The morning light that finally crept into the room was thin and grey, the kind that offered no warmth, only the reluctant reveal of a world unchanged. Rahul blinked awake, his body heavy, his mind tangled in the remnants of a dream where he was searching for something in a forest that kept rearranging itself. He wasn't rested. He felt scraped raw.
Across the small room, Raghav was already sitting up, his back against the wooden wall. He was staring at his right wrist, turning it slowly under the weak light. The mark wasn't a smudge anymore. Overnight, it had defined itself into sharp, dark lines—an intricate, interlocking pattern that looked less like ink and more like a brand. He pressed a thumb against it, wincing.
"Does it hurt?" Rahul's voice was gravelly with lack of sleep.
Raghav shook his head, not looking up. "It's… warm. Like a fever just under the skin." His usual calm was fraying at the edges, replaced by a quiet, focused dread. "And it itches. A deep itch, like it's… rooting."
The word hung in the cold air. Deep groaned from the other bed, pulling a pillow over his head. "Can we not start the day with creepy descriptions? My own heartbeat is loud enough."
Satyam was by the small window, peering out through a gap in the curtains. "The driver's outside. Just sitting in the car. Has been for an hour."
They packed in a grim, efficient silence. There was no more debate about what to do. The conversation from the night before—the owner's story, the blocked roads, the dead car—had settled over them like a verdict. The playful energy of their bachelor trip was a distant memory, a photograph from someone else's life. Now, they were just four boys trying to navigate a trap that had sprung around them.
The driver looked up as they approached. The lines on his face seemed deeper, shadows pooled under his eyes. He didn't greet them. He just nodded toward the back of the car. "Get in."
As the Bolero rattled to life, Rahul finally voiced the question that had been forming since dawn. "Can you take us? To the place on the map. The Valley."
The driver's hands tightened on the wheel. For a long minute, the only sound was the grind of the engine. "I can take you to where the road ends," he said finally, his voice flat. "After that, you walk. And you will need a guide. Not for the climb, but for the… navigation."
"Navigation?" Satyam asked from the back.
The driver met his eyes in the rearview mirror. "The paths there are not loyal. They change. They listen. A man who knows the old ways might keep you on a trail that still leads where you intend to go."
"Might?" Deep echoed.
The driver didn't answer.
They found the guide, Tenzing, in a hamlet that seemed clinging to the mountainside by willpower alone. A handful of wooden houses, smoke curling from chimneys, and everywhere, faded prayer flags, their colors bleached by sun and wind to pale pastels. Tenzing was repairing a stone wall, his movements slow and precise. He was lean, not young, with a quiet, grounded presence that felt immediately different from the driver's nervous energy. He listened as Rahul spoke, his dark, still eyes moving from face to face, lingering on Raghav's covered wrist and the palpable fear on Deep's.
When Rahul finished, Tenzing wiped his hands on his trousers. "I will not take you into the Echoing Valley," he said, his voice soft but firm.
Rahul's heart sank. "We don't need to go all the way in. Just… toward it. We just need to understand."
Tenzing studied him. "Understanding is what the valley trades in. It is a costly currency." He looked past them, toward the dense wall of forest that began just beyond the last house. "I will take you to the threshold. Where the forest becomes the keeper. No farther. And you will follow my rules. They are not for your comfort. They are for your survival."
The rules were simple, delivered not as a lecture but as solemn facts:
"You do not walk alone. Not even three steps apart."
"You do not answer a voice, even if it calls you by the name your mother used."
"If I stop, you stop. If I say run, you do not ask why. You run."
"You look at the path, not at the trees beside it. The trees have memories, and they are not all kind."
They agreed, the weight of his conditions making the venture feel even more real, and more final.
Tenzing shouldered a small, worn pack. He didn't speak again as he led them away from the village, the sounds of life—a barking dog, a woman calling a child—fading with startling quickness. The forest did not welcome them; it absorbed them.
The change was immediate. The air grew colder, denser, smelling of damp earth and something else—an ozone-like sharpness, like the air after a lightning strike. The towering pines and rhododendrons formed a canopy so thick the grey morning light became a murky green twilight. The trail underfoot was soft with centuries of fallen needles, muffling their footsteps into a soft, rhythmic shush.
It was the silence that got to Deep first. "Where are all the birds?" he whispered, the habit of lowering his voice instinctual here.
"They know better," Tenzing said without turning around.
Rahul focused on the guide's back, on the steady, sure placement of his boots. But his peripheral vision betrayed him. In the gaps between the massive tree trunks, he kept seeing suggestions of movement—a shift of shadow, a flicker of grey. When he glanced back to check on the others, his breath hitched. The path behind them looked different. Not vanished, but subtly altered. The bend they'd just rounded seemed sharper, the grouping of moss-covered rocks he'd noted was now several feet to the left.
"Raghav," he murmured. "The path…"
"I know," Raghav whispered back, his face pale. He was walking with his left hand curled into a fist, pressed against his stomach. "It's not just the path. It's… whispering. Not words. Feelings. Sadness. A lot of sadness. And waiting."
They passed signs of unnatural presence. A cluster of prayer flags, their scriptures facing inward, tied to a low branch. A small, tarnished bell hanging from a twig, giving a single, soft ting though there was no wind. And then, in a patch of muddy ground, a set of footprints. Small, barefoot, the toes clearly defined. They led off the trail and into the impenetrable undergrowth.
Tenzing paused, his body going very still. He knelt, not touching the prints, his face grim. "Do not look where they go," he instructed, his voice low. "They are an invitation. A very old one."
He stood and moved on, quicker now. The forest seemed to press closer, the spaces between the trees narrowing. The light, already dim, began to fade further, as if time were accelerating toward evening.
At a small, unnaturally circular clearing—a place where no trees grew, only coarse, grey grass—Tenzing stopped. He turned to face them, and for the first time, Rahul saw real fear in the man's eyes. It was more terrifying than any ghost story.
"I must tell you something," Tenzing said, the words coming out in a rush, as if he'd been holding them back. "Years ago, I guided others. Three men from the plains, like you. Curious. They laughed at the stories." He swallowed, his gaze darting to the tree line. "We came this far. Farther than you are now. The valley was calling them, too. I saw it in their eyes—a light, then a blankness."
"What happened?" Satyam asked, his voice thin.
"One by one, they… stepped off the path. Not running. Not scared. They smiled. They walked into the trees as if they were being greeted by an old friend." Tenzing's voice broke. "Only one came back. He followed me out. He never spoke again. He would just sit and rock, and sometimes he'd trace this symbol in the dirt." He gestured vaguely toward Raghav's wrist.
A cold that had nothing to do with the air seeped into Rahul's bones.
As Tenzing spoke, a thin, white fog began to seep from the forest floor. It wasn't like mist; it was thick, opaque, and it coiled around their ankles with deliberate slowness.
"Stay close!" Tenzing commanded, his voice sharp with alarm. "Do not lose sight of each other!"
The fog rose with unnatural speed, swallowing their legs, then their waists. In seconds, they were enveloped in a blinding, silent whiteness. Rahul could barely see Deep, who was right beside him. He reached out, grabbing Satyam's arm.
"Raghav?" Rahul called out.
"I'm here," Raghav's voice came, close but directionless.
Then, Tenzing's voice: "Do not move! Wait for it to pass!"
But a moment later, his voice came again, from a different direction: "This way. Follow my voice."
And again, from behind them, softer: "Come quickly."
And again, from above, a whisper: "It is time."
The voices were identical, but they came from everywhere and nowhere at once, weaving through the fog. A guide with a hundred mouths.
"Which one is him?" Deep hissed, panic rising.
"None of them!" Rahul snapped, his own heart hammering. "Don't answer! Don't move!"
As suddenly as it had come, the fog began to thin, dissolving upward like smoke drawn into the sky. The clearing came back into view. The trees. The grey grass.
Tenzing was gone.
No cry, no struggle, no sound of footsteps. He had simply vanished from the center of their tight circle. His worn backpack sat neatly in the exact spot where he'd been standing, as if placed there carefully.
The silence that followed was absolute and deafening. It was the sound of the last tether snapping.
Raghav sank to his knees, a low, pained sound escaping him. He clutched his wrist, his face contorted. "It burned," he gasped. "When the fog came… it burned like ice. It wanted him. It used the fog… and it used me. I felt it pulling him through me." He looked up at Rahul, his eyes wide with horror and a devastating guilt. "It's my fault."
Rahul knelt beside him, not knowing what to say. The practical part of his mind, the part that had gotten them through exams and hostel dramas, was screaming. He walked to the backpack, his movements feeling mechanical. He opened it.
Inside was a water bottle, some dried fruit, a coil of rope. And a few other items that felt like messages: a map of the area, torn at the edges, with a route penciled in that ended abruptly at this clearing. A small, hand-carved wooden charm—four intersecting lines, the symbol from Raghav's dream and wrist. And a single sheet of paper, folded neatly.
Rahul unfolded it. In a neat, precise hand, it read:
Do not follow me.
The finality of it was a physical blow. Tenzing hadn't been taken by surprise. He'd known it was a possibility. He'd left them instructions for when he failed.
As Rahul stared at the note, the whisper he'd been hearing at the edges of his perception since the monastery solidified into a clear, quiet sentence in his mind, not in his ears, but in the space behind his eyes:
You are close now.
As if in answer to that thought, a voice floated to them from the path ahead. It was Tenzing's voice, but softened, stripped of its fear and urgency, now gentle and infinitely patient.
"This way," it called, warm and inviting. "The way is clear now. Come."
The horror was not in the voice being an imitation. The horror was in recognizing that it was Tenzing. Some essence of him, his knowledge of the path, had been absorbed. He hadn't just vanished; he had become a landmark. A living signpost for the valley.
Deep made a choked sound. Satyam was crying silently, tears cutting tracks through the dirt on his face.
Rahul looked back the way they had come. The path was still there, but it was different. The familiar bends were gone. The trees had crowded in, their roots knotted across the trail in a clear, deliberate barricade. The forest behind them had sealed shut.
The voice of the guide-called to them again, sweet and persuasive from the darkness ahead.
Raghav got shakily to his feet. He looked at the sealed path behind, then at the waiting darkness ahead. The symbol on his wrist pulsed faintly, a visual echo of a heartbeat.
"We can't go back," Raghav stated, his voice hollow.
"We can't go forward either!" Deep argued, but the fight was gone from his words. They all knew it was a lie.
Rahul shouldered Tenzing's pack. He looked at his friends—Satyam, the thinker, now broken by the illogical; Deep, the heart, whose bravery had been drained away; and Raghav, the quiet anchor, who was now the focal point of the storm.
The guide was gone. But his voice remained, a siren song woven into the very forest, pulling them toward the heart of the mystery.
"We stay together," Rahul said, his voice surprisingly steady. It was the only rule left that mattered. He took a step forward, not toward escape, but toward the source of the call. The Echoing Valley was no longer a destination on a map.
It was the only direction left in the world.