The road twisted away from the monastery, shrinking as they descended. No one spoke. Deep usually broke silences with a joke, but now he just chewed his lip, staring at his knees. Satyam kept checking the windows, as if expecting something to be pacing the car. Raghav was rigid beside Rahul, the old map tight in his hands, his knuckles white.
Rahul kept the monk's note pressed between his palms. It wasn't paper anymore; it felt like a shard of ice, cold and accusatory. He wanted to throw it out the window. He didn't.
The driver was different now—his calm, weathered face was tight. He kept glancing in the rearview, his lips moving in silent, urgent prayer. It made Rahul's stomach clench. If he was scared, what did that mean for them?
At first, the sound was just wind—a low, constant moan against the windows. Then it changed. It became layered, textured. A murmur woven into the gusts.
Deep finally broke, his voice too loud in the quiet. "Do you guys… hear that?"
Satyam flinched. Raghav closed his eyes. They all heard it. It was the sound from the monastery walls, but now it was here, on the road, chasing them.
"It's the same," Raghav whispered, not opening his eyes. "It's following the car."
The driver's voice cut through, sharp and final. "No one speaks. Not on this stretch."
They fell silent, the only sound the grumble of the engine and that terrible, whispering wind.
The driver pulled into a lonely teashop clinging to the mountainside, claiming the brakes were overheating. But his hands were shaking as he killed the engine. They stumbled out, legs stiff, the cold air a shock. They were just settling at a rickety wooden table when an old woman approached.
She moved without sound. Her face was a map of wrinkles, her eyes milky but painfully focused. She didn't look at their faces. She stared at Raghav's wrist, where the sleeve had ridden up, revealing the darkening symbol.
"Ah," she breathed, the sound full of a deep, weary sorrow. "It has begun again."
Rahul's mouth went dry. "What has?"
Her clouded eyes shifted to him. "You carry the memory. He carries the mark. The mountain does not forget a debt."
"A debt to what?" Rahul's voice cracked. He wasn't asking for a story; he was begging for an answer he could fight.
But the old woman just shook her head, a violent, fearful motion. "The Valley remembers every soul. It does not forgive." She took a step back, hugging herself. "I have said too much."
Deep stood up, trying to look gentle, non-threatening. "Please, ma'am. We're just students. We're lost. We're scared."
It was the truth, raw and simple. For a second, her hardened face seemed to soften with pity. Then fear won. She turned and shuffled back into the teashop, a door closing softly behind her. She was gone.
Back in the car, the driver was quiet for a long time. The landscape blurred past, greens and greys smearing into one another. Finally, he spoke, his eyes never leaving the road.
"There is an old story," he began, his voice low. "My grandmother told it to scare us from wandering. It is about a choice the mountains force upon some."
Raghav was listening intently, his fingers tracing the symbol on his wrist.
"The story says the curse never comes for one person alone," the driver continued. "It always needs two. One to see the path in dreams. And one to walk it in waking."
Rahul's heart thudded dully against his ribs. "Who's the dreamer?"
The driver's eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, landing on Raghav. "The one who is marked. Who the visions find first."
"And the other?" Rahul already knew. He felt it in the pit of his stomach, in the way the monk had looked at him, in the pull he felt toward that damned map.
"The seeker," the driver said softly. "The one who cannot look away."
The label settled over Rahul like a weight. It felt true. He'd always been the one pushing for more, planning the trip, asking the questions. His hunger for adventure had led them here. The guilt was sudden and suffocating.
Raghav gasped beside him, doubling over, hands flying to his temples. "Stop… please, stop the car."
The driver swerved to the shoulder. Raghav was panting, his face pale. "It's… it's inside my head. It's so loud."
Rahul reached out, his hand on Raghav's shoulder. "Look at me. Just look at—"
The moment his skin touched Raghav's, the world dissolved.
Not a thought. A memory. But not his own.
A cliff edge, sharp wind. The terrified grip of a small, cold hand in his. A voice, young and breaking—"Don't let go!"—and then the gut-wrenching sensation of falling, the hand slipping from his, a cry swallowed by the roaring wind…
Rahul recoiled as if burned, scrambling back against the car door, gasping for air. His own hands were shaking.
"What? What did you see?" Satyam demanded, voice high with panic.
Rahul looked at Raghav, whose eyes were wide with a shared, horrified understanding. "It wasn't mine," Rahul whispered, the truth of it chilling him to the core. "That fear… that memory… it was yours."
They reached Yuksom as dusk painted the sky in bruised purples. The driver refused to go further. "The road ahead is not for night travel," he said, and this time, no one argued. The fear in his voice was final.
The homestay was a promise of safety—warm yellow light, the smell of woodsmoke and stew. But the comfort was a thin blanket. As true night fell, the immense, consuming silence of the mountains pressed in. The cold wasn't just air; it felt like a presence seeping through the cracks in the old wood.
Deep tried. "Hey, at least the ghosts here serve momos, right?" His joke fell flat, his own smile not reaching his eyes.
Rahul couldn't relax. He stood by the window, watching the forest. Between the black trunks, he kept seeing shifts of deeper darkness—tall, impossibly still shapes that were there one second and gone the next.
Midnight brought the sounds.
A soft thump on the roof, like something landing.
A faint, rhythmic chant, too distant to place.
Then, a whisper, so clear it seemed to be right in the room: "…come…"
Satyam pulled his blanket over his head. "Make it stop," he mumbled, sounding like a child.
Rahul must have drifted off, because he woke with a jolt, disoriented. The room was dim. Raghav's bed was empty, the covers thrown back.
Heart hammering, Rahul bolted outside. He found Raghav twenty feet down the forest trail, barefoot in the freezing dirt, walking stiffly toward the trees.
"Raghav!" Rahul grabbed his arm, spinning him around.
Raghav blinked, confused. "She was calling me," he murmured, his voice slurred with sleep. "She sounded… like my mother. When I was little."
The others had followed. Together, they led him back, a shivering, sleepwalking Raghav leaning on them. As they laid him down, Rahul saw it—the symbol on his wrist wasn't just dark. In the low light, it seemed to throb, a faint pulse under the skin, like a second heartbeat.
Then Rahul's phone, on the nightstand, lit up.
He stared. His voice recorder app was open. A new file, time-stamped for ten minutes ago—when Raghav was sleepwalking.
Hands trembling, he hit play.
The audio was crisp, horrifyingly clear. A woman's voice, tender and aching with a sadness that clawed at his chest, whispered just two words:
"Bring him home…"
The silence that followed was absolute. It was the sound of hope dying.
No one slept. They sat on the floor, backs against the wall, huddled together for warmth that didn't come, listening to every creak of the old house, waiting for dawn.
In the morning, they confronted the homestay owner, a gentle-faced man who had served them sweet milk tea just hours before. Now, he looked at them with profound sadness.
"There is a story," he said, not meeting their eyes. "Very old. Two brothers, closer than anything. They went into the Echoing Valley, young and brave and foolish." He paused. "The valley is not a place. It is a test. It shows you what you fear most. What you love most. And it makes you choose."
"What happened to them?" Deep asked, his bravado gone.
"Only one brother walked out," the owner said softly. "The survivor… his grief became a chain. A curse that does not end. It waits. For another pair who mirrors that first loss. Who fits the pattern."
The words hung in the air. Rahul felt them land, one by one, with terrible certainty.
"Why us?" Satyam whispered, voicing the question they all held.
The old man finally looked up. His gaze traveled slowly from Raghav's haunted eyes to Rahul's desperate ones. He didn't look at Deep or Satyam.
"Because," he said, his voice barely audible, "you are the reflection it has been waiting for."
They tried to leave Yuksom that afternoon. The plan was simple: get to Gangtok, find a bus, go home, forget any of this ever happened.
The mountains had other plans.
A landslide had blocked the main road—"Just happened this morning, very strange," a shopkeeper said.
Their borrowed car wouldn't start—the engine turned over with a sickly whine and died.
Every local driver they asked shook their heads, their eyes avoiding the forest behind the boys.
Above them, the sky, clear just an hour ago, churned with black clouds. Thunder grumbled in the distance, a sound of finality.
Deep sank onto the steps of a closed shop, head in his hands. "It's not letting us go."
Rahul knew he was right. This wasn't bad luck. It was a door closing, one by one. He pulled the map from his bag. The circle marking the Echoing Valley seemed to glare up at him. As he looked at it, the vision from the car—the cliff, the falling boy, the devastating loss—flooded back with painful clarity.
He saw more this time. Not just the fall. He saw the aftermath. A lone figure on a cliff, performing a ritual of binding and grief under a full moon. And as the figure turned, the face was blurred… but the eyes. The eyes were Raghav's.
Rahul's breath hitched. The pieces weren't just fitting together; they were locking into place, a prison being built around them.
He looked at his friends—Satyam, practical and scared; Deep, loud-mouthed and loyal, now hollow-eyed; Raghav, silent and marked, haunted by a past that wasn't his.
"We have to go there," Rahul said. His voice sounded strange to his own ears. Quiet. Resigned.
"Have you lost your mind?!" Satyam exploded, the fear turning to anger. "It wants to kill us!"
"I don't think it does," Rahul said, the realization cold and clear. "I think it wants something from us. Something that was left unfinished. A story that needs an ending."
He looked at Raghav. Raghav stared back, his usual calm shattered, replaced by a deep, weary understanding. He nodded, just once.
"It's not haunting us," Raghav murmured. "It's been waiting for us. Calling us since before we got on the train."
Rahul nodded. The trip to Sikkim, the bachelor adventure, the freedom they'd craved—it had all been an illusion. The path had been set long before they were born.
The fear was still there, icy in their veins. But beneath it now was something worse: a crushing sense of inevitability.
The mountains weren't just watching.
They were waiting.
And the Echoing Valley was no longer a spot on a map.
It was the only road left.