When I woke up, it was because of the alarm.
9:02 a.m. Groaning, I rolled onto my side and reached for my phone. The screen was dark. No new messages. No strange timestamps. Just the faint reflection of my ceiling fan and the edges of my cracked screen protector.
Good.
I sat up and swung my legs off the bed, my feet brushing the cold floor. My room smelled faintly of detergent and leftover coffee from the night before. A familiar, mundane comfort.
By the time I reached the campus walkway, the afternoon bustle had already started. Students moved in clusters, some clutching notebooks, others fumbling with coffee cups. Voices collided, creating a low hum of conversation that seemed both chaotic and normal.
That's when I saw Mike.
He was leaning casually against the brick wall of the math building, backpack slung over one shoulder, headphones tucked around his neck. Short-cropped black hair stuck up in random angles. Dark-rimmed glasses perched slightly crooked on his nose. A grin suggested he had just figured out something clever—even if it was only a small victory over a particularly annoying problem set.
"Alex!" he called, waving me over. His voice carried the usual mix of energy and teasing. "You look like death warmed over. Sleep through your alarm again?"
I smiled faintly, shaking my head. "Didn't sleep well."
Mike's eyes softened slightly. "Midterms, huh? Don't worry—you always ace this stuff. And hey, I fixed the errors in our paper. Nothing major—verb tense, a couple of commas, a sentence that ran too long. Easy fix."
"Thanks," I said, sliding my phone back into my pocket. "I'll review it later."
He shrugged, leaning further against the wall. "Figure I'll handle it if you want, but I thought you'd like to double-check anyway." He grinned again, slightly mischievous. "Primary author, you know."
I couldn't help but laugh a little. "Fair enough."
Mike always had a way of balancing casual teasing with quiet competence. You didn't feel like he was patronizing you, but he had this aura that told you he could solve things—small or big—before anyone else even noticed there was a problem. That calm energy made him one of the few people on campus I could actually rely on without feeling judged.
"Anyway," he said, straightening his backpack straps. "See you later in the library? We've got to tackle the next set of proofs before Friday."
I nodded, watching him walk toward the library with his easy gait. The day was unfolding normally—or at least, as normal as it could after the forest.
In Advanced Calculus, I took my usual seat near the middle of the classroom. Professor Garcia entered, chalk tapping impatiently against the board.
"Continuity," she said, writing the word large and clear. "Not just knowing that a limit exists, but why it behaves the way it does."
I opened my notebook, pen poised. Symbols and sequences filled the board. Epsilon, delta. Precise. Exact. Predictable.
The familiarity of mathematics was comforting, but still… that tug of anticipation lingered at the back of my mind. Limits. Approaching, without reaching. The word echoed, almost like the forest itself had.
The library was quieter than I expected for a Thursday afternoon. Sunlight slanted through tall windows, dust motes drifting lazily in the beams. Mike had already claimed a corner table near the math section, unpacking his laptop and notebook with a precision that made my own messy setup feel absurd.
"Found a spot where we can actually hear ourselves think," he said, sliding a chair out for me. "Don't want anyone eavesdropping on our brilliance."
I smirked, setting my bag down. "Or my confusion."
He laughed softly, flipping open his notebook. "Confusion is temporary. Brilliance is forever."
We dove into the proofs assigned earlier that week. Mike worked quickly, jotting notes in a cramped, neat script, muttering under his breath when a line didn't make sense. I focused on the symbols, the equations, the patterns. There was a comforting rhythm to it—the world could behave illogically in dreams, but mathematics obeyed rules.
Still, the forest tugged at the edges of my thoughts. A word, a number, a line in an equation would suddenly feel too familiar, like I had seen it in the wrong place—or maybe the right place—inside the village. My pen hovered mid-note.
Left, right, forward, pause…
I froze. The sequence aligned almost perfectly with the paths I had walked in my dreams.
I shook my head, trying to laugh it off. "I'm losing it."
Mike glanced up. "You're not losing it. You just… notice things more than most people. Like when you spotted that mistake in the matrix transformation I didn't even think about."
"Or maybe I'm just obsessed with noticing."
He tilted his head. "Obsessed can be good in math."
By mid-afternoon, I found myself staring at the ceiling of the library. My notes were covered in calculations and proofs, but my mind wasn't on them. I traced invisible paths along the edges of the table, imagining them as streets in the village.
If I take this route tomorrow, the tree will fall over there. If I turn left instead of right, maybe the statues—maybe the bear—won't appear.
The thought startled me. And yet… it felt logical. The forest had rules. Patterns. Predictable sequences. My waking mind, trained to see patterns, began to map them.
I leaned closer to Mike's notes. "What if…" I whispered, more to myself than to him, "What if I could manipulate the pattern?"
Mike frowned. "What pattern?"
"Never mind," I said quickly, closing my notebook. My fingers shook slightly. Better to keep this to myself—for now.
After a while, Mike stretched, cracking his knuckles. "Brain break. I'm gonna grab coffee. You want anything?"
"Sure," I said. Black. No sugar.
When he returned a few minutes later, he had two steaming cups and a faint look of triumph, as he'd just conquered a small battle in the world outside the forest.
"Victory," he said, handing me my cup. We sat back down, sipping slowly. The warmth of the coffee grounded me more than I expected. I could almost forget the forest for a moment, until my peripheral vision caught the way the sun fell across the stacks, forming long, crooked shadows. My stomach twisted briefly.
"Thinking too much again?" Mike asked, eyebrow raised.
"Nothing," I said, forcing a smile. Mike shrugged, returning to his notes. But I could tell he noticed. He always noticed.
Class was next: Probability Theory. I walked the familiar path through campus, earbuds in, playlist humming quietly. I tried to focus on the lecture, on the definitions of random variables, expected values, and probability distributions. But the forest lingered at the edge of my thoughts, insistent.
Every random sequence reminded me of the leaves shifting underfoot, every variable of the bear's slow approach. I shook it off. Too vivid. Halfway through the lecture, Professor Tan mentioned combinatorics and permutations.
I scribbled equations absentmindedly, then froze. The permutation tree on the board—the lines, branching upward and outward—reminded me too much of the crooked village roofs, of paths leading nowhere but seemingly aligned with some invisible logic. My hand twitched, almost writing "29" in the margin. I pushed it away.
Focus.
After class, I met Mike again outside the math building. He had a small stack of printouts in his hand.
"Lab assignment," he said. "The professor said we should collaborate. I figured we'd tackle it together."
We found a bench under a tree, sunlight dimming behind the campus buildings.
"Alex," Mike began, voice casual but deliberate, "you okay? You've been… off since this morning."
I hesitated, then said nothing. Instead, I pulled out my notebook and started outlining the lab problem. The questions were mundane—linear regression on sample data—but the process grounded me. Calculating slopes, plotting points, analyzing trends… I could almost pretend the forest was a figment of last night, nothing more.
Mike watched quietly. He didn't press. That was why I trusted him.
Eventually, he nudged a printout toward me.
"Take a look. Maybe we can finish this faster if we divide the work." I nodded, scribbling notes, but the faint echo of the village lingered in my peripheral vision. Rooflines. Shadows. Twisted doors. The number of windows didn't match up, and yet it somehow did.
I shook my head, focusing on the math.
Evening came quickly. The campus was bathed in golden light, shadows stretching across the walkways. I returned to my dorm, backpack heavy, mind still partially entangled with numbers and shadows.
Mike arrived shortly after, carrying a backpack of his own, a cup of coffee in his hand, and a grin that suggested he was perpetually amused by life.
"Late-night study session?" he asked, tossing me the cup. I took it without speaking.
We spread our notebooks across my bed again. Proofs, sequences, and transformations filled the pages. The hours passed, the forest occasionally flickering at the edges of my vision. Shapes I couldn't name pressed just beyond the edge of awareness.
Yet, for the first time, I started noticing patterns. Rules. Branches of logic. Repetition within variation. Something I could use. Something I could calculate.
So… what happens if I break one?
I tested it in my mind first, visualizing a step in the wrong direction, a pause where I usually moved. The bear didn't appear. The fog didn't thicken. One subtle change, and the sequence bent without snapping.
A thrill ran through me. I had control. Maybe not total control—but some.
Night came. Lights off. Fan humming. Coffee cups are empty. Mike had left, promising to pick up the conversation tomorrow.
I lay down, staring at the ceiling. Eyes shut. Breathe even. The heart is trying to slow. Sleep had become a problem I couldn't solve with logic. I tried anyway.
I attempted sleep again, fully expecting the forest to reclaim me.
Instead, the dream started differently.
This time, I wasn't in the forest at first. I stood near the edge of the village, the cobblestone walls stretching before me, low enough to climb if I dared. Behind me, the forest loomed, its skeletal trees and scattered statues. Shadows clung to the edges of the clearing.
With nothing else to do, I climbed the wall cautiously—and then I saw it.