The forest after Tenzing's disappearance did not deepen—it reshuffled itself around them, like a house rearranging its rooms while they were still inside. They walked in a silence that felt borrowed, thin and temporary, broken only by the soft, steadying voice of Tenzing that surfaced now and then from somewhere ahead. It was never loud, never demanding—just calm enough to sound like reason itself. But it wasn't him. They all knew it. It was the forest wearing his voice like a mask, and the worst part was how convincing it sounded.
Rahul focused on placing one foot in front of the other, on the feel of damp earth under his sneakers, on the way his breath clouded in front of him. He tried not to look directly at the path ahead. He'd noticed something strange: if he stared too hard, the trail seemed to blur at the edges, like a mirage. But if he glanced away—just for a second—it would sharpen again, clear and inviting, as if the forest preferred to be seen from the corner of the eye. It felt like being led by a shy, predatory thing.
The first fork in the path came without warning. One moment they were walking a single trail, the next they were standing at a four-way crossing. It wasn't marked. No signpost, no cairn. Just four equally worn, equally possible openings carved between ancient trees.
Satyam stopped so suddenly that Deep bumped into him. "That wasn't here," Satyam whispered, his voice tight. He pulled out his phone, swiping to the compass app. The needle spun wildly, a frantic, useless dance, then froze, pointing not north, but directly down one of the paths—the one that smelled faintly of rain and damp stone.
Deep crouched, running a hand over the ground. "This doesn't make sense," he muttered, more to himself than to them. "The soil's packed the same on all of them. Like they've all been walked for years."
Raghav hadn't moved. He stood slightly apart, his right hand cradling his left wrist. The symbol there wasn't just dark anymore; it looked alive, the lines pulsing gently under his skin in a slow, steady rhythm—thump… thump…—like a second, quieter heartbeat. He wasn't looking at the paths. He was looking through them, his expression distant, pained.
Rahul felt it too—not in his wrist, but in his chest. A subtle, increasing pressure, the kind you feel before a storm or a bad decision. This wasn't just about which way to go. It felt like standing before a test where the question hadn't been asked yet, but the answer mattered desperately.
Each path had its own smell, its own texture in the air. The first carried a hint of sandalwood and old incense, strangely comforting, like the memory of a temple visit with his grandmother. The second smelled of clean, wet earth after a monsoon—fresh and neutral. The third had no smell at all, an emptiness that felt heavy and wrong. The fourth… the fourth was just shadows and silence, waiting.
"Left," Rahul heard himself say. His voice sounded foreign. "We go left."
No one argued. They were too tired, too scared to debate. They took the left path, the one that smelled of rain. The moment they committed, Rahul glanced back. The intersection was gone. Not hidden by trees—gone. Where four paths had met, there was now only uninterrupted forest, dense and seamless, as if they had imagined the whole thing.
A cold knot tightened in Rahul's stomach. They weren't just walking through a forest. They were walking through a maze that erased itself behind them.
The second crossing came sooner than it should have, defying any sense of distance. This one was geometrically wrong. The paths branched at sharp, unnatural angles, one veering uphill against the slope of the mountain, another dipping into a hollow that hadn't been there moments before.
Satyam, ever the pragmatist, tried to document it. He lifted his phone, took a quick picture of the fork. He checked the screen. The image showed only swirling grey mist and dark, formless shapes. He tried again. This time, the paths in the photo were distorted—curving into spirals, melting into smears of shadow. "It's not recording the geography," he said, his voice thin with a kind of academic dread. "It's recording… something else. The memory of the place."
Memory.
The word landed among them with weight. As soon as Satyam said it, Rahul's vision swam. He wasn't seeing the forest anymore. He saw—felt—a narrow cliff path at night, lit by the warm, bobbing glow of handheld oil lamps. Snow fell softly. Figures in maroon robes chanted in low, resonant tones, their breath frosting in the air. There was a tension in the memory, a sorrow so deep it felt like a physical ache. Then, as quickly as it came, it was gone. He swayed, putting a hand out to steady himself against a tree.
Beside him, Raghav gasped, his own hand flying to his temple. "I saw it too," he whispered, his face pale. "But I was… I was one of them. One of the monks. I was looking back at… at someone left behind."
They were no longer just sharing a journey. They were sharing echoes.
The paths were pulling personal fears to the surface. At the next vague branching—more a suggestion of multiple ways than a clear split—Deep froze. He was staring down a particularly dark, narrow trail that seemed to suck the light away. His usual bravado was gone, his face young and scared. "I don't want to be left behind," he blurted out, then looked horrified that he'd spoken. It was a childhood fear, confessed once during a late-night hostel talk, now thrown back at him by the whispering woods.
At another juncture, Satyman nearly walked straight onto a path that hadn't been there a second before. It looked clean, orderly, perfectly straight. Rahul heard him murmur, "It makes sense… this one makes sense…" and lunged forward, grabbing the back of Satyam's jacket just as the boy took his first step onto it. The moment Satyam's weight left the main path, the new trail dissolved beneath his leading foot into a drift of ordinary dead leaves and loose soil. Satyam stumbled back into Rahul, his breath coming in ragged gasps, his glasses askew. The path had been an illusion, a trap woven from his own desire for logic.
"It's learning us," Raghav said, his voice hollow. He was leaning heavily against a tree trunk, looking more drained with every passing minute. The pulse in his wrist was a visible, slow throb. "It offers what we want. What we fear. It doesn't need to chase us. It just has to wait for us to choose wrong."
Time became untrustworthy. Sometimes minutes felt like hours as they agonized over which way to turn. Other times, they would walk for what felt like a long time, only for Rahul to check his watch and find barely any time had passed. The light never changed. The grey-green twilight held steady, a perpetual, eerie dusk. It was the forest's time, not theirs.
Tenzing's voice would return periodically, a gentle touch in the unnerving quiet. "Stay together, now. Just a little farther. The way is clear." Each time it spoke, Deep would flinch, his hands clenching into fists. "It's not him," he'd mutter through gritted teeth. "It's wearing him like a coat." The entity wasn't a ghost in a place. It was the place itself, and it fed on the energy of their uncertainty, their choices.
Exhaustion was a heavy blanket over them all, mental and physical. Their feet dragged. Their thoughts moved sluggishly. Raghav's stumbles became more frequent. Once, his legs simply gave way. Rahul caught him just before he hit the ground, their foreheads bumping together clumsily.
In that brief, awkward contact, another memory-flash hit Rahul—not a clear scene, but a profound sensation of choice. Two figures stood on a windswept ledge overlooking a deep valley. One figure's hand was outstretched, reaching back. The other hesitated, their face a mask of conflict. The mountains around them didn't feel like scenery; they felt like judges. And the terrible, sinking feeling in the vision was that the choice had already been made, long ago, and they were only now walking through its consequences.
Raghav shuddered as they broke apart. "You felt that too."
It wasn't a question.
They found the stone pillars as the last of their energy was bleeding away. It was a clearing, but not a natural one. Four broken pillars of dark rock stood in a rough square, half-swallowed by emerald moss and creeping vines. Etched into their surfaces, worn almost smooth by time but still visible, were variations of the four-path symbol—intersecting lines, spirals at the ends, intricate knots.
Raghav moved toward them as if pulled. He sank to his knees in the moss, not caring about the damp, and traced the carving on the nearest pillar with trembling fingers. The moment his skin touched the stone, he jerked his hand back as if burned. The symbol on his wrist flared, a sharp, bright pain that made him hiss.
Simultaneously, Rahul's chest constricted, a phantom ache mirroring Raghav's. And with it came another cascade of images: people—travelers, monks, villagers—arguing fiercely on this very spot. He saw their terrified faces, heard their raised voices (though no sound reached his ears), saw them point down different paths before finally splitting up, each choosing a different direction, each convinced theirs was the only safe way. The memory ended not with them walking away, but with a profound, chilling silence. None of them ever walked back into the clearing.
"This wasn't a starting point," Deep said, his voice subdued. He was examining the placement of the pillars. "It was a containment site. A ritual space. They weren't trying to open a path here… they were trying to close one."
Satyam nodded slowly, connecting the dots with his fraying rational mind. "The paths… they're not real trails. They're decision points. Echoes of moments where people chose, split, got lost. The forest is… replaying them. And we're walking through the replay."
The understanding was worse than not knowing. They weren't just lost. They were trapped in a psychic recording, a haunted loop of other people's fatal choices.
As true darkness finally began to seep into the forest—a deeper, more substantial dark than the twilight—the paths grew aggressive. They didn't just appear ahead; they materialized beside them, opened up behind them. Whispers came from the dark openings, sometimes promising shelter and warmth, sometimes hissing threats. The voice of Tenzing was now just one among many.
They were nearing their breaking point. Raghav could barely walk without support. Satyam was mechanically putting one foot in front of the other, his eyes glazed. Deep's usual fire was reduced to embers, his focus solely on not being separated.
It was Deep who noticed it first. He stopped, causing the ragged line of them to bunch up. "Look," he whispered, pointing behind them with a shaking finger.
A new path lay there. It was unmistakably fresh. The earth was dark and recently turned, not packed down by time or countless footsteps. The edges were sharp, the vegetation cleanly cut away as if by a blade. It looked like it had been made minutes ago.
Someone else had entered the forest.
The horror of that thought was a cold wave that washed over Rahul, momentarily clearing his exhaustion. This wasn't just their nightmare. The forest was still active, still hungry. It was setting the stage again, preparing for new players, new choices, new echoes to add to its collection.
Ahead of them, the multiple faint trails they'd been hesitating between suddenly resolved, merging into one clear, dark tunnel through the trees. It led downward, into a deeper, colder darkness where no light seemed to penetrate.
The gentle, convincing voice of Tenzing floated from that darkness one final time.
"Come. It is time."
The mountains were no longer silent watchers. They had become the architects of the maze. And the boys were no longer choosing their path.
The path was choosing them.